The Last Last Day

Danny was supposed to pick up his diploma from the front office but there was a huge line of graduated ghosts in green gowns. He wasn’t ready to join the dead yet, so he decided to go the other way and wait at his usual lunch spot. It wasn’t a special hideout but the outdoor hallway between rooms 108 and 109. Nonetheless it belonged to him.

As he crossed the quad, Danny adjusted his cap for the thousandth time. His friend had offered bobby pins but it was a joke because he was a buzz cut kid. The quiet campus was surrounded by a fluorescent force field from angler fish lamp posts but some twilight managed to seep through the cracks. He was used to staying late for debate practice, but this time he wanted to drape the darkness around himself and hide from the abysmal sea monsters who wanted to draw him out with their glowing promises.

When Danny approached his lunch spot, he saw that it was occupied by a row of orange peels. They were strategically placed apart and they resembled the phases of the moon. Of course Danny knew the leftovers weren’t some otherworldly message but probably some dumb freshman playing with their food--the seniors had a special luncheon off-campus after that morning's graduation rehearsal. Danny grew itchier in his gown just thinking about freshman vultures who circled his lunch spot, patiently waiting for him to die so they could strike. He kicked the orange peels away to show his spirit was very much alive and that they could not peck at his carcass. But as Danny looked down at the now lonely lunch spot, he knew by next Fall, all the bones of his class would have been long buried.

Danny sat down between rooms 108 and 109 for the last time. A part of him wished he were a silver painted street performer so he could spend the rest of his life there as a statue and get paid for it. This was not the first time Danny contemplated quitting everything for a more radical path, but now that he had secured a spot at UCLA, it made every dream seem more like a realistic nightmare he didn’t want to handle.

So Danny got to his feet and patted down his gown. His medals clanged and his cords kept dropping unevenly to his right. He knew he worked hard to deserve them, the same way he worked hard to get into UCLA, but he questioned how long he could make the illusion last. Danny sighed, running through alternate scenarios of his college afterlife, while he walked back to the front office to collect his death certificate.

Danny’s plan had worked as he entered the much shorter “Last Name P-Z” line. In front of him was Lilith Riley. She had dyed her hair bright red which did not pair well with the green cap and gown, giving her a Princess Fiona look. She had once kicked a soccer ball into Danny’s stomach in middle school, but now she was captain of the varsity team, so he hoped he’d made as much of an inspirational impact as she made a physical one.

Lilith turned around and asked him to sign her yearbook.

Danny knew she wanted him to think it a big deal to be asked by someone popular, but to put it simply, he did not care. There was no writing space left anyway and he was tired of telling people that their lives were going to be so great without him in it. Instead, Danny just signed his name under his senior portrait. The boy in the frame had a diplomatic smile but his sure brown eyes had melted into a mahogany melancholy. But that was him before the school year had started, when the future felt like a wild bullet train and he was afraid of the work required to lay down the rails. But now that he got the train to his station and it was set for a secure destination, he didn’t even know if he wanted to get on. Perhaps he still had the same look in his eyes.

He returned Lilith’s yearbook. She thanked him. Danny wondered if he should initiate a conversation given that these were their last few moments, but he decided catching up on lost time wouldn’t do any good now.

Danny got his diploma in a nice square envelope and exited through the entrance onto the front lawn of the school. Crowds of family and friends milled about while every space in between was filled with golden balloons, red bouquets, purple leis, and white polaroid flashes. A chain link fence followed the edge of the grass and at their own pace, the celebratory cliques and trinkets shuffled through the open gate like sand in an hourglass.

Danny was rushed into the storm, pulled by different friends into hugs and group photos. When his family found him, he was pulled into more awkward hugs and group photos. They talked about how small he was on the football field, how no one could get any good pictures because the strobe lighting was terrible, how it was so boring to wait toward the end because the family name was “Shu”, and how for dinner they were all going to go to a Taiwanese restaurant but couldn’t choose which one. Danny laughed with them and for a moment everything seemed to have glossed over like laminated paper, a joyful filter of lighter problems. He was glad that although his surroundings sped before him, it made for a pretty good pause button.

There, he noticed the people who ate lunch with him, people he knew but never said “hi” to in the halls, people who’d sat next to him, people who failed or carried the group project, people he didn’t know were even in his grade, and people who were just there for other people. It was a jumbled mess of faces. If he focused on one, he could perhaps recall a connection, but they would soon be lost in the crowd. To him, they were all the same, like cells trapped in a chain link petri dish. And now that the dish was broken, they were spilling out into a sea of blood, so it was impossible for that exact combination of cells to happen ever again. Danny disliked not knowing how different or similar life would be if just one person had not been a part of that chemical reaction. It was easier to predict the change in tides of historical events than calculating the ripples of Lilith kicking a soccer ball into his stomach.

Danny was dragged by this current as people funneled out the gate in green like cash from a cannon. He wished that they would stop moving together as one but he supposed that since birth, people have always moved in the same direction. They leave. And Danny followed.

He shifted his eyes back, looking for vultures. He could see them everywhere, resting on lamp posts, seeping beneath classroom doors, and casting shadows on the moon. Why, they’d take over his whole hometown soon enough. But Danny was a ghost. What could he do about it?