“Well, are you?”
“No.”
“Charlie.” Something inside of Nora switched on all of a sudden. The siren marked “Hey, you realize everything is very bad and overwhelming, right?” finally sounded. Charlie was set to die. Her job was gone. S.C.Y.T.H.E. would be on her heels at anymoment. And worst of all, her brother was so relentlessly, indescribably annoying. And it all caught up with her there, in the car, as they sailed past an empty gas station just before the highway turnoff, the smelly hand still in her face. And so Nora did the only reasonable thing she could do in that moment. She began to cry.
Charlie shifted in his seat. He never could withstand Nora’s tears. “All right, jeez, sorry. Here.” He offered his untainted left hand.
Nora sniffed, blotting her cheeks with the sleeve of her sensible navy blue winter coat. She took the hand and shook it.
“You’re going to die today,” she said as the crying bout eased into a mildly wavering voice and the odd sniffle. “And I know that for a fact. Because it’s what I do.”
She explained her job as best she could, keeping her eyes on the road to avoid any flashes of skepticism in her brother’s scruffy face. Finally, she reached over Charlie and pulled his file from the glove compartment. “Here,” she said. “I found this on my desk this morning. And I didn’t…and I couldn’t…here, just read it.”
Charlie flipped the folder open. “Huh. That’s my name.”
“Yeah, ding-dong, exactly. You’re supposed to get hit by a car and die sometime just before eleven fifteen a.m. today. I saw that and I just—”
“No, I’m not,” Charlie interrupted.
“What? Yes, you are.”
“Am not.”
Nora merged onto the highway with clenched teeth. This was infuriating. Charlie was infuriating. They were twenty-six years old—today—and he couldn’t even act half that age. But before Nora could help it, her childhood reflexes kicked in.
“Are too.”
“Am not.”
“For fuck’s sake, Charlie—”
“No, I’m serious,” Charlie said. He held up the file and jabbed a finger at the section marked “cause of death.”
Nora could feel the rush of blood leaving her face, likely on its way to a different body with a life that made sense. Somehow she found herself pulling onto the shoulder despite the fact that 12 percent of all highway deaths occur there. Something inside her decided driving in her current state posed the bigger risk just then. The windshield wipers groaned softly as they swatted away a light drizzle. Nora could barely hear them over the thundering in her ears. She snatched the file from Charlie’s hands and squinted at it.
“This is impossible.”
Just beneath Charlie’s name and basic information were the words:
Cause of Death: Choking
Time to Collect: 12:00 p.m.
The folder shook in Nora’s hands. She looked over at Charlie, who had conjured a snack-sized bag of Doritos from seemingly nowhere and was just prying it open.
“Want one?”
Nora slapped the bag from his hands. “Charlie,” she shouted. “Did you not just read the file? According to this you’re…you’re going to die by choking now, somehow. You can’t eat those. You can’t eat anything until we figure out what the hell is going on. It was supposed to be a car…”
“But I haven’t eaten breakfast, dude, I’m starving.”
“Are you seriously not hearing me? If you eat anything right now, you could die.”
“Okay, but, like, isn’t that always a risk? Besides, not eating kinda takes the fun out of living.”
“Charlie!”
“Okay, okay, no Doritos. Guess I’ll just waste away.”
