Will Grayson, Will Grayson(11)
Author: John Green

I could do that.

Or I could just live by the rules.

“Trust me,” I tell him. “You are not improving my life. Just stop interfering, okay?”

He answers with a shrug that I take for a nod. “So, listen,” Tiny says. “About Nick. The thing is that he and Gary were together for a really long time and, like, they only broke up yesterday, but there’s a real spark.”

“Supremely bad idea,” I say.

“But they broke up,” says Tiny.

“Right, but what would happen if someone broke up with you and then the next day was flirting with one of your friends?”

“I’ll think about it,” says Tiny, but I know he can’t possibly restrain himself from having another brief and failed romance. “Oh, hey.” Tiny perks up. “You should go with us to the Storage Room on Friday. Nick and I are going to see this band, the uh—the Maybe Dead Cats. Intellectual pop punk. Dead Milkmen-ey, but less funny ha-ha.”

“Thanks for inviting me before,” I say, elbowing Tiny in the side. He pushes me back playfully, and I almost fall down the stairs. It’s like being best friends with a fairy-tale giant: Tiny Cooper can’t help but hurt you.

“I just figured you wouldn’t want to come, after the disaster last week.”

“Oh, wait, I can’t. The Storage Room is over-twenty-one.”

Tiny Cooper, walking ahead of me, reaches the door. He throws his hips against the metal bar, and the door flings open. Outside. The weekend. The brisk bare light of Chicago. The cold air floods over me, and the light rushes in, and Tiny Cooper is backlit by the sinking sun, so I can barely see him when he turns back around to me and pulls out his phone.

“Who are you calling?” I ask, but Tiny doesn’t answer. He just holds the phone in his gigantic meaty hand and then he says, “Hey, Jane,” and my eyes get wide, and I do the slit-the-throat motion, and Tiny smiles and says, “Listen, so Grayson wants to come with us to the Maybe Dead Cats on Friday. Maybe get some dinner first?”

“. . .”

“Well, the only problem is that he doesn’t have an ID, and don’t you know some guy?”

“. . .”

“You aren’t home yet, are you? So just come back and pick his skinny ass up.” Tiny hangs up and says to me, “She’s on her way,” and then I’m left standing in the doorway as Tiny races down the steps and starts skipping—yeah, skipping—toward the junior parking lot. “Tiny!” I shout, but he doesn’t turn around; he just keeps skipping. I don’t start to skip after his crazy ass or anything, but I do kinda smile. He may be a malevolent sorcerer, but Tiny Cooper is his own goddamned man, and if he wants to be a gigantic skipper, then that’s his right as a huge American.

I figure I can’t ditch Jane, so I’m sitting on the front steps when she shows up two minutes later behind the wheel of an ancient, hand-painted orange Volvo. I’ve seen the car before in the parking lot—you can’t miss it—but I’ve never attached it to Jane. She seems quieter than the car implies. I walk down the steps, open the passenger door, and climb in, my feet landing in a pile of fast-food wrappers.

“Sorry. I realize it’s disgusting.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. This would be an excellent time to make a joke, but I’m thinking shut up shut up shut up. After a while the silence feels too weird, so I say, “Do you know this band, the uh, Maybe Dead Cats?”

“Yeah. They’re not bad. They’re sort of a poor man’s early Mr. T Experience, but they’ve got one song I like—it’s like fifty-five seconds long and it’s called ‘Annus Miribalis,’ and it basically explains Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

“Cool,” I say. She smiles, shifts into drive, and we jolt off toward the city.

Maybe a minute later, we come to a stop sign and Jane pulls over to the side of the road and looks at me. “I’m quite shy,” she says.

“Huh?”

“I’m quite shy, so I understand. But don’t hide behind Tiny.”

“I’m not,” I say.

And then she ducks beneath her seat belt and I’m wondering why she’s doing that, and then she leans across the gearbox, and I realize what’s happening, and she closes her eyes and tilts her head and I turn away, staring down at the fast-food bags on the floor of her car. She opens her eyes and jolts backward. Then I start talking to fill the silence. “I’m not really, uh, I think you’re awesome and pretty but I’m not, like, I’m not, like, I guess I don’t, um, really want a relationship right now.”

After a second, very quietly, she says, “I think I might have gotten some unreliable information.”

“Possible,” I say.

“I’m really sorry.”

“Me too. I mean, you really are—”

“No no no stop, that only makes it worse. Okay. Okay. Look at me.” I look at her. “I can totally forget that ever happened if, and only if, you can totally forget it ever happened.”

“Nothing happened,” I say, and then correct myself. “Nothing didn’t happen.”

“Exactly,” she says, and then our thirty-second stop at the stop sign ends, and my head is thrown back against the seat. Jane drives like Tiny dates.

We’re exiting Lake Shore near downtown and talking about Neutral Milk Hotel and whether there might be some recordings out there that no one has heard, just demos, and how interesting it would be to hear what their songs sounded like before they were songs, how maybe we could break into their recording studio and copy every recorded moment of the band’s existence. The Volvo’s ancient heating system makes my lips feel dry and the leaning-in thing feels actually, literally forgotten—and it occurs to me that I am weirdly disappointed about how entirely un-upset Jane seems to feel, which in turn causes me to feel strangely rejected, which in turn causes me to think that perhaps a special wing at the Museum of Crazy should be erected in my honor.

We find a parking space on the street a couple blocks away from the place, and Jane leads me to a nondescript glass door next to a hot-dog restaurant. A sign on the door reads GOLD COAST COPY AND PRINT. We head up the stairs, the smell of delicious pork lips wafting through the air, and enter a tiny officelike shop. It is extremely sparsely decorated, which is to say that there are two folding chairs, a HANG IN THERE kitten poster, a dead potted plant, a computer, and a fancy printer.