And then Tiny hauled off and punched Mr. Frye in the nose. Just like that. Thus ended our Little League careers.
It wouldn’t hurt if he weren’t right—if I hadn’t known somewhere that my weakness aggravates him. And maybe he thinks like I do, that you don’t pick your friends, and he’s stuck with this annoying bitchsquealer who can’t handle himself, who can’t close his glove around the ball, who can’t take a dressing-down from the coach, who regrets writing letters to the editor in defense of his best friend. This is the real story of our friendship: I haven’t been stuck with Tiny. He’s been stuck with me.
If nothing else, I can relieve him of that burden.
It takes a long time to stop crying. I use my glove as a handkerchief as I watch the shadow of the dugout roof creep down my outstretched legs as the sun rises to the top of the sky. Finally, my ears feel frozen in the shade of the dugout, so I get up and walk across the park and then home. On the way, I scroll through my list of contacts on my phone for a while and then call Jane. I don’t know why. I feel like I need to call someone. I feel, weirdly, like I still want someone to open the double doors to the auditorium. I get her voice mail.
“Sorry, Tarzan, Jane’s unavailable. Leave a message.”
“Hey, Jane, it’s Will. I just wanted to talk to you. I . . . radical honesty? I just spent like five minutes going through a list of everyone I could call, and you were the only person I wanted to call, because I like you. I just like you a lot. I think you’re awesome. You’re just . . . er. Smarter and funni er and prettier and just . . . er. Yeah, okay. That’s all. Bye.”
When I get home, I call my dad. He picks up on the last ring.
“Can you call the school and tell them I’m sick? I had to go home,” I say.
“You okay, bud?”
“Yeah. I’m okay,” I say, but the quiver is in my voice, and I feel like I might start up with the sobbing again for some reason, and he says, “Okay. Okay. I’ll call.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m slumped on the couch in the living room, my feet up on the coffee table. I’m staring at the TV, only the TV isn’t on. I’ve got the remote in my left hand, but I don’t even have the energy to push the goddamned power button.
I hear the garage door open. Dad comes in through the kitchen and sits down next to me, pretty close. “Five hundred channels,” he says after a moment, “and nothing’s on.”
“You get the day off?”
“I can always get someone to cover,” he says. “Always.”
“I’m okay,” I say.
“I know you are. I just wanted to be home with you, that’s all.”
I blink out some tears, but Dad has the decency not to say anything about it. I turn on the TV then, and we find a show called The World’s Most Amazing Yachts, which is about yachts that have, like, golf courses on them or whatever, and every time they show some fancy feature, Dad says, “It’s UH-MAAZING!” all sarcastically, even though it sort of is amazing. It is and isn’t, I guess.
And then Dad mutes the TV and says, “You know Dr. Porter?”
And I nod. He’s this guy who works with Mom.
“They don’t have any kids, so they’re rich.” I laugh. “But they’ve got this boat they keep at Belmont Harbor, one of these behemoths with cherry-wood cabinets imported from Indonesia and a rotating king-size bed stuffed with the feathers of endangered eagles and everything else. Your mom and I had dinner with the Porters on the boat years ago, and in the span of a single meal—in that two hours—the boat went from feeling like the most extraordinarily luxurious experience to just being a boat.”
“I assume there’s a moral to this story.”
He laughs. “You’re our yacht, bud. All that money that would have gone into a yacht, all that time we would have spent traveling the world? Instead, we got you. It turns out that the yacht is a boat. But you—you can’t be bought on credit, and you aren’t reducible.” He turns his face back toward the TV and after a moment says, “I’m so proud of you that it makes me proud of me. I hope you know that.” I nod, tight-throated, staring now at a muted commercial for laundry detergent. After a second, he mumbles to himself, “Credit, people, consumerism. . . . There’s a pun in there somewhere.”
I say, “What if I didn’t want to go to that program at Northwestern? Or what if I don’t get in?”
“Well, then I would stop loving you,” he says. He keeps a straight face for a second, then laughs and unmutes the TV.
Later in the day, we decide we’re going to surprise Mom with turkey chili for dinner. I’m chopping onions when the doorbell rings. Immediately, I know it’s Tiny, and I feel this weird relief radiate out from my solar plexus. “I got it,” I say. I squeeze past Dad in the kitchen and then run to the door.
It’s not Tiny but Jane. She looks up at me, lips pursed.
“What’s my locker combination?”
“Twenty-five-two-eleven,” I say.
She hits me playfully on the chest. “I knew it! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I couldn’t figure out which of several true things was the most true,” I answer.
“We gotta open the box,” she tells me.
“Um,” I say. I step forward so I can close the door behind me, but she doesn’t step backward, so now we’re almost touching. “The cat has a boyfriend,” I point out.
“I’m not the cat, actually. The cat is us. I am a physicist. You are a physicist. The cat is us.”
“Um, okay,” I say. “The physicist has a boyfriend.”
“The physicist does not in fact have a boyfriend. The physicist dumped her boyfriend at the botanical gardens because he wouldn’t shut up about how he was going to the Olympics in twenty sixteen, and there was this little voice in the physicist’s head named Will Grayson, saying, ‘And at the Olympics will you be representing the United States or the Kingdom of Douchelandia?’ So the physicist broke up with her boyfriend and insists that the box be opened, because she kind of cannot stop thinking about the cat. The physicist won’t mind if the cat is dead; she just needs to know.”
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it’s awesome.
“Your professional physicist opinion?” I ask.
She smiles. “I believe the cat to be alive. And what says my esteemed colleague?”
“Alive,” I say. And it truly is. Which makes it all the weirder that as I’m talking to her, some small cut inside me feels unstitched. I thought it would be Tiny at the door, brimming with apologies I would slowly accept. But such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets. Jane pulls away from me for a second and says, “Something smells good. I mean, in addition to you.”
I smile. “We’re making chili,” I say. “Do you want to—. Do you want to come in and meet my dad?”
“I don’t want to imp—”
“No,” I say. “He’s nice. A little weird. Nice, though. You can stay for dinner.”
“Um, okay let me call my house.” I stand out there shivering for a second while she talks to her mom, saying, “I’m gonna have dinner at Will Grayson’s house. . . . Yes, his dad is here. . . .They’re doctors. . . . Yeah. . . . Okay, love you.”
I come back inside. “Dad,” I say, “this is my friend Jane.” He emerges from the kitchen wearing his Surgeons Do It with a Steady Hand apron over his shirt and tie. “I give people credit for buying into consumerism!” he says excitedly, having found his pun. I laugh.
Jane extends her hand, the picture of class, saying, “Hello, Dr. Grayson, I’m Jane Turner.”
“Ms. Turner, it’s a pleasure.”
“Is it okay if Jane stays for dinner?”
“Of course, of course. Jane, if you’ll excuse us for a moment.”
Dad takes me into the kitchen, then leans in and says softly, “This was the cause of your problems?”
“Strangely, no,” I say. “But we are sorta yeah.”
“You are sorta yeah,” he mumbles to himself. “You are sorta yeah.” And then quite loudly he says, “Jane?”
“Yes, sir?”
“What is your grade-point average?”
“Um, three point seven, sir?”
He looks at me, his lips scrunched up, and nods slowly. “Acceptable,” he says, and then smiles.
“Dad, I don’t need your approval,” I say softly.
“I know,” he answers. “But I thought you might like it anyway.”
Chapter sixteen
four days before his show is supposed to go on, tiny calls me and tells me he needs to take a mental health day. it’s not just because the show is in chaos. the other will grayson isn’t talking to him. i mean, he’s talking to him, but he’s not saying anything. and part of tiny is pissed that o.w.g. is ‘pulling this shit so close to curtain time’ and part of him seems really, really afraid that something is really, really wrong.
me: what can i do? i’m the wrong will grayson.
tiny: i just need a will grayson fix. i’ll be at your school in an hour. i’m already on the road.
me: you’re what?
tiny: you just have to tell me where your school is. i google-mapped it, but those directions always suck. and the last thing my mental health day needs is to be google-mapped into iowa at ten in the morning.
I think the idea of a ‘mental health day’ is something completely invented by people who have no clue what it’s like to have bad mental health. the idea that your mind can be aired out in twenty-four hours is kind of like saying heart disease can be cured if you eat the right breakfast cereal. mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying ‘i don’t want to deal with things today’ and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless we choose to bring a gun to school or ruin the morning announcements with a suicide.
I don’t say any of this to tiny. i pretend that i want him here. i don’t let him know how freaked out i am about him seeing more of my life. it seems to me that he’s cross-wired on his will graysons. i’m not sure i’m the one who can help him.
It’s gotten so intense - more intense than it was with isaac. and not just because tiny is real. i don’t know what freaks me out more - that i matter to him, or that he matters to me.
I tell gideon right away about tiny’s visit, mostly because he’s the only person in the school who i’ve really talked to about tiny.
gideon: wow, it’s sweet that he wants to see you.
me: i hadn’t even thought of that.
gideon: most guys will drive over an hour for sex. but only a few will drive over an hour just to see you.
me: how do you know this?
It’s sort of strange that gideon’s become my go-to gay guy, since he’s told me the most play he’s ever gotten was at boy scout camp the summer before ninth grade. but i guess he’s been to enough blogs and chat rooms and things. oh, and he watches hbo-on-demand all the time. i am constantly telling him that i’m not sure the laws of sex and the city apply when there’s no sex and there’s no city, but then he looks at me like i’m throwing spiked darts at the heart-shaped helium balloons that populate his mind, so i let it go.
the funny thing is that most of the school - well, the part that cares, which is not that huge - thinks gideon and i are a couple. because, you know, they see gay me walking in the halls with gay him, and they immediately assume.
I will say this, though - i kind-of don’t mind it. because gideon is really cute, and really friendly, and the people who don’t beat him up seem to like him a lot. so if i’m going to have a hypothetical boyfriend in this school, i could do much worse.
still, it’s weird to think of gideon and tiny finally meeting. it’s weird to think of tiny walking the halls with me. it’s like inviting godzilla to the prom.
I can’t picture it . . . but then i get a text that he’s two minutes away, and i have to face facts.
I basically just leave mr. jones’s physics class in the middle of a lab - he never really notices me, anyway, so as long as my lab partner, lizzie, covers for me, i’m set. i tell lizzie the truth - that my boyfriend is sneaking into the school to meet me - and she becomes my accomplice, because even if she wouldn’t ordinarily do it for me, she’ll definitely do it for LOVE. (well, LOVE and gay rights - three cheers for straight girls who max out on helping gay guys.)
the only person who gives me grief is maura, who snorts out a black cloud when i explain my story to lizzie. she’s been trying to fuck up my silent treatment by eavesdropping on me whenever she can. i don’t know whether the snort is because she thinks i’m making it up or because she’s disgusted that i’m mistreating my physics lab. or maybe she’s just jealous of lizzie, which is funny because lizzie has acne so bad that it looks like bee stings. but whatever. maura can snort until all the brain-mucus has left her head and pooled at her feet. i will not respond.
I find tiny easily enough in front of the school, shifting from foot to foot. i am not about to start making out with him on school grounds, so i give him a guy-hug (two points of contact! only two!) and tell him that if anyone asks, he should say he’s moving to town in the fall and is checking out the school ahead of time. he’s a little different than when i last saw him - tired, i guess. otherwise, though, his mental health seems perfectly fine.
tiny: so this is where the magic happens?