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

Gaines.
    “I like your room.”
    “Thanks.”
    “How many pillows is that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “I wish I had that many pillows.”
    “Why don’t you ask your parents for some?”
    “They wouldn’t like that.”
    I have no idea why I said that.
    “Why not?”
    “Uh.”
    “They’re
pillows.
”
    “Yeah, they’d be suspicious or something.”
    “That you’d sleep all the time?”
    “No, uh . . . They’d probably think I was just going to masturbate all over them.”
    I would like to point out that I conducted the above conversation 100 percent on autopilot.
    Rachel was silent; her mouth was hanging open and her eyes were kind of bugging out.
    Eventually, she said: “That is
disgusting.
” But she was also making snorting noises. I remembered the snort from Hebrew school; it indicated that there were some huge laughs on the way.
    “That’s my parents,” I said. “They’re gross.”
    “They won’t get you pillows [snort] because they think you’re going to [snort snort], they think you’re going to masturb[SNORTsnortsnortsnort].”
    “Yeah, they have really gross ideas about me.”
    Now Rachel couldn’t even talk. She had completely lost control. She was laughing and snorting so hard that I was a little worried about her rupturing her spleen or something. Nonetheless, a fun thing to do when Rachel is in the throes of a mega-laugh is to see how long you can keep it going.
    • “I mean, it’s also their fault for getting sexy pillows.”
    • “We had this one pillow in the house, they had to burn it, because that thing just got me so aroused.”
    • “That was the sexiest pillow, I just, I just wanted to make love to it all night, until the break of dawn.”
    • “I used to call that pillow the dirtiest names. I used to say, ‘You slutty pillow, you’re such a dirty slut, stop
toying with my emotions.
’”
    • “The pillow’s name was Francesca.”
    • “Then one day I came home from school and caught that pillow having oral sex with this table from across the street, and—OK, OK. I’ll stop.”
    Rachel was begging me to stop. I shut up and let her calm down. I had forgotten how hard she could laugh. It took her a while to catch her breath.
    “Oh—ohhh—
ow
—oohh.”
    The Greg S. Gaines Three-Step Method of Seduction
    1. Lurch into girl’s bedroom pretending to be a zombie.
    2. Go for a fist pound.
    3. Suggest that you habitually masturbate all over pillows.
    “Do I have to keep you away from
my
pillows?” she asked, still having involuntary laugh-snort-spasms.
    “No. Are you serious? Those pillows are all dudes.”
    Two words: mucus explosion. However, the problem with mega-laughs is that they’re hard to follow up. Sooner or later you’re all laughed out, and there’s this big silence. Then what do you do?
    “So I guess you really like films.”
    “They’re OK.”
    “I mean, you have all these actors all over your room.”
    “Huh?”
    “Hugh Jackman, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig, Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds, Daniel Craig, Brad Pitt.”
    “It’s not really about the movies.”
    “Oh.”
    She was sitting at her desk and I was sitting on her bed. It was way too soft of a bed. I had sunk into it to an uncomfortable degree.
    “I like movies,” said Rachel, sort of apologetically. “But a movie doesn’t have to be good if it has Hugh Jackman.”
    Fortunately and unfortunately, at that moment I got a text from Earl.
    yo pa gaines drove me to whole foods so if you need some funky vlasic pickle relish for that pussy just hollerrr
    This was fortunate because it changed the subject from movies, and it was going to be difficult to discuss movies with Rachel without mentioning my filmmaking career, which for obvious reasons I did not want to mention. But it was unfortunate in that it made me do a sort of snarfing laugh and then Rachel wanted to know what had happened.
    “Who was that from?”
    “Uh, that was from Earl.”
    “Oh.”
    “You know Earl? Earl