Me and Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews Read Free Book Online

(For example, he has a huge painful-looking neck tattoo that says “TRU NIGGA” next to some pictures of guns. Brandon himself owns a gun and has already managed to impregnate another human being, even though his voice hasn’t dropped all the way yet. If the city of Pittsburgh gave out a Least Promising Human award, he would be on the shortlist.) Due to the noise problems mentioned above, the Jackson house is not a great place to try to read, or do homework, or do any kind of work; also, if someone finds you alone in a room with a book, sometimes this is considered sufficient grounds to whup the hell out of you.
    Problems 5 through 10. The house itself is kind of falling apart—there’s a big chunk of the gutters lying in the front yard, and the ceiling drips in some of the bedrooms, and usually at least one of the toilets is clogged and no one really wants to deal with it. In the winter, the heating generally conks out and everyone has to sleep in their winter coat. There’s definitely a rat problem, and a cockroach problem, and it’s not a good idea to drink the tap water.
    The video games, however, are solid.
    So Earl and I, when we hang out, usually hang out at my house instead. By now Earl is almost a member of the family: the chain-smoking vertically challenged son my parents never had. They’re the only grown-ups besides Mr. McCarthy who even sort of know how to talk to him without pissing him off. Emphasis on “sort of.” Their interactions with him are always kind of surreal.
    INT. LIVING ROOM OF MY HOUSE — DAY
    DAD is sitting in his rocking chair, contemplating the wall, as he likes to do. CAT STEVENS is asleep on the couch. Enter EARL, on his way to the front door, smacking a fresh pack of cigarettes against the palm of his hand.
    EARL
    How’s life, Mr. Gaines.
    DAD
    echoing mysteriously
    Life.
    EARL
    patiently
    How’s your life.
    DAD
    Life! Yes, life. Life is good, as I was just telling Cat Stevens here. How’s your life?
    EARL
    It’s goin’ awright.
    DAD
    You’re going out for a cigarette break, I see.
    EARL
    Yeah. You want to come?
    DAD
    five seconds of unexplained staring
    EARL
    Awright then.
    DAD
    Earl, would you agree that suffering in life is a, a relative notion—that for every life there is a different baseline, an equilibrium, below which one can be said to suffer?
    EARL
    I guess.
    DAD
    The primary insight being that one man’s suffering is another man’s joy.
    EARL
    Sounds good, Mr. Gaines.
    DAD
    Very well then.
    EARL
    I’ma go smoke one of these.
    DAD
    Godspeed, young man.
    Maybe 80 percent of the interaction between Dad and Earl is along those lines. The rest is when Dad takes Earl to a specialty food place or Whole Foods and they buy something unspeakably disgusting and then eat it together. It’s a weird scene and I’ve learned to stay away.
    The Mom-Earl conversations are slightly less insane. She likes to tell him that he’s “a hoot,” and she’s learned that it doesn’t really do any good to try to get him to quit smoking, and as long as
I’m
not smoking, she’ll allow it. For his part, even on days when he’s mega-pissed, he tones it down when he’s around her and doesn’t do any of his trademark rage-expressing mannerisms, such as stomping his feet really fast and growling the consonant “ngh.” He doesn’t even threaten to kick anyone in the head.
    So that’s Earl. I’ve probably missed a bunch of stuff and will have to describe Earl in greater detail later, but there’s no reason to believe that you’ll still be reading the book at that time, so I guess I would say don’t worry about it.

On the way to Rachel’s house, I realized that I had just been a colossal idiot.
    “You idiot, Greg,” I thought, and may also have said out loud. “Now she thinks you’ve been in love with her for five years.”
    Moron. I could picture the scene in my head: I was going to show up, ring the doorbell, and Rachel would fling open the door and embrace me, her frizzy