Crutcher, Chris. (2007). Deadline. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
What would you do if you only had one year to live?
Ben Wolf is 18 and a senior in high school when he receives the diagnosis of a "rare blood disease" and is given a year to live. While reeling from this news, Ben makes a couple of decisions: one, he is not going to tell anyone, not even his family, and two, he is going to make this last year count.
I have read several good books for my young adult literature class, but this is the first one that I have decided that I must buy my own copy so that I can underline passages.
Ben lives in a town of less than 1000 people in Idaho. His high school has fewer than 100 students. He has always been a star cross country runner, because he is short and slight and cross country is "safer." With one year left to live, he decides to throw caution to the wind and go out for football. He ends up being a star on the football field as well; he enjoys the game and only hopes to finish the season before his disease catches up with him. He does, and describes a winning pass that he threw to his brother to be the highlight of his life. Those who enjoy football, or know more about it than I do (meaning "know more than it is played by guys wearing pads who throw around a brown ball with pointed ends") will enjoy these passages.
Ben also, for the first time, challenges his social studies teacher in class, a social studies teacher whom Ben describes as teaching the idea that "intellectual freedom is the freedom to believe what he believes." Ben challenges the "traditional" history curriculum with gems like "Did you know Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist?" and "Did you know Christopher Columbus was a catalyst behind slave trading all over the world?" The teacher weathers the challenges, and Ben stops himself before he gets sent to the office for disruption. Ben's biggest challenge to this teacher is to allow him, as his senior project, to petition the all-white town to name a street after Malcolm X. The teacher refuses, and Ben moves forward with the project anyway, not because he thinks he'll be successful, but because he wants to gauge the town's reaction.
In another "what have I got to lose?" move, he asks out a girl he has only admired from a distance. He ends up dating her for awhile, and his dream coming true backfires when he discovers that she is falling for him without knowing that he won't live to see the end of the year. That, Ben discovers, is his first mistake. He did not want anyone to know that he was dying because he wanted to have a "normal" year, but there is nothing "normal" about only having a year to live, and he realized, to his regret, that he was doing his family and friends a disservice by keeping them in the dark.
Other characters make their appearances, sometimes as caricatures but all likeable. Ben's manic depressive mother who embarrasses Ben with her unfiltered chatter on her good days and hides in her room on her bad days. The town drunk who used to be a child molesting priest. The dumb jock with the bigoted abusive father. Ben's very-paternal football coach, whom he has known all his life, and who becomes the first person to find out his secret.
Through conversations with two therapists and in his dreams with a spiritual guide named "Hey-Soos," Ben discovers another truth: he has spent much of his life trying to save people who could not be saved. His mother was the first; Rudy the drunk child molesting priest became the last.
Ben is in the unique position to find himself losing his life so young, but the universal truths that appear in this book can apply to anyone of any age: Live like you're dying. Be who you are. Follow your dreams. And there are some things that no one can fix.
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