Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (27 page)

“If you—”

“Mom, you have to let me finish.”

“Fine.”

“It’s not a good film. OK? Actually, it sucks. Because—Mom,
chill
—we had pretty good intentions, but that doesn’t mean we made a good film. OK? Because it’s not about her at all. It’s just this embarrassing thing that shows that we don’t even understand anything about her. And also, you’re my mom, so you’re ridiculously biased, and you can’t see that the film actually sucks and doesn’t make any sense.”

“Honey. It’s so
creative.
It—”

“Just because something is weird and hard to understand doesn’t mean it’s
creative.
That’s—that’s the whole problem. If you want to pretend like something is good, even when it’s not, that’s when you use the stupid word ‘creative.’ The film sucked. Our classmates hated it.”

“They just didn’t understand it.”

“They didn’t understand it because we made a
shitty film.
”

“Honey.”

“If it was good, they would have liked it. They would have understood it. And if it was good, maybe it would have helped.”

We were quiet again. Someone a few doors down seemed to be loudly dying. It really did not help the mood.

“Well, maybe you’re right.”

“I
am
right.”

“Well, I’m sorry.”

“OK.”

“What you don’t understand is, it’s hard when your children start growing up,” said Mom, and all of a sudden she was crying again, way harder than before, and I had to comfort her. We were doing a Cross-Chair Hug, and physically it was extremely awkward.

Crying semi-hysterically, Mom made a number of points:

• Your friend is dying

• It’s just so hard to watch a child die

• And it’s much harder to watch a friend’s daughter die

• But the hardest is watching your son watching his friend die

• You have to make your own decisions now

• It’s so hard for me to let you make your own decisions

• But I have to let you make your own decisions

• I am so proud of you

• Your friend is dying, and you have been so strong

I wanted to argue with some of this. I hadn’t been strong at all, and I definitely didn’t feel like I had done anything to be proud of. But somehow I knew this was no time for an episode of
Excessive Modesty Hour
.

We left. I knew I wouldn’t see Rachel again. I just felt kind of empty and exhausted. Mom got me some Kahlúa ice cream with habaneros and bee pollen in it. It tasted OK.

That’s when I knew I was going to make it.

Winter break was almost over. It hadn’t snowed yet. Earl and I were in Thuyen’s Saigon Flavor and it was the first time we had seen each other since I became a hermit. Thuyen’s Saigon Flavor is that Vietnamese restaurant in Lawrenceville that Mr. McCarthy recommended to us the day we accidentally got stoned and told Rachel that we were filmmakers. I thought Earl would be more likely to want to meet up if it was at a place with bizarre and possibly inedible food.

Earl was already there when I showed up. I was sweating a lot under my winter coat because I had biked from my house. Also, my glasses were all fogged up, so I had to take them off and squint around like a mole-rat. Earl did not identify himself, so I wandered at random around the restaurant until I located him. He was sullenly stirring his bowl of soup.

“WELCOME WELCOME,” said a blurry object who was probably Thuyen, momentarily scaring the hell out of me.

“Hey,” I said to Earl.

“Sup.”

“Is that pho?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it good?”

“It’s got tendons in it and shit.”

“Huh.”

“WHAT YOU LIKE TO ORDER,” said Thuyen. He was about my height and shape, and he seemed disproportionately happy that we were there.

“Pho,” I said.

“ONE PHO,” bellowed Thuyen, and waddled away.

“Drug-free for once,” muttered Earl.

The music was extremely smooth R&B, and it was playing kind of loud. “You’re my sexy love,” a guy was crooning. “Se-e-exy lo-o-ove.”

“So,” I said. “I dunno if you heard, but Rachel died.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“So, uh. Did you end up getting your DVDs back from her?”

“Yeah,” said Earl, stirring.

“Can we make some copies of those?”

Earl raised his eyebrows.

“I sort of freaked out,” I said. “I kind of had this freak-out and, uh, scratched all my copies up. So I don’t have any copies anymore.”

Earl looked at me kind of bug-eyed.

“I
burnt
mine,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. For some reason, this didn’t surprise me all that much. I probably should have freaked out when I heard it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I burnt em in a trash can.”

“I guess there are no more copies,” I said.

“You jacked yours up? They don’t play no more?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Damn,” Earl said.

“Ooh girl!” bleated the R&B guy. “You make me say, ‘Ooh ooh ooh.’”

We were both quiet for a while. Then Earl said, “I didn’t think you was gonna jack up your copies.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I just kind of freaked out. I dunno.”

“It didn’t even
occur
to me that you would . . . do something like that.”

“I shouldn’t have done it,” I said, but Earl didn’t seem to be trying to make me feel bad. He just seemed kind of astonished.

“ONE PHO,” announced Thuyen, putting the bowl on the table. It smelled kind of great and kind of nasty. I would be smelling it and it would have this amazing kind of beefy sweet licorice smell for a while, and then suddenly there would be this hint of some other smell, which was sort of the smell of a sweaty butt. There was also a big complicated plate with leaves and fruit and sperm-looking bean sprouts on it.

I was trying to figure out what to eat first when Earl suddenly said, “It’s a good thing, man, because I can’t be making films no more. I gotta get a job or something. I gotta make some money and get outta my mom’s goddamn house.”

“Oh yeah?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Earl. “It’s time to move on, man. I can’t be doing this no more.”

“What kind of job are you thinking about getting?”

“Man, I don’t know. Manage a Wendy’s or some shit.”

We tried to eat. The broth was OK. The various animal parts were a little too weird for me. They had little knobbly bumps and huge chunks of fat and stuff. There were also “beef balls.” There was no way I was going to eat those.

I don’t know why I brought it up, but I said, “I’m probably failing some classes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, I stopped going to school basically.”

“Yup, McCarthy was pissed.”

“Well, he can suck it,” I said, and then was immediately filled with regret.

“Don’t talk shit,” said Earl.

I didn’t say anything to that.

“You’re stupid if you fail,” continued Earl. He didn’t sound pissed. He was being very matter-of-fact. “You’re smarter than that, man. You got college and shit to look forward to. Get a good job and shit.”

“I was thinking,” I said, “maybe I don’t want to go to college. Maybe I want to go to film school.”

“What, cuz of Rachel.”

“No. Did she say anything to you about film school?”

“She axed
me
to apply to film school. I figured she probly axed you, too. I was like, Girl, are you outta your mind. I ain’t got no money for no film school.”

“You could get a scholarship, though.”

“Ain’t nobody giving my ass no scholarship,” said Earl, and finally he ate some noodles.

“Why not?” I asked.

Sort of menacingly, with his mouth full, Earl said, “It’s just not gonna
happen
.”

We ate some more. The R&B guy was singing happily about how a girl kept him “sprung.” Thuyen was kind of singing along to it, from behind a sketchy-looking glass counter.

For some reason, I couldn’t drop the film school thing.

“I’m probably gonna apply to film school anyway,” I said. “So I guess I’ll need to make some new films for that.”

Earl was munching something.

“I don’t know if you wanna help out with it,” I said.

Earl didn’t look at me. After a while he said, kind of sadly, “I can’t be
doing
this anymore.”

Then some kind of very evil and/or stupid space alien took control of my brain and made me say something unbelievably shitty.

“Rachel would probably like that, though,” I heard myself say. “If we were working together.”

Earl stared at me for a while.

“You don’t know shit, man,” he said finally. He was brisk and sad at the same time. “I hate to get on you for this. I’m
not
getting on you for this, but I’m just telling you. This is the first . . .
negative
thing that happened to you in your life. And you can’t be overreacting to it and making big-ass expensive decisions based on it. I’m just saying. People die. Other people do stupid shit. I’m
surrounded
by family members doing stupid shit. I used a think I had to do shit for them. I still
wanna
do shit for them. But you gotta live your own life. You gotta
take care a your
own shit
before you get started doing things for errybody else.”

I was quiet because this was a completely unprecedented outburst for him. I mean, it was unprecedented because it was so personal. Or maybe that’s not it. I don’t know. Anyway, I was silenced by this and eventually that made him keep talking.

“I don’t wanna leave my mama
behind
,” he said, in the same tone of voice as before. “In that
house.
Drinking morning till night and always being online and shit. I don’t wanna leave Derrick and Devin. They a couple of jackasses. They all dumb as hell, man. I look around and ain’t nobody got a family as bad as mine. Ain’t nobody live in a damn shithole of a house like mine.

“But I gotta take care of
my own shit
,” he said. I think he was talking more to himself than to me at that point. He was sort of explaining, sort of pleading. “They got shit to figure out before I can help em. I love my mama, but she has problems that I can’t help her with. I love my brothers, but they need to figure they shit out before I can help em. Otherwise they just gonna drag me down.”

It was possible for me to go for months without remembering that Earl had a mom. It was really jarring for me to hear about her, for some reason. I didn’t even have a picture of her in my head. She was this kind of small faded-looking woman with big eyes and a sort of dreamy smile all the time.

Anyway, Earl seemed happier that he had said all of this. Then he noticed me like he had forgotten that I was there.

“Same thing with you and Rachel, except she dead, so it don’t even matter what you do for her. You gotta do what’s good
for you. You gotta
graduate
, son. Graduate, go to college, get some job. We can’t be doin this no more.”

This was simultaneously awesome and depressing. At any rate, Earl had actually gotten himself in a good mood.

“The hell Vietnamese people even think to put some of this shit in soup,” he said. “Look at this damn thing. Look like somebody’s nutsack up in here.”

Without warning, it was time for Gross-Out Mode. I didn’t feel up to it, but I did my best.

“That’s nutsack? That’s not a butthole?”

“This wrinkly bullshit? Nutsack. I
think.
Check the menu.”

“What about this thing with the fringe on it?”

“
That
might be a butthole. Did you order the large? The large got butthole, nutsack, uh, sautéed donkey dick, and uh, you probably got some hairy-ass goat titties floating around in there.”

“Yeah, this is the large.”

“Goat titties are rich in antioxidants.”

“I’m looking for the donkey dick. I’m not seeing any donkey dick.”

“Looks like you didn’t get none.”

“This is an outrage. There’s no donkey dick in my soup. I’m so pissed about this.”

“I most definitely had a couple generous chunks of finely sautéed donkey dick up in mine.”

I sort of got burned out and couldn’t add anything after a while.

“Don’t be pissed, son,” said Earl reassuringly. “I’ve had better.”

So it’s June and I just finished writing about all this. First of all: Thank Christ that this book is over. Also, I can probably just write whatever on this page, because there’s no way you made it all the way to the end, because this book is a disgrace to the English language. To
all
language. They should take away my language privileges. But meanwhile, I can write anything I want. For example: Will Carruthers’s penis is basically an innie. Suck it, Will Carruthers. I no longer care about being your friend.

So as you probably know, I got into Pitt, but then my admission was suspended when I failed the first semesters of English 12, Calculus I, Biology II, and gym. And Dad thought maybe it would make a difference if I explained to the admissions people at Pitt
why
I failed those classes. Dad kept throwing around the word “bereavement,” which sounds like the word for being attacked by beavers. Mom thought I should show you
Rachel the Film
, and it is perhaps a sign of maturity that this suggestion didn’t make me pretend to be dead even for like five
seconds. Then Mom and Dad suggested I make some kind of film for your special consideration, but after
Rachel the Film,
and after I found Earl was done with filmmaking, I retired from filmmaking forever.