Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Plan C was sock puppets.

First of all, let me just say that sock puppets can be way more emotional and expressive than they get credit for. There are a lot of different ways to put your hand in a sock and make it look like a face. Also, if you draw eyebrows over the eyes, that’s really humanizing. You have to know what you’re doing with the mouth, but if you do, you can make magic happen.

All that said, Plan C was a cancer-themed movie starring sock puppets. So it was pretty much doomed from the get-go.

Once we decided to try sock puppets, our main problem was plot. If Rachel was the star, what did she do? Whose ass did she kick? Was she going to kick leukemia’s ass?

INT. BRIGHTLY COLORED CARDBOARD LANDSCAPE — DAY

RACHEL

La di da di da

LUKE

wearing cape and mustache, speaking with a Southern accent

Howdy!

RACHEL

suspiciously

Hmmm. Who are you.

LUKE

Uh . . . my name is Luke.

RACHEL

What’s your full name.

LUKE

Luke mmmphlmmph.

RACHEL

I can’t hear you.

LUKE

Luke Emia.

RACHEL

TIME FOR A BEATDOWN.

How did this make us better than Justin Howell? The theater kid who wrote the song about how leukemia made Rachel want to scream-ia? We weren’t sure.

INT. BRIGHTLY COLORED CARDBOARD LANDSCAPE — DAY

LUKE EMIA

addressing camera

What’s up, this is a public service announcement. I’m leukemia. I like to pick on kids and teenagers, because I’m extremely pathetic. Here’s a list of things I hate:

—delicious foods such as pizza

—adorable panda cubs

—if you were to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool with pleasant-smelling rubber balls such as would be fun to frolic around in, I would hate that as well.

Not a lot of people know this, but my favorite thing in the world is a poorly made car commercial with generic guitar music in the backGROUN GAARRGGHH

RACHEL, holding a baseball bat in her mouth, clubs LUKE while yodeling.

It was just all really childish and simplistic. It had nothing to do with anything. It looked like television for toddlers, and even worse, it was a big stupid lie. Rachel wasn’t fighting leukemia. She wasn’t interested in fighting. She seemed like she was giving up.