Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

So Rachel moved back to her room. Things were different, obviously. Actually, she was in a pretty good mood those first few days. The first day she came back was a Friday. It was late November but not cold yet.

“They’ve stopped shooting me up with chemicals,” she explained.

“So that’s over?”

“They just didn’t seem to be doing me any good.”

We silently contemplated this morbid utterance. For some reason, I said, “Certainly not in the hair department.” I was trying to make things less depressing, which of course had the effect of making things more depressing. But Rachel actually laughed. It was sort of a different kind of laugh, like she had to reengineer the shape of her mouth during laughter, because the old way was too painful. I did a surprisingly good job of not thinking about this.

Pretty soon I was just talking a lot and I wasn’t trying too hard to make her laugh and it felt a lot like before she went to the hospital and got all depressed. We were just sprawled out in her kind of dark poster-and-pillow-intensive room and I was going on at insane length about my life and she was just listening and absorbing it all and it felt like we were back on normal terms with each other. It was possible to forget that she had decided to die.

By the way, when someone stops cancer treatment and you point out that this is a decision to die, everyone freaks out at you. Mom, for example. I don’t even want to get into it.

But yeah.

“So Gretchen is just acting nuts.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Oh man. Girls at that age are just impossible. There’s just a lot of shrieking and stomping around. Some of it doesn’t even make any sense. Were you like that? At like age fourteen?”

“I fought with my mom sometimes.”

“Gretchen even gets pissed off at Cat Stevens. She’ll be petting him and then he’ll freak out and bite her, which he’s been doing for his entire life, and then suddenly she’s like, Oh my God, I fucking hate stupid Cat Stevens. She says he looks like a big garden slug. Which he does, obviously, but that’s sort of what’s so great about him.”

“That he looks like a slug?”

“Yeah, he’s just this ugly stripey slug color. He’s like the biting champion of the slug world.”

I guess it actually wasn’t possible to completely forget that she had decided to die. Because the whole time as we were talking, it was in the back of my mind and it was stressing me out a little bit, the idea that Rachel was close to the end of her life. Or not stressing me out, but just kind of weighing on me and making me feel a little short of breath.

Eventually, Rachel said, “How’s your latest film coming?”

“Oh, the latest one! Yeah. It’s pretty good.”

“I’m really excited to see it.”

Something about the way she said this made me realize that she knew about it. I mean, it was stupid to think she wouldn’t find out.

“Yeah, uh . . . Hey. You should probably know: It’s for you. Like, it’s sort of about you, and uh, yeah.”

“I know.”

I was trying to be cool about this.

“Oh, you knew that already?”

“Yeah, some people told me.”

“Oh, like who?” I was talking kind of loud and high-pitched. I actually sounded a little like Denise Kushner at that moment.

“I don’t know. Madison told me about it. Mom sort of mentioned it. Anna, Naomi. Earl. A few people.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh. That reminds me. I have to go talk to Earl about something.”

“OK,” she said.