Will Grayson, Will Grayson(16)
Author: John Green

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: i’m here

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: i’m here

until the next sentence comes.

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: i’m here

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: what are we doing?

grayscale: ???

boundbydad: i think it’s time

boundbydad: time for us to meet

grayscale: !!!

grayscale: seriously?

boundbydad: deliriously

grayscale: you mean i would get a chance to see you

boundbydad: hold you for real

grayscale: for real

boundbydad: yes

grayscale: yes?

boundbydad: yes.

grayscale: yes!

boundbydad: am i crazy?

grayscale: yes! ☺

boundbydad: i’ll go crazy if we don’t.

grayscale: we should.

boundbydad: we should.

grayscale: ohmygodwow

boundbydad: it’s going to happen, isn’t it?

grayscale: we can’t go back now.

boundbydad: i’m so excited . . .

grayscale: and terrified

boundbydad: . . . and terrified

grayscale: . . . but most of all excited?

boundbydad: but most of all excited.

It’s going to happen. i know it’s going to happen.

giddily, terrifyingly, we pick a date.

friday. six days away

only six days.

In six days, maybe my life will actually begin.

this is so insane.

and the most insane thing of all is that i’m so excited that i want to immediately tell isaac all about it, even though he’s the one person who already knows it’s happened. not maura, not simon, not derek, not my mom – nobody in this whole wide world but isaac. he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.

I have to believe that’s a sign.

Chapter five

It’s one of those weekends where I don’t leave the house at all—literally—except briefly with Mom to go to the White Hen. Such weekends usually don’t bother me, but I keep sort of hoping Tiny Cooper and/or Jane might call and give me an excuse to use the ID I’ve hidden in the pages of Persuasion on my bookshelf. But no one calls; neither Tiny nor Jane even shows up online; and it’s colder than a witch’s tit in a steel bra, so I just stay in the house and catch up on homework. I do my precalc homework, and then when I’m done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That’s the kind of weekend it is—the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.

Then on Sunday night while I’m at the computer checking to see if anyone’s online, my dad’s head appears in my doorway. “Will,” he says, “do you have a sec to talk in the living room?” I spin around in the desk chair and stand up. My stomach flips a bit because the living room is the room least likely to be lived in, the room where the nonexistence of Santa is revealed, where grandmothers die, where grades are frowned upon, and where one learns that a man’s station wagon goes inside a woman’s garage, and then exits the garage, and then enters again, and so on until an egg is fertilized, and etc.

My dad is very tall, and very thin, and very bald, and he has long thin fingers, which he taps against an arm of a floral-print couch. I sit across from him in an overstuffed, overgreen armchair. The finger tapping goes on for about thirty-four years, but he doesn’t say anything, and then finally I say, “Hey, Dad.”

He has a very formalized, intense way of talking, my dad. He always talks to you as if he’s informing you that you have terminal cancer—which is actually a big part of his job, so it makes sense. He looks at me with those sad, intense you-have-cancer eyes, and he says, “Your mother and I are wondering about your plans.”

And I say, “Uh, well. I thought I would, uh, go to bed pretty soon. And then, just go to school. I’m going to a concert on Friday. I already told Mom.”

He nods. “Yes, but after that.”

“Uh, after that? You mean, like, get into college and get a job and get married and give you grandchildren and stay off drugs and live happily ever after?”

He almost smiles. It is an exceedingly hard thing, to get my dad to smile. “There’s one facet of that process in which your mother and I are particularly interested at this particular juncture in your life.”

“College?”

“College,” he says.

“Don’t have to worry about it until next year,” I point out.

“It’s never too early to plan,” he says. And then he starts talking about this program at Northwestern where you do both college and medical school in, like, six years so that you can be in residency by the time you’re twenty-five, and you can stay close to home but of course live on campus and whatever whatever whatever, because after about eleven seconds, I realize he and Mom have decided I should go to this particular program, and that they are introducing me to the idea early, and that they will periodically bring this program up over the next year, pushing and pushing and pushing. And I realize, too, that if I can get in, I will probably go. There are worse ways to make a living.

You know how people are always saying your parents are always right? “Follow your parents’ advice; they know what’s good for you.” And you know how no one ever listens to this advice, because even if it’s true it’s so annoying and condescending that it just makes you want to go, like, develop a meth addiction and have unprotected sex with eighty-seven thousand anonymous partners? Well, I listen to my parents. They know what’s good for me. I’ll listen to anyone, frankly. Almost everyone knows better than I do.

Andbutso little does my dad know, but all his explanation of this future is lost on me; I’m already fine with it. No, I’m thinking about how little I feel in this absurdly immense chair, and I’m thinking about the fake ID warming up Jane Austen’s pages, and I’m thinking about whether I’m more mad at Tiny or in awe of him, and thinking about Friday, steering clear of Tiny in the mosh pit as he tries to dance like everyone else, and the heat turned on too high in the club and everyone sweating through their clothes and the music so uptempo and goose bumps that I don’t even care what they’re singing about.

And I say, “Yeah, it sounds really cool, Dad,” and he’s talking about how he knows people there, and I’m just nodding nodding nodding.

I’m at school Monday morning twenty minutes early because Mom has to get to the hospital by seven—I guess someone has an extralarge tumor or something. So I lean against the flagpole on the lawn in front of school waiting for Tiny Cooper, shivering in spite of the gloves and the hat and the coat and the hood. The wind tears across the lawn, and I can hear it whipping the flag above me, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to enter that building a nanosecond before the first period bell rings.