"Son, do you have any interest in going on a-a college tour."

"Uh, not really."

"Oh!"

"Yeah, I don't really want to do that."

"No-no to the college tour, you're saying! I see."

"Yeah, no."

Dad was so fired up about not doing a college tour that he immediately left the room and didn't mention it again for months. And even though college was kind of looming over my entire life during that time, as long as no one brought it up, I was able to ignore it.

For some reason I just really wasn't able to deal with the idea of college. I would try to think about it and then my mouth would get all dry and my armpits would start stinging and I would have to change the channel in my brain to something other than college. Usually it was to the Brain Nature Channel. That's where you picture a graceful herd of antelopes frolicking in the plains, or some playful beavers making a sophisticated little home out of twigs, or maybe one of those specials where they show Brazilian jungle insects biting the h.e.l.l out of each other. Basically, anything until it no longer feels like your armpits have bees in them.

I don't know why college freaked me out so much. Actually, that's a blatant lie. I definitely know why. It had been a ridiculous amount of work figuring out life at Benson-mapping out the entire social landscape, figuring out all the ways to navigate it without being noticed-and it was pretty much at the limit of my espionage talents. And college is a much bigger, more complicated place than high school-like with infinitely more groups and people and activities-and so I got panicky and insane just thinking about how impossible it would be to deal with that. I mean, you're actually living with your cla.s.smates in a dormitory most of the time. How can you possibly be invisible to them? How can you just be sort of bland and inoffensive and unmemorable to the guys who are living in your room? You can't even fart in there. You have to go out into the hall or something to fart. Or you could just never fart, but then who knows what would happen.

So that was really terrifying to me and I didn't want to think about it. But then Mom and Dad decided that it was Important to Prepare For, and about a week after I got out of the hospital they ambushed me like a pair of Brazilian jungle insects and started biting the h.e.l.l out of me. I mean, not literally. You know what I mean. It sucked.

After thinking about it a little bit, I figured I would just go to Carnegie Mellon, where Dad teaches. But Mom and Dad were doubtful that I'd get in, because of my grades and total lack of extracurriculars.

"You could show them your films," suggested Mom.

This was such a terrible idea that I had to pretend to be dead for five minutes, which was how long it took Mom and Dad to get bored of yelling at me and leave the room. But then when they heard me moving around they came back and we had to talk some more.

In the end we decided that at the very least I should also apply to Pitt, a.k.a. the University of Pittsburgh, which I thought of at the time as Carnegie Mellon's larger, slightly dumber sibling. Mom also made me promise to just take a look at this directory of colleges, just maybe sit down for an hour and page through it, just to get some ideas about what's out there, it really won't take that long and it's just good to have some idea of your options because there are so many different options out there and it would really be a shame if you didn't find the right one and finally I was like OK OK JESUS CHRIST.

But the book of colleges was literally fourteen hundred pages long. So there was no way that was actually going to happen. For some reason I carried it around in my backpack for a few days and every time I looked at it I had the bees-in-the-armpits feeling.

I made the mistake of mentioning college around Rachel during one of my hospital visits, and then she got really interested in it and we had to talk about it for an awkwardly long time.

"Apparently, Hugh Jackman is doing this new ab workout," I said in an attempt to distract her. "So now he has four more abs than he used to have."

It's insane that that didn't distract her from college, but it didn't.

"So you want to go to Carnegie Mellon?" she said. She propped herself up and was sort of staring at me harder than usual.

"I mean, I'd rather go there than anywhere else," I said. "But Mom and Dad think I won't even get in. So I'll probably go to Pitt."

"Why wouldn't you get in?"

"Ugh, I don't know. You have to have good grades, and then additionally you have to be the president of a debate team, or you have to have built a homeless shelter, and I haven't done anything outside of school except f.u.c.k around."

I could tell Rachel wanted to bring up the films, but she didn't, which was good, because I was fully prepared to pretend to be dead again. But in a hospital that's less acceptable as a conversation-changing tactic. It's just not the right place to try that kind of move. Also, someone might walk in and actually think you're dead, and then they'd put you in a wheelchair and stick you out in a waiting room or something, like with Gilbert, the wheelchair-bound Possible Dead Person that I mentioned twenty-four hundred words ago.

"Really, my only goal with college is not to get into a fraternity," I said, just to get a decent riff going. "Because the number-one thing fraternities like to do is to take a fat kid and then tie him to a flagpole or a professor's car or something. So I'm worried about that happening to me. That's their favorite thing to do. Maybe they would want to whip me with a belt or something. It's actually extremely h.o.m.oerotic, but then if you point this out, they lose their s.h.i.t."

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 b.u.t.ter and Belly, minus the peanut b.u.t.ter."

"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 a.s.s 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 f.u.c.ked 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 f.u.c.k 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 d.i.c.k. Like, a colossal d.i.c.k. I was asking a dying girl about her plans she's making for the future. That is just about the d.i.c.kest move out there. Holy f.u.c.k. 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-a.s.s 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 p.i.s.sed 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 h.e.l.l, 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 jacka.s.s."

"You're not being a jacka.s.s."

"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 p.i.s.sed 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.

So basically my life had been completely f.u.c.ked 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 h.e.l.l 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 d.i.c.kbag 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.