Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (18 page)

“Snnnrnn. It’s OK.”

“Yeah.”

More silence. I inadvertently looked at Rachel’s boiled-looking bald head and got the hot/prickly skin sensation for maybe the fourteenth time since arriving.

“So, how are you feeling?” I asked.

“I feel pretty good,” she said. She was obviously lying. She also seemed to have decided to talk more to make me worry about her less, but talking seemed to make her kind of exhausted. “I feel kind of weak, though. I’m sorry I yelled at you when you said you needed an excuse to visit me. I just yelled at you because I’m sick.”

“I totally go to town on people when I get sick.”

“Yeah.”

“You look good,” I lied.

“No I don’t,” she said.

I wasn’t sure how hard to push back on this. Obviously, I couldn’t insist that she legitimately looked really good, after she had been in the hospital for a week. No one looks good after that. Eventually, I went with, “You definitely look really good for someone who just had chemo,” and she seemed to accept this.

“Thank you.”

Then it was the end of visiting hours, and a nurse came in and told me I had to go, and if we’re being honest, I sort of regretted that, just because I felt like I had done a mediocre job of cheering Rachel up and wanted to keep going for a bit. But if this makes me seem like a good person, it shouldn’t. The reason was that cheering Rachel up was one of the things I had gotten really good at, and when you’re good at something, you want to do it all the time, because it makes you feel good. So if I wanted to hang out with Rachel, it was mostly for selfish reasons.

“Wait, what’s that drawing on your cast?” asked Mom, in the car.

“Oh,
those
,” I said. My mind raced but I couldn’t think of anything, so I had to just be honest. “Those are boobs.”

“
Gross
,” shrieked Gretchen, and we drove home, and then I ate normal food for the first time in a few days, and my stomach got all fucked up and trust me, you do not want to hear the details.

It was about the second or third week of October when all this arm stuff happened. I think it was, anyway. I don’t feel like looking it up. Do I have to give you a reason for not looking it up? I probably do, and that sucks. The reason that I probably should use is that it’s just too emotionally painful, but obviously that’s not true if I’m going to the trouble of writing this idiotic book. The real reason is: laziness. I thought about digging up the paperwork from my stay in the hospital and it just seemed like an unbelievable pain in the ass. So I didn’t do it.

Also, it’s weird to put a date to things anyway. It makes it feel like news or something. Like my life was in the
Post-Gazette
or the
New York Times
.

Oct. 20, 2011
PASTY TEEN RELEASED FROM HOSPITAL
Relieved Filmmaker Celebrates by Eating
Tummy Jiggling Leads to Cat Attack

Actually, yeah. This book is probably making my life seem more interesting and eventful than it actually is. Books always try to do that. If you just had headlines from every single day of my life you would get a better sense of how boring and random it is.

Oct. 21, 2011
PASTY TEEN MAKES QUIET RETURN TO SCHOOL
Gaines “Annoyed” by Backlog of Schoolwork
Numerous Teachers Failed to Notice Student’s
Week-Long Absence

Oct. 22, 2011
NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS AT ALL
Even Dinner Was Leftovers

Oct. 23, 2011
FLABBY TEEN ATTEMPTS TO GROW MUSCLES ON
UNBROKEN ARM
Weight-Lifting Session Brief, Excruciating
Filmmaker Recovers with Hours Spent Motionless
Facedown on Floor of Room

Oct. 24, 2011
EXTREMELY LITTLE HAPPENS
Tummy Jiggling Leads to Cat Attack, Again
Student Has Series of Inane Conversations
Not Worth Going Into

Maybe after you die you get sent to a giant room with archives of newspapers that have been written by these angel journalists specifically about your life and then you read them and they look like this. That would be insanely depressing. Hopefully at least some of the headlines would be about the other people in your life and not just you.

Oct. 25, 2011
KUSHNER PURCHASES HAT
Awkward Staring at Bald Head Probably Became Annoying
After a While
Hat Somehow Even More Depressing Than
Darth Vader–Looking Head

Oct. 26, 2011
JACKSON UNLEASHES NICOTINE-DEPRIVED
LUNCHTIME TIRADE
Numerous People, Inanimate Objects, and
Concepts Said to Suck Donkey Dick
Plump Groundhog-Faced Friend:
Quitting Smoking “Probably a Mistake”

Oct. 27, 2011
GAINES PARENTS INITIATE NEW ROUND OF
COLLEGE TALKS
Filmmaker’s “Disappointing” Grades Cited in
Detailed Predictions of Failur
e
Hobo Vocational College Considered

I guess when I was in the hospital, Mom and Dad decided that it was time to talk to me about colleges. It wasn’t the first time we had discussed college, of course. The first time was when Dad walked into my room one day near the end of junior year. He had this sort of sheepish resentful look on his face that he gets when Mom asks him to do some really annoying thing.

“Hello, son,” he had said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Son, do you have any interest in going on a—a
college tour.
”

“Uh, not really.”

“Oh!”

“Yeah, I don’t really want to do that.”

“No—
no
to the college tour, you’re saying! I
see.
”

“Yeah, no.”

Dad was so fired up about not doing a college tour that he immediately left the room and didn’t mention it again for months. And even though college was kind of looming over my entire life during that time, as long as no one brought it up, I was able to ignore it.

For some reason I just really wasn’t able to deal with the idea of college. I would try to think about it and then my mouth would get all dry and my armpits would start stinging and I would have to change the channel in my brain to something other than college. Usually it was to the Brain Nature Channel. That’s where you picture a graceful herd of antelopes frolicking in the plains, or some playful beavers making a sophisticated little home out of twigs, or maybe one of those specials where
they show Brazilian jungle insects biting the hell out of each other. Basically, anything until it no longer feels like your armpits have bees in them.

I don’t know why college freaked me out so much. Actually, that’s a blatant lie. I definitely know why. It had been a ridiculous amount of work figuring out life at Benson—mapping out the entire social landscape, figuring out all the ways to navigate it without being noticed—and it was pretty much at the limit of my espionage talents. And college is a much bigger, more complicated place than high school—like with infinitely more groups and people and activities—and so I got panicky and insane just thinking about how impossible it would be to deal with that. I mean, you’re actually
living
with your classmates in a dormitory most of the time. How can you possibly be invisible to them? How can you just be sort of bland and inoffensive and unmemorable to the guys who are
living in your room
? You can’t even fart in there. You have to go out into the hall or something to fart. Or you could just never fart, but then who knows what would happen.

So that was really terrifying to me and I didn’t want to think about it. But then Mom and Dad decided that it was Important to Prepare For, and about a week after I got out of the hospital they ambushed me like a pair of Brazilian jungle insects and started biting the hell out of me. I mean, not literally. You know what I mean. It sucked.

After thinking about it a little bit, I figured I would just go to Carnegie Mellon, where Dad teaches. But Mom and Dad
were doubtful that I’d get in, because of my grades and total lack of extracurriculars.

“You could show them your films,” suggested Mom.

This was such a terrible idea that I had to pretend to be dead for five minutes, which was how long it took Mom and Dad to get bored of yelling at me and leave the room. But then when they heard me moving around they came back and we had to talk some more.

In the end we decided that at the very least I should also apply to Pitt, a.k.a. the University of Pittsburgh, which I thought of at the time as Carnegie Mellon’s larger, slightly dumber sibling. Mom also made me promise to just take a look at this directory of colleges, just maybe sit down for an hour and page through it, just to get some
ideas about what’s out there
, it really won’t take that long and it’s just good to have some idea of your options because there are
so many different options out there
and it would
really be a shame if you didn’t find the right one
and finally I was like OK OK JESUS CHRIST.

But the book of colleges was literally fourteen hundred pages long. So there was no way that was actually going to happen. For some reason I carried it around in my backpack for a few days and every time I looked at it I had the bees-in-the-armpits feeling.

I made the mistake of mentioning college around Rachel during one of my hospital visits, and then she got really interested in it and we had to talk about it for an awkwardly long time.

“Apparently, Hugh Jackman is doing this new ab workout,”
I said in an attempt to distract her. “So now he has four more abs than he used to have.”

It’s insane that that didn’t distract her from college, but it didn’t.

“So you want to go to Carnegie Mellon?” she said. She propped herself up and was sort of staring at me harder than usual.

“I mean, I’d rather go there than anywhere else,” I said. “But Mom and Dad think I won’t even get in. So I’ll probably go to Pitt.”

“Why wouldn’t you get in?”

“Ugh, I don’t know. You have to have good grades, and then additionally you have to be the president of a debate team, or you have to have built a homeless shelter, and I haven’t done anything outside of school except fuck around.”

I could tell Rachel wanted to bring up the films, but she didn’t, which was good, because I was fully prepared to pretend to be dead again. But in a hospital that’s less acceptable as a conversation-changing tactic. It’s just not the right place to try that kind of move. Also, someone might walk in and actually think you’re dead, and then they’d put you in a wheelchair and stick you out in a waiting room or something, like with Gilbert, the wheelchair-bound Possible Dead Person that I mentioned twenty-four hundred words ago.

“Really, my only goal with college is not to get into a fraternity,” I said, just to get a decent riff going. “Because the number-one thing fraternities like to do is to take a fat kid and then tie him to a flagpole or a professor’s car or something. So
I’m worried about that happening to me. That’s their favorite thing to do. Maybe they would want to whip me with a belt or something. It’s actually extremely homoerotic, but then if you point this out, they lose their shit.”

For some reason this didn’t make Rachel laugh.

“You’re not fat,” she said.

“I’m pretty fat.”

“You’re not.”

It seemed stupid that Rachel was disagreeing with me. So the next thing I did was something I’ve never done before.

“I know of someone who disagrees with you,” I said. “His name is Peanut Butter and Belly, minus the peanut butter.”

“Huh,” said Rachel, but then I lifted up my shirt and was showing her my belly.

I mean, I’m not as fat as a lot of kids, but I’m definitely fat, and I can definitely grab two different rolls of my stomach and make it talk like a Muppet.

“I WOULD LIKE TO TAKE ISSUE WITH WHAT YOU JUST SAID,” yelled my stomach. It had a Southern accent for some reason. “I AM MORTIFIED AND DISTRESSED BY YOUR ACCUSATION. ADDITIONALLY, DO YOU HAVE ANY HEAPING PLATTERS OF NACHOS LYING ABOUT?”

Up until that point in my life I had never made my stomach talk for other human beings. It had just never seemed worth it to demean myself in that way for laughs. This should indicate how bad I wanted Rachel to laugh. But there was no snorting and honking from Rachel that day.

It’s bad enough manhandling your own flabby stomach
and bellowing in a Southern accent at someone. It’s worse when they’re not even laughing at it.

“IF THERE ARE NO NACHOS, I WOULD BEGRUDGINGLY SETTLE FOR A STEAK AND A CAKE,” my stomach added, but Rachel did not even smile.

“What would you want to study at Carnegie Mellon?” she asked.

“Who knows?” I said. I was keeping my shirt up just in case she suddenly realized that I was making a total pathetic ass out of myself for her entertainment. But she didn’t seem to be realizing it.

She was silent, so I kept talking. “I mean, most of the time you don’t even know what you’re gonna study when you show up to college anyway. So you just take a bunch of courses and you see what you like. Right?”

I had to keep riffing or she was going to ask about films. I could just tell. “It’s like a buffet, basically. Like this really expensive buffet, except also you have to eat all of what’s on your plate or they expel you. So conceptually that’s kind of fucked up. If that happened at real buffets, that would be incredible. If you were like, ‘Hmm, this moo shu pork has kind of a chalky dirt taste,’ and then some enormous Chinese guy is like, ‘EAT IT OR WE WILL GIVE YOU AN F, AND ALSO WE WILL KICK YOU OUT OF THIS RESTAURANT,’ that just doesn’t seem like a good business model.”