"I want you to take your films and apply to them. Earl, too."

"Uh, OK."

"That's the only thing I want you to do."

"Yeah."

"Can you do that?"

"Yeah, sure."

"You promise."

"Yeah, I promise."

So. I'm finally getting to the part where my life gets ruined by Mom, and also Earl's life. Go get some popcorn! This is gonna be awesome. I'll wait right here.

Mmmm. b.u.t.tery, salty popcorn.

Actually, I'm gonna go make some popcorn, too. Hang on.

f.u.c.k, this is the diet kind. This is disgusting. This tastes like the inside of a couch.

f.u.c.kburglar.

So in the making of Rachel the Film, I fell behind on schoolwork sort of a lot. I already kind of told you about that, but during Rachel the Film, things reached sort of an embarra.s.sing point. Basically, I was getting g.a.n.g.b.a.n.ger-level grades, and teachers were starting to take me aside after cla.s.s to tell me that I was destroying my own life. And finally, the day after I delivered the one copy of Rachel the Film to Rachel, Mr. McCarthy staged an intervention. He went to Mom and Dad, and the three of them agreed that Mr. McCarthy was allowed to keep me after school every day for hours to prevent me from failing my cla.s.ses.

Did this happen to Earl? No. Earl takes cla.s.ses where you don't fail, period. It doesn't matter what work you do or how often you show up. You could staple a dead animal to your homework and you wouldn't fail. You could show up one day and pelt your teacher with bags of narcotics and p.o.o.p. They'd probably just send you to the vice princ.i.p.al's office or something.

So suddenly I was doing schoolwork all the time, under the watchful, quietly insane eye of Mr. McCarthy. I guess I was actually sort of grateful that someone else was taking over my life. I mean, I'm obviously pretty terrible at managing my own life, so it was nice to know that it was in good hands. But also it was nice to have all these concrete tasks to do and be sort of distracted and consumed by them. It kept me from thinking about every depressing weird thing that was going on at that time.

Unfortunately, it also prevented me from noticing that Mom was suddenly behaving abnormally.

Normally, when I'm home, she likes to do some annoying check-in at least every hour. There is no end to the reasons moms can use for annoying check-ins.

* Just seeing how things are going

* Just seeing if you need any help with anything * Just wanted to say it's a beautiful day outside and maybe you should think about getting some exercise * Just letting you know that I'm going to spin cla.s.s * Just letting you know I'm back from spin cla.s.s * Just letting you know that Gretchen is being A Little Difficult Right Now so please don't aggravate her * Just wondering if you want beef tips for dinner or do you eat lamb because I was heading out to Whole Foods but I forget if you eat lamb * Just had a question for you but now I forget what it is, so I'll just ask you later, unless you might know what the question was, but you probably don't, so I'll just come back later, so things are going OK? They are? Honey, you need to turn some lights on in here or you'll destroy your eyes For a few days, this came to an unprecedented halt. I wasn't home as much, and then when I was home, there were no check-ins. In hindsight, I really should have suspected something was up. But I was busy, and also, I was probably unconsciously grateful for the temporary lack of annoying check-ins, and unwilling to risk re-triggering them.

The hammer fell during eighth period.

One great thing about eighth-period lunch is that pep rallies are always scheduled for eighth period, so Earl and I never have to go to them. However, at least in theory, they're mandatory attendance for the whole school, and for some reason Mr. McCarthy was a jerk about this one.

"Sorry, guys," he said, standing in the doorway as his ninth-grade history cla.s.s milled around outside like disoriented toddlers. "I'd get in big trouble if anyone found you here during the pep rally."

So we left our lunches on his desk and tagged along with the ninth graders to the auditorium.

For most pep rallies, the marching band's drum section is onstage, pounding out some repet.i.tive beat, and maybe some of the bolder athletes grab a microphone and try to freestyle over it, until they get too s.e.xually explicit or accidentally say the F- or N-word, at which point a vice princ.i.p.al shuts them down. However, there was just a ma.s.sive projector screen onstage, and no drummers; just Princ.i.p.al Stewart. We were among the last cla.s.ses to arrive, and so we had barely sat down among the ninth graders when Princ.i.p.al Stewart took the microphone and spoke.

Princ.i.p.al Stewart is a giant, terrifying black man. There's no other way to put it. He is extremely authoritative, and his default facial expression, like Earl's, is p.i.s.sed. I had never been directly addressed by him, and I was hoping to keep it that way until graduation.

His speaking style is hard to describe. There's sort of an angry undercurrent to everything he says, even when the words aren't angry at all, and there are a lot of pauses. He definitely sounded p.i.s.sed at the pep rally.

"Students and teachers. Of Benson High School. Welcome to this pep rally. We are here. To cheer the Trojans. To certain victory over Allderdice. Tonight on the football field."

Cheering and hollering that Princ.i.p.al Stewart, glaring at all of us, brought to an abrupt end.

"However. It is for a greater purpose. That I have a.s.sembled everyone. Here on this afternoon. I will make my words brief. On this subject."

Major pause.

"A member of the Benson family. Is in the fight of her life. Against cancer. You may know her personally. And if not you have certainly heard. Her name. Her name is Rachel Kushner. We have all. At one time or another. Sent our prayers. Out to her and her family. They are needed."

The anger sort of made this sound ironic, which made me sort of giggle quietly. And then Princ.i.p.al Stewart was staring right at me, and I had this dumb smile frozen on my face, and words cannot describe to you the terror I felt at that moment.

"But two students. Have gone further. Much further. They have spent countless hours. Creating a film."

Next to me, I heard Earl make a strangled noise.

"A film to lift Rachel's spirits. A film to give her company. And hope. And love. A film to make her laugh. And feel cherished."

For every word that Princ.i.p.al Stewart was saying, I wanted to punch myself in the face.

"They did not intend. For anyone but Rachel. To see this film. They did this for her. And her alone. However, gestures of love. Of this quality. Are surely worth seeing. And appreciating. And applauding."

A new feeling came over me. I wanted to punch myself in the junk.

"Gregory Gaines. Earl Jackson. Please come to the stage."

My legs felt weak. I couldn't stand up. The back of my throat tasted like barf. Earl had a look on his face like a dead man. I was trying to black out on command. I wasn't quite able to do it.

What had happened was, Denise had found the film. Rachel had put it on and then fallen asleep. And Denise walked into the room, found it, and watched it. And then Denise shared it with Mom. And Mom told Denise about how Earl and I never let anyone see anything. And Denise and Mom decided that everyone should see this film. And without letting us know, they went to some teachers at the school. And the teachers saw it. And Princ.i.p.al Stewart saw it. And now everyone was about to see it.

Onstage, as people halfheartedly applauded, Princ.i.p.al Stewart clapped his giant hands on our shoulders, glared at us as though he was about to eat our flesh, and said quietly, "I am very moved. By what you boys have done. You are a credit to this school." Then the three of us sat in chairs off to one side, and Earl's giant head and my somehow even gianter head appeared on the screen, and for twenty-eight minutes, everyone at Benson sat through Rachel the Film.

So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves, and Rachel would somehow miraculously make a recovery, or maybe she would die but we would Always Have Her to Thank for Making Us Discover Our Inner Talent, and Madison would become my girlfriend and I would get to nuzzle her b.o.o.bs like an affectionate panda cub whenever I wanted.

That is why fiction sucks. None of that happened. Instead, pretty much everything happened that I was afraid of, except worse.

1. My Cla.s.smates Did Not Particularly Enjoy Rachel the Film They hated it. They thought it was weird and confusing. They also thought we had forced them to watch it, despite what Princ.i.p.al Stewart said. Most students weren't paying very close attention to his speech. They just showed up at the auditorium, started paying attention when the lights went down, and a.s.sumed that it was our idea to make everyone watch the stupid film. And because it genuinely sucks, they hated it. Earl and I got to watch their reactions from onstage. There was a lot of restless fidgeting, bored conversations, teachers hissing "Shhh," and hostile glaring. So that wasn't great.

The worst part was the occasional screams of outrage. The spinning tarantula, for example, caused more than a couple of people to lose their s.h.i.t. "That ain't right!" "That's nasty." "WHY WE GOTTA WATCH THIS."

Actually, maybe it was worse to see the reactions of Rachel's friends Anna and Naomi. They both clearly hated it. Naomi made her feelings clear by having an enormous scowl on her face and rolling her eyes roughly every ten seconds. And the thing was, I couldn't even really blame her for that. Anna was worse, because she just looked kind of miserable. She was being comforted by Scott Mayhew, the guy who I pretended was a barfing alien. He had become her boyfriend. Scott was mostly glaring at me, with the icy unblinking hatred of a gothy dork who feels that his trust has been betrayed. I guess I was lucky that he didn't have a sword.

The teachers all made a big deal of liking it, which (1) reflects poorly on their artistic judgment and (2) made the students hate it even more. It kept getting rubbed in everyone's face that we had done this stupid film. It started to look as though we had just done it because we wanted attention. That idea, of course, makes me want to throw poisonous stinging insects at my own head.

Some of the stoners liked it, and that did not make me feel better about anything. Dave Smeggers, for example, stopped me in the hall to tell me that he thought the film was "deep."

"It was funny, man," he said. "You took death, like a real person's death, and you made it funny. You made it funny as h.e.l.l! That blew me away."

It didn't seem worth it to tell him that that actually wasn't our goal.

Madison claimed to like it, but it was pretty obvious she was just being nice. The kicker was when she said she didn't understand all of it.

"You guys are just so creative," she explained, as though that permitted us to make any weird, alienating, poorly created thing and force people to watch it.

So everyone saw it. Almost everyone hated it.

In the words of Nizar the Surly Syrian, "You want to fight, I fight you. c.o.c.k s.h.i.t a.s.s f.u.c.k."

2. My Cla.s.smates Now Had Active Reason to Dislike Me And so in the days directly after the screening of Rachel the Film, my role in the Benson ecosystem changed again, for the worse. At the beginning of the year I had been Greg Gaines, the guy who is casually friendly with everyone. Then I became Greg Gaines, Possible Boyfriend of a Boring Girl. That wasn't great; nor was Greg Gaines, Filmmaker. But now I was Greg Gaines, Filmmaker Who Specifically Makes s.h.i.tty Experimental Films and Forces You to Watch Them. I was a lone chimp, hobbling around on the forest floor. I also had a ginormous target on the back of my head and a sign under it that said: "Betcha Can't Hit My Head with Your Thrown Feces!"

I couldn't even bring myself to talk to anyone at school. I wasn't able to talk to anyone anyway, without it being film-related. Kids would shout things at me in the hall from time to time-often about the spinning tarantula, which I think really came to symbolize the film's aggressive awfulness-and I was unable to come up with a response that would make it OK. Instead, I would just kind of walk faster. This felt horrible.

In terms of social groups: The smart kids treated me with outright pity. The rich kids suddenly behaved as though they had never known me. The jocks started asking me when I was going to do a gay p.o.r.n. The theater kids-this was the worst-seemed to think that, now that I had invaded their auditorium, we had some kind of tense artistic rivalry going. And most other kids just treated me with a combination of mistrust and dislike.

So that wasn't great.

3. Earl and I Stayed Far, Far Away from Each Other We had no interest in hanging out. None.

4. I Had Kind of a Meltdown and Became a Hermit In fairness, I definitely did not react very well to what happened. The screening was in December, so I went to school for another week after that, and then the week before winter break, I just sort of stopped going to school. I biked to Home Depot, bought a lock for my door, attached it kind of messily with some power tools, and locked myself in my room.

Since the film thing, the only parent I was on speaking terms with was Dad, and even then I didn't really want to talk to him, so instead we sent texts to each other. It was weird.

Son, Are you going to school today?

no Why not?

feel sick Should we take you to a doctor?

no i just need to be alone So you don't have a broken arm or anything?

why would i have a broken arm You don't really know how to use power tools! LOL no broken arm Well, feel free to make lunch for yourself in the kitchen. I'll be in my study if you need anything.

I learned later that Mom was so upset about this whole fiasco that she let Dad talk her into being much more hands-off with me than before. This, of course, was completely welcome by me. In fact, Mom finally staying out of my life was probably the only thing that prevented me from attempting to jog to Buenos Aires.

So for a week I just stayed in my room and watched films. First I watched only the good ones, in the hopes that they would cheer me up, but all they did was remind me of what a terrible filmmaker I was. Then I watched some bad films, but that didn't make me feel good, either. Every now and then I put in a Gaines/Jackson DVD, and had to take it out after five minutes. Our films were just so bad. They just were. We didn't have any equipment, or actors. We were just kids making embarra.s.sing kid stuff. I put in the ones I thought would be the best, and they were terrible. Star Peaces. 2002. Cat-ablanca. Horrific. An abomination. Boring, stupid, unwatchable.

And on Day Three I freaked out and took out a scissors and scratched them all up and threw them in the garbage, and I knew at the time it wasn't going to make me feel any better, but I did it anyway, because, f.u.c.k it.

So I was feeling about as awful as I had ever felt when Dad called my cell phone one afternoon to tell me that Rachel was back in the hospital.

Denise was there when I got to Rachel's room, and we didn't really have anything to say to each other, so we both awkwardly sat there for a while. I felt like I should leave, but I knew that would make me feel even worse. Rachel wasn't awake. She had pneumonia, apparently.

I really wanted Rachel to wake up. In retrospect, this was stupid and pointless, because I had nothing to say to her, but I just wanted to talk to her again. I sat there staring at her for like an hour. Her frizzy hair was gone, and her mouth was closed, so I couldn't see her sort of big teeth. And her eyes were closed, so I couldn't see them, either. So you'd think the person lying there wouldn't have looked like Rachel at all, but somehow she did.

Actually I was crying the whole time, because for some reason it had never really sunk in with me that she was dying, and now I was literally watching her die, and it was different somehow.

There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not really understood, if you know what I mean. I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn't really hit you, and then when it does, that's when you feel like s.h.i.t.

So like an idiot, I hadn't understood until I was sitting there actually watching her physically die, when it was too late to say or do anything. I couldn't believe it had taken me so long to understand it even a little bit. This was a human being, dying. This was the only time there was going to be someone with those eyes and those ears and that way of breathing through her mouth and that way of building up right before a monster laugh with her eyebrows all raised and her nostrils flaring a little bit, this was the only time there was ever going to be that person, living in the world, and now that was almost over, and I couldn't deal with it.

I was thinking, also, that we had made a film about a thing, death, that we knew nothing about. Maybe Earl sort of knew something, but I knew absolutely nothing about it. Plus we had made a film about a girl who we really hadn't gotten to know. Actually, we hadn't made the film about her at all. She was just dying, there, and we had gone and made a film about ourselves. We had taken this girl and used her really to make a film about ourselves, and it just seemed so stupid and wrong that I couldn't stop crying. Rachel the Film is not at all about Rachel. It's about how little we know about Rachel. We were so ridiculously arrogant to try to make a film about her.

So I was sitting there and the whole time I had this insane wish for Rachel to wake up and just tell me everything she had ever thought, so that it could be recorded somewhere, so that it wouldn't be lost. I found myself thinking, what if she's already had her last thought, what if her brain isn't producing conscious thoughts anymore, and that was so awful that I started completely bawling, I was making hideous sobbing noises like an elephant seal or something, like: HURNK HURNGK HRUNNNN.

Denise was just sitting there frozen.

At the same time, and I hated myself for this, I was realizing how to make the movie I should have made, that it had to be something that stored as much of Rachel as possible, that ideally we would have had a camera on her for her whole life, and one inside her head, and it made me so bitter and f.u.c.king angry that this was impossible, and she was just going to be lost. Just as if she had never been around to say things and laugh at people and have favorite words that she liked to use and ways of fidgeting with her fingers when she got antsy and specific memories that flashed through her head when she ate a certain food or smelled a certain smell like, I dunno, how maybe honeysuckle made her think of one particular summer day playing with a friend or whatever the f.u.c.k, or how rain on the windshield of her mom's car used to look like alien fingers to her, or whatever, and as if she had never had fantasies about stupid Hugh Jackman or visions of what her life was going to be like in college or a whole unique way of thinking about the world that was never going to be articulated to anyone. All of it and everything else she had ever thought was just going to be lost.

And the point of Rachel the Film should really have been to express how awful and s.h.i.tty that loss was, that she would have become a person with a long awesome life if she had been allowed to continue living, and that this was just a stupid meaningless loss, just a motherf.u.c.king loss, a loss loss loss f.u.c.king loss, there was no f.u.c.king meaning to it, there was nothing good that could come out of it, and I was sitting there thinking about the film and I knew the film would have to have a scene of me losing my s.h.i.t in the hospital room, and her mom sitting there wordless and dead-eyed like a statue, and I hated myself for having a cold detached part of me that thought this, but I couldn't help it.

At some point during all this, my mom came in, and if you think it was possible for either of us to talk through all the crying, you may just be stupid.

We had to step out into the hall eventually, but not before Mom had a bizarre interaction with Denise, where she hugged Denise's body and said some incoherent things while Denise just sat there rigidly.