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.”
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.