John Green & David Levithan Read online

  the whole time.

  the whole time it was maura.

  not isaac.

  no isaac.

  never.

  there’s hurt. there’s pain. and there’s hurt-and-pain-at-once.

  i am experiencing hurt-and-pain-at-once.

  o.w.g.: um . . . will?

  he looks like he can see the hurt-and-pain-at-once very clearly on my face.

  me: you know that guy i was supposed to meet?

  o.w.g.: isaac.

  me: yeah, isaac. well, it ends up he wasn’t a fifty-year-old after all. he was my friend maura, playing a joke.

  o.w.g.: that’s one helluva mean joke.

  me: yeah. i’m feeling that.

  i have no idea whether i’m talking to him because he’s also named will grayson or because he told me a little about what’s going on with him or because he’s the only person in the world who’s willing to listen to me right now. all of my instincts are telling me to curl into a tiny ball and roll into the nearest sewer - but i don’t want to do that to o.w.g. i feel he deserves more than being an eyewitness to my self-destruction.

  me: anything like this ever happen to you before?

  o.w.g. shakes his head.

  o.w.g.: i’m afraid we’re in new territory here. my best friend tiny was once going to enter me into seventeen magazine’s boy of the month contest without telling me, but i don’t think that’s really the same thing.

  me: how did you find out?

  o.w.g.: he decided he needed someone to proofread his entry, so he asked me to do it.

  me: did you win?

  o.w.g.: i told him i’d mail it for him and then filed it away. he was really upset that i didn’t win . . . but i think it would’ve been worse if i had.

  me: you might have gotten to meet miley cyrus. jane would’ve died of jealousy.

  o.w.g.: i think jane would’ve died of laughter first.

  i can’t help it - i imagine isaac laughing, too.

  and then i have to kill that image. because isaac doesn’t exist. i feel like i’m going to lose it again.

  me: why?

  o.w.g.: why would jane die laughing?

  me: no, why would maura do this?

  o.w.g: i can’t honestly say.

  maura. isaac.

  isaac. maura.

  anvil.

  anvil.

  anvil.

  me: you know what sucks about love?

  o.w.g.: what?

  me: that it’s so tied to truth.

  the tears are starting to come back. because that pain - i know i’m giving it all up. isaac. hope. the future. those feelings. that word. i’m giving it all up, and that hurts.

  o.w.g.: will?

  me: i think i need to close my eyes for a minute and feel what i need to feel.

  i shut my eyes, shut my body, try to shut out everything else. i feel o.w.g. stand up. i wish he were isaac, even though i know he’s not. i wish maura weren’t isaac, even though i know she is. i wish i were someone else, even though i know i’ll never, ever be able to get away from what i’ve done and what’s been done to me.

  lord, send me amnesia. make me forget every moment i ever didn’t really have with isaac. make me forget that maura exists. this must be what my mother felt when my dad said it was over. i get it now. i get it. the things you hope for the most are the things that destroy you in the end.

  i hear o.w.g. talking to someone. a murmured recap of everything that’s just happened.

  i hear footsteps coming closer. i try to calm myself a little, then open my eyes . . . and see this ginormous guy standing in front of me. when he notices me noticing him, he gives me this broad smile. i swear, he has dimples the size of a baby’s head.

  ginormous guy: hello there. i’m tiny.

  he offers his hand. i’m not entirely in a shaking mood, but it’s awkward if i just leave him there, so i hold out my hand, too. instead of shaking it, though, he yanks me up to my feet.

  tiny: did someone die?

  me: yeah, i did.

  he smiles again at that.

  tiny: well, then . . . welcome to the afterlife.

  chapter nine

  You can say a lot of bad things about Tiny Cooper. I know, because I have said them. But for a guy who knows absolutely nothing about how to conduct his own relationships, Tiny Cooper is kind of brilliant when it comes to dealing with other people’s heartbreak. Tiny is like some gigantic sponge soaking up the pain of lost love everywhere he goes. And so it is with Will Grayson. The other Will Grayson, I mean.

  Jane’s a storefront down standing in a doorway, talking on the phone. I look over at her, but she’s not looking at me, and I’m wondering if they played the song. Something Will—the other Will—said right before Tiny and Jane walked up keeps looping around my head: love is tied to truth. I think of them as unhappily conjoined twins.

  “Obviously,” Tiny is saying, “she’s just a hot smoldering pile of suck, but even so, I give her full credit for the name. Isaac. Isaac. I mean, I could almost fall in love with a girl, if she were named Isaac.”

  The other Will Grayson doesn’t laugh, but Tiny is undeterred. “You must have been so totally freaked out when you realized it was a porn store, right? Like, who wants to meet there.”

  “And then also when his namesake was buying a magazine,” I say, holding up the black bag, thinking that Tiny will snatch it and check out my purchase. But he doesn’t. He just says, “This is even worse than what happened to me and Tommy.”

  “What happened with you and Tommy?” Will asks.

  “He said he was a natural blonde, but his dye job was so bad it looked like a weave from Mattel—like Barbie. Also, Tommy wasn’t short for Tomas, like he told me. It was short for regular old Thomas.”

  Will says, “Yes, this is worse. Much worse.”

  I clearly don’t have much to contribute to the conversation, and anyway, Tiny is acting like I don’t exist, so I smile and say, “I’m gonna leave you two boys alone now.” And then I look at the other Will Grayson, and he’s sort of swaying like he might fall over if the wind kicks up. I want to say something, because I feel really bad for him, but I never know what to say. So I just say what I’m thinking. “I know it sucks, but in a way, it’s good.” He looks at me like I’ve just said something absolutely idiotic, which of course I have. “Love and truth being tied together, I mean. They make each other possible, you know?”

  The kid gives me about an eighth of a smile and then turns back to Tiny, who—to be fair—is clearly the better therapist. The black bag with Mano a Mano doesn’t seem funny anymore, so I just drop it on the ground next to Tiny and Will. They don’t even notice.

  Jane’s standing on the curb on her tiptoes now, almost leaning out into a street choked thick with cabs. A group of college guys walk past and look at her, one raising his eyebrows to another. I’m still thinking about the tying of love and truth—and it makes me want to tell her the truth—the whole, contradictory truth—because otherwise, on some level, am I not that girl? Am I not that girl pretending to be Isaac?

  I walk over to her and try to touch the back of her elbow, but my touch is too soft and I only get her coat. She turns to me and I see that she’s still on her cell. I make a gesture that is intended to convey, “Hey, no hurry, talk as long as you’d like,” and probably actually conveys, “Hey, look at me! I have spastic hands.” Jane holds up a finger. I nod. She speaks softly, cutely into the phone, saying, “Yeah, I know. Me too.”

  I step backward across the sidewalk and lean against the brick wall between Frenchy’s and a closed sushi restaurant. To my right, Will and Tiny talk. To my left, Jane talks. I pull out my cell as though I’m going to send a text, but I just scroll through my contact list. Clint. Dad. Jane. Mom. People I used to be friends with. People I sorta know. Tiny. Nothing after the T’s. Not much for a phone I’ve had three years.

  “Hey,” Jane says. I look up, flip the phone shut, and smile at her. “Sorry about the concert,”
she says.

  “Yeah, it’s okay,” I answer, because it is.

  “Who’s the guy?” she asks, gesturing toward him.

  “Will Grayson,” I say. She squints at me, confused. “I met a guy named Will Grayson in that porn store,” I say. “I was there to use my fake ID, and he was there to meet his fake boyfriend.”

  “Jesus, if I’d known that was gonna happen, I would’ve skipped the concert.”

  “Yeah,” I say, trying not to sound annoyed. “Let’s take a walk.”

  She nods. We walk over toward Michigan Avenue, the Magnificent Mile, home to all of Chicago’s biggest, chainiest stores. Everything’s closed now, and the tourists who flood the wide sidewalks during the day have gone back to their hotels, towering fifty stories above us. The homeless people who beg off the tourists are gone, too, and it is mostly just Jane and me. You can’t tell the truth without talking, so I’m telling her the whole story, trying to make it funny, trying to make it grander than any MDC concert could ever be. And when I finish there’s a lull and she says, “Can I ask you something random?”

  “Yeah, of course.” We’re walking past Tiffany, and I stop for a second. The pale yellow streetlights illuminate the storefront just enough that through triple-paned glass and a security grate, I can see an empty display—a gray velvet outline of a neck wearing no jewelry.

  “Do you believe in epiphanies?” she asks. We start walking again.

  “Um, can you unpack the question?”

  “Like, do you believe that people’s attitudes can change? One day you wake up and you realize something, you see something in a way that you never saw it before, and boom, epiphany. Something is different forever. Do you believe in that?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t think anything happens all at once. Like, Tiny? You think Tiny falls in love every day? No way. He thinks he does, but he doesn’t really. I mean, anything that happens all at once is just as likely to unhappen all at once, you know?”

  She doesn’t say anything for a while. She just walks. My hand is down next to her hand, and they brush but nothing happens between us. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” she says finally.

  “Why do you ask?” I say.

  “I don’t know. No reason, really.” The English language has a long and storied history. And in all that time, no one has ever asked a “random question” about “epiphanies” for “no reason.” “Random questions” are the least random of all questions.

  “Who had the epiphany?” I ask.

  “Um, I think you’re actually, like, the worst possible person to talk to about this,” she says.

  “How’s that?”

  “I know it was pretty lame of me to go to the concert,” she says randomly. We come to a plastic bench and she sits down.

  “It’s okay,” I say, sitting down next to her.

  “It’s actually not okay on, like, the grandest possible scale. I guess the thing is that I’m a little confused.” Confused. The phone. The sweet, girly voice. Epiphanies. I finally realize the truth.

  “The ex-boyfriend,” I say. I feel my gut sinking down like it’s swimming in the ocean deep, and I learn the truth: I like her. She’s cute and she’s really smart in precisely the right slightly pretentious way, and there’s a softness to her face that sharpens everything she says, and I like her, and it’s not just that I should be honest with her; I want to. Such is the way these things are tied together, I guess. “I have an idea,” I say.

  I can feel her looking at me, and I cinch the hood of my coat. My ears feel cold like burning.

  And she says, “What’s the idea?”

  “The idea is that for ten minutes, we forget that we have feelings. And we forget about protecting ourselves or other people and we just say the truth. For ten minutes. And then we can go back to being lame.”

  “I like the idea,” she says. “But you have to start.”

  I push my coat sleeve back and look at my watch. 10:42. “Ready?” I ask. She nods. I look at my watch again. “Okay, and . . . go. I like you. And I didn’t know whether I liked you until I thought of you at that concert with some other guy, but now I do know, and I realize that makes me a bitchsquealer, but yeah, I like you. I think you’re great, and very cute—and by cute I mean beautiful but don’t want to say beautiful because it’s cliché but you are—and I don’t even mind that you’re a music snob.”

  “It’s not snobbery; it’s good taste. So I used to date this boy and I knew he was going to be at the concert and I wanted to go with you partly because I knew Randall would be there but then I wanted to go even without you because I knew he would be there and then he saw me while MDC was playing ‘A Brief Overview of Time Travel Paradoxes,’ and he was screaming in my ear about how he had an epiphany and he now knows that we’re supposed to be together and I was, like, I don’t think so and he quoted this e. e. cummings poem about how kisses are a better fate than wisdom and then it turns out that he had MDC dedicate a song to me which was the kind of thing that he would never have done before and I feel like I deserve someone who consistently likes me which you kind of don’t and I don’t know.”

  “What song?”

  “‘Annus Miribalis.’ Uh, he’s the only person who knows my locker combination, and he had them dedicate it to my locker combination, which is just, I mean, I don’t know. That’s just. Yeah.”

  Even though these are the minutes of truth, I don’t tell her about the song. I can’t. It’s too embarrassing. The thing is, coming from your ex-boyfriend, it’s sweet. And coming from the guy who wouldn’t kiss you in your orange Volvo, it’s just weird and maybe even mean. She’s right that she deserves someone consistent, and maybe I can’t be that. Nonetheless, I shred the guy. “I fucking hate guys who quote poetry to girls. Since we are being honest. Also, wisdom is a better fate than the vast majority of kisses. Wisdom is certainly a better fate than kissing douches who only read poetry so they can use it to get in girls’ pants.”

  “Oh, my,” she says. “Honest Will and Regular Will are so fascinatingly different!”

  “To tell you the truth, I prefer just your average, run-of-the-mill, everyday jackass with his glass-eyed, slack-jawed obliviousness to the guys who try to hijack my cool by reading poetry and listening to halfway-good music. I worked hard for my cool. I got my ass kicked in middle school for my cool. I came by this shit honestly.”

  “Well, you don’t even know him,” she says.

  “And I don’t need to,” I answer. “Look, you’re right. Maybe I don’t like you the way someone should like you. I don’t like you in the call-you-and-read-you-a-poem-every-night-before-you-go-to-bed way. I’m crazy, okay? Sometimes I think, like, God, she’s superhot and smart and kind of pretentious but the pretentiousness just makes me kind of want her, and then other times I think it’s an amazingly bad idea, that dating you would be like a series of unnecessary root canals interspersed with occasional makeout sessions.”

  “Jesus, that’s a burn.”

  “But not really, because I think both! And it doesn’t matter, because I’m your Plan B. Maybe I’m your Plan B because I feel that way, and maybe I feel that way because I’m your Plan B, but regardless, it means you’re supposed to be with Randall and I’m supposed to be in my natural state of self-imposed hookup exile.”

  “So different!” she says again. “Can you be like this permanently?”

  “Probably not,” I say.

  “How many minutes do we have?”

  “Four,” I say.

  And then we’re kissing.

  I lean in this time, and she doesn’t turn away. It’s cold, and our lips are dry, noses a little wet, foreheads sweaty beneath wool hats. I can’t touch her face, even though I want to, because I’m wearing gloves. But God, when her lips come apart, everything turns warm and her sugar sweet breath is in my mouth, and I probably taste like hot dogs but I don’t care. She kisses like a sweet devouring, and I don’t know where to touch her because I want all of her. I want to touch her knee
s and her hips and her stomach and her back and her everything, but we’re encased in all these clothes, so we’re just two marshmallows bumping against each other, and she smiles at me while still kissing because she knows how ridiculous it is, too.

  “Better than wisdom?” she asks, her nose touching my cheek.

  “Tight race,” I say, and I smile back as I pull her tighter to me.

  I’ve never known before what it feels like to want someone—not to want to hook up with them or whatever, but to want them, to want them. And now I do. So maybe I do believe in epiphanies.

  She pulls away from me just enough to say, “What’s my last name?”

  “I have no idea,” I answer immediately.

  “Turner. It’s Turner.” I slip in one last peck, and then she sits up properly, although her gloved hand still rests against my jacketed waist. “See, we don’t even know each other. I have to find out if I believe in epiphanies, Will.”

  “I can’t believe his name is Randall. He doesn’t go to Evanston, does he?”

  “No, he goes to Latin. We met at a poetry slam.”

  “Of course you did. My God, I can picture the slimy bastard: He’s tall and shaggy-haired, and he plays a sport—soccer, probably—but he pretends like he doesn’t even like it because all he likes is poetry and music and you, and he thinks you’re a poem and tells you so, and he’s slathered in confidence and probably body spray.” She laughs, shaking her head. “What?” I ask.