Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

So. If this was some normal fictional young-adult book, this is the part of the story where after the film, the entire high school would rise to their feet and applaud, and Earl and I would find True Acceptance and begin to Truly Believe in Ourselves, and Rachel would somehow miraculously make a recovery, or maybe she would die but we would Always Have Her to Thank for Making Us Discover Our Inner Talent, and Madison would become my girlfriend and I would get to nuzzle her boobs like an affectionate panda cub whenever I wanted.

That is why fiction sucks. None of that happened. Instead, pretty much everything happened that I was afraid of, except worse.

1. My Classmates Did Not Particularly Enjoy Rachel the Film

They hated it. They thought it was weird and confusing. They also thought we had forced them to watch it, despite what Principal Stewart said. Most students weren’t paying very close attention to his speech. They just showed up at the auditorium, started paying attention when the lights went down, and assumed that it was our idea to make everyone watch the stupid film. And because it genuinely sucks, they hated it. Earl and I got to watch their reactions from onstage. There was a lot of restless fidgeting, bored conversations, teachers hissing “Shhh,” and hostile glaring. So that wasn’t great.

The worst part was the occasional screams of outrage. The spinning tarantula, for example, caused more than a couple of people to lose their shit. “That ain’t right!” “That’s nasty.” “WHY WE GOTTA WATCH THIS.”

Actually, maybe it was worse to see the reactions of Rachel’s friends Anna and Naomi. They both clearly hated it. Naomi made her feelings clear by having an enormous scowl on her face and rolling her eyes roughly every ten seconds. And the thing was, I couldn’t even really blame her for that. Anna was worse, because she just looked kind of miserable. She was being comforted by Scott Mayhew, the guy who I pretended was a barfing alien. He had become her boyfriend. Scott was mostly glaring at me, with the icy unblinking hatred of a gothy dork who feels that his trust has been betrayed. I guess I was lucky that he didn’t have a sword.

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.