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.
(That last paragraph is so stupid that I couldn’t even bring myself to delete it. By the way, for every mind-numbing thing that you have read in this book, there were like four other things that I wrote and then deleted. Most of them are about food or animals. I realize that I probably seem obsessed with food and animals. That’s because they’re the two strangest things in the entire world. Just sit in a room and think about them. Actually, don’t, because you might have a panic attack.)