Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(61)
“Sort of, toward the end.”
“You used a condom, right?”
Her head swivels violently toward me. “Do you think I’m an idiot?”
A minute passes. Then she sighs.
“Yeah, no, we totally didn’t. I had to go get Plan B.”
“Did Mike go with you?”
“He had wrestling practice.”
“Did you go by yourself?” I ask, alarmed.
She nods.
“You’re kidding. Why didn’t you ask me to go with you?”
She looks off to the side and twists her mouth with concern.
“I thought you were mad at me or something.”
“What? Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’ve felt like that for a while. And then I read that story you wrote.”
I feel my face go red, the way it does whenever somebody brings up something I wrote IRL.
“Just because I have a boyfriend now doesn’t mean we can’t hang out and keep things exactly the way they are,” she says softly.
I shake my head, but I don’t have the energy to explain why everything’s different now, from my feelings about writing to my friendship with Ave. I feel blanched, totally drained of any cleverness or insight. Eventually we both start falling asleep.
While I’m still half-conscious, I dimly register Dawn, backlit from the hallway, quietly pulling my bedroom door closed.
Chapter 24
I LOOK DOWN AT THE SMALL CLUSTER OF FOLD-OUT CHAIRS below me, where Ruth’s family and a couple of her friends sit. From the front row, Dawn gives me an encouraging nod.
I take a deep breath.
“Okay, so the problem is, it’s impossible to write a eulogy because nobody is really honest about who they’re writing it for. Theoretically, it’s supposed to be for the person who passed away, right? You talk to them in heaven—or, if you’re agnostic, you imagine them sitting in the front row with popcorn and Mike and Ikes or something—and tell them how much they enriched your life, how kind and wonderful they were, what a joy to be around. But at their core, eulogies are selfish. They’re not for the dead person; they’re really for the rest of us, so we can say goodbye the way we would have if we’d seen it coming.
“Which is especially tough in this case because one of so many things that made Ruth special is that she wouldn’t want me to give myself that pass, to turn her into a saintly little old lady whose only interests were fresh Toll House cookies and lumbar back pillows. I think I understand now why people do that: because the pain is less acute if you blur out the idiosyncrasies and specifics of this person you loved and make it more like a generic grief template, like you’re saying goodbye to some neutral, safe stranger made out of geriatric Mad Libs.
“The word eulogy comes from a combination of the Greek words for praise and elegy. Ruth would call bullshit on both. She’d probably ask for a Viking funeral instead. You know, that kind where you put the body in a canoe and push it into the lake and set it on fire. And she’d want it to scare the crap out of the Melville Prep boys’ crew team in the next boat.
“In fact, though, in Judaism, it’s sinful to eulogize the dead with attributes they didn’t possess. It’s considered mocking them. I’m Jewish, so I’m really not allowed to bullshit about her unless I want to be infested with locusts or become a pillar of salt or whatever. So here’s the no-BS truth. Ruth was old, and weird, and sometimes super-cranky, and not a lot of people in the neighborhood understood her. Honestly, not a lot of people close to her did, either. I sometimes didn’t, for sure. She had a way of knocking people off balance, and if you didn’t fall down like most other people, if you rode the wave and kept standing, you were in forever. If you didn’t fit in anywhere else, it’s almost like she had a you-shaped hole just waiting.
“She was a lot of things to a lot of people who meant more to her than I did. Before I met her, she was a rebellious daughter and a brave friend. If Ruth’s life were a book, I only read the last chapter, except it was upside down and in Esperanto. And she seemed like she was losing it, sometimes. Last year she came over to my house at, like, eight A.M., knocked on my door, and told me, “I’m going to talk to the president.” It was her way of trying to tell me that everything would be okay, and I shouldn’t worry. She was handling it. But to just tell me that, plainly, like everybody else was telling kids—that everything would be okay—felt like the lie to her. And if she had chosen you as a person in her life, she knew you’d see through it too.
“That was another one of the amazing things about Ruth: She never underestimated anybody around her, even when it would be so easy to. And when you’re as smart as she was, that’s a really incredible, rare way to be.
“It’s a little devastating to think about this now—devastating is a melodramatic word, I know; I tried a bunch of other ones: sad, depressing, disconcerting, but none of them felt as right—because I wrote off so much of what she said when she was still here without really listening to her, when the whole time she was really telling me everything. She just refused to do it in the typical way. She knew, or at least hoped, everybody she knew was better than that. And we were. But some of us probably didn’t know it until now. This isn’t fair of me, but I’m mad at her. She was supposed to sit in the waiting room and feel bad for herself and let the rest of us have a proper goodbye. But just because she knew she was about to get called into her appointment, she wasn’t about to waste the years she had left. If she didn’t, nobody should. And yet, here we are. Right? Using our valuable time just to sit in the waiting room and complain about how bored we are.