Will Grayson, Will Grayson(24)
Author: John Green

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 f**k 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  p**n  stores, even if, technically speaking, I am myself a guy who hangs out at  p**n  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- p**n -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  p**n  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.