Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (17 page)

• 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, the 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.”

Rachel looked better than most of the other kids, but she was totally bald. That really took a lot of getting used to. Every couple of minutes or so I would look at her head, or even just think about her bald head while trying not to look at it, and my skin would get all hot and prickly. As Earl pointed out, it
looked a lot like Darth Vader’s head when they took off his mask. It was insanely white, like it had been boiled, and sort of veiny and lumpy.

But at least she was in an OK mood—she was weak and her voice was scraggly, but she smiled when she saw me, and somehow her eyes were very happy. I don’t know how to describe it. There’s a chance the happiness was just from some extremely powerful pain medication they were giving her. You can never really know in a hospital.

“Yo,” I said.

“The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet,” she told me.

This was a line from
Hello, Good-Die,
our James Bond parody in which everyone is actually a sock puppet. For some reason it was hilarious that she greeted me with this line.

“Haaarf,” I said.

“Thanks for visiting me.”

“Yeah, I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

My guard was down a little bit after the
Hello, Good-Die
thing. Usually it’s when your guard is down that you find yourself saying the most dick sentences of your life. Here comes an example of that right now.

“Yeah, I thought it would be weird if I just visited you with no excuse, so I convinced Earl to break my arm so, uh, that gave me a good cover story, uhhhh. Yeah.”

Jesus Christ in a cockwagon. At the beginning of this sentence, my Feeling Like a Dick Quotient was at a solid 4.0,
which is normal. By about the word “excuse,” it was all the way up to 9.4. By the end I was easily maxed out at 10.0. Actually, I may have broken the scale.

Rachel was definitely not thrilled about this sentence.

“Next time maybe you can come
without
an excuse.”

“Yeah, I realized that I, uh, yeah.”

“Or, you don’t have to come at all.”

“No. What are you talking about?”

“Nothing.”

“I was just making a joke.”

“I know.”

“Urrrrgh.”

We were silent, so I made the noise again.

“Urrrrnngh.”

“What is that noise.”

“Regretful polar bear.”

Snort.

“Polar bears are the most regretful animals in nature. Scientists do not know why this is. But they have the purest expressions of regret in the animal kingdom. Listen to how beautiful and haunting they sound: Urrrrrrrnnngh.”

Snort, cough. Then Rachel said, “Actually, you shouldn’t try to make me laugh.”

“Oops, sorry.”

“No, I like the polar bear, but when I laugh it hurts a little.”

“See, now I regret doing the polar bear thing, but this feeling of regret just makes me want to make the polar bear noise even more. Because the polar bear is so regretful.”

Weak snort.

“The polar bear just regrets
everything.
He
loves
fish and seals. They’re his
friends.
He
hates
having to kill and eat them. But he lives too far north to go to Whole Foods, and—”

SNOORT

“Sorry, sorry. I have to chill out.”