Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

I knew our first plan was a mistake when Jared “Crackhead” Krakievich waddled up to me in the hall and addressed me as “Spielberg.”

“Hah yih doin, Spillberg,” he shouted, grinning hideously.

“What?” I said.

“I seen yer maykin’ a mewvie.”

“Oh yeah.”

“I dinn know yih made mewvies.”

“Just this one,” I said, probably too hastily.

“I’m call yih Spillberg fruh now on.”

“Great.”

It was the first shot fired in a nightmarish barrage of attention that would continue all day.

Mrs. Green, Physics 1 I.S.: “I think what you are doing is so . . . touching and . . . remarkable, and just really touching.”

Kiya Arnold: “My cousin died of leukemia. I just want to say. I’m so sorry about your girlfriend. How long y’all been together?”

Will Carruthers: “Hey faggot! Lemme be in your gay movie.”

Plan A was: Get the well-wishes of everyone at school, synagogue, etc., and put them in a film, and have that be the film. A get-well film, basically. Simple, elegant, heartwarming. Sounds like a good idea, right? Of course it does. We were completely seduced by this idea. We were morons.

First Problem: We had to get the footage ourselves, meaning we had to reveal ourselves as filmmakers to a hostile world. Originally, I asked Madison if she would get the footage herself, i.e., if she would hang out in a classroom with a camera instead of me and Earl. This led to me saying that I sort of didn’t want people knowing I was making a film for Rachel, which made her upset. That led to me saying that I didn’t want people to know about my feelings for Rachel, which made her upset in a different way that I did not, frankly, understand. Anyway, she insisted that I get the footage, and said “Oh, Greg” about seventy times until I quietly freaked out and ran away.

So we made plans to film in Mr. McCarthy’s room after school, and reluctantly told a couple of teachers about it, and with disturbing speed all teachers had found out about it, and told their students, and also it made the morning announcements every day in a row for like a week.

So yeah. This was possibly the death blow to the invisibility I had been cultivating throughout high school, and then gradually losing since becoming friends with Rachel. I used to be just normal Greg Gaines. Then I was Greg Gaines, Rachel’s Friend and Possibly Boyfriend.

That was bad enough. But now I was Greg Gaines, Filmmaker. Greg Gaines, Guy with a Camera, Following People Around. Greg Gaines, Perhaps He Is Creepily Filming You Right Now Without Your Knowledge or Consent.

Fuckbiscuit.

Second Problem: The footage was not very good. The teachers all ran way too long, first of all. None of them said anything that could be edited down. A lot of them started talking about tragedies that had happened in their lives, which besides being unusable made things fairly awkward in the room after they were done recording.

As for the students, 92 percent said some combination of these things:

• “Get better.”

• “I have to say I don’t know you that well.”

• “I know we never hung out very much.”

• “You’re in my class, but we’ve never really talked.”

• “I actually don’t know anything about you.”

• “But I do know that you have the inner strength to get better.”

• “You have a beautiful smile.”

• “You have a beautiful laugh.”

• “You have really beautiful eyes.”

• “I think your hair is beautiful.”

• “I know you’re Jewish, but I’d like to just say something from the Bible.”

And then the other 8 percent tried to be funny or creative, and that was even worse.

• “In eighth period, I wrote a song that I want to sing you. Are we ready? Can I just sing it? OK. Rachel Kushner / Don’t you push her / She’s got leukemia / and she probably wants to scream-ia / But she’s everybody’s friend! / You know her life’s not gonna end!!!”

• “Even if you do die, I was thinking today, it’s really only on the arbitrary human scale that a human life seems short, or long, or whatever, and, like, from the perspective of eternal time, the human life is vanishingly small, like it’s really equivalent whether you live to be 17 or 94 or even 20,000 years old, which is obviously impossible, and then, on the other hand, from the perspective of an ultra-nanoinstant, which is the smallest measurable unit of time, a human life is almost infinite even if you die when you’re, like, a toddler. So either way it doesn’t even matter how long you live. So I don’t know if that makes you feel better, but it’s just something to think about.”

• “Greg’s a fag. I guess he’s in love with you, so that makes him bisexual or whatever. I hope you feel better.”

Third Problem: Madison had already made get-well cards for Rachel. So we weren’t really doing anything new, for one. We were just doing a get-well card in video form.

Also—this took a little longer to realize—there was nothing specifically Gaines/Jackson about the get-well video. It was something anyone could do. So was it really that great of a gesture? No.

We’d been making films for seven years. We needed to do something better.