Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (19 page)

Nothing. No snorting, no smiling. This really sucked. At this point I was holding up my shirt just to be stubborn, because it clearly was not going to produce any monster yuks.

“So you don’t know what you want to study?”

Rachel was obviously driving at the film thing. But if she wasn’t going to laugh at what I was saying, then fuck it. I decided to turn the whole thing on its head.

“No,” I said. “I mean, what are
you
gonna study?”

Rachel just sort of stared at me.

“I mean, when you go to college, what are you gonna study?”

Rachel sort of turned her head away. I should have shut up at that moment but didn’t.

“Where are you applying to college, anyway?”

Now Rachel was staring at the blank television screen and I was sitting there aiming my stupid fat stomach at her, and that was when it hit me that I was being a dick. Like, a colossal dick. I was asking a dying girl about her plans she’s making for the future. That is just about the dickest move out there. Holy fuck. I wanted to punch myself in the face so bad. I wanted to slam a door on my head.

Although, at the same time, it’s not like I stopped resenting her for being all sad and hostile and weird and making me feel bad for trying to cheer her up.

So basically I hated everyone in that room. I pulled my shirt down and tried to figure out a way to end this conversation without one of us trying to kill ourselves.

“Hey,” I said. “Mom gave me this big-ass book of colleges. You can definitely have it if you want to look at some. I actually have it right now.”

“I’m not applying to college this year.”

“Oh.”

“I’m gonna wait until I get better.”

“That sounds like a good plan.”

She continued to stare at the television screen, looking sort of blank and sort of pissed off.

“That’s good,” I said, “because this book sucks. It’s like fourteen hundred pages long and every other page is about some random Christian place in Texas or something.”

Can I tell you something? It was exhausting to keep coming up with these riffs. And maybe I should have just chilled out. But I felt like I had to make her laugh, or else my whole visit was a failure. So like some kind of brave seafaring adventurer, I embarked on another riff.

“Plus I get irritated because it’s basically a reminder of how I’m not going to get into anywhere good. Like, you’ll start from the end and then you get to ‘Yale,’ and you’re like, Oh yeah, Yale, I should apply to there because it’s a good school. All right. But then you see that they need at least a four point six grade point average. Yeah. And you’re like, What the hell, Benson’s grade point average doesn’t even go
up
to four point six.”

Rachel seemed to be softening up a little bit, although I felt like it was unrelated to the riff. But I decided to keep going with it because it was filling the time. Actually, that’s the best thing about a good riff. It’s not that it’s funny, although usually a good riff is pretty funny. The most important thing is that it fills up the time so you don’t have to talk about anything depressing.

“Yeah. And then you call their admissions office and you’re like, Yale, what’s up with this four point six business, and they’re like, Oh, yeah, you know, if you were a more motivated student,
you would have discovered the
secret Yale preparation high school
that is buried deep beneath your normal high school, and all the teachers are these creepy
undead geniuses
, and that is the place where you would get a four point six or better, and also where you learn
the secrets of time travel.
And uh, and
creating artificial life out of ordinary household objects.
You can
bring the blender to li-i-i-i-ife.
The blender will become your devoted manservant
who gets you the mail
, except it accidentally
keeps tearing it into tiny pieces because it is a blender.
Ya-a-a-a-a-ale.”

“Actually Greg, you can leave the book here.”

There was a pretty good chance she was just saying this to get rid of me, but at least it was a response, and sort of a positive one.

“Seriously?”

“Unless you want to keep it.”

“No. Are you kidding? I hate this book. This is great.”

“Yeah, I want to look at it.”

I fished it out of my backpack. I was really fired up to get rid of it. Also, maybe it was gonna make Rachel feel less like she was dying.

“Here you go.”

“Just put it on the table.”

“Done.”

“OK.”

She had maybe softened up a little bit, but she still wasn’t laughing or responding very much at all and I sort of lost control a little and said, “I’m not cheering you up at all when I come here. I’m being a jackass.”

“You’re not being a jackass.”

“I sort of am.”

“Well, you don’t have to come visit if you don’t want.”

This was kind of a tough thing to hear. Because, honestly, I
didn’t
want to keep visiting her. It was stressful enough when she was in a
good
mood. Now that she was super-sick and pissed off all the time, it really stressed me out. It jacked up my heart rate, for example. I was sitting in there and I had that awful fluttery feeling you get in your heart when your heart rate is all jacked up. But I knew I would feel even worse if I didn’t visit her.

So basically my life had been completely fucked up by all of this.

“I’m not coming here because I
don’t want to
,” I said. Then, because that didn’t make any sense, I clarified: “I’m coming here because I want to. If I didn’t want to come here, why the hell would I come here.”

“Because you feel like you have to.”

Really, the only thing I could do in response to this was lie.

“I don’t feel like I
have to.
Also, I’m totally irrational and stupid. So sometimes when there are things I
have to do
, I don’t even
do
them. I don’t know how to live a
normal human life.
”

This was a ridiculous direction to go in, so I backed up and started over.

“I
want
to come here,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

Then I said, “I like you.”

It felt ridiculously awkward saying that. I don’t think I had ever said those words to anyone before, and I probably never will again, because you can’t say them without feeling like a moron.

Anyway, she responded with: “Thanks.” It was unclear how she meant it.

“Don’t
thank
me.”

“OK.”

“I mean, sorry. This is insane. I’m yelling at you right now.”

I wanted to get out of there. But I knew I’d feel like a dickbag just leaving. I guess she sensed this.

“Greg, I’m sick,” she said. “I’m just not very cheerful right now.”

“Yeah.”

“You can go.”

“OK, yeah.”

“I like when you visit.”

“That’s good.”

“Maybe I’ll feel better next time.”

But as it turned out, she didn’t.

Jesus Christ I hate writing about this.

So I should probably try to explain what leukemia is just in case you are confused about it. I knew extremely little about it before the whole Rachel thing. Now I know a mediocre amount, which frankly is much more than I am actually interested in knowing.

Some cancers are localized in your body, like lung cancer, or butt cancer. You probably think butt cancer doesn’t exist, but it does. Anyway, with those cancers you can sometimes go in and cut them out surgically. But leukemia is cancer of the blood and bone marrow, so it’s spread throughout your entire body, so you can’t just go in and cut it out with knives. I mean, the knife thing obviously is scary and disgusting, but then the other way to treat cancer is to blast it with radiation and/or chemicals, which is worse. And with leukemia, you have to do that to someone’s entire body.

So that definitely sucks.

Mom said it’s like a city that has “bad guys” in it—something about the Rachel situation makes Mom forget that I’m not a toddler—anyway, it’s like a city with bad guys and chemo is like
dropping bombs on the city to kill the bad guys. In the process, part of the city gets jacked up. I told Rachel about this, and she was dismissive.

“It’s more like I have cancer,” she said, “and I’m getting chemotherapy.”

Anyway, in the process of bombing the bad guys to death, there was definitely some damage sustained by Rachel City, specifically in the neighborhoods of Hairville, Skinfield, and the Gastrointestinal District. That is why she bought the hat. It was this cute furry pink thing that you normally see on girls running around in shopping malls and not on pale girls lying in bed all the time.

So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don’t feel like lying to you. She didn’t have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn’t fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet.

So I would go in there and say some things, and she would sort of smile and sometimes giggle a little bit but mostly just not say anything, and I would run out of things to say, and then we’d put on a Gaines/Jackson film and watch it. First the more recent ones, then the older ones when we got tired of those.

Watching them with her was a strange experience because
she was just so focused on them. I know it sounds idiotic, but sitting next to her, I suddenly saw the films the way I think she was seeing them—as this uncritical fan who actually
likes
all the stupid choices that we were making. I’m not saying I learned to enjoy watching the films. I guess I just saw how you might kind of tolerate all the insane imperfections and fuckups that we had. You might look at the bad lighting or the weird sound design and have your attention taken away from the story we were trying to tell and instead just be thinking about me and Earl, as filmmakers, sort of accidentally drawing attention to ourselves. And if you liked us, you would like that. That’s maybe how Rachel was seeing everything we did.

But she didn’t actually say anything, so maybe I was just making that all up.

And meanwhile, she didn’t seem to be getting any better, and there were a couple of days where she was in a really dark mood and there was nothing I could do to help. Like one day when we were watching something and she had been really quiet and then she said, “Greg, I think you were right.”

“What?”

“I said I think you were right.”

“Oh.”

She was quiet like she expected me to know what that meant.

“I’m, uh, usually right.”

“Don’t you want to know about what?”

“Uh, yeah.”

Or maybe she didn’t expect me to know what she meant.
Who knows? Girls are insane, and dying girls are even more insane. Actually, that sounds fucked up. I take that back.

“So I was right about what?”

“I think you were right when you said I was dying.”

I hate complaining about this, but at the same time, this made me feel like shit. I was so pissed off that she said this. I tried to swallow it.

“I never said you were dying.”

“You
thought
I was dying, though.”

“No I didn’t.”

She was silent and it was infuriating.

“I
didn’t
,” I said, too loudly.

I mean, this was a lie, and we both knew it.

Finally, Rachel said, “Well, if you had thought it, you would have been right.”

We were silent for a really long time after that. Actually, I wanted to yell at her. Maybe I should have.

JESUS CHRIST I HATE WRITING ABOUT THIS

A person’s life is like a big weird ecosystem, and if there’s one thing science teachers enjoy blathering about, it’s that changes in one part of an ecosystem affect the entire thing. So let’s say my life is a pond. OK. Now let’s say some insane person (Mom) shows up with this nonnative species of depressed fish (Rachel) and puts the fish in the pond. OK. The other organisms in the pond (films, homework) are used to having a certain amount of algae (time that I get to spend on those things) to eat. But now this cancer-stricken fish is eating all that algae. So the pond is sort of jacked up as a result.