Jesse Andrews - Me and Earl and the Dying Girl.epub

PUBLISHERS NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents
are either the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Andrews, Jesse.
Me & Earl & the dying girl / by Jesse Andrews.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-4197-0176-4
[1. FriendshipFiction. 2. LeukemiaFiction. 3. High schoolsFiction.
4. SchoolsFiction. 5. Family lifePennsylvaniaFiction. 6. JewsUnited
StatesFiction. 7. Pittsburgh (Pa.)Fiction. 8. Humorous stories.] I. Title.
II. Title: Me and Earl and the dying girl.
PZ7.A56726Me 2012

[Fic]dc23
2011031796

Text copyright 2012 Jesse Andrews

Book design by Chad W. Beckerman

The text in this book is set in 10.75-point Adobe Garamond.

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To Schenley, which Benson is not

I have no idea how to write this stupid book.

Can I just be honest with you for one second? This is the literal truth. When I first started writing this book, I tried to start it with the sentence It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. I genuinely thought that I could start this book that way. I just figured, its a classic book-starting sentence. But then I couldnt even figure out how you were supposed to follow that up. I stared at the computer for an hour and it was all I could do not to have a colossal freak-out. In desperation, I tried messing with the punctuation and italicization, like:

It was the best of times? And it was the worst of times?!!

What the hell does that even mean? Why would you even think to do that? You wouldnt, unless you had a fungus eating your brain, which I guess I probably have.

The point is, I have no idea what Im doing with this book. And the reason for that is, Im not a writer. Im a filmmaker. So now youre probably asking yourself:

1. Why is this guy writing a book and not making a film?

2. Does it have to with the brain-fungus thing?

Answer Key

1. Im writing a book instead of making a film because I have retired from filmmaking forever. Specifically, I retired after making the Worst Film Ever Made. Usually the goal is to retire after making the best possible thing you can makeor, even better, diebut I did the opposite. A brief outline of my career would look like this:

i. Many Bad Films

ii. A Mediocre Film

iii. Some OK Films

iv. A Decent Film

v. Two or Three Good Films

vi. A Bunch of Pretty Great Films

vii. The Worst Film Ever Made

Fin. How bad was that film? It killed someone, thats how bad it was. It caused an actual death. Youll see.

2. Lets just say that it would explain a lot of things if there were a fungus eating my brain. Although that fungus would have to have been eating my brain for basically my entire life. At this point its possible that the fungus has gotten bored and left, or died from malnutrition or something.

I do actually want to say one other thing before we get started with this horrifyingly inane book. You may have already figured out that its about a girl who had cancer. So theres a chance youre thinking, Awesome! This is going to be a wise and insightful story about love and death and growing up. It is probably going to make me cry literally the entire time. I am so fired up right now. If that is an accurate representation of your thoughts, you should probably try to smush this book into a garbage disposal and then run away. Because heres the thing: I learned absolutely nothing from Rachels leukemia. In fact, I probably became stupider about life because of the whole thing.

Im not really putting this very well. My point is this: This book contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever. And, unlike most books in which a girl gets cancer, there are definitely no sugary paradoxical single-sentence-paragraphs that youre supposed to think are deep because theyre in italics. Do you know what Im talking about? Im talking about sentences like this:

The cancer had taken her eyeballs, yet she saw the world with more clarity than ever before.

Barf. Forget it. For me personally, things are in no way more meaningful because I got to know Rachel before she died. If anything, things are less meaningful. All right?

So I guess we should just start.

(I just realized that you may not know what fin means. It is a filmmaking term. Specifically, it is French for This movie is over, which is good, because it probably confused the hell out of you, because it was made by French people.)

Fin for real this time.

So in order to understand everything that happened, you have to start from the premise that high school sucks. Do you accept that premise? Of course you do. It is a universally acknowledged truth that high school sucks. In fact, high school is where we are first introduced to the basic existential question of life: How is it possible to exist in a place that sucks so bad?

Most of the time middle school sucks even worse, but middle school is so pathetic that I cant even bring myself to write about it, so lets just focus on high school.

All right. Allow me to introduce myself: Greg S. Gaines, seventeen. During the period described in this book, I was a senior at Benson High School in lovely inner-city Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And before we do anything else, it is necessary for us to examine Benson and the specific ways in which it sucks.

So, Benson is on the border of Squirrel Hill, an affluent neighborhood, and Homewood, a non-affluent neighborhood, and it draws about equal numbers of students from both. On television, its usually the rich kids who assert control at a high school; however, most of Squirrel Hills genuinely rich kids go to the local private school, Shadyside Academy. The ones that remain are too few to impose any kind of order. I mean, occasionally, they try to, and that tends to be more adorable than anything else. Like when Olivia Ryan freaks out about the puddle of urine that appears in one of the stairwells most days between 10:30 and 11:00 AM , shrieking at bystanders in an insane, misguided attempt to try to figure out who did it. You want to say, Liv! The perpetrator has probably not returned to the scene of the crime. Pee Diddy is long gone by now. But even if you did say that, she probably wouldnt stop freaking out. And anyway, my point is that the freak-out doesnt have any measurable effect on anything. Its like when a kitten tries to bite something to death. The kitten clearly has the cold-blooded murderous instinct of a predator, but at the same time, its this cute little kitten, and all you want to do is stuff it in a shoebox and shoot a video of it for grandmas to watch on YouTube.