Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Before it was time for me to leave, I went to go visit Rachel. The cancer ward looked a lot like the part of the hospital that I had been staying in, except that the kids there were more depressing. Look. They just were. I have to be honest about this. They were paler, and weaker, and skinnier, and sicker. There was one boy—actually, it definitely could have been a girl—motionless with his eyes closed in a wheelchair, unattended by anyone, and I had to suppress what felt like a significant freak-out coming over me, because what if that boy was dead? And they just left this dead person in a wheelchair lying around? It was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s Gilbert. He’s been there for three days! We find that he’s a helpful reminder of WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL LIVING THINGS.”

Rachel looked better than most of the other kids, but she was totally bald. That really took a lot of getting used to. Every couple of minutes or so I would look at her head, or even just think about her bald head while trying not to look at it, and my skin would get all hot and prickly. As Earl pointed out, it looked a lot like Darth Vader’s head when they took off his mask. It was insanely white, like it had been boiled, and sort of veiny and lumpy.

But at least she was in an OK mood—she was weak and her voice was scraggly, but she smiled when she saw me, and somehow her eyes were very happy. I don’t know how to describe it. There’s a chance the happiness was just from some extremely powerful pain medication they were giving her. You can never really know in a hospital.

“Yo,” I said.

“The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet,” she told me.

This was a line from Hello, Good-Die, our James Bond parody in which everyone is actually a sock puppet. For some reason it was hilarious that she greeted me with this line.

“Haaarf,” I said.

“Thanks for visiting me.”

“Yeah, I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

My guard was down a little bit after the Hello, Good-Die thing. Usually it’s when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life. Here comes an example of that right now.

“Yeah, I thought it would be weird if I just visited you with no excuse, so I convinced Earl to break my arm so, uh, that gave me a good cover story, uhhhh. Yeah.”

Jesus Christ in a cockwagon. At the beginning of this sentence, my Feeling Like a Dick Quotient was at a solid 4.0, which is normal. By about the word “excuse,” it was all the way up to 9.4. By the end I was easily maxed out at 10.0. Actually, I may have broken the scale.

Rachel was definitely not thrilled about this sentence.

“Next time maybe you can come without an excuse.”

“Yeah, I realized that I, uh, yeah.”

“Or, you don’t have to come at all.”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

“I was just making a joke.”

“I know.”

“Urrrrgh.”

We were silent, so I made the noise again.

“Urrrrnngh.”

“What is that noise.”

“Regretful polar bear.”

Snort.

“Polar bears are the most regretful animals in nature. Scientists do not know why this is. But they have the purest expressions of regret in the animal kingdom. Listen to how beautiful and haunting they sound: Urrrrrrrnnngh.”

Snort, cough. Then Rachel said, “Actually, you shouldn’t try to make me laugh.”

“Oops, sorry.”

“No, I like the polar bear, but when I laugh it hurts a little.”

“See, now I regret doing the polar bear thing, but this feeling of regret just makes me want to make the polar bear noise even more. Because the polar bear is so regretful.”

Weak snort.

“The polar bear just regrets everything. He loves fish and seals. They’re his friends. He hates having to kill and eat them. But he lives too far north to go to Whole Foods, and—”

SNOORT

“Sorry, sorry. I have to chill out.”

“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.