Mateo reads the blog CountDowners on his laptop in his bedroom when he gets the call from Death-Cast. When Mateo answers the call, he is shaking with fear. The Death-Cast representative—called a “herald”—instructs Mateo to log onto death-cast.com to fill out any special requests for his funeral and to provide the inscription as he would like it to read on his headstone. Mateo reflects that he has only been to one funeral in his life (his grandmother’s), and he does not expect his own funeral to be well-attended: “Maybe I would feel differently if I could count on people showing up to my funeral if I had more friends than I do fingers” (7). After the call, Mateo sinks to his knees. He is in shock that “it’s all ending today and there is absolutely nothing” he can do about it (8). He ponders on the person he might have been in the future.

At 12:42 a.m., Mateo takes a shower to calm down. He decides that he will not tell anyone that he is going to die that day, and that he needs to “get out in the world” to see his father at the hospital and also to visit his best friend Lidia and her one-year-old daughter, Penny.