Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (5 page)

I sat there, paralyzed by the problem of what to say. What can you possibly say to a dying person? Who might not even know that you know that they’re dying? I made a list of opening lines, and none of them seemed like they would be any good.

Opening line:

Hey, this is Greg. You want to hang out?

Probable response:

Rachel:
Why do you want to hang out with me all of a sudden?

Greg:
Because we don’t have that much time left, to hang out.

Rachel:
So, you just want to hang out with me because I’m dying.

Greg:
I just want to get in some Rachel time! You know! While I still can.

Rachel:
This is probably the most insensitive conversation I have ever had with anyone.

Greg:
Do-over time.

Opening line:

Hey, this is Greg. I heard about your leukemia, and I’m calling to make you feel better.

Probable response:

Rachel:
Why would you calling make me feel better?

Greg:
Because! Uh. I dunno!

Rachel:
You’re just reminding me of all those times you never wanted to hang out with me.

Greg:
Hoo boy.

Rachel:
Right now, you’re screwing up my last days of existence. That’s what you’re doing.

Greg:

Rachel:
I have just a few more days on this earth, and you’re smearing your barf on those days.

Greg:
Fuck, let me try this again.

Opening line:

Hey, this is Greg. You, me, and some pasta makes three.

Probable response:

Rachel:
Huh?

Greg:
I’m taking you out on a
date.
Greg style.

Rachel:
What?

Greg:
Listen to me. Our remaining days with each other are few, and precious. Let’s make up for lost time. Let’s be together.

Rachel:
Oh my God, that’s so romantic.

Greg:

Greg:
Damn it.

There just wasn’t a good way to do it. Mom was asking me to resume a friendship that had no honest foundation and ended on screamingly awkward terms. How do you do that? You can’t.

“Hello? Who is this?” said Rachel’s mom over the phone. She sounded aggressive and was kind of barking like a dog. This was standard behavior for Mrs. Kushner.

“Uh, hi, this is Greg,” I said. Then for some reason, instead of asking for Rachel’s number, I said, “How are you doing?”

“Gre-e-e-eg,” oozed Mrs. Kushner. “I’m fi-i-i-ine.” Boom. In an instant, her tone had changed completely. This was a side of her I had never seen, nor had I ever hoped to see it.

“That’s great,” I said.

“Greg, how are you-u-u-u.” She was now using a voice that women usually reserve for cats.

“Uh, good,” I said.

“And how is schoo-o-o-o-ool.”

“Just trying to get it over with,” I said, then immediately realized what a colossally stupid thing that was to say to someone whose daughter had cancer, and I almost hung up. But then she said: “Greg, you’re so funny. You’ve always been such a funny kid.”

It sounded like she meant it, but she wasn’t laughing at all. This was getting even weirder than I had feared.

“I was calling to maybe get Rachel’s number,” I said.

“She. Would.
Love.
To hear from you.”

“Yup,” I agreed.

“She’s in her room right now, just waiting around.”

I had no idea what to make of that sentence. In her room,
just waiting around. Waiting for me? Or for death? My God, that’s bleak. I tried to put a positive spin on it.

“Livin’ it up,” I said.

This was the second brain-punchingly insensitive thing I had said in about thirty seconds, and again I considered closing my cell phone and eating it.

But: “Greg, you have such a good
sense of humor
,” Mrs. Kushner informed me. “Never let them take that away from you, all right? Always keep your sense of humor.”

“‘Them’?” I said, alarmed.

“People,” Mrs. Kushner said. “The whole world.”

“Huh,” I said.

“The world tries to just beat you down, Greg,” announced Mrs. Kushner. “They just want to crush the life out of you.” I had no response to this, and then she said, “I don’t even know what I’m
saying.
”

Mrs. Kushner had lost it. It was time to ride the wave or drown in a sea of crazy.

“Hallelujah,” I said. “Preach.”

“Preach,” she crowed. She actually cackled. “Greg!”

“Mrs. Kushner!”

“You can call me Denise,” she said, terrifyingly.

“Awesome,” I said.

“Here’s Rachel’s number,” said Denise, and gave it to me, and thank God, that was that. It almost made me relieved to talk to my sort-of-kinda-not-really ex-girlfriend about her imminent death.

“Hi, this is Rachel.”

“Hey, this is Greg.”

“Hi.”

“Yo.”

“. . .”

“I called the doctor and he said you needed a prescription of Greg-acil.”

“What’s that.”

“That’s me.”

“Oh.”

“Uh, in convenient gel-tab form.”

“Oh.”

“Yeahhhh.”

“So I guess you heard that I’m sick.”

“Yeahhhh.”

“Did my mom tell you?”

“Uh, my mom told me.”

“Oh.”

“So, uh.”

“What?”

“What?”

“What were you going to say?”

“Uhhh.”

“Greg, what?”

“Well, I was calling . . . to see . . . if you wanted to hang out.”

“Right now?”

“Uh, sure.”

“No thanks.”

“Uh . . . you don’t want to hang out?”

“No, thanks anyway.”

“Well, maybe later then.”

“Maybe later.”

“OK, uh . . . bye.”

“Bye.”

I hung up feeling like the biggest douchebag in the world. Somehow the conversation was 100 percent what I was expecting, yet I still managed to be blindsided by it. By the way, this kind of awkward fiasco was always what happened when Mom tried to get involved in my social life. Let me point out here that it’s acceptable for moms to try to run their kids’ social lives when the kids are in kindergarten or whatever. But I have a mom who didn’t stop scheduling play dates for me until I reached the ninth grade. The worst part of that was that the only other twelve and thirteen-year-olds whose moms scheduled their play dates were kids with mild to serious developmental disorders. I’m not going to go into detail about that, but let’s just say that it was emotionally scarring and is possibly a reason I spend so much time freaking out and pretending to be dead.

Anyway. What you’re seeing here is just part of a larger pattern of Mom-Greg Life Interference. She was without a doubt the single biggest obstacle between me and the social life that I was trying to describe before: a social life without friends, enemies, or awkwardness.

I guess I should introduce my family. Please forgive me if this sucks.

Again, let’s try and get this over with as quickly as possible.

Dr. Victor Gaines:
That would be my dad, a professor of classics at Carnegie Mellon University. No human being is weirder than Victor Quincy Gaines, PhD. My theory on Dad is that he was a party animal in the ’80s, and drugs and alcohol have partially unraveled the wiring of his brain. One of his favorite things to do is sit in a rocking chair in the living room, rock back and forth, and stare at the wall. Around the house he usually wears a muumuu, which is essentially a blanket with holes cut in it, and he talks to the cat, Cat Stevens, as if he were a real human being.

It’s hard not to be envious of Dad. He teaches at most two classes per semester, usually one, and that seems to occupy a very small percentage of his week. Sometimes they give him the entire year off to write a book. Dad has very little patience for most of the other professors he works with. He thinks they whine too much. Dad spends a lot of his time at specialty food shops on the Strip, chatting with the owners and buying obscure animal products that
no one else in the family will eat, like yak tripe and ostrich sausage and dried cuttlefish.

Every two years, Dad grows a beard, and it makes him look like a member of the Taliban.

Marla Gaines:
And that’s my mom, Marla, the ex-hippie. Mom led a very interesting life before she married Dad, but the details are carefully guarded. We know that she lived in Israel at some point, and we suspect that she may have had a boyfriend in the Saudi royal family, which would have been sort of a big deal, because she is Jewish. In fact, Marla Weissman Gaines is
very
Jewish. She is the executive director of Ahavat Ha’Emet, a nonprofit that sends Jewish teenagers to Israel to work on a kibbutz and lose their virginity. I should point out that the virginity-losing part is not technically in the mission statement of Ahavat Ha’Emet. I’m just saying, you do not leave Israel without getting laid. You could have an eight-inch-thick titanium diaper bolted to your pelvis, and you would still somehow get laid. It should be their official tourism slogan:
Israel. Where Virginity Goes to Die.
^™

Israelis get it on.

Anyway, my mom is a very loving woman, and she lets Dad do whatever the hell he wants, but she is also very opinionated and strong-willed, especially when it comes to Matters of Right and Wrong, and when she decides that something is the Right Thing to Do, that thing gets done. No ifs, ands, or buts. For better or worse. Whether we like it or not. This characteristic, in moms, is a colossal pain in the ass, and it basically ruined my life as I knew it, as well as Earl’s. Thanks a lot, Mom.

Gretchen Gaines:
Gretchen is my older younger sister. She’s fourteen, which means that any kind of normal interaction with her is doomed to failure. We used to be pretty good friends, but fourteen-year-old girls are psychotic. Her main interests are yelling at Mom and not eating whatever is for dinner.

Grace Gaines:
Grace is my younger younger sister. She’s six. Gretchen and I are pretty sure Grace was an accident. Incidentally, you may have noticed that all of our names begin with
GR
and are not at all Jewish-sounding. One night Mom had a little too much wine at dinner and confided to us all that, before we were born, and after she realized her children would have Dad’s also-not-Jewish last name, she decided she wanted all of us to be “surprise Jews.” Meaning, Jews with sneaky Anglo-Saxon names. I know, it makes no sense. I guess it shows that a vulnerability to brain fungus runs in the family.

Anyway, Grace aspires to be a writer and a princess, and like Dad, she treats Cat Stevens as though he is a human being.

Cat Stevens Gaines:
Cat Stevens was awesome, once—he used to do things like stand up on his back paws and hiss whenever you entered the room, or run up to you in the hallway and wrap his arms around your shin and start biting you—but now he’s old and slow. You can still get him to bite you, but you have to grab his tummy and jiggle it. Technically, he’s my cat; I was the one who named him. I came up with the name when I was seven, having recently learned about Cat Stevens’s existence from National Public Radio, which of course is the only radio station that gets any burn
in the Gaines house. It seemed like an obvious name for a cat at the time.

Only years later did I realize that Cat Stevens, the musician, is totally beat.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Dad has a
strong
affinity for Cat Stevens (the cat). In addition to sharing long-winded philosophical meditations with him, sometimes Dad plays Cat Stevens like a drum, which is a thing that Cat Stevens loves. Cat Stevens is also the only other member of the family who enjoys eating the meats that Dad brings home from the Strip, although sometimes he expresses his enjoyment by barfing.

Gamma-Gamma Gaines:
Dad’s mom lives in Boston and comes to visit occasionally. As with Cat Stevens, I named her when I was a toddler, and now I don’t get a do-over, and me and my sisters all have to call her Gamma-Gamma. It’s embarrassing. I guess we all make mistakes when we’re young.