Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

by Jesse Andrews

  Anyway, Maxwell put Earl in a headlock and punched his head while Earl thrashed around. The commotion attracted the attention of several brothers, including Brandon, the thirteen-year-old psychopath with the “TRU NIGGA” neck tattoo. He came hurtling down the stairs like a missile with elbows. His teeth were bared, and his eyes were locked on mine. I made a small shrieking noise and turned to run.

  Maxwell and Earl were in Brandon’s way, so I actually did make it out of the door before Brandon was able to elbow me in the head. The problem is, I got too excited. When I got to the end of the porch, instead of jumping, I sort of dove, as in, headfirst.

  There’s a convention in films where, when someone is flying through the air, time slows down. The person gets to observe all of the various details of their environment, reconsider their course of action, maybe even contemplate the notion of God. Anyway, this convention is a lie. If anything, time sped up. My feet left the porch and immediately I was lying all scraped up on some cement with a broken arm. Almost as immediately, Brandon was standing over me.

  “Yeah, nigga,” he piped, in his not-all-the-way-dropped thirteen-year-old voice. “Yeah, clumsy bitch.” He kicked me kind of halfheartedly.

  “OW,” I said. This angered him. He kicked me harder.

  “Shut the hell up,” he said, but the second kick actually hurt a lot, so I began screaming. This made Brandon slap my face repeatedly. Fortunately, Felix had just arrived on the scene, and according to his own mysterious logic, his reaction to what he saw was to grab Brandon by the head and throw him across the yard.

  He turned to me. We stared at each other. His eyes were cold with disgust.

  Eventually, he said: “Fuck outta here,” and walked back into the house.

  So, that was how I came to be in the same hospital as Rachel. Although it was a completely different wing of the hospital—hers was the chemotherapy area, and mine was the broken-arm-that-had-somehow-become-infected area. No one seemed to know how my broken arm got infected. Pretty quickly I stopped asking about it. I was worried I would find out that there were other basic medical facts that the nurses didn’t know, like where skin comes from, or how surgery works.

  But yeah, my broken arm got infected, and I ran a fever, and all of that meant a lengthy stay in the hospital. And that meant visitors. Each of these visitors had various points to make.

  Mom

  • Poor, poor sweetie.

  • We’re gonna get you out of here soon.

  • Oh, my poor brave boy.

  • You must be so bored.

  • Here are some books that I collected at random from your room or the library.

  • I’ll just put these books on top of those other books from last time.

  • You have to make sure to do your schoolwork.

  • You have to make sure to tell the nurses if anything feels funny.

  • If you have even the slightest headache, you need to get on the phone and call the nurses right away because it might be meningitis.

  • I said it might be meningitis.

  • Meningitis is a fatal brain disease, and in hospitals you’re sometimes more vulnerable to—

  • You know what, I don’t want to scare you with this.

  • Just if you have even the tiniest headache, call the nurses.

  • I’m just being crazy, but seriously, call them.

  • Does your phone work?

  • Let me just see if it works.

  Mom accompanied by Gretchen

  • We thought we’d come here and cheer you up.

  • Gretchen, do you want to say anything to your brother?

  • Gretchen, can you just cooperate for fifteen minutes.

  • Gretchen. This is not a game.

  • I can’t believe you refuse to cooperate even with this.

  • Just go wait outside then. You are really being awful. You are being just awful and I wish I knew why. I’ll be outside in five minutes.

  • Jesus.

  Mom accompanied by Grace

  • Grace drew you a picture!

  • It’s a picture of Cat Stevens!

  • It’s a what? Oh.

  • It’s a bear.

  • Grace drew you a very handsome bear.

  Earl

  • sup, ike

  • i talked to some a your teachers

  • you gotta write an essay or some shit

  • you gotta do a list of problems outta some book

  • ms. harrad says don’t worry about the test friday, you and her gonna talk about it when you get back, also she hope you get better

  • mr. cubaly want you to do some test while you in here but i got no idea how that suppose to happen so my advice is don’t worry about it

  • you got mulholland drive in the mail from netflix so i watched it

  • that shit is fucked the fuck up, no joke

  • we gotta watch it once you get out of here

  • that shit is crazy as hell

  • lesbians and shit

  • look at you

  • you gonna be a weak little bitch when you get outta here

  • you just lying in bed all damn day

  • what else, what else

  • oh i went to see your girl again

  • she got a bald-ass head right now

  • she look like darth vader without the helmet

  • chemo is no joke, son

  • she axed me for some of our films last time so i lent em to her

  • i dunno which ones, i gave her like ten of em

  • whoa

  • what the hell are you yelling about?

  • are you being serious right now? are you being serious with me right now?

  • you need to calm your ass down

  • you need to be toning this shit down right about now

  • man, that girl has a damn bag full of chemicals in her body right now, she need something to cheer her the hell up, she happy as hell about these films

  • i mean no she is not happy as hell but she was smiling and shit and that’s a major improvement so don’t be trying to bitch me out about this

  • yeah, that’s right, tone it down

  • the fuck you think i’m gonna say no to this girl be dying out of cancer and shit.

  • damn

  • this is what papa gaines would call an “extenuating circumstance,” am i right

  • goddamn

  • look

  • you’re being dumb as hell but i do feel you

  • you know i don’t like to show this shit to no one

  • but you can’t say no to this girl

  • i do feel you, but it’s like, i dunno, you do not understand how much she like our dumbass films, but she like the hell out of em

  • so don’t give me shit

  • aight, i’m done

  • feel better, son

  Dad

  • Well, well, well.

  • You seem rather jolly today!

  • No, I know. I’m just making a little joke.

  • No, it can’t be much fun to be in here.

  • Although you do get to lead a fairly decadent lifestyle, don’t you.

  • With the constant television, and the food brought to you, and the mountains of books.

  • Not all who stay in hospitals enjoy such luxury.

  • When I was hospitalized in the Amazon, the patients were all quartered together in a single room, and instead of television, all we had to watch for entertainment were the giant hairy spiders lying in wait for prey on the thatched ceiling, maybe eight feet above our faces.

  • Spiders the size of your fist.

  • Fangs glistening with venom.

  • They each had hundreds of little black eyes that would twinkle dimly at night.

  • And how they used to battle the wasps!

  • Sometimes in the darkness a wasp would strike one of them, and in their struggle they would come tumbling down onto the bed, biting and stinging
and thrashing and—

  • OK. OK.

  • It’s just something to think about.

  Earl accompanied by Derrick

  • sup

  • ’Sup, Greg.

  • derrick was like, yo, earl, do they got candy at the hospital

  • Yeah I was like, if I don’t get to eat candy, I go bah-serk.

  • so we brought you some skittles and a couple airheads

  • There was three but I ate one.

  • yeah

  • Yo, lemme sign your cast one time.

  • if you don’t like these flavors obviously you can just give em back to us

  • There ...we...go. HA-HA!

  • goddamn derrick what the fuck

  • TITTIES.

  • you did not just draw a pair of bare-ass-naked titties on greg’s fucking cast

  • no it ain’t awright, don’t be saying it’s awright

  • YA BURNT.

  • goddammit

  • we gotta go

  Madison

  • Hello!

  • I and my boobs are in your room with you!!

  Yeah. Madison Hartner visited me in the hospital. Actually, I’m gonna stop doing this stupid bullet-point thing and just describe what happened with Madison. For a while I got tired of writing the normal way, but now I’m also tired of writing the bullet-point way. We really are caught between a rock and a hard place here.

  If after reading this book you come to my home and brutally murder me, I truly do not blame you.

  Obviously, Madison didn’t come out and say, “I am really hot and I am in your room with you,” but that was the takeaway for me. I had no reason to expect her, so when she appeared in the doorway with her hair all cut short in this sexy way and she was wearing a halter top and looking like a sex goddess, for about thirty seconds I wasn’t even really able to say anything. I was painfully aware that prolonged hospital exposure was causing me to achieve new and historic levels of pastiness.

  “Hey, Alien Researcher.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “I heard you got your arm broken by an alien while you were out in the field.”

  For a moment I had no idea what this meant, and I was worried that it was a racist comment about Earl’s brothers. But this was just because I wasn’t thinking clearly. I know it’s an annoying stereotype that hot girls make you bad at thinking, but seriously, they do. It’s like they produce nerve gas somehow. Anyway, eventually I remembered what she was talking about.

  “Oh yeahhhhh.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I forgot that I made that joke.”

  “You forgot?”

  “Yeah, I got my arm broken. I was trying to collect some barf.”

  “Right, like you were telling us.”

  “Yeah, this alien was so excited to share his barf that he started whipping his tentacles around in a frenzy, and that’s how it happened.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “That’s what true science is. It’s extremely dangerous. But at least this space alien felt bad about it. He sent one of his alien brothers to visit me and the alien brother drew me this mystical hieroglyph on my cast. Check it out. It says, ‘My heart aches with the regretful sorrow of a thousand moons,’ in this really touching and beautiful alien language. Unfortunately, to us it looks like boobs.”

  Let’s be honest: No girl is ever going to be that interested in a crude drawing of boobs. Like I said before, I can really only turn it on around less attractive girls and older women. Around hot girls, I am a mess. But Madison was giggling a little. And maybe it wasn’t even out of politeness.

  Then Madison said something with her beautiful lipsticky mouth that I didn’t register immediately.

  “Hey, I was just visiting Rachel and she was watching one of your movies.”

  This took a few moments to sink in. And then suddenly a section of my heart felt like it was eating itself.

  “Oh. Uh . . . Yeah. Uh-huh.”

  “Sorry?”

  “No, that’s, uh, yeah. Yeahhhhhh.”

  “Greg, what’s wrong?”

  “No, it’s great. Well, I mean, it’s fine.”

  “She was really enjoying it.”

  “Which, um, one?”

  My whole body was sweating. Like, my ears were full of sweat. Additionally, it felt like my hair was trying to uproot itself and escape from my head.

  “She wouldn’t tell me! She wouldn’t even show it to me. She shut it off as soon as I walked in.”

  OK. This was a relief.

  “Ohhh.”

  “She says she’s not allowed to show them to anyone.”

  OK. Thank God. I was still freaking out—I was thinking, Madison knows that me and Earl make films, she’ll inevitably tell someone about it, and soon it’ll be this big weird secret thing that everyone knows—but it was also somehow comforting to have further proof that Rachel understood how I felt about the films.

  “She told me that you and Earl want them to stay secret for some reason.”

  Rachel really did understand. That was indisputable. You had to respect that. She wasn’t a filmmaker, but she had spent so much time listening to me that I guess she pretty much knew exactly how I felt about certain things, and you can’t deny that it feels nice when someone knows you that well. I forced myself to relax a little bit.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’re pretty weird about it. I guess we’re perfectionists.”

  Madison was quiet, but something about the way she was looking at me made me also shut up. So we both shut up for a little while. Then she said, “You have been such a good friend to Rachel. I think it’s so amazing what you’ve been doing.”

  Unfortunately, this was where the Hot Girl Nerve Gas really started to take effect. Specifically, I entered Excessive Modesty Mode. Nothing is stupider and more ineffective than Excessive Modesty Mode. It is a mode in which you show that you’re modest by arguing with someone who is trying to compliment you. Essentially, you are going out of your way to try to convince someone that you’re a jerk.

  I am the Thomas Edison of conversational stupidity.

  So yeah, Madison said, “You have been such a good friend to Rachel. I think it’s so amazing what you’ve been doing.”

  And obviously the best possible response for me was: “Eh. I dunno about that.”

  “No, you should hear the way she talks about you.”

  “I really can’t have been that good of a friend.”

  “Greg, that’s ridiculous.”

  “No, like . . . I dunno. I go to her place and just talk about myself the whole time. I’m a bad listener.”

  “Well, it’s really cheering her up.”

  “It can’t be cheering her up that much.”

  “Greg. It totally is.”

  “Uh, I really doubt it.”

  “Are you serious right now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Greg, she told me. That you’ve been an awesome friend.”

  “Well, maybe she’s just lying.”

  “You think she’s lying? Why would she lie?”

  “Uhhhh.”

  “Greg. Oh my God. I can’t believe you’re arguing about this. She loves your movies, and you’ve given them to her, even though you won’t let anyone else watch them, and that by itself is really amazing. So just shut up.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Why would she lie about you being a good friend, Greg, that’s insane.”

  “I dunno. Girls are weird.”

  “No. You’re weird.”

  “No, you’re weird. I’m the only normal one.”

  This made Madison giggle suddenly.

  “Oh my God, Greg, you’re so weird. I love that about you, that you’re so weird.”

  Remember what I said before? About how girls like Madison are like elephants wandering around in the undergrowth, sometimes accidentally stomping chipmunks to death and not even noticing? This is what I was talking about. Because, honestly, t
he rational part of me knew for a rock-solid fact that I would never, ever get with Madison Hartner. But that was just the rational part of me. There’s always a stupid irrational part of you, too, and you can’t get rid of it. You can never completely kill off that tiny absurd spark of hope that this girl—against all odds, although she could date any guy at school, not to mention guys at college, and even though you look like the Oatmeal Monster and are a compulsive eater and suffer from constant congestion and say so many stupid things per day that it seems like a Stupid Things company is paying you to do it—this girl might like you.

  And so when that girl says, “You’re so weird, I love that about you,” it might feel good, it might actually feel amazing, but that’s just the weird chemical process that happens in your brain as you are being stomped to death by an elephant.

  I think she saw that I was paralyzed, because she quickly moved on.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say, get better soon, and uh . . . I think it’s awesome that you’ve been such a good friend to Rachel.” She quickly added, “Even if you don’t think so, you’ve made her really happy.”

  “I guess she likes weirdos.”

  “Greg, we all like weirdos.”

  My chipmunk brains and intestines were smeared all over the forest floor like pizza and Tater Tots. And the fucked-up part is, it was awesome.

  Being a chipmunk is the stupidest.

  Before it was time for me to leave, I went to go visit Rachel. The cancer ward looked a lot like the part of the hospital that I had been staying in, except that the kids there were more depressing. Look. They just were. I have to be honest about this. They were paler, and weaker, and skinnier, and sicker. There was one boy—actually, it definitely could have been a girl—motionless with his eyes closed in a wheelchair, unattended by anyone, and I had to suppress what felt like a significant freak-out coming over me, because what if that boy was dead? And they just left this dead person in a wheelchair lying around? It was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s Gilbert. He’s been there for three days! We find that he’s a helpful reminder of WHAT HAPPENS TO ALL LIVING THINGS.”