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

match the casualness with which eleven-
year-old Earl can say words like “fuck”
    Uh, shit.
    EARL
    Fuck.
    DAD
    offscreen, through the door
    Guys, dinner’s in ten minutes.
    after we do not reply
    Guys? That was really pretty amazing. Mom and I are very impressed. You both should be really proud of yourselves.
    a shorter pause
    You guys all right? Can I come in there?
    EARL
    immediately
    Hell no.
    GREG
    We’re OK, Dad.
    EARL
    If he come in here and talk about that stupid movie, I’ma kick myself in the head.
    DAD
    OK then!
    Footsteps indicate that DAD has left.
    GREG
    That sucked so bad.
    EARL
    I’ma get that tape and burn it.
    GREG
    still having trouble swearing convincingly
    Yeah, uh, fuck. Shit.
    GREG and EARL are silent. CLOSE-UP of Earl. Earl is realizing something.
    EARL
    Werner Herzog can lick my ass-cheek.
    GREG
    What?
    EARL
    Man, fuck
Aguirre, the Wrath of God
. Werner Herzog can stick his face all up in my butthole.
    GREG
    uncertainly
    OK.
    EARL
    We gotta make our
own
movie.
    gaining momentum
    We can’t try to make someone else’s movie. We’re gonna make our
own
movie.
    now excited
    We’re gonna make a movie called
The Wrath of God II .
    GREG
    Earl, the Wrath of God II .
    EARL
    HELL YEAH.
    In our creative partnership, Earl has always had the best ideas, and
Earl, the Wrath of God II
was one of his best. It never would have occurred to me, even though it wasn’t that complicated or crazy of an idea: Basically, it was to remake
Aguirre
again, but this time, to change all the parts that we couldn’t do, or even just the parts that we didn’t feel like doing. If there was a scene we didn’t like, in our version, it was gone. A character we couldn’t recreate:
sayonara
. A jungle that we couldn’t reproduce: converted into a living room, or the inside of a car. The best ideas are always the simplest.
    So
Earl, the Wrath of God II
ended up being about a crazy guy named Earl and his search for the city of Earl Dorado
in a normal family house in Pittsburgh.
We shot it on location in the Gaines residence in Point Breeze, and we ad-libbed a lot of the dialogue, and Cat Stevens made some awesome cameos, and we set the whole thing to a funk CD Dad had lying around, and it took another month or two. At the end of it, we burned it to a DVD and had a secret viewing of the movie in the TV room.
    It sucked. But it didn’t suck nearly as bad as our first film.
    Our careers were born.

So by October things were weird. I had a person, at school, that I was being especially nice to and spending time with and stuff. Could we use the word “friend”? I guess. Rachel was my friend. You should know that writing that sentence didn’t feel good. It just didn’t. Having friends is how your life gets fucked up.
    Anyway, I couldn’t keep ignoring her in school when we were spending all this time together outside of school, so all of a sudden, in school, I was seen having a friend. I was seen by everyone talking to Rachel before and after class, and often this resulted in her laughing kind of loud, and that got people’s attention. And when it was time to work in groups, we were almost always in the same group. And people notice stuff like that.
    So probably some people thought we were boyfriend and girlfriend, and perhaps even having sex. And how can you fight that impression without seeming like a dick? You can’t go around making remarks like, “There’s certainly nothing going on between me and Rachel! Especially nothing sexual. I don’t evenknow what her genital area looks like, or if it’s in a different place than normal or something.”
    At the very least, people thought we were casually dating. And here’s the thing: Most people, especially girls, seemed to get fired up about that. I have a theory about that, and the theory is depressing.
    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