by John Green
i thank her again. and again. and again.
when that’s done, i head home and email with isaac once he gets home from school - no work for him today. we go over our plan about two thousand times. he says a friend of his suggested we meet at a place called frenchy’s, and since i don’t really know chicago that much outside of places where you’d go on a class trip, i tell him that’s fine by me, and print out the directions he sends me.
when we’re through, i go on facebook and look at his profile for the millionth thousandth time. he doesn’t really change it that often, but it’s a good enough reminder to me that he’s real. i mean, we’ve exchanged photos and have talked enough for me to know that he’s real - it’s not like he’s some forty-six-year-old who’s already prepared a nice spot in the back of his unmarked van for me. i’m not that stupid. we’re meeting in a public place, and i have my phone. even if isaac has a psychotic break, i’ll be prepared.
before i go to sleep, i look at all the pictures i have of him, as if i haven’t already memorized them. i’m sure i’ll recognize him the moment i see him. and i’m sure it’ll be one of the best moments of my life.
friday after school is brutal. i want to commit murder about a thousand different ways, and it’s my closet i want to kill. i have no fucking idea what to wear - and i am not a what-do-i-wear kind of guy at all, so it’s like i can’t even begin to comprehend the task at hand. every single goddamn piece of clothing i own seems to have chosen now to reveal its faults. i put on this one shirt which i’ve always thought made me look good, and sure enough it makes my chest look like it actually has some definition. but then i realize it’s so small that if i raise my arms even an inch, my belly pubes are on full display. so then i try this black shirt which makes me look like i’m trying too hard, and then this white shirt which is cool until i find this stain near the bottom which i’m hoping is orange juice, but is probably from when i tucked before i tapped. band t-shirts are too obvious - if i wear a shirt from one of his favorites, it’s like i’m being a kiss-ass, and if i wear one for a band he might not like, he might think my taste is lame. my gray hoodie is too blech and this blue shirt i have is practically the same color as my jeans, and looking all-blue is something only cookie monster can pull off.
for the first time in my life i realize why hangers are called hangers, because after fifteen minutes of trying things on and throwing them aside, all i want to do is hook one to the top of my closet door, lean my neck into the loop, and let my weight fall. my mother will come in and think it’s some autoerotic asphyxiation where i didn’t even have the time to get my dick out, and i won’t be alive enough to tell her that i think autoerotic asphyxiation is one of the dumbest things in the whole universe, right up there with gay republicans. but, yeah, i’ll be dead. and it’ll be like an episode of CSI: FU, where the investigators will come in and spend forty-three minutes plus commercials scouring over my life, and at the end they’ll bring my mother to the station house and they’ll sit her down and give her the truth.
cop: ma’am, your son wasn’t murdered. he was just getting ready for a first date.
i’m kind-of smiling, picturing how the scene would be shot, then i remember that i’m standing shirtless in the middle of my room, and i have a train to catch. finally i just pick this shirt that has a little picture of this robot made out of duct tape or something, with the word robotboy in small lowercase underneath it. i don’t know why i like it, but i do. and i don’t know why i think isaac will like it, but i do.
i know i must be nervous, because i’m actually thinking about how my hair looks, but when i get to the bathroom mirror, i decide my hair’s going to do what it wants to do, and since it usually looks better when it’s windy, i’ll just stick my head out of the train window or something on my way there. i could use my mother’s hair stuff, but i have no desire to smell like butterflies in a field. so i’m done.
i’ve told mom that the mathletes competition is in chicago - i figured if i was going to lie, she might as well think we made the state finals. i claimed the school had chartered a bus, but instead i head to the train station, no problem. my nerves are completely jangling by now. i try to read to kill a mockingbird for english class, but it’s like the letters are this nice design on the page and don’t mean anything more to me than the patterns on the train seats. it could be an action movie called die, mockingbird, die! and i still wouldn’t be into it. so i close my eyes and listen to my ipod, but it’s like it’s been preprogrammed by a mean-ass cupid, because every single song makes me think of isaac. he’s become the one the songs are about. and while part of me knows he’s probably worth that, another part is yelling at me to slow the fuck down. while it’s going to be exciting to see isaac, it’s also going to be awkward. the key will be to not let that awkwardness get to us.
i take about five minutes to think about my dating history - five minutes is really all i can fill - and i’m sent back to the traumatic experience of drunkenly groping carissa nye at sloan mitchell’s party a couple months ago. the kissing part was actually hot, but then when it got more serious, carissa got this stupidly earnest look on her face and i almost cracked up. we had some serious problems with her bra cutting off the circulation to her brain, and when i finally had her boobs in my hands (not that i’d asked for them), i didn’t know what to do with them except pet them, like they were puppies. the puppies liked that, and carissa decided to give me a rub or two also, and i liked that, because when it all comes down to it, hands are hands, and touch is touch, and your body’s going to react the way your body’s going to react. it doesn’t give a damn about all the conversations you’re going to have afterward - not just with carissa, who wanted to be my girlfriend and who i tried to let down easy, but ended up hurting anyway. no, there was also maura to deal with, because the moment she heard (not from me) she was pissed (all at me). she said she thought carissa was using me, and she acted like she thought i was using carissa, when really the whole thing was useless, and no matter how many times i told maura this, she refused to let me off the hook. for weeks i had her shouting ‘well, why don’t you give carissa a call, then?’ whenever we disagreed. for that alone, the groping wasn’t worth it.
isaac, of course, is completely different. not just in the groping sense. although there is certainly that. i’m not heading into the city just to mess around with him. it might not be the last thing on my mind, but it isn’t near the first, either.
i thought i was going to be early, but of course by the time i get near where we’re supposed to meet, i’m later than a pregnant girl’s period. i walk along michigan avenue with the right-before-curfew tourist girls and tourist boys, who all look like they’ve just come from basketball practice or watching basketball on tv. i definitely eye a few specimens, but it’s purely scientific research. for the next, oh, ten minutes, i can save myself for isaac.
i wonder if he’s already there. i wonder if he’s as nervous as i am. i wonder if he has spent as much time this morning as i did picking a shirt out. i wonder if by some freak of nature we’ll be wearing the same thing. like this is so meant to be that god’s decided to make it really obvious.
sweaty palms. check. shaky bones. check. the feeling that all oxygen in the air has been replaced by helium. yup. i look at the map fifteen times a second. five blocks to go. four blocks to go. three blocks to go. two blocks to go. state street. the corner. looking for frenchy’s. thinking it’s going to be a hip diner. or a coffee shop. or an indie record store. or even just a rundown restaurant.
then: getting there and finding out . . . it’s a porn shop.
thinking maybe the porn shop was named after something else nearby. maybe this is the frenchy’s district, and everything is named frenchy’s, like the way you can go downtown and find downtown bagels and the downtown cleaners and the downtown yoga studio. but no. i loop the block. i try the other side. i check the address over and over and over.
and there i am. back at the door.
what the fuck, i figure.
cold wind blowing all around me, i head inside.
chapter seven
I hear the electronic bing and turn around to see a kid walking in. Naturally, he doesn’t get carded, and while he is on the hairy side of puberty, there’s no way he’s eighteen. Small and big-eyed and towheaded and absolutely terrified—as scared as I would probably be had I not already been driven to the brink by the anti-Will Grayson conspiracy encompassing A. Jane, and B. Tiny, and C. The well-pierced specimen behind the counter, and D. Stonedy McKopyShoppy.
But, anyway, the kid is staring at me with a level of intensity that I find very troubling, particularly given that I am holding a copy of Mano a Mano. I’m sure there are a number of fantastic ways to indicate to the underage stranger standing next to a Great Wall of Dildos that you are not, in fact, a fan of Mano a Mano, but the particular strategy I choose is to mumble, “It’s, uh, for a friend.” Which is true, but A. It’s not a terribly convincing excuse, and B. It implies that I’m the kind of guy who is friends with the kind of guy who likes Mano a Mano, and further implies that C. I’m the kind of guy who buys porn magazines for his friends. Immediately after saying “It’s for a friend,” I realize that I should have said, “I’m trying to learn Spanish.”
The kid just continues to stare at me, and then after a while he narrows his eyes, squinting. I hold his stare for a few seconds but then glance away. Finally, he walks past me and into the video aisles. It seems to me that he is looking for something specific, and that the something specific is not related to sex, in which case I rather suspect he will not find it here. He meanders toward the back of the store, which contains an open door that I believe may in some way be related to “Tokens.” All I want to do is get the hell out of here with my copy of Mano a Mano, so I walk up to the pierced guy and say, “Just this, please.”
He rings it up on the cash register. “Nine eighty-three,” he says.
“Nine DOLLARS?” I ask, incredulous.
“And eighty-three cents,” he adds.
I shake my head. This is turning into an extraordinarily expensive joke, but I’m not very well going to return to the creepy magazine rack and look for a bargain. I reach into my pockets and come out with somewhere in the neighborhood of four dollars. I sigh, and then reach for my back pocket, handing the guy my debit card. My parents look at the statement, but they won’t know Frenchy’s from Denny’s.
The guy looks at the card. He looks at me. He looks at the card. He looks at me. And just before he talks, I realize: my card says William Grayson. My ID says Ishmael J. Biafra.
Quite loud, the guy says, “William. Grayson. William. Grayson. Where have I seen that name before? Oh, right. NOT on your driver’s license.”
I consider my options for a moment and then say, real quietly, “It’s my card. I know my pin. Just—ring it up.”
He swipes it through the card machine and says, “I don’t give a shit, kid. It all spends the same.” And just then I can feel the guy right behind me, looking at me again, and so I wheel around, and he says, “What did you say?” Only he’s not talking to me, he’s talking to Piercings.
“I said I don’t give a shit about his ID.”
“You didn’t call me?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, kid?”
“William Grayson. Did you say William Grayson? Did someone call here for me?”
“Huh? No, kid. William Grayson is this guy,” he says, nodding toward me. “Well, two schools of thought on that, I guess, but that’s what this card says.”
And the kid looks at me confused for a minute and finally says, “What’s your name?”
This is freaking me out. Frenchy’s isn’t a place for conversation . So I just say to Piercings, “Can I have the magazine?” and Piercings hands it to me in an unmarked and thoroughly opaque black plastic bag for which I am very grateful, and he gives me my card and my receipt. I walk out the door, jog a half block down Clark, and then sit down on the curb and wait for my pulse to slow down.
Which it is just starting to do when my fellow underage Frenchy’s pilgrim runs up to me and says, “Who are you?”
I stand up then and say, “Um, I’m Will Grayson.”
“W-I-L-L G-R-A-Y-S-O-N?” he says, spelling impossibly fast.
“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Why do you ask?”
The kid looks at me for a second, his head turned like he thinks I might be putting him on, and then finally he says, “Because I am also Will Grayson.”
“No shit?” I ask.
“Shit,” the guy says. I can’t decide if he’s paranoid or schizophrenic or both, but then he pulls a duct-taped wallet out of his back pocket and shows me an Illinois driver’s license. Our middle names are different, at least, but—yeah.
“Well,” I say, “good to meet you.” And then I start to turn away, because nothing against the guy but I don’t care to strike up a conversation with a guy who hangs out at porn stores, even if, technically speaking, I am myself a guy who hangs out at porn stores. But he touches my arm, and he seems too small to be dangerous, so I turn back around, and he says, “Do you know Isaac?”
“Who?”
“Isaac?”
“I don’t know anyone named Isaac, man,” I say.
“I was supposed to meet him at that place, but he’s not there. You don’t really look like him but I thought—I don’t know what I thought. How the—what the hell is going on?” The kid spins a quick circle, like he’s looking for a cameraman or something. “Did Isaac put you up to this?”
“I just told you, man, I don’t know any Isaac.”
He turns around again, but there’s no one behind him. He throws his arms in the air, and says, “I don’t even know what to freak out about right now.”
“It’s been a bit of a crazy day for Will Graysons everywhere,” I say.
He shakes his head and sits down on the curb then and I follow him, because there is nothing else to do. He looks over at me, then away, then at me again. And then he actually, physically pinches himself on the forearm. “Of course not. My dreams can’t make up shit this weird.”
“Yeah,” I say. I can’t figure out if he wants me to talk to him, and I also can’t figure out if I want to talk to him, but after a minute, I say, “So, uh, how do you know meet-meat-the-porn-store Isaac?”
“He’s just—a friend of mine. We’ve known each other online for a long time.”
“Online?”
If possible, Will Grayson manages to shrink into himself even more. His shoulders hunched, he stares intently into the gutter of the street. I know, of course, that there are other Will Graysons. I’ve Googled myself enough to know that. But I never thought I would see one. Finally he says, “Yeah.”
“You’ve never physically seen this guy,” I say.
“No,” he says, “but I’ve seen him in like a thousand pictures.”
“He’s a fifty-year-old man,” I say, matter-of-factly. “He’s a pervert. One Will to another: No way that Isaac is who you think he is.”
“He’s probably just—I don’t know, maybe he met another freaking Isaac on the bus and he’s stuck in Bizarro World.”
“Why the hell would he ask you to go to Frenchy’s?”
“Good question. Why would someone go to a porn store?” He kind of smirks at me.
“Fair point,” I say. “Yeah, that’s true. There’s a story to it, though.”
I wait for a second for Will Grayson to ask me about my story, but he doesn’t. Then I start telling him anyway. I tell him about Jane and Tiny Cooper and the Maybe Dead Cats and “Annus Miribalis” and Jane’s locker combination and the
copy shop clerk who couldn’t count, and I weasel a couple of laughs out of him along the way, but mostly he just keeps glancing back toward Frenchy’s, waiting for Isaac. His face seems to alternate between hope and anger. He pays very little attention to me actually, which is fine, really, because I’m just telling my story to tell it, talking to a stranger because it’s the only safe kind of talking you can do, and the whole time my hand is in my pocket holding my phone, because I want to make sure I feel it vibrate if someone calls.
And then he tells me about Isaac, about how they’ve been friends for a year and that he always wanted to meet him because there’s just no one like Isaac out in the suburb where he lives, and it dawns on me pretty quickly that Will Grayson likes Isaac in a not-altogether-platonic way. “So, I mean what perverted fifty-year-old would do that?” Will says. “What pervert spends a year of his life talking to me, telling me everything about his fake self, while I tell him everything about my real self? And if a perverted fifty-year-old did do that, why wouldn’t he show up at Frenchy’s to rape and murder me? Even on a totally impossible night, that is totally impossible.”
I mull it over for a second. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “People are pretty fucking weird, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah.” He’s not looking back to Frenchy’s anymore, just forward. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, and I’m sure he can see me out of the corner of his, but mostly we are looking not at each other, but at the same spot on the street as cars rumble past, my brain trying to make sense of all the impossibilities, all the coincidences that brought me here, all the true-and-false things. And we’re quiet for a while, so long that I take my phone out of my pocket and look at it and confirm that no one has called and then put it back, and then finally I feel Will turning his head away from the spot on the street and toward me and he says, “What do you think it means?”
“What?” I ask.
“There aren’t that many Will Graysons,” he says. “It’s gotta mean something, one Will Grayson meeting another Will Grayson in a random porn store where neither Will Grayson belongs.”