Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

by Jesse Andrews

  EARL

  How’s life, Mr. Gaines.

  DAD

  echoing mysteriously

  Life.

  EARL

  patiently

  How’s your life.

  DAD

  Life! Yes, life. Life is good, as I was just telling Cat Stevens here. How’s your life?

  EARL

  It’s goin’ awright.

  DAD

  You’re going out for a cigarette break, I see.

  EARL

  Yeah. You want to come?

  DAD

  five seconds of unexplained staring

  EARL

  Awright then.

  DAD

  Earl, would you agree that suffering in life is a, a relative notion—that for every life there is a different baseline, an equilibrium, below which one can be said to suffer?

  EARL

  I guess.

  DAD

  The primary insight being that one man’s suffering is another man’s joy.

  EARL

  Sounds good, Mr. Gaines.

  DAD

  Very well then.

  EARL

  I’ma go smoke one of these.

  DAD

  Godspeed, young man.

  Maybe 80 percent of the interaction between Dad and Earl is along those lines. The rest is when Dad takes Earl to a specialty food place or Whole Foods and they buy something unspeakably disgusting and then eat it together. It’s a weird scene and I’ve learned to stay away.

  The Mom-Earl conversations are slightly less insane. She likes to tell him that he’s “a hoot,” and she’s learned that it doesn’t really do any good to try to get him to quit smoking, and as long as I’m not smoking, she’ll allow it. For his part, even on days when he’s mega-pissed, he tones it down when he’s around her and doesn’t do any of his trademark rage-expressing mannerisms, such as stomping his feet really fast and growling the consonant “ngh.” He doesn’t even threaten to kick anyone in the head.

  So that’s Earl. I’ve probably missed a bunch of stuff and will have to describe Earl in greater detail later, but there’s no reason to believe that you’ll still be reading the book at that time, so I guess I would say don’t worry about it.

  On the way to Rachel’s house, I realized that I had just been a colossal idiot.

  “You idiot, Greg,” I thought, and may also have said out loud. “Now she thinks you’ve been in love with her for five years.”

  Moron. I could picture the scene in my head: I was going to show up, ring the doorbell, and Rachel would fling open the door and embrace me, her frizzy hair bouncing, her biggish teeth grazing my cheek. Then we would have to make out, or talk about how much we loved each other. Just thinking about this was making me sweaty.

  And, of course, she had cancer. What if she wanted to talk about death? That would be a disaster, right? Because I had somewhat extreme beliefs about death: There’s no afterlife, and nothing happens after you die, and it’s just the end of your consciousness forever. Was I going to have to lie about that? That would definitely be way too depressing, right? Was I going to have to make up some afterlife for reassurance purposes? Did it need to have those creepy naked baby angels that you see sometimes?

  What if she wanted to get married? So she could have a wedding before dying? I wouldn’t be allowed to say no, right? My God, what if she wanted to have sex? Would I even be able to get a boner? I was pretty sure it would be impossible for me to get a boner in those circumstances.

  These were the questions running through my mind as I trudged, with growing despair, to her doorstep. But it was Denise who answered the door.

  “Gre-e-e-eg,” she purred, in her cat-voice. “It is so good to see you-u-u-u-u.”

  “Right back at you, Denise,” I said.

  “Greg, you’re a riot.”

  “I’m illegal in twelve states.”

  “HA.” This was a huge cackle. Then there was another one. “HA.”

  “I have a Surgeon General’s warning tattooed on my butt.”

  “STOP IT. STOP. IT. HA-A-A-A.” Why do I never have this effect on the girls I want to impress? Why is it only moms and homely girls? When it’s just them, I can really turn it on. I don’t know what it is.

  “Rachel’s upstairs. Can I get you a Diet Coke?”

  “No thanks.” I wanted to end with a bang, so I added, “Caffeine just makes me more obnoxious.”

  “Hang on.”

  This was in a completely different tone of voice. We were back to the old snappish, aggressive Mrs. Kushner. “Greg, who says you’re obnoxious?”

  “Oh. Uh, people, you know—”

  “Listen. You tell them: They can just shove it.”

  “No, yeah. I was just saying that as a—”

  “Hey. Nuh-uh. You listening to me? You tell them: They can shove it.”

  “They can shove it, yeah.”

  “The world needs more guys like you. Not less.”

  Now I was getting alarmed. Was there a campaign to get rid of guys like me? Because that campaign would probably start with me.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Rachel’s upstairs.”

  I went upstairs.

  Rachel’s room had no IV stands or heart-rate monitors like I was expecting. Actually, I had been picturing her room as a hospital room, with like a full-time nurse hanging out in there. Instead, I can sum up Rachel’s bedroom in two words: pillows; posters. Her bed had at least fifteen pillows on it, and the walls were 100 percent posters and magazine cutouts. There was a lot of Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig, especially without their shirts. If you were to show me this room and make me guess who lived in it, my answer would be: a fifteen-headed alien who stalks male human celebrities.

  But instead of an alien, it was Rachel, standing sort of uncomfortably near the door.

  “Rachel-l-l-l,” I said.

  “Hello,” she said.

  We stood there, motionless. How the hell were we supposed to greet each other? I took a step forward with my arms out, for hugging purposes, but that just made me feel like a zombie. She took a step backward, frightened. At that point I had to go with it.

  “I am the Zombie Hug Monster,” I said, lurching forward.

  “Greg, I’m afraid of zombies.”

  “You should not fear the Zombie Hug Monster. The Zombie Hug Monster does not want to eat your brains.”

  “Greg, stop it.”

  “OK.”

  “What are you doing.”

  “Uh, I was going for a fist pound.”

  I was going for a fist pound.

  “No thanks.”

  Just to summarize: I lurched into Rachel’s room like a zombie, freaking her out, then went for a fist pound. It is impossible to be less smooth than Greg S. Gaines.

  “I like your room.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How many pillows is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wish I had that many pillows.”

  “Why don’t you ask your parents for some?”

  “They wouldn’t like that.”

  I have no idea why I said that.

  “Why not?”

  “Uh.”

  “They’re pillows.”

  “Yeah, they’d be suspicious or something.”

  “That you’d sleep all the time?”

  “No, uh . . . They’d probably think I was just going to masturbate all over them.”

  I would like to point out that I conducted the above conversation 100 percent on autopilot.

  Rachel was silent; her mouth was hanging open and her eyes were kind of bugging out.

  Eventually, she said: “That is disgusting.” But she was also making snorting noises. I remembered the snort from Hebrew school; it indicated that there were some huge laughs on the way.

  “That’s my parents,” I said. “They’re gross.”

  “They won’t get you pillows [snort] because they think you’re going to [snort snort], they think
you’re going to masturb[SNORTsnortsnortsnort].”

  “Yeah, they have really gross ideas about me.”

  Now Rachel couldn’t even talk. She had completely lost control. She was laughing and snorting so hard that I was a little worried about her rupturing her spleen or something. Nonetheless, a fun thing to do when Rachel is in the throes of a mega-laugh is to see how long you can keep it going.

  • “I mean, it’s also their fault for getting sexy pillows.”

  • “We had this one pillow in the house, they had to burn it, because that thing just got me so aroused.”

  • “That was the sexiest pillow, I just, I just wanted to make love to it all night, until the break of dawn.”

  • “I used to call that pillow the dirtiest names. I used to say, ‘You slutty pillow, you’re such a dirty slut, stop toying with my emotions.’”

  • “The pillow’s name was Francesca.”

  • “Then one day I came home from school and caught that pillow having oral sex with this table from across the street, and—OK, OK. I’ll stop.”

  Rachel was begging me to stop. I shut up and let her calm down. I had forgotten how hard she could laugh. It took her a while to catch her breath.

  “Oh—ohhh—ow—oohh.”

  The Greg S. Gaines Three-Step Method of Seduction

  1. Lurch into girl’s bedroom pretending to be a zombie.

  2. Go for a fist pound.

  3. Suggest that you habitually masturbate all over pillows.

  “Do I have to keep you away from my pillows?” she asked, still having involuntary laugh-snort-spasms.

  “No. Are you serious? Those pillows are all dudes.”

  Two words: mucus explosion. However, the problem with mega-laughs is that they’re hard to follow up. Sooner or later you’re all laughed out, and there’s this big silence. Then what do you do?

  “So I guess you really like films.”

  “They’re OK.”

  “I mean, you have all these actors all over your room.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hugh Jackman, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig, Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Craig, Brad Pitt.”

  “It’s not really about the movies.”

  “Oh.”

  She was sitting at her desk and I was sitting on her bed. It was way too soft of a bed. I had sunk into it to an uncomfortable degree.

  “I like movies,” said Rachel, sort of apologetically. “But a movie doesn’t have to be good if it has Hugh Jackman.”

  Fortunately and unfortunately, at that moment I got a text from Earl.

  yo pa gaines drove me to whole foods so if you need some funky vlasic pickle relish for that pussy just hollerrr

  This was fortunate because it changed the subject from movies, and it was going to be difficult to discuss movies with Rachel without mentioning my filmmaking career, which for obvious reasons I did not want to mention. But it was unfortunate in that it made me do a sort of snarfing laugh and then Rachel wanted to know what had happened.

  “Who was that from?”

  “Uh, that was from Earl.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know Earl? Earl Jackson, from high school?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  How the hell was I even supposed to introduce Earl.

  “Uh, Earl and I send each other disgusting texts sometimes.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s basically our entire friendship.”

  “What does that one say?”

  I considered sharing it with her. Then I decided that that would bring about the apocalypse.

  “I can’t show it to you. It is way too disgusting.”

  This was a tactical error, because a more annoying girl might have said, “Greg, now you have to show it to me,” and let’s face it: Most girls are annoying. I mean, most humans are annoying, so it’s not specific to girls. Also, I don’t really mean “annoying.” I guess I mean that most humans like to try to fuck up your plans.

  But one thing you could say about Rachel was this: She wasn’t constantly trying to fuck up your plans.

  “That’s fine. You don’t have to show it to me.”

  “You really don’t want to see it.”

  “I don’t need to see it.”

  “All you need to know is that it’s about the combination of food and sex. Like, oral sex.”

  “Greg, why are you telling me about it.”

  “Just so you can know for sure that it’s something you don’t want to know about.”

  “Why is Earl combining food and oral sex?”

  “Because he’s a psychopath.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s just completely insane. If you looked into his brain for even one second you would probably go blind.”

  “He sounds like a pretty weird friend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you guys end up being friends?”

  There was no good way to answer this seemingly innocuous question.

  “I mean, I’m also pretty weird.”

  This actually got Rachel to do a little aftershock snort.

  “I guess the pillow thing is weird.”

  Earl and I are both pretty weird. And maybe that is why we’re friends. But probably you deserve more of an explanation than that.

  Also, what the hell does “weird” even mean? I’ve just written it like five times and all of a sudden I’m staring at it and it doesn’t even mean anything anymore. I just murdered the word “weird.” Now it’s just a bunch of letters. It’s like there’s all these dead bodies all over the page now.

  I’m sort of close to having a freak-out about this. I have to go eat some snacks or leftovers or something.

  OK, I’m back.

  Although, let’s just do a new chapter, because this chapter got really fucked up somehow and I’m afraid of what will happen if I continue with it.

  Earl and I come from very different worlds, obviously. And it’s definitely insane that we even became friends in the first place. In some ways our friendship makes no sense at all. I guess I’ll just give you the backstory of it and let you draw your own conclusions. Then we can make our triumphant return to Cancerland.

  Cancerland is not nearly as popular of a board game as Candyland.

  Some observers would conclude that our friendship is a triumph of Pittsburgh’s public school system, but I would tell you that instead it’s a testament to the power of video games. Mom has never allowed video games in the house, except for the educational kind, like Math Blaster, and that wasn’t so much to teach us math as to teach us that video games sucked. However, my first encounter with Earl left no doubt that video games were, in fact, awesome.

  It was the second or third week of kindergarten. So far I had made it without having to interact with any of the other kindergarteners—that was my primary objective, because all of the other kindergarteners seemed to be evil, or boring, or both—but one day Miss Szczerbiak had us sit in groups and decorate cardboard boxes. It was me, Earl, and two girls whose names I forget. All the girls wanted to do was cover the box in glitter, but Earl and I recognized that this would look terrible.

  “Let’s make a gun out of it,” said Earl.

  I thought this was awesome.

  “The laser gun from GoldenEye,” added Earl.

  I had no idea what that meant.

  “GoldenEye for N64,” explained Earl. “My brothers got an N64 and they let me play it whenever I want.”

  “I have Math Blaster on my computer at home,” I said.

  “I never heard of Math Blaster,” said Earl dismissively.

  “You have to do math problems and then it lets you shoot pieces of garbage,” I said. Then, realizing how pathetic this sounded, I shut up. I was hoping that somehow Earl hadn’t heard. But he had, and he looked at me with both pity and scorn.

  “In GoldenEye you don’t have to do no math, and you get to shoot people,” said Earl triumphantly, and that settled it. As the girls dutifully coated
the box in glitter and had a discussion about pixies or domesticity or whatever, Earl and I sat at the other end of the table and Earl told me the entire plot of GoldenEye three times. Pretty soon it was agreed that after school, I was going to Earl’s house. As fate would have it, it was Dad picking me up from school that day, and he saw nothing wrong with sending his kid off to Homewood with some other kid he had never met before, plus that kid’s two rambunctious brothers, one of whom was repeatedly promising to shoot everyone else to death.

  Earl had lied in at least one respect: The brothers, in fact, did not let Earl play N64 whenever he wanted to. When we got to the Jackson house, Devin (the oldest) announced that he had to complete a mission before we did anything else.

  So we sat on the floor, in the glow of the screen, and it was the best thing I had ever experienced. We were in the presence of a master. We watched in rapturous happiness as Devin steered a tank through the streets of St. Petersburg, laying waste to everything in his path. We did not make a fuss when Devin told us he was going to do a second mission. We marveled as he snuck around a battleship, quietly murdering dozens of people.

  “Now y’all can play me,” Devin said, switching to the multiplayer option. I picked up a controller. It had more knobs and buttons than I could reach with all of my fingers, so I tried getting a foot involved. That did not particularly work out. Earl tried to explain how it worked, but soon gave up. It was clear that he himself was not much of an expert. For twenty minutes, we jogged around a snowy Siberian missile base, threw grenades at random into the forest, got trapped against walls because we didn’t know how to turn around, and were slaughtered by Devin, who chose a new and exciting weapon each time: the assault rifle, the shotgun, the laser pistol. Earl’s other brother Derrick ignored me and Earl completely, choosing to do battle with the master alone. It was a losing effort. Taunting us mercilessly and without cease, Devin painted the tundra red with our blood.

  “Y’all both suck donkey dick,” said Devin at the end. “Now get the hell out of here.”

  A friendship had been born. Earl was definitely the leader, and I was the sidekick. Even when we weren’t playing video games, I deferred to him, because he was far worldlier than me. He knew where the alcohol was in his kitchen, for example. I was worried we were going to have to try some, but fortunately that wasn’t part of the plan. “Alcohol gimme a damn headache,” he explained at some point.