Theory: People always get fired up when an unattractive girl and an unattractive dude are dating each other.

No one came out and said anything to this effect, but I feel like it’s probably true. When girls see two Unattractives dating, they think, “Hey! Love is possible even for unattractive people. They have to love different things about each other than their physical appearances. That’s so sweet.” Meanwhile, dudes see it and think, “That is one less guy I have to compete with for the most succulent boobs in the Boob Competition that is high school.”

And, inevitably, spending time with Rachel meant being at least partially absorbed by her group, Upper-Middle-Class Senior Jewish Girl Sub-Clique 2a: Rachel Kushner, Naomi Shapiro, and Anna Tuchman. Naomi Shapiro had this loud, blustering, sarcastic persona that she used at all times, and Anna Tuchman was OK but invariably clutching a paperback with a title like The Meridian Sword or Cleavage of Destiny or something. A few times before school, I was roped into spending time with these girls. Their conversations were tough to be part of for a sustained period of time.

INT. BENSON HALLWAY — MORNING

ANNA

Ugggh. I don’t want to go to English today.

NAOMI

MR. CUBALY IS SUCH A PERV.

Giggling from RACHEL and ANNA.

NAOMI

pretending not to understand the giggling

WHAT?! HE’S ALWAYS TRYING TO LOOK DOWN MY SHIRT.

More giggling. GREG is also politely trying to giggle and failing.

NAOMI

IT’S LIKE: TAKE A PICTURE, MR. CUBALY, IT’LL LAST LONGER.

ANNA

pretending to be horrified

Naomi-i-i-i-i-i!!

All of a sudden everyone is looking at Greg to see what he thinks of all this.

GREG

deciding that the safest option is simply to summarize what has been said thus far

Uh . . . Takin’ a picture of some boobs. Cubaly style.

NAOMI

UGGGGGH. BOYS ARE SUCH PERVERTS. GREG, CAN YOU THINK ABOUT JUST ONE THING OTHER THAN SEX.

ENTIRE HALLWAY’S WORTH OF STUDENTS

Greg, we are all making a note of your playful bantering friendship with this loud obnoxious person.

So yeah, my hard-earned social invisibility definitely was taking something of a hit. I even made the mistake one afternoon of agreeing to have lunch with Rachel and her friends in the cafeteria, a place I hadn’t set foot in for years.

The cafeteria is chaos. First of all, it’s in a perpetual state of low-level food fight. It’s rarely violent enough for the security guards to get involved, but at any given time, someone is attempting to whip a piece of food or condiment at someone else from close range, and half of the time they miss and hit someone else in a different part of the cafeteria. So it’s like one of the more chill battles of World War II.

Second of all, the food every single day is pizza and Tater Tots. Sometimes to mix things up they put little gray poop-like nuggets of sausage on the pizza, but that’s as much variation as there is. Also, a lot of food ends up on the cafeteria floor, and both pizza and Tater Tots get very slippery when stepped on. There’s also a lot of dried Pepsi down there, which is sticky and therefore easy to walk on but somehow even more disgusting.

Finally, the cafeteria is extremely crowded, meaning if you accidentally slip on a slick of pizza cheese and mashed-up Tater Tots, you will probably be trampled to death.

Basically, it’s like a low-security state prison.

And so I had to sit there with my backpack perched awkwardly on my lap, because you do not want your backpack down there under the table accumulating greasy food stains and families of insects, and I was eating my weird but probably healthful lunch that Dad had packed because if I ate pizza and Tater Tots every day I would be even more overweight and my face would have a pimple somewhere the size of a human eyeball. And Naomi was loudly talking about how Ross Said Something Ignorant and I Was Like Don’t Even Go There, and I was attempting to listen politely and probably had some kind of dumb smile or grimace on my face. And that’s the state I was in when Madison Hartner came over to sit with us.

So in case you don’t remember, Madison Hartner is the insanely hot girl who probably dates one of the Pittsburgh Steelers or at least a college student or something. She’s also the girl that I relentlessly antagonized in the fifth grade, with the Madison Fartner nickname, the Booger ChapStick accusation, etc. That’s all water under the bridge now, of course, and in October of senior year, we were on vaguely friendly terms with each other. We would say hi to each other in the hall sometimes, and maybe I would even make some kind of bland inoffensive joke, and she would smile or something, and I would daydream for a couple of seconds about nuzzling my face in her boobs like an affectionate panda cub, and then we would both get on with our lives.

Did I want to get with Madison? Yes. Of course I did. I would have given up a year of my life just to make out with her. Well, maybe a month. And obviously she would have to be doing it voluntarily. I’m not suggesting that some weird wish-granting genie would force her to make out with me in exchange for a month of my life. This entire paragraph is a moron.

Look: If you asked me, Greg, who do you have a crush on, the answer would be Madison. But most of the time I was able to not think about girls, because in high school guys like me are completely unable to get with the girls they actually want to get with, so there’s no sense in dwelling on that like a pathetic idiot.

I asked Dad point-blank about girls in high school once and he said that, yeah, high school is impossible, but college is different and that once I get there I “should have no trouble making whoopie,” which was embarrassing but reassuring at the same time. Then I asked Mom and she said I’m actually very handsome, and that statement immediately became Piece of Evidence #16087 in the case of Mom v. The Truth.

Anyway. Madison, a hot and almost universally popular girl, came strolling up to us and plunked her tray down next to Rachel’s. Why did she choose to do this? Here, let me give you another long-winded explanation of something. I am like the Joseph Stalin of narrators.

There are two kinds of hot girls: Evil Hot Girls, and Hot Girls Who Are Also Sympathetic Good-Hearted People and Will Not Intentionally Destroy Your Life (HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL). Olivia Ryan—the first girl in our class to get a nose job—is definitely an Evil Hot Girl, which is why everyone is terrified of her. Periodically she will just randomly destroy someone’s life. Occasionally it’s because that person wrote something on Facebook like liv ryan is a btichhhh !!!! but most of the time, there’s no reason for it. It’s like a volcano suddenly erupted in someone’s house and melted their flesh. At Benson, I would estimate that about 75 percent of hot girls are evil.

But Madison Hartner is not evil. Actually, she’s like the president of the HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL. The best evidence of this is Rachel. Madison and Rachel were, at best, distant acquaintances before Rachel got cancer, but when the cancer happened, this triggered Madison’s Friend Hormones.

Let me also tell you that the problem with HGWAASGHPAWNIDYL is, just because they’re not intentionally out to destroy your life, doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes still destroy your life. They can’t help it. They’re like elephants, blithely roaming the jungle, occasionally stomping a chipmunk and not even noticing: hot, sexy elephants.

Actually, Madison is a lot like Mom. She’s obsessed with doing Good Deeds, and she’s awesome at persuading people to do stuff. This is just an incredibly dangerous combination, as you will see later in this book, if I can even finish it without freaking out and throwing my laptop out of a moving car and into a pond.

All right. So Madison’s leukemia-activated Friend Hormones had begun pumping through her system, and now she was showing her friendship by sitting with us during lunch.

“Is anyone sitting here?” she asked. She has this dark honeyed kind of wise-sounding voice, which doesn’t quite fit how she looks. That is also hot. I feel like an assclown writing about how hot she is, so I’ll stop.

“I DON’T THINK SO,” said Naomi.

“Sit with us,” said Rachel.

So she sat there. Naomi was being quiet. The balance of power had shifted in ways that none of us yet understood. There was tension in the air. It was a moment of great opportunity, and greater danger. The world was about to change forever. I had beef in my mouth.

“Greg, that looks like an interesting lunch,” said Madison.

Lunch was leftover beef slices, bean sprouts, and lettuce in a plastic container. There was also teriyaki sauce and scallions and stuff. It basically looked like an alien came to earth and took a class in salad-making but didn’t do all that great on the final exam. Anyway, this was my opportunity, and I seized it.

“I already had lunch,” I said. “This is the barf of a space alien.”

Rachel and Anna snorted, and Madison actually giggled a little bit. I did not have time to truly register the boner-generating ramifications of that, because Naomi was clearly about to make a loud irritating attempt to reclaim the center of attention, and I had to prevent this at all costs.

“Yeah, for extra credit in Mr. McCarthy’s class, I’m doing a documentary on the barfing habits of space aliens. I follow them around with a camera, and I collect their barf in containers like this. You thought I was going to eat this? No way. Madison, you must think I’m perverted. I’m a barf historian, and you need to have some respect for that. That’s why I have this beautiful specimen of barf in this container here. I’m going to do some research with it.”

Naomi was periodically trying to cut in by bellowing “GROSS” and “YOU DID NOT JUST GO THERE,” but to no avail. I was getting some momentum and had some decent laughs going, especially from Rachel, who at that point was the Duchess of Snortsylvania.

“I am not going to eat this precious barf. Let me explain something to you guys. When an alien barfs, it’s a sign of trust. I have spent a ton of time with aliens, gaining their trust so that they can bestow their wondrous barf on me, and I am not about to sabotage that trust by eating the barf. Even though it looks nutritious and like it would taste awesome. Check it out. Look at these weird sperm-looking thingies. Do they make me want to just go to town on this barf? And eat it in my mouth? Obviously. But this is about trust. Next question. Rachel.”

Rachel was helplessly snorting and honking away, so I knew if I gave her the opportunity to speak, it would let me reload a little bit without letting Naomi talk. I was also trying not to focus on the fact that I was making probably Benson’s hottest girl laugh. This was easily the only time anything like this had ever happened.

“Where do you even find space aliens,” Rachel eventually managed to ask.

“Awesome question,” I said. “Space aliens generally disguise themselves as people, but if you know what to look for, you can identify them pretty easily.” I was sort of looking around the cafeteria for inspiration. For some reason I was focusing on Scott Mayhew, one of the Magic-card-playing gothy dorks from eighteen thousand words ago. He was wearing a trench coat and he was clumsily loping around with a school lunch tray.

“Aliens have an unusual fashion sense revolving around trench coats,” I continued, “and they haven’t really figured out how to use human legs to walk normally. Like, don’t look now, but Scott Mayhew over there? Yeah. He is a textbook alien.”

My heart was racing. On the one hand, I had just committed a cardinal sin of my whole way of being: Never make fun of anybody. Talking shit on people is probably the easiest way to make friends and enemies in high school, or really anywhere, and as I have noted like a billion times, that is the opposite of my goal in life.

But on the other hand, I had three girls cracking up, and one of them was Madison, and another was Rachel, and I had to keep it going.

“You’ve probably seen Scott running around all weird and stuff, and you’ve thought to yourself, what is his deal. Well, he’s from outer space. His home is on some fucked-up meteor or something. And it’s taken a really long time for us to get to the level of trust where he’ll let me carry around his barf. You don’t even want to know how much alien poetry I’ve had to sit around and listen to. It’s mostly about centaurs. And finally this morning after he read me some of his poetry, I was like, ‘I’d like to thank you for that, that was really beautiful,’ and then he was like, ‘I’d like to honor you with my barf.’ And that’s when he barfed in this thing here. It’s been a wild ride.”

And then I shut up, because Scott had sort of stopped what he was doing and was staring at us from across the cafeteria. He can’t have liked what he was seeing. Anna, Rachel, and Madison were all looking at him and laughing. And I was saying things with a big dumb grin on my face. He knew we were making fun of him. It was obvious. He gazed at me coldly and angrily.

“GREG, YOU’RE WEIRD AND GROSS,” announced Naomi, stepping eagerly into the void.

“Greg, you’re being mean,” said Madison with a sweet smile on her face.

How the hell was I going to get out of this. “No, no, no!” I yelled. “Naomi, alien barf is not gross. That’s the whole point. It’s rare and beautiful. And Madison, what I’m saying is not mean. It’s like the opposite. I’m celebrating this magical bond that Scott and I have. With his barf. That I’m holding right now in this container.”

But I was freaked out. I had temporarily lost control of myself and talked shit on Scott Mayhew and made him probably hate me. And also now I had created a reputation for myself as a guy who talks shit on people. I was so freaked out that I didn’t even really say anything else until the bell rang for next period, and of course in the weeks to follow, I did not return to the cafeteria. I couldn’t even think about eating lunch down there without my armpits getting all hot and prickly.

Later, Rachel confided to me that Scott Mayhew had a big crush on Anna.

“Ohhh. That makes sense.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She’s always reading books about centaurs and stuff.”

“I think he’s too weird for her.”

“He’s not that weird.”

I was still feeling guilty and sensitive about the whole Scott thing.

“Greg, he’s pretty weird. And his hair is gross.”

“Well, he’s not as weird as me.”

“I guess you’re the one making the space alien barf documentary.”

“Yeah.”

“Are your other films documentaries?”

I think Rachel was trying to give me an opportunity to go on some open-ended riff about something here, but honestly I was too freaked out to really say anything. There was the Scott thing, and now there was Rachel bringing up my films, and I just didn’t know what to do.

So I kind of just said, “Uhhhhh. Not really. Uh.”

But fortunately Rachel understood what this meant.

“Sorry, I know they’re secret. I shouldn’t ask you about them.”

“No, I’m being stupid.”

“No you’re not. It’s important to you that they’re secret. I don’t want you to describe them to me.”

I have to say this: In that moment, Rachel was awesome. Meanwhile, I guess I probably have to describe the films to you. You’re being less awesome than Rachel, you stupid reader.

I mean, I’m the one who’s deciding you have to read about them, so really it’s me who is being a human poop factory right now.

This should come as a surprise to no one.

This is obviously just a partial list.

Earl, the Wrath of God II (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2005). Yes, I know. The II makes no sense. It should have been either Aguirre, the Wrath of God II, or Earl, the Wrath of God I. Whatever. At the time, Earl, the Wrath of God II just seemed to work. Also, we were eleven. Give us a break.

Anyway, Earl’s bravura performance as a psychotic fake-German-speaking Spanish conquistador was overshadowed by a near-total lack of plot, character development, intelligible dialogue, etc. In hindsight, we probably should have used less footage of Cat Stevens flipping out and attacking one of us. We also should have added subtitles, because there is no way to tell what Earl is trying to say. “Ich haufen mit staufen ZAUFENSTEINNN,” for example. It sounds great, but literally translated, it means “I pile/cluster/accumulation with [nonsense word] ALCOHOL-DRINKING-STONNNNE.”

Ran II (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2006). We really stepped it up for Ran II, with costumes, a soundtrack, weaponry, and a plot that we actually sat and tried to write down beforehand. Here goes: An emperor and his sons are having dinner. One of the sons makes fun of the emperor. The emperor becomes enraged and kills his own court jester. The wife of one of the other sons runs in and announces that she has just gotten remarried to another emperor. She is noogied to death. The second emperor, meanwhile, lives in a bathroom and eats soap, and has a lengthy freak-out scene when a messenger tells him that his wife is dead. The messenger turns out to be the rebellious son; the rebellious son, however, then makes the mistake of walking under a tree, where a mysterious assassin is waiting with some toothpaste. The assassin and the first emperor chase each other through the forest for a while. This causes the second emperor to have an even longer freak-out scene. Eventually, he runs into the living room and commits Elbow-Forehead Suicide, while the for-some-reason-alive-again court jester sings a very loud nonsense song.

And that’s when things get complicated.

Apocalypse Later (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2007). Again, not our best title. Once we found out what the apocalypse was, we thought that it was ridiculous that Apocalypse Now was not, in fact, about the End of the World. This movie can best be summed up like this:

1. Earl, wearing a bandanna and holding a Super Soaker, demands to know when the apocalypse is happening.

2. Offscreen, I tell Earl that the apocalypse is not for a while.

3. Earl sits in a chair and does a lot of cussing.

4. Repeat. ½

Star Peaces (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2007). It’s the year 2007 on planet Earth, not the future, and although he has an awesome name, Luke Crazy Bad-Ass is the lamest guy in his entire neighborhood. For example: His wallet contains nothing but pudding, and instead of wanting to make out with him, girls prefer to punch him in the stomach. Then he discovers two robots in a sandbox who tell him that he can move things with his mind. There is no evidence that this is true, but he tells everyone about it anyway, and when they ask him for a demonstration, he gets really angry and does the Robot Dance of Anger. At one point, he thinks that his bike is some kind of futuristic speeder and uses it to ride around Frick Park with a Super Soaker, making space noises with his lips and attacking people that he thinks are storm troopers. Then the police show up, as in, real policemen who were not in the script but who were called up by an old lady we almost ran over. This turned out to be awesome, because we hadn’t really written an ending. ½

Hello, Good-Die (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2008). Breakthrough! This was the first of many of our films to use sock puppets. James Bondage, British superspy, wakes up in bed with a beautiful woman, who is secretly a sock puppet. We know that it’s a secret from when James Bondage says, “The most beautiful thing about you is that you’re not a sock puppet.” ½

Cat-ablanca (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2008). The thing is, cats can’t act.

2002 (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2009). We felt very liberated after watching 2001. If Aguirre, the Wrath of God taught us that the plot of a film doesn’t need to have a happy ending, 2001 taught us that a film doesn’t even need a plot in the first place, and a lot of its scenes can just be weird colors. Artistically, this is our most ambitious film, which also makes it the least fun to watch. ½

The Manchurian Cat-idate (dir. G. Gaines and E. Jackson, 2010). Not only can cats not act, they also hate wearing clothes. ½

All in all we made forty-two films, starting with Earl, the Wrath of God II. We had a ritual for when each film was finished: We would burn the film to two DVDs, erase the film on Dad’s computer, and then I would take the raw footage out to the garbage behind our house while Earl smoked a cigarette. Mom usually watched disapprovingly while this happened—she thought we would want the footage for later, and also, while she tolerated the smoking, at the same time she wasn’t exactly the biggest fan—but she let us do it, because we didn’t give her a choice.

We didn’t want anyone watching the films but us. No one. Not Mom and Dad; we knew we couldn’t trust their opinions. Not our classmates; we didn’t care about their opinions, not after the Aguirre, the Wrath of God fiasco. Also, it’s not like we really were friends with any of them.

In Earl’s case, the fact is that he just didn’t give a shit about making friends. I was the closest friend he had, and aside from making films, we didn’t hang out all that much. In middle school he started spending a lot of time on his own; I didn’t know where he went, but it wasn’t his house or mine. There was a period where he was doing drugs, but I wasn’t really privy to any of that. It didn’t last very long, either; there were two movies that we did where he was sort of cracked out the whole time (Walk Lola Walk [2008], Gay.I. [2008]), and then pretty quickly he got himself together. By eighth grade, he had restricted himself to cigarettes. However, he remained a very solitary person, and there were weeks where I didn’t see him at all.

And as for me: In middle school I just had a hard time making friends. I don’t know why. If I knew why, it wouldn’t have been so impossible. One thing was that I just usually wasn’t interested in what other kids were interested in. For a lot of kids, it was sports or music, two things that I just couldn’t really get into. Music really only interested me as a soundtrack to a movie, and as for sports, I mean, come on. It’s some guys throwing some balls around, or trying to knock each other over, and you’re supposed to watch them for three hours at a time, and it just sort of seems like a waste. I dunno. I don’t want to sound condescending, so I’m not going to say anything else, except that it is literally impossible to imagine a thing dumber than sports.

So I didn’t really share any interests with anyone. More to the point, I’d be in some kind of social situation, and I had no idea what to talk about. I definitely didn’t know how to make jokes that weren’t part of a movie, and so instead I would freak out and try to think of the most interesting possible thing to say, and it was usually something like:

1. Have you ever noticed that people look like either rodents or birds? And you can classify them that way, like, I definitely have more of a rodent face, but you look like a penguin.

2. If this were a video game, you could just break everything in this room and a bunch of money would come out of it, and you wouldn’t even have to pick it up, you would just walk into it and suddenly it would be in your bank account.

3. If I were to talk like the lead singer of some old-school rock band, like for example Pearl Jam, everyone would think I literally had a severe head injury. So how come the guy from Pearl Jam was allowed to do it?

These are all great things to talk about when you’re friends with someone, but not when you’re just trying to make polite conversation. And somehow I just never got to the friendship stage. By the time I got to high school, and figured out how to talk to other people a little better, I had decided I didn’t really want to be friends with anyone. Other than Earl, who like I said was really more of a coworker.

And girls? Forget about girls. There was never any chance, with girls. For reference, please refer to chapter 3, “Let’s Just Get This Embarrassing Chapter Out of the Way.”

So, to conclude, we never showed the films to anyone.

Mr. McCarthy is one of the only reasonable teachers at Benson. He’s on the young side and seems somehow immune to the life-crushing qualities of high school. Many of the young teachers at Benson cry at least once a day; a few others are just sort of dumb and tyrannical, in the conventional mold; but Mr. McCarthy is his own kind of guy.

He’s white, but he has a shaved head, and his forearms are covered in tattoos. Nothing gets him more fired up than facts. If anyone in class cites a fact of any kind, he pounds his chest and yells, “TRUE FACT,” or sometimes, “RESPECT THE RESEARCH.” If the fact is wrong, this becomes “FALSE FACT.” He drinks Vietnamese soup out of a thermos, all day, and he refers to drinking soup as “consulting the oracle.” On rare occasions when he gets really excited, he pretends to be a dog. Most of the time he’s insanely easygoing, and sometimes he teaches barefoot.

Anyway, Mr. McCarthy is the only teacher I have anything close to a kind of friendship with, and he lets me and Earl eat lunch in his office.

Earl is always morose during this time. He takes remedial courses, and his classmates are nitwits. Also, all remedial classrooms are on the B floor, which is below the surface of the earth.

By the way, Earl is smart enough to place into any classes he wants. I have no idea why he takes remedial courses, and Earl’s decision making is a thing that would need like twenty books to explore, so I’m not going into it here. The point is that by seventh period, he’s been exposed to four hours of grinding stupidity, and he wants to slit his wrists. For the first ten minutes of lunch, he shakes his head angrily at everything I say. Then eventually he snaps out of it.

“So you been spending time with this girl now,” he said the day after my ill-advised lunch in the cafeteria.

“Yeah.”

“Your mom still making you.”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“She gonna die or what.”

“Uhhh,” I said. I didn’t really know what to say about this. “I mean, she’s got cancer. But she doesn’t think she’s gonna die, so I feel sort of bad when we’re hanging out, because the whole time I’m thinking, you’re gonna die you’re gonna die you’re gonna die.”

Earl was stony-faced. “Everybody dies,” he said. Actually, he said “Irrybody dies,” but that looks stupid written out somehow. How does writing even work? I hate this.

“Yeah,” I said.

“You believe in the afterlife?”

“Not really.”

“Nuh, you do.” Earl sounded pretty sure about this. “No, I don’t.”

“You can’t not believe in no afterlife.”

“That’s uh—that’s a triple negative,” I said, to be annoying. Which was stupid because you shouldn’t practice being annoying.

“Man, fuck you. Think you’re too good for the afterlife.”

We ate. Earl’s lunch was Skittles, SunChips, cookies, and Coke. I was eating some of his cookies. “You can’t wrap your head around not living. You can’t actually believe that you’re not gonna be alive.”

“I have a very powerful brain.”

“I’m bout to kick that brain in the head,” said Earl, stomping the ground a little bit for no reason.

Mr. McCarthy entered.

“Greg. Earl.”

“Sup, Mr. McCarthy.”

“Earl, that lunch is garbage.” Mr. McCarthy was maybe one of four people in the world who could say this to Earl without him freaking out.

“Least I ain’t drinkin no funky seaweed-lookin . . . tentacle soup out of no thermos.”

For some reason Earl and I were both obsessed with tentacles during this time.

“Yeah, I was just coming in here to replenish the oracle.”

That was when we noticed the hot plate on his desk.

“They’re rewiring the teachers’ lounge,” explained Mr. McCarthy. “This, my boys, is the source of all wisdom. Gaze into the waters of the oracle.”

We looked into Mr. McCarthy’s huge vat of soup. Earl’s description was pretty much on the money; the noodles looked like tentacles, and there were a lot of soggy wispy green leafy things. Actually, it looked like an entire ecosystem in there. I was sort of expecting to see snails.

“It’s called pho,” said Mr. McCarthy. “Pho” is apparently pronounced “fuh.”

“Lemme try some,” said Earl.

“Nope,” said Mr. McCarthy.

“Dag,” said Earl.

“Can’t give you guys food,” apologized Mr. McCarthy. “It’s one of those things they really don’t like teachers doing. It’s a shame. Earl, I can recommend a particular Vietnamese restaurant for you if you want. Thuyen’s Saigon Flavor, over in Lawrenceville.”

“I ain’t eatin out in no Lawrenceville,” said Earl with disdain.

“Earl refuses to go to Lawrenceville,” I said. I found that sometimes with Earl and another person around, a fun thing to do was narrate Earl’s behavior, especially if it meant simply rephrasing things that he said. Basically, the premise was that he had some irritating personal assistant who actually wasn’t useful in any way.

“I ain’t got eatin-out money.”

“Earl has no money allocated for that purpose.”

“Tryna get some soup up in here.”

“Earl was hoping to have some of your soup.”

“Not gonna happen,” announced Mr. McCarthy cheerfully, closing the tureen of soup. “Greg, throw me a fact.”

“Uh . . . Like much Vietnamese cuisine, pho includes elements of French cooking, specifically the broth, which is derived from the consommé.” I’m embarrassed to say this, but that fact came from the Food Network.

“RESPECT THE RESEARCH,” barked Mr. McCarthy. “Greg, you beasted on that fact.” He flexed his right biceps, then punched it with his left fist. “Continue the dominance.” He was insanely fired up. He was actually snarling a little. I thought he was going to attack me. Instead, he turned to face Earl.

“Earl, if you change your mind, you can tell Thuyen to put it on Mr. McCarthy’s tab. All right?”

“Awright.”

“His pho is much better than mine anyway.”

“Awright.”

“Gentlemen.”

“Mr. McCarthy.”

As soon as Mr. McCarthy left, of course, we got some paper cups and macked on that soup. It tasted OK: like chicken soup, but with strange overtones that we couldn’t identify. Sort of garlicky and licoricey at the same time. Anyway, it wasn’t mind-blowing. At least, not at first.

I first started to feel funny when the bell rang at the end of the day. I stood up and all the blood rushed to my head and I got that brown fuzzy wall in front of my eyes that you sometimes get when the blood rushes to your head, and I had to stand there until it went away. Meanwhile, my eyes were still open, and apparently they were staring at Liv Ryan, the first girl at our school to get a nose job. Specifically, my eyes were staring at her boobs.

From behind the brown fuzzy wall, Liv said some words. I could definitely hear the words, but for some reason I wasn’t able to put them together.

I had no idea what the fuck was going on.

“Greg, what’s your problem,” said Liv again, and this time I was able to determine what she was saying, and also her boobs slowly materialized.

“Blood,” I said. “My, uh, head.”

“What,” she said.

“Couldn’t see,” I said. It was hard to talk. Also, I had become aware that I looked and sounded like a moron. My voice sounded ridiculously nasal, like my face was about 80 percent nose.

“Blood rushed to my head and I couldn’t see,” I explained, although I may not have said all of those words correctly, or in that order.

“Greg, you don’t look so good,” someone else said.

“Can you just not look at me, please,” said Liv, and her words filled my heart with terror.

“I have to go,” I blurted. I realized that I needed to get my bag, and moved my feet for some reason.

That is when I fell down.

I probably don’t need to tell you that nothing is funnier at Benson, or any other high school, than when a human being falls down. I don’t mean witty, or legitimately funny; I’m just saying, people in high school think falling down is the funniest thing that a person can possibly do. I’m not sure why this is true, but it is. People completely lose control when they see this happen. Sometimes they themselves fall down, and then the entire world collapses on itself.

So I fell down. Normally, I would have been able to deal with it by getting up and bowing, or doing an ironic celebration or something. However, I wasn’t feeling normal. I couldn’t think straight. “Everyone is laughing at you,” my brain was telling me, instead of providing me with valuable information, or coming up with a plan. “It’s because you fell down like an idiot!” My brain was malfunctioning. I panicked. I grabbed my bag and actually lunged for the door, and in the process, fell down a second time.

People were close to throwing up from laughing so hard. It was truly a gift from the Comedy Gods: a chubby guy falling down, freaking out, lurching in the direction of the door, and falling down again.

Meanwhile, I scrambled out the door and into the hall, and somehow the hall was about three times longer than normal and just totally packed with people. I was swimming in a sea of human flesh, and trying not to completely freak out. Faces floated past and they all seemed to be staring at me. I was trying to be invisible, but I have never felt so conspicuous in my entire life. I was the Human Nose, as well as Fall-Down Boy.

It was probably five minutes, but it seemed like it took an hour to get outside, and it was an hour of hell. Then, as soon as I was through the school doors and onto the front steps, I got a text.

that soup had drugs .meet me in parking lot

It was Earl.

“McCarthy puts weed in that soup,” he hissed. This took a while to register with me.

“Man, he musta put a damn ton of weed in there,” continued Earl. “Cuz I didn’t even have that much. You had seconds, though. You must be done, son.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You look high as hell.”

“I fell down.”

“Damn,” said Earl. “Wish I’d seen that.”

So this was what it was like to get high. I had tried smoking marijuana once before at a party thrown by Dave Smeggers, but nothing happened. Maybe I hadn’t been smoking it right.

“Let’s go to your house and mack on some grub,” suggested Earl.

“OK,” I said, and we started walking. But actually, the more I thought about it, that sounded like a terrible idea. I looked high as hell! According to Earl! So when we got home: Mom and Dad would immediately know that I was on drugs! Fuck! Then we would have to talk about it! I wasn’t capable of talking about anything! I wasn’t really even capable of thinking with words! I had this badger image in my head for some reason! That badger was awesome!

Also, I would have to make something up because I didn’t want to get Mr. McCarthy in trouble. What was I going to say? That some random stoner kids forced us to get high? That was ridiculous, right? Where the hell was I supposed to tell them we had gotten high from? And maybe more importantly: How was I going to make it all the way to the bus without falling down again?

“Do McCarthy act stoned in class,” asked Earl. “Cuz this is lights out. I can’t wait to get my grub on. Damn.”

Earl was in an awesome mood. I was not. In addition to worrying about Mom and Dad, I felt that everyone on the street was staring at us with disapproval. We were two kids on drugs, just walking around! We were incredibly high! And my nose was like a blimp attached to my face! A blimp filled with mucus! How could we not be the center of attention? (Only in retrospect did I realize that, on the Can’t Stop Watching Scale of Interestingness, me and Earl walking down the street does not get a very high rating. [Ha ha! “High” rating! Get it? That’s truly hilarious. Just kidding, of course; that joke sucked. In fact, that type of joke is the reason most people hate stoners.])

“Do McCarthy act all stoned,” repeated Earl. “While he teaching.”

“He—not really,” I said. “Well, maybe. Sort of. I guess. You could, uh . . . Not exactly, uh. You know.”

I couldn’t even put a goddamned sentence together.

Earl was temporarily silenced by this display.

“Damn, son,” he said eventually. “Damn.”

While we were on the bus to my house, I got another text.

going in for chemo tomw. do u want 2 say goodbye 2 my hair? :)

I’m embarrassed to say that it took us the entire bus ride to decipher this message. First of all, we did not understand that “chemo tomw” were abbreviations. Instead, we thought they were nonsense words. We said them to each other.

“Tcheh-moe tom-wah.”

“Khee-moo tuh-moe.”

“Emu tomb.”

“Ha . . . ha . . . ha.”

“Heh heh.”

“No seriously, what, uh.”

“Heh.”

“Harf.”

Finally, as we were leaving the bus, Earl figured it out. “Chemotherapy,” he said.

“Ohhhh.”

“Your girl gonna lose all her hair.”

“What?”

“Chemotherapy. You get injected with a shitload of chemicals and all your hair fall out.”

This struck me as ridiculous, even though I sort of knew it was true. “Ohhhhh.”

“You basically get sick as hell.”

Well, I thought to myself, this is a pretty pickle. Then I started thinking about the phrase “pretty pickle.” Pretty soon I was envisioning a cucumber with Madison Hartner’s face and boobs. Somehow this was hilarious.

“Dude,” said Earl, who looked concerned.

“What?”

“Why you laughing.”

“Uhhh.”

“Chemotherapy is serious. You don’t want to be cracking up about no chemotherapy.”

“No, it was, uh . . . I was thinking about something else.” Jesus Christ, I was a mess.

“So you gonna text her back, tell her we’re coming.”

I wasn’t sure if this was a question. “Maybe?”

“Yeah, we gotta see your friend, dumbass.”

“OK. OK.”

“So write, yeah, me and Earl gonna come see you.”

This took forever to write, and I ended up with:

oaky sounds grea8~! but can i bring frined earl hes cool ul’l liek him ???/

Holy flame-throwing Jesuses. There are definitely kids out there who enjoy being on drugs, but I can promise you that Greg Gaines is not one of them.

Our first obstacle was Denise.

“Hello, Greg,” she said. She seemed preoccupied. She was also giving Earl the crazy eye, sort of like if I had showed up on her doorstep with a llama. “And who might this be?”

Earl and I said something at the same time.

“Sorry?”

Then neither of us said anything.

“I’m Denise,” said Denise eventually.

“Earl Jackson,” said Earl, too loudly. I eyed him fearfully. When talking with adults, Earl often becomes brash and combative. I knew this was not going to go over well with Denise, so I started talking. This turned out to be a tactical error.

What not-on-drugs Greg would have said: “Earl’s a good friend of mine, and he wanted to wish Rachel well. Is she upstairs?”

What on-drugs Greg ended up saying: “Earl’s my best—Earl’s one of my best friends. And we were just hanging out together, you know, like, not really doing anything, you know, so it’s cool. So, uh. So we got this text, from Rachel, about the hair loss—which, I mean, hasn’t happened yet, obviously, so we wanted to see her hair. And hang out! Not just see the hair, because, you know, the hair, I can take it or leave it. I’m sure she’s gonna look great without hair. But we just wanted to hang out. Say what’s up, that sort of . . . thing.”

By the end of this monologue I was covered in sweat. Meanwhile, Earl was not even trying to hide his disgust. He had his face in his hands and said a word that I think was “Goddamn.”

“Oka-a-a-a-ay,” said Denise, sounding uncertain.

We were all silent for a while.

“So is Rachel upstairs?” I said eventually.

“Yeah, yeah, of course,” said Denise and waved us up, and we ran up there and away from Denise with extreme quickness.

Our second obstacle was Rachel’s mistrust of Earl, and also our record-setting drug-related weirdness.

“I wasn’t sure what your text message meant,” she said. She was eyeing Earl warily. I had the queasy feeling that she was mistrustful of him because he was black, although I also felt terrible for thinking that, because that would be accusing a girl of racism who is about to lose all her hair, and then probably die.

“Earl’s the man,” I said, as if this explained anything.

“Yeah, you guys send gross text messages to each other.”

It took me a long, uncomfortably silent time to remember that this was the only thing I had ever said to Rachel about Earl, and by the time I remembered that, Earl had already taken some initiative.

“Sup.”

“Hello, Earl.”

Silence.

“I like your room.”

“Thank you. Greg thinks it’s too girly.”

I knew I had to say something here, so I sort of yelled, “I do not!”

“Of course it’s girly,” said Earl. “My room doesn’t have no James Bond in no . . . thong.”

What not-on-drugs Greg would have said: “Yeah, Earl prefers his James Bond posters naked.”

What on-drugs Greg ended up saying: “Huh huh.”

Longer silence.

“So, I’m getting a round of chemo tomorrow.”

“Yeah, that sucks.”

“Dude, what the hell.” Earl shoved me.

“What?”

“Don’t say it sucks.”

“Uh . . . yeah, you’re right.”

“It sucks a little bit,” said Rachel.

“Yeah, but it’s exciting.”

“I guess.”

“If you get it early enough, you’ve got a good chance,” said Earl, staring at the ground.

“Yup.” Rachel was also staring at the ground.

Possibly racist silence.

Rachel and Earl were clearly not hitting it off. I had to do something. Unfortunately, I had no idea what that thing would be. The silence grew. Rachel continued staring at the ground. Earl started sighing. It was the opposite of a party. It was about the least fun social situation imaginable. If terrorists had burst into the room and tried to suffocate us in hummus, it would have been an improvement. This idea got me thinking about hummus. What is hummus, exactly? It’s basically a paste. Who eats paste? Especially a paste that resembles cat barf? You can’t deny the resemblance here. At least, when Cat Stevens barfs, it looks like hummus.

And then a part of me was like: “Why do you keep comparing food to barf? First the alien thing in the cafeteria, and now this. Maybe you have a problem.”

That’s when I realized that I was giggling. But sort of in a nervous scared way, which made it even more obnoxious than just lighthearted giggling.

Earl was pissed: “Stop it with your goddamn giggling.” But Rachel’s reaction was worse: “You guys can go if you want,” she said, and it sounded like she was about to cry. This was terrible. I felt like such a dickhead. It was time to come clean.

“We’re on drugs,” I blurted.

Earl had his head in his hands again.

“What?” said Rachel.

“We accidentally got high.”

“Accidentally?”

It was time to come sort of clean. Actually, it was high time for Lie Time.

“I totally blacked out. I don’t even remember what happened.”

“You did not black out,” snapped Earl.

“No, we both did.”

“The hell are you even talkin about.”

“Why are you guys on drugs?” asked Rachel.

“I don’t know!” I said.

“I don’t know.”

Then Earl started to say something, and I knew it was going to be about Mr. McCarthy. But I really didn’t want to get him fired.

So I just started talking: “Actually, we went into a bathroom, and there were some guys there, you know, some of the stoner guys, and they were like, you want some weed, and at first we were like, no, we don’t want any of your, uh, weed, but then they started getting angry, and were like, yo, you better smoke some of this, or we’ll, uh, beat the hell out of you, and there were like twenty of them, so we were like, OK fine, so we smoked with them, but again, I don’t totally remember what happened because I blacked out.”

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 987