“What’s it say?” I ask.
“Confidential. I think he kinda trusts me not to blab his texts, you know?”
I might point out the ridiculousness of anyone trusting Tiny not to blab anything, but I don’t. He tapes up the poster and starts walking down the hallway. I follow.
“Well, I’m glad your night was so awesome. Meanwhile I was being blindsided about Jane’s water polo-playing exboyf—”
“Well, first off,” he says, cutting me off, “what do you care? You’re not into Jane. And second off, I wouldn’t call him a boy. He is a man. He is a sculpted, immaculately conceived, rippling hunk of ex-manfriend.”
“You’re not helping.”
“I’m just saying—not my type, but he is truly a wonder to behold. And his eyes! Like sapphires burning into the darkened corners of your heart. But anyway, I didn’t know they ever dated. I’d never even heard of the guy. I just thought he was a hot guy hitting on her. Jane never talks to me about guys. I don’t know why; I’m totally trustworthy about that sort of thing.” There’s enough sarcasm in his voice—just enough—that I laugh. Tiny talks over the laugh. “It’s amazing what you don’t know about people, you know? Like, I was thinking about that all weekend talking to Will. He fell for Isaac, who turned out to be made up. That seems like something that only happens on the Internet, but really it happens all the time i-r-l, too.”
“Well, Isaac wasn’t made up. He was just a girl. I mean, that girl Maura is Isaac.”
“No, she’s not,” he says simply. I’m holding up the last of the posters as he tapes it to a boys’ bathroom door. It says ARE YOU FABULOUS? IF SO, SEE YOU NINTH PERIOD TODAY AT THE AUDITORIUM. He finishes it up and then we walk toward precalc, the halls beginning to fill up.
The Isaac/Maura namescrewing reminds me of something. “Tiny,” I say.
“Grayson,” he answers.
“Will you please rename that character in your play, the sidekick guy?”
“Gil Wrayson?” I nod. Tiny throws his hands up in the air and announces, “I can’t change Gil Wrayson’s name! It’s thematically vital to the whole production.”
“I’m really not in the mood for your bullshit,” I say.
“I’m not bullshitting you. His name has to be Wrayson. Say it slow. Ray-sin. Rays-in. It’s a double meaning—Gil Wrayson is undergoing a transformation. And he has to let the rays of sunlight in—those rays of sunlight coming in the form of Tiny’s songs—in order to become his true self—no longer a plum, but a sun-soaked raisin. Don’t you see?”
“Oh, come on, Tiny. If that’s true, why the hell is his name Gil?”
That stops him for a moment. “Hmm,” he says, squinting down the still-quiet hallway. “It just always sounded right to me. But I suppose I could change it. I’ll think about it, okay?”
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome. Now please stop being a pussy.”
“What?”
We get to our lockers, and even though other people can hear him, he talks as loud as ever. “Wah-wah, Jane doesn’t like me even though I don’t like her. Wah-wah, Tiny named a character after me in his play. Like, there are people in the world with real problems, you know? You gotta keep it in perspective.”
“Dude, YOU’RE telling ME to keep it in perspective? Jesus Christ, Tiny. I just wanted to know she had a boyfriend.”
Tiny closes his eyes and takes a deep breath like I’m the annoying one. “As I said, I didn’t even know he existed, okay? But then I saw him talking to her, and I could tell he was into her just from his posture. And when he left, I just had to go up and ask who he was, and she was, like, ‘My ex-boyfriend,’ and I was, like, ‘Ex?! You need to scoop that beautiful man back up immediately!’”
I’m staring into the broad side of Tiny Cooper’s face. He’s looking away from me, into his locker. He looks sort of bored, but then his eyebrows dart up, and I think for a second he realizes how pissed I am about what he just said, but then he reaches into his jeans and pulls out the phone. “You didn’t,” I say.
“Sorry, I know I shouldn’t read texts while we’re talking, but I’m a little twitterpated at the moment.”
“I’m not talking about texts, Tiny. You didn’t tell Jane to get back together with that guy.”
“Well, of course I did, Grayson,” he answers, still looking at the phone. Now he’s writing Will back while talking. “He was gorgeous, and you told me you didn’t like her. So you like her now? Typical boy—you’re interested as long as she isn’t.”
I want to slug him in the kidney, for being wrong and for being right. But it would only hurt me. I’m nothing but a bit character in the Tiny Cooper story, and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it except get jerked around until high school is over and I can finally escape his orbit, can finally stop being a moon of his fat planet.
And then I realize what I can do. The weapon I have. Rule 2: Shut up. I step past him and walk toward class.
“Grayson,” he says.
I don’t answer.
I say nothing in precalculus, when he miraculously inserts himself into his desk. And then I say nothing when he tells me that right now I am not even his favorite Will Grayson. I say nothing when he tells me how he has texted the other Will Grayson forty-five times in the last twenty-four hours, and do I think that’s too much. I say nothing when he holds his phone under my nose, showing me some text from Will Grayson that I am supposed to find adorable. I say nothing when he asks me why the hell I’m not saying anything. I say nothing when he says, “Grayson, you were just getting on my nerves, and I only said all that stuff to shut you up. But I didn’t mean to shut you up this much.” I say nothing when he says, “No seriously, talk to me,” and nothing when he says under his breath but still plenty loud enough for people to hear, “Honestly, Grayson, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.”
And then, blessedly, class starts.
Fifty minutes later, the bell rings, and Tiny follows me out into the hallway like a swollen shadow, saying, “Seriously, come on, this is ridiculous.” It’s not even that I want to torture him anymore. I’m just reveling in the glory of not having to hear the neediness and impotence of my own voice.
At lunch, I sit down by myself at the end of a long table featuring several members of my former Group of Friends. This guy Alton says, “How’s it going, faggot?” and I say, “Pretty good,” and then this other guy Cole says, “You coming to the party at Clint’s? It’s gonna be sick,” which makes me think these guys don’t in fact dislike me even though one of them just called me a faggot. Apparently, having Tiny Cooper as your best-and-only friend does not leave you well-prepared for the intricacies of male socialization.
I say, “Yeah, I’ll try to stop by,” even though I don’t know when the party will be occurring. Then this shave-headed guy Ethan says, “Hey, are you trying out for Tiny’s gay-ass play?”
“Hell, no,” I say.
“I think I am,” he says, and it takes me a second to tell if he’s kidding. Everyone starts laughing and talking all at once, trying to get in the first insult, but he just laughs them off and says, “Girls love a sensitive man.” He turns around in his chair and shouts at the table behind him, where his girlfriend, Anita, is sitting. “Baby, ain’t my singing sexy?”
“Hell, yeah,” she says. Then he just looks, satisfied, at all of us. Still, the guys rag on him. I mostly stay quiet, but by the end of my ham and cheese, I’m laughing at their jokes at the appropriate times, which I guess means I’m having lunch with them.
Tiny finds me when I’m putting my tray onto the conveyor belt, and he’s got Jane with him, and they walk with me. Nobody talks at first. Jane is wearing an army green hoodie, the hood pulled up. She looks almost unfairly adorable, like she picked it out for the express purpose of taunting. Jane says, “Hilarious note, Grayson. So Tiny tells me you’ve taken a vow of silence.”
I nod.
“Why?” she asks.
“I’m only talking to cute girls today,” I answer, and smile. Tiny’s right—the existence of the water-polo guy makes it easy to flirt.
Jane smiles. “I think Tiny’s a fairly cute girl.”
“But why?” Tiny begs as I turn down a hallway. The maze of identical hallways differentiated only by different Wildkit murals that used to scare the hell out of me. God, to go back to when my biggest fear was a hallway. “Grayson, please. You’re KILLING me.”
I am aware that for the first time in my memory, Tiny and Jane are following me.
Tiny decides to ignore me, and he tells Jane that he hopes one day to have enough texts from Will Grayson to turn them into a book, because his texts are like poetry.
Before I can stop myself, I say, “‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ becomes ‘u r hawt like august.’”
“He speaks!” Tiny shouts, and puts his arm around me. “I knew you’d come around! I’m so happy I’m renaming Gil Wrayson! He shall now be known as Phil Wrayson! Phil Wrayson, who must fill up on the rays of Tiny’s sun in order to become his true self. It’s perfect.” I nod. People will still assume it’s me, but he’s—well, he’s pretending to try. “Oh, text!” Tiny pulls out his phone, reads the text, sighs loudly, and begins trying to type a response with his meaty hands. While he’s thumbing, I say, “I get to pick who plays him.”
Tiny nods distractedly.
“Tiny,” I repeat, “I get to pick who plays him.”
He looks up. “What? No no no. I’m the director. I’m the writer, producer, director, assistant-costume designer, and casting director.”
And Jane says, “I saw you nod, Tiny. You already agreed to it.” He just scoffs, and then we’re at my locker, and Jane kind of pulls me by the elbow away from Tiny and says quietly, “You know, you can’t say that stuff.”
“Damned if I talk, damned if I don’t,” I say, smiling.
“I just. Grayson, I just—you can’t say those things.”
“What things?”
“Cute girl things.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“Because I am still doing research on the relationship between water polo and epiphanies.” She tries a small, tight-lipped smile.
“You wanna go to the Tiny Dancer tryouts with me?” I ask. Tiny is still thumbing away.
“Grayson, I can’t—I mean, I am kind of taken, you know?”
“I’m not asking you on a date. I’m asking you to an extracurricular activity. We will sit in the back of an auditorium and laugh at the kids auditioning to play me.”
I haven’t read Tiny’s play since last summer, but as I recall, there are about nine meaty parts: Tiny, his mom (who has a duet with Tiny), Phil Wrayson, Tiny’s love interests Kaleb and Barry, and then this fictional straight couple who make the character Tiny believe in himself or whatever. And there’s a chorus. Altogether, Tiny needs thirty cast members. I figure there will be maybe twelve people at the auditions.
But when I arrive in the auditorium after chem, there are already at least fifty people lounging around the stage and the first few rows of seats waiting for the auditions to start. Gary is running around handing everyone safety pins and pieces of paper with handwritten numbers on them, which the auditioners are pinning to themselves. And, since they are theater people, they are all talking. All of them. Simultaneously. They do not need to be heard; they only need to be speaking.
I take a seat in the back row, one in from the aisle so that Jane can have the aisle. She shows up just after I do and sits down next to me, appraises the situation for a second, and then says, “Somewhere down there, Grayson, there’s someone who will have to look into your soul in order to properly embody you.”
I’m about to respond when Tiny’s shadow passes over us. He kneels next to us, handing us each a clipboard. “Please write a brief note about each person who you’d consider for the role of Phil. Also I’m thinking of writing in a small role for a character named Janey.”
Then he marches confidently down the aisle. “People!” he shouts. “People, please take a seat.” People scurry into the first few rows as Tiny hurtles onto the stage. “We haven’t much time,” he says, his voice weirdly affected. He’s talking like he thinks theater people talk, I guess. “First, I need to know if you can sing. One minute of a song from each of you; if you’re called back, you’ll read for a part then. You may choose your song, but know this: Tiny. Cooper. Hates. Over. The. Rainbow.”
He jumps off the stage dramatically, and then shouts, “Number One, make me love you.”
Number 1, a mousy blonde who identifies herself as Marie F, climbs the stairs beside the stage and slouches to a microphone. She looks up through her bangs toward the back of the auditorium, where it says in large purple block letters WILDKITS ROCK. She proceeds to prove otherwise with a stunningly bad rendition of a Kelly Clarkson ballad.
“Oh, my God,” Jane says under her breath. “Oh, God. Make it end.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble. “This chick’s a lock for the role of Janey. She sings off-key, loves corporate pop, and dates bitchsquealers.” She elbows me.
Number 2 is a boy, a husky lad with hair too long to be considered normal but too short to be considered long. He sings a song by a band apparently called Damn Yankees—Jane knows them, natch. I don’t know how the original sounds, but this guy’s howler-monkey a cappella rendition of it leaves a lot to be desired. “He sounds like someone just kicked him in the nuts,” Jane says; to which I respond, “If he doesn’t stop soon, someone will.” By Number 5, I’m wishing for a mediocre rendition of something inoffensive like “Over the Rainbow,” and I suspect Tiny is, too, from the way his peppy, “That was great! We’ll get back to you.” has devolved into a, “Thanks. Next?”