Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (26 page)

The teachers all made a big deal of liking it, which (1) reflects poorly on their artistic judgment and (2) made the students hate it even more. It kept getting rubbed in everyone’s face that we had done this stupid film. It started to look as though we had just done it because we wanted attention. That idea, of course, makes me want to throw poisonous stinging insects at my own head.

Some of the stoners liked it, and that did not make me feel better about anything. Dave Smeggers, for example, stopped me in the hall to tell me that he thought the film was “deep.”

“It was
funny
, man,” he said. “You took death, like a real person’s death, and you made it
funny
. You made it funny as hell! That blew me away.”

It didn’t seem worth it to tell him that that actually wasn’t our goal.

Madison claimed to like it, but it was pretty obvious she was just being nice. The kicker was when she said she didn’t understand all of it.

“You guys are just so
creative
,” she explained, as though that permitted us to make any weird, alienating, poorly created thing and force people to watch it.

So everyone saw it. Almost everyone hated it.

In the words of Nizar the Surly Syrian, “You want to fight, I fight you. Cock shit ass fuck.”

2. My Classmates Now Had Active Reason to Dislike Me

And so in the days directly after the screening of
Rachel the Film
, my role in the Benson ecosystem changed again, for the worse. At the beginning of the year I had been Greg Gaines, the guy who is casually friendly with everyone. Then I became Greg Gaines, Possible Boyfriend of a Boring Girl. That wasn’t great; nor was Greg Gaines, Filmmaker. But now I was Greg Gaines, Filmmaker Who Specifically Makes Shitty Experimental Films and Forces You to Watch Them. I was a lone chimp, hobbling around on the forest floor. I also had a ginormous target on the
back of my head and a sign under it that said: “Betcha Can’t Hit My Head with Your Thrown Feces!”

I couldn’t even bring myself to talk to anyone at school. I wasn’t able to talk to anyone anyway, without it being film-related. Kids would shout things at me in the hall from time to time—often about the spinning tarantula, which I think really came to symbolize the film’s aggressive awfulness—and I was unable to come up with a response that would make it OK. Instead, I would just kind of walk faster. This felt horrible.

In terms of social groups: The smart kids treated me with outright pity. The rich kids suddenly behaved as though they had never known me. The jocks started asking me when I was going to do a gay porn. The theater kids—this was the worst—seemed to think that, now that I had invaded their auditorium, we had some kind of tense artistic rivalry going. And most other kids just treated me with a combination of mistrust and dislike.

So that wasn’t great.

3. Earl and I Stayed Far, Far Away from Each Other

We had no interest in hanging out. None.

4. I Had Kind of a Meltdown and Became a Hermit

In fairness, I definitely did not react very well to what happened. The screening was in December, so I went to school for another week after that, and then the week before winter break, I just sort of stopped going to school. I biked to Home Depot, bought a lock for my door, attached it kind of messily with some power tools, and locked myself in my room.

Since the film thing, the only parent I was on speaking terms with was Dad, and even then I didn’t really want to talk to him, so instead we sent texts to each other. It was weird.

Son, Are you going to school today?

no

Why not?

feel sick

Should we take you to a doctor?

no i just need to be alone

So you don’t have a broken arm or anything?

why would i have a broken arm

You don’t really know how to use power tools! LOL

no broken arm

Well, feel free to make lunch for yourself in the kitchen. I’ll be in my study if you need anything.

I learned later that Mom was so upset about this whole fiasco that she let Dad talk her into being much more hands-off with me than before. This, of course, was completely welcome by me. In fact, Mom finally staying out of my life was probably the only thing that prevented me from attempting to jog to Buenos Aires.

So for a week I just stayed in my room and watched films. First I watched only the good ones, in the hopes that they would cheer me up, but all they did was remind me of what a terrible filmmaker I was. Then I watched some bad films, but that didn’t make me feel good, either. Every now and then I put in a Gaines/Jackson DVD, and had to take it out after five minutes. Our films were just so bad. They just were. We didn’t have any equipment, or actors. We were just kids making embarrassing kid stuff. I put in the ones I thought would be the best, and they were terrible.
Star Peaces. 2002. Cat-ablanca.
Horrific. An abomination. Boring, stupid, unwatchable.

And on Day Three I freaked out and took out a scissors and scratched them all up and threw them in the garbage, and I knew at the time it wasn’t going to make me feel any better, but I did it anyway, because, fuck it.

So I was feeling about as awful as I had ever felt when Dad called my cell phone one afternoon to tell me that Rachel was back in the hospital.

Denise was there when I got to Rachel’s room, and we didn’t really have anything to say to each other, so we both awkwardly sat there for a while. I felt like I should leave, but I knew that would make me feel even worse. Rachel wasn’t awake. She had pneumonia, apparently.

I really wanted Rachel to wake up. In retrospect, this was stupid and pointless, because I had nothing to say to her, but I just wanted to talk to her again. I sat there staring at her for like an hour. Her frizzy hair was gone, and her mouth was closed, so I couldn’t see her sort of big teeth. And her eyes were closed, so I couldn’t see them, either. So you’d think the person lying there wouldn’t have looked like Rachel at all, but somehow she did.

Actually I was crying the whole time, because for some reason it had never really sunk in with me that she was dying, and now I was literally watching her die, and it was different somehow.

There was just something about her dying that I had understood but not
really
understood, if you know what I mean.
I mean, you can know someone is dying on an intellectual level, but emotionally it hasn’t really hit you, and then when it does, that’s when you feel like shit.

So like an idiot, I hadn’t understood until I was sitting there actually watching her physically die, when it was too late to say or do anything. I couldn’t believe it had taken me so long to understand it even a little bit. This was a human being, dying. This was the only time there was going to be someone with
those
eyes and
those
ears and
that
way of breathing through her mouth and
that
way of building up right before a monster laugh with her eyebrows all raised and her nostrils flaring a little bit, this was the only time there was ever going to be that person, living in the world, and now that was almost over, and I couldn’t deal with it.

I was thinking, also, that we had made a film about a thing, death, that we knew nothing about. Maybe Earl sort of knew something, but I knew absolutely
nothing
about it. Plus we had made a film about a girl who we really hadn’t gotten to know. Actually, we hadn’t made the film about her at all. She was just dying, there, and we had gone and made a film about ourselves. We had taken this girl and used her really to make a film about
ourselves
, and it just seemed so stupid and wrong that I couldn’t stop crying.
Rachel the Film
is not at all about Rachel. It’s about how little we know about Rachel. We were so ridiculously arrogant to try to make a film about her.

So I was sitting there and the whole time I had this insane wish for Rachel to wake up and just tell me everything she had ever thought, so that it could be recorded somewhere, so that it wouldn’t be lost. I found myself thinking, what if she’s already
had her last thought, what if her brain isn’t producing conscious thoughts anymore, and that was so awful that I started completely bawling, I was making hideous sobbing noises like an elephant seal or something, like: HURNK HURNGK HRUNNNN.

Denise was just sitting there frozen.

At the same time, and I hated myself for this, I was realizing how to make the movie I should have made, that it had to be something that stored as much of Rachel as possible, that ideally we
would
have had a camera on her for her whole life, and one inside her head, and it made me so bitter and fucking angry that this was impossible, and she was just going to be
lost.
Just as if she had never been around to say things and laugh at people and have favorite words that she liked to use and ways of fidgeting with her fingers when she got antsy and specific memories that flashed through her head when she ate a certain food or smelled a certain smell like, I dunno, how maybe honeysuckle made her think of one particular summer day playing with a friend or whatever the fuck, or how rain on the windshield of her mom’s car used to look like alien fingers to her, or
whatever
, and as if she had never had fantasies about stupid Hugh Jackman or visions of what her life was going to be like in college or a whole unique way of thinking about the world that was never going to be articulated to anyone. All of it and everything else she had ever thought was just going to be lost.

And the point of
Rachel the Film
should really have been to express how awful and shitty that loss was, that she would have become a person with a long awesome life if she had been allowed to continue living, and that this was just a stupid meaningless
loss
, just a motherfucking
loss
, a loss loss loss fucking loss, there was no fucking meaning to it, there was nothing good that could come out of it, and I was sitting there thinking about the film and I knew the film would have to have a scene of me losing my shit in the hospital room, and her mom sitting there wordless and dead-eyed like a statue, and I hated myself for having a cold detached part of me that thought this, but I couldn’t help it.

At some point during all this, my mom came in, and if you think it was possible for either of us to talk through all the crying, you may just be stupid.

We had to step out into the hall eventually, but not before Mom had a bizarre interaction with Denise, where she hugged Denise’s body and said some incoherent things while Denise just sat there rigidly.

So Mom and I sat there in two generic institutional chairs in the hallway and tried to get all the crying out of our system, and eventually I was able to talk in short little bursts.

“I just w want her to w , wake up.”

“Oh, honey.”

“It s sucks.”

“You made her very happy.”

“If I m , made her h happy, then why is sn’ sn’t she trying to f fight. Harder.”

“It’s just too hard. Honey. Some things,
no one
can fight.”

“It
sucks.
”

“Death happens to everyone.”

“HurrnNRNNNGK.”

This went on for like an hour. I’ll spare you the rest of it. Eventually, we stopped talking, and there was a long silence as people like Gilbert were wheeled around and doctors and nurses strode briskly past them.

Then Mom said: “I’m sorry.”

I thought I knew what she was talking about.

“Well, I just wish you had asked me first.”

“I
did
ask you first, but I guess I didn’t really give you a choice.”

“Mom, what are you talking about. You didn’t ask me first.”

“Are we talking about the same thing?”

“I’m talking about the stupid pep rally.”

“Oh.”

“What are you talking about.”

“
I’m
talking about getting you to spend time with Rachel in the first place.”

“The pep rally was way worse.”

“That, I don’t feel bad about. I
do
feel bad about making you deal with such a difficul—”

“You don’t feel bad about the pep rally?”

“No, but I do feel bad ab—”

“The pep rally was a nightmare. It was literally like a nightmare.”

“If you
regret
that your beautiful movie was shown to your classmates, then I really don’t know how to respond to that.”

“I can’t believe that you still think that was a
good idea.
First of all, th—”

“There are some things—”

“Can I just finish?”

“First, there are some—”

“Can I just
finish.
Mom. Mom, let me finish.
Mom.
Jesus
Christ.
”

We were both using Mom’s unstoppable nonstop-stream-of-words move, and I think she was so surprised that I was using it back on her that she actually relented and let me talk.

“Fine. What.”

“Mom. My classmates hated the film. And Earl and I really don’t like it either. We don’t think it’s very good. In fact, we think it’s terrible.”