Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

by Jesse Andrews

  Rachel looked better than most of the other kids, but she was totally bald. That really took a lot of getting used to. Every couple of minutes or so I would look at her head, or even just think about her bald head while trying not to look at it, and my skin would get all hot and prickly. As Earl pointed out, it looked a lot like Darth Vader’s head when they took off his mask. It was insanely white, like it had been boiled, and sort of veiny and lumpy.

  But at least she was in an OK mood—she was weak and her voice was scraggly, but she smiled when she saw me, and somehow her eyes were very happy. I don’t know how to describe it. There’s a chance the happiness was just from some extremely powerful pain medication they were giving her. You can never really know in a hospital.

  “Yo,” I said.

  “The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet,” she told me.

  This was a line from Hello, Good-Die, our James Bond parody in which everyone is actually a sock puppet. For some reason it was hilarious that she greeted me with this line.

  “Haaarf,” I said.

  “Thanks for visiting me.”

  “Yeah, I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “Yeah, I heard.”

  My guard was down a little bit after the Hello, Good-Die thing. Usually it’s when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life. Here comes an example of that right now.

  “Yeah, I thought it would be weird if I just visited you with no excuse, so I convinced Earl to break my arm so, uh, that gave me a good cover story, uhhhh. Yeah.”

  Jesus Christ in a cockwagon. At the beginning of this sentence, my Feeling Like a Dick Quotient was at a solid 4.0, which is normal. By about the word “excuse,” it was all the way up to 9.4. By the end I was easily maxed out at 10.0. Actually, I may have broken the scale.

  Rachel was definitely not thrilled about this sentence.

  “Next time maybe you can come without an excuse.”

  “Yeah, I realized that I, uh, yeah.”

  “Or, you don’t have to come at all.”

  “No. What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I was just making a joke.”

  “I know.”

  “Urrrrgh.”

  We were silent, so I made the noise again.

  “Urrrrnngh.”

  “What is that noise.”

  “Regretful polar bear.”

  Snort.

  “Polar bears are the most regretful animals in nature. Scientists do not know why this is. But they have the purest expressions of regret in the animal kingdom. Listen to how beautiful and haunting they sound: Urrrrrrrnnngh.”

  Snort, cough. Then Rachel said, “Actually, you shouldn’t try to make me laugh.”

  “Oops, sorry.”

  “No, I like the polar bear, but when I laugh it hurts a little.”

  “See, now I regret doing the polar bear thing, but this feeling of regret just makes me want to make the polar bear noise even more. Because the polar bear is so regretful.”

  Weak snort.

  “The polar bear just regrets everything. He loves fish and seals. They’re his friends. He hates having to kill and eat them. But he lives too far north to go to Whole Foods, and—”

  SNOORT

  “Sorry, sorry. I have to chill out.”

  “Snnnrnn. It’s OK.”

  “Yeah.”

  More silence. I inadvertently looked at Rachel’s boiled-looking bald head and got the hot/prickly skin sensation for maybe the fourteenth time since arriving.

  “So, how are you feeling?” I asked.

  “I feel pretty good,” she said. She was obviously lying. She also seemed to have decided to talk more to make me worry about her less, but talking seemed to make her kind of exhausted. “I feel kind of weak, though. I’m sorry I yelled at you when you said you needed an excuse to visit me. I just yelled at you because I’m sick.”

  “I totally go to town on people when I get sick.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You look good,” I lied.

  “No I don’t,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure how hard to push back on this. Obviously, I couldn’t insist that she legitimately looked really good, after she had been in the hospital for a week. No one looks good after that. Eventually, I went with, “You definitely look really good for someone who just had chemo,” and she seemed to accept this.

  “Thank you.”

  Then it was the end of visiting hours, and a nurse came in and told me I had to go, and if we’re being honest, I sort of regretted that, just because I felt like I had done a mediocre job of cheering Rachel up and wanted to keep going for a bit. But if this makes me seem like a good person, it shouldn’t. The reason was that cheering Rachel up was one of the things I had gotten really good at, and when you’re good at something, you want to do it all the time, because it makes you feel good. So if I wanted to hang out with Rachel, it was mostly for selfish reasons.

  “Wait, what’s that drawing on your cast?” asked Mom, in the car.

  “Oh, those,” I said. My mind raced but I couldn’t think of anything, so I had to just be honest. “Those are boobs.”

  “Gross,” shrieked Gretchen, and we drove home, and then I ate normal food for the first time in a few days, and my stomach got all fucked up and trust me, you do not want to hear the details.

  It was about the second or third week of October when all this arm stuff happened. I think it was, anyway. I don’t feel like looking it up. Do I have to give you a reason for not looking it up? I probably do, and that sucks. The reason that I probably should use is that it’s just too emotionally painful, but obviously that’s not true if I’m going to the trouble of writing this idiotic book. The real reason is: laziness. I thought about digging up the paperwork from my stay in the hospital and it just seemed like an unbelievable pain in the ass. So I didn’t do it.

  Also, it’s weird to put a date to things anyway. It makes it feel like news or something. Like my life was in the Post-Gazette or the New York Times.

  Oct. 20, 2011

  PASTY TEEN RELEASED FROM HOSPITAL

  Relieved Filmmaker Celebrates by Eating

  Tummy Jiggling Leads to Cat Attack

  Actually, yeah. This book is probably making my life seem more interesting and eventful than it actually is. Books always try to do that. If you just had headlines from every single day of my life you would get a better sense of how boring and random it is.

  Oct. 21, 2011

  PASTY TEEN MAKES QUIET RETURN TO SCHOOL

  Gaines “Annoyed” by Backlog of Schoolwork

  Numerous Teachers Failed to Notice Student’s

  Week-Long Absence

  Oct. 22, 2011

  NOTHING INTERESTING HAPPENS AT ALL

  Even Dinner Was Leftovers

  Oct. 23, 2011

  FLABBY TEEN ATTEMPTS TO GROW MUSCLES ON

  UNBROKEN ARM

  Weight-Lifting Session Brief, Excruciating

  Filmmaker Recovers with Hours Spent Motionless

  Facedown on Floor of Room

  Oct. 24, 2011

  EXTREMELY LITTLE HAPPENS

  Tummy Jiggling Leads to Cat Attack, Again

  Student Has Series of Inane Conversations

  Not Worth Going Into

  Maybe after you die you get sent to a giant room with archives of newspapers that have been written by these angel journalists specifically about your life and then you read them and they look like this. That would be insanely depressing. Hopefully at least some of the headlines would be about the other people in your life and not just you.

  Oct. 25, 2011

  KUSHNER PURCHASES HAT

  Awkward Staring at Bald Head Probably Became Annoying

  After a While

  Hat Somehow Even More Depressing Than

  Darth Vader–Looking Head

  Oct. 26, 2011

  JACKSON UNLEASHES NICOTINE-DEPRIVED


  LUNCHTIME TIRADE

  Numerous People, Inanimate Objects, and

  Concepts Said to Suck Donkey Dick

  Plump Groundhog-Faced Friend:

  Quitting Smoking “Probably a Mistake”

  Oct. 27, 2011

  GAINES PARENTS INITIATE NEW ROUND OF

  COLLEGE TALKS

  Filmmaker’s “Disappointing” Grades Cited in

  Detailed Predictions of Failure

  Hobo Vocational College Considered

  I guess when I was in the hospital, Mom and Dad decided that it was time to talk to me about colleges. It wasn’t the first time we had discussed college, of course. The first time was when Dad walked into my room one day near the end of junior year. He had this sort of sheepish resentful look on his face that he gets when Mom asks him to do some really annoying thing.

  “Hello, son,” he had said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “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 hell 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 classmates 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 hell 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 fuck 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 homoerotic, but then if you point this out, they lose their shit.”

  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 Butter and Belly, minus the peanut butter.”

  “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 ass 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 fucked 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 fuck 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 dick. Like, a colossal dick. I was asking a dying girl about her plans she’s making for the future. That is just about the dickest move out there. Holy fuck. 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.