“Look, I’m not gonna hit you with some impassioned speech. I don’t have one in me and that’s not what I’m about.” I gotta do better than that. “But I know that frustration you’re feeling, dude. You have options, thankfully. If you wanna go back to your dad or best friend, I’m not stopping you. If you wanna ditch me, I’m not chasing you. It’s your last day, live it however the hell you want. If you want help living it, I got you.”
Mateo lifts his head and squints at me. “Sounded pretty impassioned to me.”
“Yeah. My bad.” I like him better with his glasses, but no-glasses is a good look on him, too. “What do you wanna do?” If he ditches, I’ll respect it, and I’ll figure out my next move. I gotta see what’s what with the Plutos, but I can’t sneak back there, I don’t know if there are eyes on the place.
“I want to keep moving forward,” Mateo says.
“Good call.”
He puts his glasses back on, and, I don’t know, if you wanna put together some analogy on how he’s seeing the world with new eyes or something, be my guest. I’m just relieved I’m not taking this day on alone.
“I’m sorry for yelling,” Mateo says. “I still think not saying goodbye is the right move, but it’s something I’ll regret all day.”
“I didn’t get to say my piece to my friends either,” I say.
“What happened at your funeral?”
All my talk about honesty and getting stuff off your chest, and I’m not being straight with him. “It got interrupted. I haven’t been able to reach my friends again since then. I’m hoping they’ll hit me up before . . .” I crack my knuckles as cars go by. “I want them to know I’m okay. No mystery over if I’m dead yet or not. But I can’t keep texting them until whatever happens finally goes down.”
“Set up a CountDowners profile,” Mateo suggests. “I’ve followed enough stories online and I can help you navigate it.”
I bet he can. Going by that logic, I’ve watched enough porn to make me a sex god. “Nah, that stuff isn’t me. I never even got on board with Tumblr or Twitter. Just Instagram. The photography stuff is still pretty new, just a few months. Instagram is dope.”
“Can I see your account?”
“Sure.”
I hand him my phone.
My profile is public because I don’t care if some stranger stumbles onto it. But it’s crazy different watching a stranger scroll through my photos. I feel exposed, like I’m stepping out of the shower and someone is watching me wrap a towel around my boys. My earlier photos are pretty amateur-hour because of bad lighting, but there’s no edit button and that’s probably for the best.
“Why are they all in black and white?” Mateo asks.
“I got the account a few days after I moved in to the foster home. My boy Malcolm took this one photo of me, look . . .” I scoot closer to him and scroll down to my first wave of photos, self-conscious about my dirty fingernail for half a second before no longer giving a shit. I click the photo of me sitting on my bed at Pluto with my face in my hands. Malcolm is the credited photographer. “It was my third or fourth night there. We were playing board games and I was freaking out in my head because I was feeling guilty for having a decent time—nah, kill that. I was having mad fun, that’s what made it worse. I walked away without a word and Malcolm hunted me down because I was taking too long and he captured my breakdown.”
“Why?” Mateo asks.
“He said he liked tracking a person’s growth and not just physically. He’s hard on himself, but he’s smart as hell.” But for real, I kicked Malcolm in his giant knee when he first showed me that photo weeks later. Creep. “I keep my photos in black and white because my life lost color after they died.”
“And you’re living your life but not forgetting theirs?” Mateo asks.
“Exactly.”
“I thought people got on Instagram just to be on Instagram.”
I shrug. “Old school.”
“Your photos look old school,” Mateo says. He shifts, looking at me with wide eyes. He smiles at me for the first time and yo, this is not the face you see on a Decker. “You don’t need the CountDowners app, you can post everything here. You can create a hashtag or whatever, too. But I think you should post your life in color. . . . Let that be how the Plutos remember you.” The smile goes away because that’s the nature of today. “Forget it. That’s stupid.”