Will Grayson, Will Grayson(14)
Author: John Green

me: so what’s up?

maura: you’re a prick.

me: this is a news flash?

maura: shut up for a second.

me: only if you shut up, too.

maura: stop it.

me: you started it.

maura: just stop it.

I decide, okay, i’ll shut up. and what do i get? fifteen f**king seconds of silence. then it’s all

maura: i always tell myself that you don’t mean to hurt me, which makes it less hurtful, you know. but today – i’m just so f**king sick of it. of you. just so you know, i don’t want to sleep with you, either. i would never sleep with someone i can’t even be friends with.

me: wait a second – now we’re not friends?

maura: i don’t know what we are. you won’t even tell me that you’re g*y.

this is a classic maura maneuver. if she doesn’t get an answer she wants, she will create a corner to back you into. like the time she went through my bag when i was in the bathroom and found my pills – i hadn’t taken them in the morning, so i brought them along with me to school. she waited a good ten minutes before asking me if i was on any medication. this seemed a little random to me, and i didn’t really want to talk about it, so i told her no. and then what does she do? she reaches into my bag and pulls out the pill bottles and asks me what they’re for. she got her answer, but it didn’t exactly inspire trust. she kept telling me i didn’t need to be ashamed of my ‘mental condition,’ and i kept telling her i wasn’t ashamed – i just didn’t want to talk about it with her. she couldn’t understand the difference.

so now we’re back in another corner, and this time it’s the g*y thing.

me: whoa, wait a second. even if i was g*y, wouldn’t that be my decision? to tell you?

maura: who’s isaac?

me: f**k.

maura: you think i can’t see what you draw in your notebook?

me: you’re kidding me. this is about isaac? maura: just tell me who he is.

I fundamentally don’t want to tell her. he’s mine, not hers. if i give her just a piece of the story, she’ll want the whole thing. i know in some twisted way she’s doing this because she thinks it’s what i want – to talk about everything, to have her know everything about me. but that’s not what i want. that’s not what she can have.

me: maura maura maura . . . isaac’s a character. he doesn’t actually exist. f**k! it’s just this thing i’m working on. this – i don’t know – idea. i have all these stories in my head. starring this character, isaac.

I don’t know where this shit comes from. it’s like it’s just being given to me by some divine force of fabrication. maura looks like she wants to believe it, but doesn’t really.

me: like pogo dog. only he’s not a dog, and he’s not on a pogo stick.

maura: god, i forgot all about pogo dog.

me: are you kidding? he was going to make us rich!

and she’s buying it. she’s leaning against me and, i swear to god, if she was a guy i’d be able to see the boner in her pants.

maura: i know it’s awful, but i’m kind of relieved that you’re not hiding something that big from me.

I figure this would be a bad time to point out that i’ve never actually said i wasn’t g*y. i just told her to f**k off.

I don’t know if there’s anything more horrifying than a goth girl getting all cuddly. maura’s not only leaning, but now she’s examining my hand like somebody stamped it with the meaning of life. in braille.

me: i should probably get back to my mom.

maura: tell her we’re hanging out.

me: i promised her i would watch this thing with her.

the key here is to blow off maura without her realizing i’m blowing her off. because i really don’t want to hurt her, not when i just managed to bring her back from the brink of the last hurt i allegedly inflicted. i know as soon as maura gets home, she’s going to dive right into her notebook of skull-blood poetry, and i’m doing my best not to get a bad review. maura once showed me one of her poems.

hang me

like a dead rose

preserve me

and my petals won’t fall

until you touch them

and i dissolve

and i wrote her a poem back

I am like

a dead begonia

hanging upside down

because

like a dead begonia

I don’t give a f**k

to which she replied

not all flowers

depend on light

to grow

so now maybe tonight i’ll inspire

I thought his soil was g*y

but maybe there’s a chance

I can get myself some play

and get into his pants

hopefully i’ll never have to read it or know about it or even think about it ever again.

I stand up and open the garage door so maura can leave that way. i tell her i’ll see her monday in school and she says ‘not if i see you first’ and i go har har har until she’s a safe distance away and i can shut the garage door again.

the sick thing is, i’m sure that someday this is going to come back to haunt me. that someday she’s going to say i led her on, when the truth is i was only holding her off. i have to set her up with somebody else. soon. it’s not me she wants – she just wants anybody who will make it all about her. and i can’t be that guy.

when i get back to the living room, pride & prejudice is almost over, which means that everyone knows pretty much where they stand with everyone else. usually my mom is a crumpled-tissue mess at this point, but this time there’s not a wet eye in the house. she pretty much confirms it when she turns the dvd off.

mom: i really have to stop doing this. i need to get a life.

I think she’s directing this at herself, or the universe, not really at me. still, i can’t help thinking that ‘getting a life’ is something only a complete idiot could believe. like you can just drive to a store and get a life. see it in its shiny box and look inside the plastic window and catch a glimpse of yourself in a new life and say, ‘wow, i look much happier – i think this is the life i need to get!’ take it to the counter, ring it up, put it on your credit card. if getting a life was that easy, we’d be one blissed-out race. but we’re not. so it’s like, mom, your life isn’t out there waiting, so don’t think all you have to do is find it and get it. no, your life is right here. and, yeah, it sucks. lives usually do. so if you want things to change, you don’t need to get a life. you need to get off your ass.

of course i don’t say any of these things to her. moms don’t need to hear that kind of shit from their kids, unless they’re doing something really wrong, like smoking in bed, or doing heroin, or doing heroin while they’re smoking in bed. if my mom were a jock guy in my school, all of her jock-guy friends would be saying, ‘dude, you just need to get laid.’ but sorry, geniuses, there’s no such thing as a f**k cure. a f**k cure is like the adult version of santa claus.