Me and Earl and the Dying Girl - by Jesse Andrews

A person’s life is like a big weird ecosystem, and if there’s one thing science teachers enjoy blathering about, it’s that changes in one part of an ecosystem affect the entire thing. So let’s say my life is a pond. OK. Now let’s say some insane person (Mom) shows up with this nonnative species of depressed fish (Rachel) and puts the fish in the pond. OK. The other organisms in the pond (films, homework) are used to having a certain amount of algae (time that I get to spend on those things) to eat. But now this cancer-stricken fish is eating all that algae. So the pond is sort of jacked up as a result.

(That last paragraph is so stupid that I couldn’t even bring myself to delete it. By the way, for every mind-numbing thing that you have read in this book, there were like four other things that I wrote and then deleted. Most of them are about food or animals. I realize that I probably seem obsessed with food and animals. That’s because they’re the two strangest things in the entire world. Just sit in a room and think about them. Actually, don’t, because you might have a panic attack.)

So that is what was happening in my life. My schoolwork was definitely suffering, for example. Mr. McCarthy even took me aside to talk about it.

“Greg.”

“Hi, Mr. McCarthy.”

“Purvey a fact for me.”

Mr. McCarthy had ambushed me in the hall on the way to class. He was standing squarely in front of me and adopting an inexplicable stance. It was like the stance of a sumo wrestler, except with less stomping.

“Uh . . . any fact?”

“Any fact, but it must be presented with extreme authority.”

I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep for some reason, so I actually had some trouble coming up with a fact.

“Fact: A change in one part of an ecosystem, uh, affects an entire thing.”

Mr. McCarthy clearly wasn’t impressed by this fact, but he let it go. “Greg, I’m gonna waylay you for five minutes. Then I’m gonna give you a note so you can go to class.”

“Sounds good.”

“That’s what’s about to happen, right now.”

“OK.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

We walked into his office. They still hadn’t finished rewiring the teachers’ lounge, so the oracle was on his desk, presumably containing marijuana-infused soup. Seeing it, I immediately started panicking that Mr. McCarthy was going to confront me and Earl about drinking from the oracle. This panicky feeling got worse when Mr. McCarthy said the following thing:

“Greg, do you know why I brought you in here?”

There didn’t seem to be a correct answer to that question. I’m pretty bad in pressure situations, also. This should not surprise you at all. So I tried to say “No,” but my throat was dry from fear and I sort of just made a squeaking noise. I also probably looked like I was going to throw up. Because honestly, it was too stressful to think about what a big crazy tattoo-covered wacko like Mr. McCarthy would do if he knew we had discovered that he was doing something illegal. I was sitting there realizing that while I liked Mr. McCarthy, I was also deeply terrified of him and suspected that he might actually be a psychopath.

This suspicion deepened when, without warning, he tried to crush me with his giant brightly colored arms.

I was too terrified to fight back in any way, so I kind of just went limp. He had closed in on me and was sort of hugging me to death. A lot of thoughts were running through my head at that moment. One of them was: This is exactly the sort of dumb way a stoner would try to kill someone. By fatally hugging them. What is up with stoners? Drugs are asinine.

It took an embarrassingly long time to realize that he was actually just giving me a hug.

“Greg, bud,” he said after a while. “I know how tough things are for you right now. With Rachel in the hospital. We’ve all seen it.”

Then he let go. Because I had gone limp, this caused me to fall most of the way down. Unlike your average high school student, Mr. McCarthy did not find this hilarious. Instead, he became very concerned.

“Greg!” he shouted. “Easy, bud. Do you need to go home?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I got up. We sat down in chairs. Mr. McCarthy had a look on his face of deep concern. It was definitely out of character for him and it was sort of distracting me. It was like when a dog makes a human-style face at you and you’re temporarily thrown off guard by it. You’re like, “Whoa, this dog is feeling a mixture of nostalgic melancholy and proprietary warmth. I was not aware that a dog was capable of an emotion of that complexity.”

That’s what I was like with Mr. McCarthy.

“We’ve all seen how you’ve been affected by Rachel,” said Mr. McCarthy. “And we’ve definitely heard about all this time you’re spending with her. Bud, you’re a great friend. Anyone would be lucky to have a friend like you.”

“I’m really not,” I said. Mr. McCarthy did not seem to hear me, which was probably good.

“And I know school is not your number one priority right now,” added Mr. McCarthy, staring me in the eye in a way that was really nerve-racking. “I get that, bud. I was like you in school. I was smart, and I didn’t apply myself, and I did just enough to get by. And until recently, you’ve been doing enough to get by. But hey.”

He got closer to me. I was trying to imagine Mr. McCarthy as a student. For some reason, in my head he was a ninja. He was sneaking around the cafeteria late at night, preparing to assassinate someone.

“Hey. Your schoolwork is definitely suffering. This is a true fact. I’ve talked to your other teachers. In all of your classes, you’re unfocused, and you’re not participating, and you’re forgetting to do assignments. And in a few classes, bud, you’re pretty deep underwater. Let me unload another fact on you. Rachel . . . doesn’t want you . . . to fail your classes.”

“Yeah,” I said.

To be honest, I was pissed. Partially, I was pissed because Mr. McCarthy and I used to have this casual teacher-student relationship that involved zero earnest annoying talks like this, and that relationship was great. And now apparently it was over. And partially I was pissed because I knew he was right. I was definitely not doing all of my homework. Teachers had been pointing this out. I had been ignoring them, but it was harder to ignore Mr. McCarthy, because despite being an insane stoner, he was the only reasonable teacher in all of Benson.

“Bud, this is it,” Mr. McCarthy said. “This is the last year, and then you’re gone. Let me tell you this: After high school, life only gets better. You’re in a tunnel right now. There’s a light glimmering there at the end of it. You gotta make it to that light. High school is a nightmare, bud. It might be the worst years of your life.”

I didn’t really know what to say to this. The eye contact was giving me a headache.

“So you gotta make it out. You can’t fail. You’ve got the best excuse in the world right now, but you can’t use it. All right?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna do everything I can for you, because you’re a good kid. Greg, you’re a fucking great kid.”

I had never heard Mr. McCarthy use the F-word, so this at least was sort of exciting. Still, my Excessive Modesty reflex would not be denied.

“I’m not that great of a kid.”

“You’re an absolute beast,” said Mr. McCarthy. “That’s all there is to it. Get to class. Here’s a note. We all think you’re a total . . . ferocious . . . beast.”

The note said: “I had to meet with Greg Gaines for five minutes. Please excuse his absence. He is a beast. Mr. McCarthy, 11:12 am.”

Meanwhile, at home, Gretchen was going through this phase where she could not make it through an entire meal if Dad was at the table. This was in part because Dad was going through a phase of his own wherein he couldn’t stop pretending to be a cannibal. If we were eating anything with chicken in it, he would pat his stomach and announce, “Huma-a-a-a-an flesh. TASTE LIKE CHICKEN.” This caused Gretchen to burst into tears and stomp out of the dining room. Things only got worse when Grace started doing it, too, which was insane, because a six-year-old pretending to be a cannibal is one of the greatest things there is.

So that’s what was going on at home. Actually, that’s not even relevant, but I wanted to write about the cannibal thing.

And as for filmmaking, I dunno. Earl and I didn’t really end up doing the Two Poncy Dudes movie. We met up a few times to watch David Lynch films, and we knew that he kicked ass, but for some reason we were having trouble coming up with a script of our own. We’d kind of just sit around staring at the laptop screen. Then Earl would go outside for a cigarette and I would follow him. Then we’d come back and do more wordless staring.

So you’re probably reading all this, and being like, “Wow, Greg was really sad about Rachel, to the point where his entire life was in this tailspin. That is sort of touching.” But honestly, that’s not accurate. It’s not like I was sitting in a room, with tears running down my face, clutching one of Rachel’s bedroom pillows and listening to harp music all the time. I wasn’t wandering any dewy meadows, ruefully meditating on the Happiness We Could Have Had. Because maybe you don’t remember this, but I really didn’t love Rachel at all. If she hadn’t had cancer, would I be spending any time with her at all? Of course not. In fact, if she were to make a miraculous recovery, would we stay friends after that? I’m not even sure if we would. This all obviously sounds terrible, but there’s no point in lying about it.

So I wasn’t sad. I was just exhausted. When I wasn’t at the hospital, I felt guilty for not being at the hospital trying to cheer Rachel up. When I was at the hospital, most of the time I felt ineffective and useless as a friend. So either way, my life was deeply fucked up. But I also felt like a moron feeling sorry for myself, because I was not the one whose life was literally about to end.

At least I had Earl some of the time to cheer me up.

EXT. GAINES BACK PORCH — EVENING

EARL

suddenly

So you can be a heterosexual, or a homosexual, and I feel like I understand that, like you’re a woman in a man’s body or some shit, but I been thinking about it and how the fuck can somebody call theyself a bisexual.

GREG

Uhh . . .

EARL

Man, ain’t nobody like, that fine-ass girl is making me hard right now. Oh wait, my mistake, that dude over there is the one that’s making me hard. That don’t make no goddamn sense.

GREG

I guess sometimes I also wonder about that.

EARL

Goddamn. If you’re seriously like, “For real, I’m a bisexual, any person can get me hard,” man, you must get a hard-on from all kinds of freaky shit.

GREG

I think, uh . . . I mean, some scientists think that everyone’s actually a little bit of both. Homo and hetero.

EARL

Naw. That don’t make any damn sense at all. You tellin me right now, you can look at some titties, get a hard-on, look at some dude’s funky dick, get another hard-on. You gonna tell me that for real.

GREG

I guess I can’t say that, no.

EARL

determinedly

Dog taking a dump: hard-on. Wendy’s double cheeseburger: hard-on. Computer virus that destroy all your shit: hard-on.

GREG

Business section of the Wall Street Journal.

EARL

Big-ass hard-on for that shit.

Contemplative silence.

EARL

Yo, I got a line for you. You wanna get with that girl, with the big-ass titties?

GREG

Yeah, give me a line.

EARL

You walk up to her, say, Girl, you might not a known this about me, but I’m a trisexual.

GREG

uncertainly

OK.

EARL

Girl’s like, What the fuck?

GREG

Yeah.

EARL

You like, Yeah, trisexual.

GREG

OK.

EARL

She like, Whaaaaaat. You with me?

GREG

I’m with you.

EARL

Awright, she all confused. Then you drop the bomb, you’re like: trisexual, girl. Cuz I’ma try to have sex with you.

GREG

Ohhhhhh!

EARL

Try-sexual.

GREG

I’ll definitely use that.

EARL

Mack.

All right. Now we’re reaching the part where my life really started accelerating toward the edge of a cliff. And actually, this part wasn’t even Mom’s fault! It was Madison’s. It’s definitely messed up that they played similar roles in my life. I’m trying not to think about this too hard, lest I never get a boner ever again.

It was the beginning of November, and I was in the part of the hall where they had tacked up a bunch of vaguely terrifying pilgrim-and-turkey paintings by the ninth graders, when Madison appeared out of nowhere and grabbed my arm. Our skin was actually touching, specifically in the hand-to-arm format.

Suddenly, I became terrified that I was going to belch.

“Greg,” she said. “I have a favor to ask you.”

It wasn’t like I felt a belch forming in my stomach. It was just that, in my mind’s eye, I could foresee myself belching at Madison. I saw this extremely vividly. Maybe there would be a small amount of barf in there.

“So I promise I haven’t seen any of your movies,” she said, sort of a little impatiently, “but Rachel has, obviously, and she really likes them. And I just had this idea—you should make a movie for her.”

I wasn’t really sure what this meant. Also, to distract myself from the Belch of Doom that was lurking in my esophagus, I was looking away at a picture of a turkey. It was not all that well drawn. For some reason it seemed to have blood shooting out of all parts of its body. It was probably supposed to be feathers, or rays of the sun, or something.

“Huh,” I said.

Meanwhile, Madison sounded confused by my unenthusiastic reaction to her idea.

“I mean,” she said, and stopped. “Don’t you think she would love that?”

“Hummmm.”

“Greg, what are you looking at?”

“Uh, sorry, I got distracted.”

“By what?”

I really couldn’t think of anything. It was like I was on drugs. In fact, that reminded me of the inexplicable badger picture that showed up in my head after Earl and I ate Mr. McCarthy’s pho. So I said, “Uh, there was just this badger picture in my head for some reason.”

It goes without saying that the moment those words left my lips, I wanted to do serious injury to myself.

“Badger,” Madison repeated. “Like the animal?”

“Yeah, you know,” I said feebly. Then I added: “Just one of those badger head pictures you sometimes get.”

I wanted to eat a power tool. Incredibly, however, Madison was able to ignore this and move on.

“So I think you should make a movie for Rachel. She just really loves your movies so much. She watches them all the time. They make her so happy.”

As if the badger thing weren’t enough, it had suddenly become time for me to say a second stupid thing. Actually, it was time for another episode of everyone’s least favorite show, Excessive Modesty Hour with Greg Gaines.

“They can’t make her that happy.”

“Greg, shut up. I know you have issues with being complimented. Just take a compliment for once, because it’s true.”

Madison had actually observed and remembered one of my personality traits. This was so astonishing that I said, “Word,” completing a personal trifecta of Consecutive Inane Utterances That Will Prevent Sex from Ever Happening.

“Did you just say ‘Word’?”

“Yeah, word.”

“Huh.”

“Word, like, I agree.”

Madison, crafty girl that she is, managed to turn this last one on its head.

“So you agree! To make a movie! For Rachel!”

What the hell could I possibly say to that? Except yes?

“Uh, yeah. Yeah! I think it’s a good idea.”

“Greg,” she said, with a huge lovely smile, “this is going to be amazing.”

“Maybe it’ll be good!”

“I know you are going to make something wonderful.”

So I felt deeply conflicted here. On the one hand, basically the hottest nice girl in the entire school was telling me how great I was and how great of a film I was going to make. So that felt really good and was making me stand funny to hide a partial boner. On the other hand, though, I was agreeing to a project that I had grave doubts about. Actually, I didn’t even know what I was agreeing to.

So I said, “Uh.”

Madison waited for me to continue. The problem was I wasn’t even sure what to say.

“One thing, though,” I said.

“Mmmmm?”

“What, uh. Uhhhmmmmm.”

“What?”

“It’s just, uh.”

There seemed to be no way of asking this question without sounding like a moron.

“What do you think,” I said carefully, “the film should be.”

Madison now had kind of a blank look.

“You should just make a movie,” she said, “that’s specifically for her.”

“Yeah, but, uh.”

“Just make the movie that you would want to get if you were Rachel.”

“But what should it be, uh, about? D’you think.”

“I dunno!” said Madison cheerfully.

“OK.”

“Greg, you’re the director. It’s your movie!”

“I’m the director,” I said. I was really starting to lose focus. I felt the distant rumblings of a major freak-out coming on.

“I have to run. I’m so happy you’re doing this!” she exclaimed.

“Yeahhhh,” I said weakly.

“You’re the best,” she said, hugging me. Then she ran away.

“Burp,” I said, when she was out of earshot.

The exploding turkey had an expression on his face, like: “Goddammit! I’m exploding again?”

Earl had even less of an idea of how to do this project than I did. However, he was much better at articulating that.

“The fuck,” he kept muttering as I was trying to describe the project to him.

“Look,” he finally said. “You agreed to make a film for somebody. Now what the hell do that mean.”

“Uh, I guess . . . It means . . . Huh.”

“Yeah. You got no idea what the hell it mean.”

“I feel like I sort of do.”

“Well, spit it out, son.”

We were in my kitchen and he was rummaging through our food, which put him in at least a neutral mood, if not a good one.

“I mean, if we were painters, we could just paint a picture of something and give it to her as a gift. Right? So let’s just do the film version of that.”

“Where the hell do Pa Gaines keep the salsa at.”

“I think we’re out. Look—what if we just did a one-off film? And gave her the only copy? That works, right?”

“Son, that don’t give oh, hot damn.”

“What?”

“What the hell is this.”

“That’s—lemme look at it.”

“This smell like a donkey’s hairy-ass dick.”

“Ohhhh. This is goose-liver pâté.”

“There ain’t no salsa, I’ma eat this shit.”

As I’ve mentioned before, Earl gets very fired up about the occasionally gross animal-derived foods purchased and refrigerated by Dr. Victor Q. Gaines. I say “purchased and refrigerated” because Dad never eats them right away. He likes for them to spend a lot of time in the fridge, so that the rest of the family has a chance to become aware of them. It’s a habit that Gretchen may hate more than anything else in the world. However, Gretchen’s extreme dislike is balanced by the almost-as-extreme appreciation of Earl. Earl expresses his appreciation by talking about how disgusting the food is while eating it.

“Son. We still have no idea what the film gonna be about.”

“Yeah, that’s the hard part.”

“Yeah.”

“Uhhhh.”

“Like, we could make the David Lynch film that we was gonna make, and just give it to Rachel, and that’s her film. But I don’t think we want to do that.”

“No?”

“Hell no. That’d be weird as hell. We’d be like, Yo, Rachel, watch this crazy-ass film about lesbians running around and hallucinating and shit. We made this film especially for you.”

“Huh.”

“Like at the beginning, it’s like, ‘For Rachel.’ It’s like we’re saying: Rachel, you love David Lynch. You love freaky-ass lesbians getting they freak on. So here’s a film about that shit. Nah. That don’t make no sense. Now what the fuck is this.”

“No, no, don’t eat that. That’s dried cuttlefish. That’s like Dad’s favorite. He likes to wander around with part of it sticking out of his mouth.”

“I’ma take a little bite.”

“You can like nibble it once, but that’s it.”

“Mmm.”

“What do you think?”

“Man, this taste stupid. This taste like some kinda . . . undersea . . . urinal.”

“Huh.”

“It taste like dolphins and shit.”

“So, you don’t like it.”

“I did not say that.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, it’s like seventy-five percent dolphin scrotum, twenty-five percent chemicals.”

“So you do like it.”

“This is a dumb-ass piece of food.”

I had to agree with Earl: We couldn’t just do any film. There had to be at least some kind of connection to Rachel’s life. But what connection could that be? We sat in the kitchen and we brainstormed a bunch of them. All of the ideas were stupid.

They were really stupid. You’re about to see exactly how stupid. I mean, my God.

“Are you done eating that?”

“What?”

“You shouldn’t finish that, Dad’s gonna want some.”

“The hell he will.”

“He will.”

“It’s so nasty. Son, it’s so nasty.”

“Then why are you finishing it?”

“Takin a bullet.”

I knew our first plan was a mistake when Jared “Crackhead” Krakievich waddled up to me in the hall and addressed me as “Spielberg.”

“Hah yih doin, Spillberg,” he shouted, grinning hideously.

“What?” I said.

“I seen yer maykin’ a mewvie.”

“Oh yeah.”

“I dinn know yih made mewvies.”

“Just this one,” I said, probably too hastily.

“I’m call yih Spillberg fruh now on.”

“Great.”

It was the first shot fired in a nightmarish barrage of attention that would continue all day.

Mrs. Green, Physics 1 I.S.: “I think what you are doing is so . . . touching and . . . remarkable, and just really touching.”

Kiya Arnold: “My cousin died of leukemia. I just want to say. I’m so sorry about your girlfriend. How long y’all been together?”

Will Carruthers: “Hey faggot! Lemme be in your gay movie.”

Plan A was: Get the well-wishes of everyone at school, synagogue, etc., and put them in a film, and have that be the film. A get-well film, basically. Simple, elegant, heartwarming. Sounds like a good idea, right? Of course it does. We were completely seduced by this idea. We were morons.

First Problem: We had to get the footage ourselves, meaning we had to reveal ourselves as filmmakers to a hostile world. Originally, I asked Madison if she would get the footage herself, i.e., if she would hang out in a classroom with a camera instead of me and Earl. This led to me saying that I sort of didn’t want people knowing I was making a film for Rachel, which made her upset. That led to me saying that I didn’t want people to know about my feelings for Rachel, which made her upset in a different way that I did not, frankly, understand. Anyway, she insisted that I get the footage, and said “Oh, Greg” about seventy times until I quietly freaked out and ran away.

So we made plans to film in Mr. McCarthy’s room after school, and reluctantly told a couple of teachers about it, and with disturbing speed all teachers had found out about it, and told their students, and also it made the morning announcements every day in a row for like a week.

So yeah. This was possibly the death blow to the invisibility I had been cultivating throughout high school, and then gradually losing since becoming friends with Rachel. I used to be just normal Greg Gaines. Then I was Greg Gaines, Rachel’s Friend and Possibly Boyfriend.

That was bad enough. But now I was Greg Gaines, Filmmaker. Greg Gaines, Guy with a Camera, Following People Around. Greg Gaines, Perhaps He Is Creepily Filming You Right Now Without Your Knowledge or Consent.

Fuckbiscuit.

Second Problem: The footage was not very good. The teachers all ran way too long, first of all. None of them said anything that could be edited down. A lot of them started talking about tragedies that had happened in their lives, which besides being unusable made things fairly awkward in the room after they were done recording.

As for the students, 92 percent said some combination of these things:

• “Get better.”

• “I have to say I don’t know you that well.”

• “I know we never hung out very much.”

• “You’re in my class, but we’ve never really talked.”

• “I actually don’t know anything about you.”

• “But I do know that you have the inner strength to get better.”

• “You have a beautiful smile.”

• “You have a beautiful laugh.”

• “You have really beautiful eyes.”

• “I think your hair is beautiful.”

• “I know you’re Jewish, but I’d like to just say something from the Bible.”

And then the other 8 percent tried to be funny or creative, and that was even worse.

• “In eighth period, I wrote a song that I want to sing you. Are we ready? Can I just sing it? OK. Rachel Kushner / Don’t you push her / She’s got leukemia / and she probably wants to scream-ia / But she’s everybody’s friend! / You know her life’s not gonna end!!!”

• “Even if you do die, I was thinking today, it’s really only on the arbitrary human scale that a human life seems short, or long, or whatever, and, like, from the perspective of eternal time, the human life is vanishingly small, like it’s really equivalent whether you live to be 17 or 94 or even 20,000 years old, which is obviously impossible, and then, on the other hand, from the perspective of an ultra-nanoinstant, which is the smallest measurable unit of time, a human life is almost infinite even if you die when you’re, like, a toddler. So either way it doesn’t even matter how long you live. So I don’t know if that makes you feel better, but it’s just something to think about.”

• “Greg’s a fag. I guess he’s in love with you, so that makes him bisexual or whatever. I hope you feel better.”

Third Problem: Madison had already made get-well cards for Rachel. So we weren’t really doing anything new, for one. We were just doing a get-well card in video form.

Also—this took a little longer to realize—there was nothing specifically Gaines/Jackson about the get-well video. It was something anyone could do. So was it really that great of a gesture? No.

We’d been making films for seven years. We needed to do something better.