Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (13 page)

All in all we made forty-two films, starting with
Earl, the Wrath of God II.
We had a ritual for when each film was finished: We would burn the film to two DVDs, erase the film on Dad’s computer, and then I would take the raw footage out to the garbage behind our house while Earl smoked a cigarette. Mom usually watched disapprovingly while this happened—she thought we would want the footage for later, and also, while she tolerated the smoking, at the same time she wasn’t exactly the biggest fan—but she let us do it, because we didn’t give her a choice.

We didn’t want anyone watching the films but us. No one. Not Mom and Dad; we knew we couldn’t trust their opinions. Not our classmates; we didn’t
care
about their opinions, not after the
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
fiasco. Also, it’s not like we really were friends with any of them.

In Earl’s case, the fact is that he just didn’t give a shit about making friends. I was the closest friend he had, and aside from making films, we didn’t hang out all that much. In middle school he started spending a lot of time on his own; I didn’t know where
he went, but it wasn’t his house or mine. There was a period where he was doing drugs, but I wasn’t really privy to any of that. It didn’t last very long, either; there were two movies that we did where he was sort of cracked out the whole time (
Walk Lola Walk
[2008],
Gay.I.
[2008]), and then pretty quickly he got himself together. By eighth grade, he had restricted himself to cigarettes. However, he remained a very solitary person, and there were weeks where I didn’t see him at all.

And as for me: In middle school I just had a hard time making friends. I don’t know why. If I knew why, it wouldn’t have been so impossible. One thing was that I just usually wasn’t interested in what other kids were interested in. For a lot of kids, it was sports or music, two things that I just couldn’t really get into. Music really only interested me as a soundtrack to a movie, and as for sports, I mean, come on. It’s some guys throwing some balls around, or trying to knock each other over, and you’re supposed to watch them for three hours at a time, and it just sort of seems like a waste. I dunno. I don’t want to sound condescending, so I’m not going to say anything else, except that it is literally impossible to imagine a thing dumber than sports.

So I didn’t really share any interests with anyone. More to the point, I’d be in some kind of social situation, and I had no idea what to talk about. I definitely didn’t know how to make jokes that weren’t part of a movie, and so instead I would freak out and try to think of the most interesting possible thing to say, and it was usually something like:

1. Have you ever noticed that people look like either rodents or
birds? And you can classify them that way, like, I definitely have more of a rodent face, but you look like a penguin.

2. If this were a video game, you could just break everything in this room and a bunch of money would come out of it, and you wouldn’t even have to pick it up, you would just walk into it and suddenly it would be in your bank account.

3. If I were to talk like the lead singer of some old-school rock band, like for example Pearl Jam, everyone would think I literally had a severe head injury. So how come the guy from Pearl Jam was allowed to do it?

These are all great things to talk about when you’re friends with someone, but not when you’re just trying to make polite conversation. And somehow I just never got to the friendship stage. By the time I got to high school, and figured out how to talk to other people a little better, I had decided I didn’t really
want
to be friends with anyone. Other than Earl, who like I said was really more of a coworker.

And girls? Forget about girls. There was never any chance, with girls. For reference, please refer to
chapter 3
, “Let’s Just Get This Embarrassing Chapter Out of the Way.”

So, to conclude, we never showed the films to anyone.

Mr. McCarthy is one of the only reasonable teachers at Benson. He’s on the young side and seems somehow immune to the life-crushing qualities of high school. Many of the young teachers at Benson cry at least once a day; a few others are just sort of dumb and tyrannical, in the conventional mold; but Mr. McCarthy is his own kind of guy.

He’s white, but he has a shaved head, and his forearms are covered in tattoos. Nothing gets him more fired up than facts. If anyone in class cites a fact of any kind, he pounds his chest and yells, “TRUE FACT,” or sometimes, “RESPECT THE RESEARCH.” If the fact is wrong, this becomes “FALSE FACT.” He drinks Vietnamese soup out of a thermos, all day, and he refers to drinking soup as “consulting the oracle.” On rare occasions when he gets really excited, he pretends to be a dog. Most of the time he’s insanely easygoing, and sometimes he teaches barefoot.

Anyway, Mr. McCarthy is the only teacher I have anything close to a kind of friendship with, and he lets me and Earl eat lunch in his office.

Earl is always morose during this time. He takes remedial courses, and his classmates are nitwits. Also, all remedial classrooms are on the B floor, which is below the surface of the earth.

By the way, Earl is smart enough to place into any classes he wants. I have no idea why he takes remedial courses, and Earl’s decision making is a thing that would need like twenty books to explore, so I’m not going into it here. The point is that by seventh period, he’s been exposed to four hours of grinding stupidity, and he wants to slit his wrists. For the first ten minutes of lunch, he shakes his head angrily at everything I say. Then eventually he snaps out of it.

“So you been spending time with this girl now,” he said the day after my ill-advised lunch in the cafeteria.

“Yeah.”

“Your mom still making you.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“She gonna die or what.”

“Uhhh,” I said. I didn’t really know what to say about this. “I mean, she’s got cancer. But
she
doesn’t think she’s gonna die, so I feel sort of bad when we’re hanging out, because the whole time I’m thinking, you’re gonna die you’re gonna die you’re gonna die.”

Earl was stony-faced. “Everybody dies,” he said. Actually, he said “Irrybody dies,” but that looks stupid written out somehow. How does writing even work? I hate this.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You believe in the afterlife?”

“Not really.”

“Nuh, you do.” Earl sounded pretty sure about this. “No, I don’t.”

“You can’t
not
believe in no afterlife.”

“That’s uh—that’s a triple negative,” I said, to be annoying. Which was stupid because you shouldn’t
practice
being annoying.

“Man, fuck you. Think you’re too good for the afterlife.”

We ate. Earl’s lunch was Skittles, SunChips, cookies, and Coke. I was eating some of his cookies. “You can’t wrap your head around
not
living. You can’t actually believe that you’re not gonna be alive.”

“I have a very powerful brain.”

“I’m bout to kick that brain in the head,” said Earl, stomping the ground a little bit for no reason.

Mr. McCarthy entered.

“Greg. Earl.”

“Sup, Mr. McCarthy.”

“Earl, that lunch is garbage.” Mr. McCarthy was maybe one of four people in the world who could say this to Earl without him freaking out.

“Least I ain’t drinkin no funky seaweed-lookin . . .
tentacle soup
out of no thermos.”

For some reason Earl and I were both obsessed with tentacles during this time.

“Yeah, I was just coming in here to replenish the oracle.”

That was when we noticed the hot plate on his desk.

“They’re rewiring the teachers’ lounge,” explained Mr.
McCarthy. “This, my boys, is the source of all wisdom. Gaze into the waters of the oracle.”

We looked into Mr. McCarthy’s huge vat of soup. Earl’s description was pretty much on the money; the noodles looked like tentacles, and there were a lot of soggy wispy green leafy things. Actually, it looked like an entire ecosystem in there. I was sort of expecting to see snails.

“It’s called
pho
,” said Mr. McCarthy. “Pho” is apparently pronounced “fuh.”

“Lemme try some,” said Earl.

“Nope,” said Mr. McCarthy.

“Dag,” said Earl.

“Can’t give you guys food,” apologized Mr. McCarthy. “It’s one of those things they really don’t like teachers doing. It’s a shame. Earl, I can recommend a particular Vietnamese restaurant for you if you want. Thuyen’s Saigon Flavor, over in Lawrenceville.”

“I ain’t eatin out in no
Lawrenceville
,” said Earl with disdain.

“Earl refuses to go to Lawrenceville,” I said. I found that sometimes with Earl and another person around, a fun thing to do was narrate Earl’s behavior, especially if it meant simply rephrasing things that he said. Basically, the premise was that he had some irritating personal assistant who actually wasn’t useful in any way.

“I ain’t got eatin-out
money.
”

“Earl has no money allocated for that purpose.”

“Tryna get some
soup
up in here.”

“Earl was hoping to have some of
your
soup.”

“Not gonna happen,” announced Mr. McCarthy cheerfully, closing the tureen of soup. “Greg, throw me a fact.”

“Uh . . . Like much Vietnamese cuisine, pho includes elements of French cooking, specifically the broth, which is derived from the consommé.” I’m embarrassed to say this, but that fact came from the Food Network.

“RESPECT THE RESEARCH,” barked Mr. McCarthy. “Greg, you beasted on that fact.” He flexed his right biceps, then punched it with his left fist. “Continue the dominance.” He was insanely fired up. He was actually snarling a little. I thought he was going to attack me. Instead, he turned to face Earl.

“Earl, if you change your mind, you can tell Thuyen to put it on Mr. McCarthy’s tab. All right?”

“Awright.”

“His pho is much better than mine anyway.”

“Awright.”

“Gentlemen.”

“Mr. McCarthy.”

As soon as Mr. McCarthy left, of course, we got some paper cups and macked on that soup. It tasted OK: like chicken soup, but with strange overtones that we couldn’t identify. Sort of garlicky and licoricey at the same time. Anyway, it wasn’t mind-blowing. At least, not at first.

I first started to feel funny when the bell rang at the end of the day. I stood up and all the blood rushed to my head and I got that brown fuzzy wall in front of my eyes that you sometimes get when the blood rushes to your head, and I had to stand
there until it went away. Meanwhile, my eyes were still open, and apparently they were staring at Liv Ryan, the first girl at our school to get a nose job. Specifically, my eyes were staring at her boobs.

From behind the brown fuzzy wall, Liv said some words. I could definitely hear the words, but for some reason I wasn’t able to put them together.

I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

“Greg, what’s your
problem
,” said Liv again, and this time I was able to determine what she was saying, and also her boobs slowly materialized.

“Blood,” I said. “My, uh, head.”

“What,” she said.

“Couldn’t see,” I said. It was hard to talk. Also, I had become aware that I looked and sounded like a moron. My voice sounded ridiculously nasal, like my face was about 80 percent nose.

“Blood rushed to my head and I couldn’t see,” I explained, although I may not have said all of those words correctly, or in that order.

“Greg, you don’t look so good,” someone else said.

“Can you just not look at me, please,” said Liv, and her words filled my heart with terror.

“I have to go,” I blurted. I realized that I needed to get my bag, and moved my feet for some reason.

That is when I fell down.

I probably don’t need to tell you that nothing is funnier at Benson, or any other high school, than when a human being falls down. I don’t mean witty, or legitimately funny; I’m just saying,
people in high school think falling down is the funniest thing that a person can possibly do. I’m not sure why this is true, but it is. People completely lose control when they see this happen. Sometimes they
themselves
fall down, and then the entire world collapses on itself.