Project MUSE – Until We Die
Adam Silvera’s third novel, They Both Die at the End (2017), poses a serious philosophical question: What would you do if you knew today would be your last?
Enter Mateo Torrez, eighteen, and Rufus Emeterio, seventeen (but almost eighteen, he would argue), two young, queer men of color living in present-day New York City. Just after midnight on September 5, both teenagers receive the infamous call from Death-Cast, the organization responsible for notifying a person when their End Day has arrived. They don’t know how they will die, or when, but their deaths today are certain…. Death-Cast is never wrong. How much time do these boys have? How will they say goodbye to their friends and families? How should they spend their last, precious moments alive when death lurks around every corner? Through these teens’ courage to overcome their fears and, most importantly, to be open and vulnerable together, Silvera compels us to imagine ourselves in their situations and to ask ourselves these same questions. His novel is an artistically and culturally significant contribution to contemporary young adult literature, a guide for including diverse characters with universal emotional appeal.
The two protagonists are both caring and passionate people; however, they are different from each other in many ways, too. Mateo is quiet, reserved, calculating, and paranoid. When he first receives his End Day alert, he feels paralyzed, too afraid to leave the apartment that he shares with his dad, who, after recently suffering a stroke, has been lying in a coma at the hospital. Before his time runs out, he needs to say goodbye to him, to Lidia, Mateo’s best friend, and to Penny, her one-year-old daughter and his goddaughter.
Rufus is normally chill; however, he can also be bold, rash, and outgoing. Whereas Mateo receives the alert while browsing Countdowners, a popular website “where Deckers chronicle their final hours through statuses and photos via live feeds,” Rufus receives his alert while he and his
two besties, Malcolm and Tagoe, are pummeling his ex-girlfriend Aimee’s new boyfriend, Peck. In whatever time Rufus has left, he wants to make amends with Aimee and to spend time with Malcolm, Tagoe, and their foster parents, Jenn Lori and Francis. The novel’s chapters jump between Mateo’s and Rufus’s perspectives as alternating character narrators and, occasionally, utilizes a third, non-character narrator, who gives us glimpses into the thoughts and experiences of the secondary and tertiary characters, for many of whom September 5 is also their End Day. In total, we see into the minds of seventeen different people, and it is this diversity of experiences that binds the novel together and gives it its sense of poetry. Although the novel is primarily grounded in rich, detailed characterizations of its two protagonists, their contrast to the other characters’ experiences is equally important. The first paperback edition of the novel even includes a character map in its bonus materials at the end. We see into Aimee’s and Lidia’s lives: their distress at losing their closest friends; Aimee’s remorse for bringing Peck to the funeral; and Lidia’s fear of raising Penny alone, without her best friend to lean on. We learn more about the Plutos — Rufus, Aimee, Malcolm, and Tagoe’s name for their group — as they remember how the traumatic losses of their parents ultimately brought them together as a new family. And then there are the unexpected characters and their unique circumstances. Peck is in a rage and wants revenge; he’s going to put a bullet in Rufus’s head. Andrea works at Death-Cast and is the one to call Mateo; she’s great at her job because she understands “Rule number one of one: Deckers are no longer people.” Delilah wastes her day away, believing the End Call she receives that morning to be a prank from Victor, her ex-fiancé who also works at Death-Cast. Vin is an entitled misogynist, who, after receiving…
