Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

by Jesse Andrews

  So basically I hated everyone in that room. I pulled my shirt down and tried to figure out a way to end this conversation without one of us trying to kill ourselves.

  “Hey,” I said. “Mom gave me this big-ass book of colleges. You can definitely have it if you want to look at some. I actually have it right now.”

  “I’m not applying to college this year.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m gonna wait until I get better.”

  “That sounds like a good plan.”

  She continued to stare at the television screen, looking sort of blank and sort of pissed off.

  “That’s good,” I said, “because this book sucks. It’s like fourteen hundred pages long and every other page is about some random Christian place in Texas or something.”

  Can I tell you something? It was exhausting to keep coming up with these riffs. And maybe I should have just chilled out. But I felt like I had to make her laugh, or else my whole visit was a failure. So like some kind of brave seafaring adventurer, I embarked on another riff.

  “Plus I get irritated because it’s basically a reminder of how I’m not going to get into anywhere good. Like, you’ll start from the end and then you get to ‘Yale,’ and you’re like, Oh yeah, Yale, I should apply to there because it’s a good school. All right. But then you see that they need at least a four point six grade point average. Yeah. And you’re like, What the hell, Benson’s grade point average doesn’t even go up to four point six.”

  Rachel seemed to be softening up a little bit, although I felt like it was unrelated to the riff. But I decided to keep going with it because it was filling the time. Actually, that’s the best thing about a good riff. It’s not that it’s funny, although usually a good riff is pretty funny. The most important thing is that it fills up the time so you don’t have to talk about anything depressing.

  “Yeah. And then you call their admissions office and you’re like, Yale, what’s up with this four point six business, and they’re like, Oh, yeah, you know, if you were a more motivated student, you would have discovered the secret Yale preparation high school that is buried deep beneath your normal high school, and all the teachers are these creepy undead geniuses, and that is the place where you would get a four point six or better, and also where you learn the secrets of time travel. And uh, and creating artificial life out of ordinary household objects. You can bring the blender to li-i-i-i-ife. The blender will become your devoted manservant who gets you the mail, except it accidentally keeps tearing it into tiny pieces because it is a blender. Ya-a-a-a-a-ale.”

  “Actually Greg, you can leave the book here.”

  There was a pretty good chance she was just saying this to get rid of me, but at least it was a response, and sort of a positive one.

  “Seriously?”

  “Unless you want to keep it.”

  “No. Are you kidding? I hate this book. This is great.”

  “Yeah, I want to look at it.”

  I fished it out of my backpack. I was really fired up to get rid of it. Also, maybe it was gonna make Rachel feel less like she was dying.

  “Here you go.”

  “Just put it on the table.”

  “Done.”

  “OK.”

  She had maybe softened up a little bit, but she still wasn’t laughing or responding very much at all and I sort of lost control a little and said, “I’m not cheering you up at all when I come here. I’m being a jackass.”

  “You’re not being a jackass.”

  “I sort of am.”

  “Well, you don’t have to come visit if you don’t want.”

  This was kind of a tough thing to hear. Because, honestly, I didn’t want to keep visiting her. It was stressful enough when she was in a good mood. Now that she was super-sick and pissed off all the time, it really stressed me out. It jacked up my heart rate, for example. I was sitting in there and I had that awful fluttery feeling you get in your heart when your heart rate is all jacked up. But I knew I would feel even worse if I didn’t visit her.

  So basically my life had been completely fucked up by all of this.

  “I’m not coming here because I don’t want to,” I said. Then, because that didn’t make any sense, I clarified: “I’m coming here because I want to. If I didn’t want to come here, why the hell would I come here.”

  “Because you feel like you have to.”

  Really, the only thing I could do in response to this was lie.

  “I don’t feel like I have to. Also, I’m totally irrational and stupid. So sometimes when there are things I have to do, I don’t even do them. I don’t know how to live a normal human life.”

  This was a ridiculous direction to go in, so I backed up and started over.

  “I want to come here,” I said. “You’re my friend.”

  Then I said, “I like you.”

  It felt ridiculously awkward saying that. I don’t think I had ever said those words to anyone before, and I probably never will again, because you can’t say them without feeling like a moron.

  Anyway, she responded with: “Thanks.” It was unclear how she meant it.

  “Don’t thank me.”

  “OK.”

  “I mean, sorry. This is insane. I’m yelling at you right now.”

  I wanted to get out of there. But I knew I’d feel like a dickbag just leaving. I guess she sensed this.

  “Greg, I’m sick,” she said. “I’m just not very cheerful right now.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can go.”

  “OK, yeah.”

  “I like when you visit.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Maybe I’ll feel better next time.”

  But as it turned out, she didn’t.

  Jesus Christ I hate writing about this.

  So I should probably try to explain what leukemia is just in case you are confused about it. I knew extremely little about it before the whole Rachel thing. Now I know a mediocre amount, which frankly is much more than I am actually interested in knowing.

  Some cancers are localized in your body, like lung cancer, or butt cancer. You probably think butt cancer doesn’t exist, but it does. Anyway, with those cancers you can sometimes go in and cut them out surgically. But leukemia is cancer of the blood and bone marrow, so it’s spread throughout your entire body, so you can’t just go in and cut it out with knives. I mean, the knife thing obviously is scary and disgusting, but then the other way to treat cancer is to blast it with radiation and/or chemicals, which is worse. And with leukemia, you have to do that to someone’s entire body.

  So that definitely sucks.

  Mom said it’s like a city that has “bad guys” in it—something about the Rachel situation makes Mom forget that I’m not a toddler—anyway, it’s like a city with bad guys and chemo is like dropping bombs on the city to kill the bad guys. In the process, part of the city gets jacked up. I told Rachel about this, and she was dismissive.

  “It’s more like I have cancer,” she said, “and I’m getting chemotherapy.”

  Anyway, in the process of bombing the bad guys to death, there was definitely some damage sustained by Rachel City, specifically in the neighborhoods of Hairville, Skinfield, and the Gastrointestinal District. That is why she bought the hat. It was this cute furry pink thing that you normally see on girls running around in shopping malls and not on pale girls lying in bed all the time.

  So if this were a normal book about a girl with leukemia, I would probably talk a shitload about all the meaningful things Rachel had to say as she got sicker and sicker, and also probably we would fall in love and have some incredibly fulfilling romantic thing and she would die in my arms. But I don’t feel like lying to you. She didn’t have meaningful things to say, and we definitely didn’t fall in love. She seemed less pissed with me after my stupid outburst, but she basically just went from irritable to quiet.

  So I would go in there and say some things, and she would sort of smile and sometimes giggle a
little bit but mostly just not say anything, and I would run out of things to say, and then we’d put on a Gaines/Jackson film and watch it. First the more recent ones, then the older ones when we got tired of those.

  Watching them with her was a strange experience because she was just so focused on them. I know it sounds idiotic, but sitting next to her, I suddenly saw the films the way I think she was seeing them—as this uncritical fan who actually likes all the stupid choices that we were making. I’m not saying I learned to enjoy watching the films. I guess I just saw how you might kind of tolerate all the insane imperfections and fuckups that we had. You might look at the bad lighting or the weird sound design and have your attention taken away from the story we were trying to tell and instead just be thinking about me and Earl, as filmmakers, sort of accidentally drawing attention to ourselves. And if you liked us, you would like that. That’s maybe how Rachel was seeing everything we did.

  But she didn’t actually say anything, so maybe I was just making that all up.

  And meanwhile, she didn’t seem to be getting any better, and there were a couple of days where she was in a really dark mood and there was nothing I could do to help. Like one day when we were watching something and she had been really quiet and then she said, “Greg, I think you were right.”

  “What?”

  “I said I think you were right.”

  “Oh.”

  She was quiet like she expected me to know what that meant.

  “I’m, uh, usually right.”

  “Don’t you want to know about what?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Or maybe she didn’t expect me to know what she meant. Who knows? Girls are insane, and dying girls are even more insane. Actually, that sounds fucked up. I take that back.

  “So I was right about what?”

  “I think you were right when you said I was dying.”

  I hate complaining about this, but at the same time, this made me feel like shit. I was so pissed off that she said this. I tried to swallow it.

  “I never said you were dying.”

  “You thought I was dying, though.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  She was silent and it was infuriating.

  “I didn’t,” I said, too loudly.

  I mean, this was a lie, and we both knew it.

  Finally, Rachel said, “Well, if you had thought it, you would have been right.”

  We were silent for a really long time after that. Actually, I wanted to yell at her. Maybe I should have.

  JESUS CHRIST I HATE WRITING ABOUT THIS

  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 ni
nja. 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.”