Will Grayson, Will Grayson(39)
Author: John Green

I nod, but he doesn’t look over, even though we’re stopped at a light. “Well,” he goes on, “I was looking at those stars and they were fading away because it had been a few minutes since I’d turned out the light, and then I had a blinding light spiritual awakening. What is Tiny Dancer about? I mean, what is its subject, Grayson? You’ve read it.”

I assume that, as usual, he is asking this question rhetorically, so I say nothing so he’ll go on ranting, because as painful as it is for me to admit, there is something kind of wonderful about Tiny’s ranting, particularly on a quiet street when I am still half asleep. There is something about the mere act of him speaking that is vaguely pleasurable even though I wish it weren’t. It is something about his voice, not his pitch or his rapid-fire, caffeinated diction, but the voice itself—the familiarity of it, I guess, but also its inexhaustibility.

But he doesn’t say anything for a while and then I realize he actually does want me to answer. I don’t know what he wants to hear, so in the end I just tell him the truth. “Tiny Dancer is about Tiny Cooper,” I say.

“Exactly!” he shouts, pounding the steering wheel. “And no great musical is ever about a person, not really. And that’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the play. It’s not about tolerance or understanding or love or anything. It’s about me. And, like, nothing against me. I mean, I am pretty fabulous. Am I not?”

“You’re a pillar of fabulosity in the community,” I tell him.

“Yes, exactly,” he says. He’s smiling, but it’s tough to tell how much he’s kidding. We’re pulling into school now, the place entirely dead, not even a car in the faculty lot. He turns into his usual spot, reaches into the back for his backpack, gets out, and starts walking across the desolate lot. I follow.

“Four,” he says. “So I realized, in spite of my great and terrible fabulousness, the play can’t be about me. It must be about something even more fabulous: love. The polychromic many-splendored dreamcoat of love in all its myriad glories. And so it had to be revised. Also retitled. And so I had to stay up all night. And I’ve been writing like crazy, writing a musical called Hold Me Closer. We’ll need more sets than I thought. Also! Also! More voices in the chorus. The chorus must be like a f**king wall of song, you know?”

“Sure, okay. What’s the fifth thing?”

“Oh, right.” He wiggles a shoulder out of his backpack and slings it around to his chest. He unzips the front pocket, digs around for a moment, and then pulls out a rose made entirely of green duct tape. He hands it to me. “When I get stressed,” Tiny explains, “I get crafty. Okay. Okay. I’m gonna go to the auditorium and start blocking out some scenes, see how the new stuff looks onstage.”

I stop walking. “Um, do you need me to help or something?”

He shakes his head no. “No offense, Grayson, but what exactly are your theater credentials?”

He’s walking away from me, and I try to stand my ground, but then finally chase after him up the steps to school, because I’ve got a burning question. “Then why the hell did you wake me up at five forty-three in the morning?”

He turns to me now. It becomes impossible not to feel Tiny’s immensity as he stands over me, shoulders back, his width almost entirely blocking the school behind him, his body a bundle of tiny tremors. His eyes are open unnaturally wide, like a zombie’s. “Well, I needed to tell someone,” he says.

I think about that a minute, and then follow him into the auditorium. For the next hour, I watch Tiny as he runs around the theater like a rampaging lunatic, mumbling to himself. He puts masking tape down on the floor to mark the spots of his imaginary sets; he pirouettes across the stage as he hums song lyrics in fast motion; and every so often he shouts, “It’s not about Tiny! It’s about love!” Then people start to file in for their first period drama class, so Tiny and I go to precalc, and Tiny performs the Big-Man-in-Small-Desk miracle, and I experience the traditional amazement, and school is boring, and then at lunch I’m sitting with Gary and Nick and Tiny, and Tiny is talking about his blinding light spiritual awakening in a manner that—nothing against Tiny—kind of implies that maybe Tiny has not fully internalized the idea that the earth does not spin around the axis of Tiny Cooper, and then I say to Gary, “Hey, where is Jane?”

And Gary says, “Sick.”

To which Nick adds, “Sick in the I’m-spending-the-day-with-my-boyfriend-at-the-botanical-gardens kind of way.” Gary shoots Nick a disapproving look.

Tiny quickly changes the subject, and I try to laugh at all the appropriate moments for the rest of lunch, but I’m not listening.

I know that she is dating Douchepants McWater Polo, and I know that sometimes when you date people you engage in idiotic activities like going to the botanical gardens, but in spite of all the knowledge that ought to protect me, I still feel like shit for the rest of the day. One of these days, I keep telling myself, you’ll learn to truly shut up and not care. And until then . . . well, until then I’ll keep taking deep breaths because it feels like the wind got knocked out of me. For all my not crying, I sure feel a hell of a lot worse than I did at the end of All Dogs Go to Heaven.

I call Tiny after school, but I get his voice mail, so I send him a text: “The Original Will Grayson requests the pleasure of a phone call whenever possible.” He doesn’t call until 9:30. I’m sitting on the couch watching a dumb romantic comedy with my parents. The plates from our take-out-Chinese-put-on-real-plates-so-you-feel-like-it’s-a-homemade dinner fill the coffee table. Dad is falling asleep, as he always does when he’s not working. Mom sits closer to me than seems necessary.

Watching the movie, I can’t stop thinking about wanting to be at the ridiculous botanical gardens with Jane. Just walking around, her in that hoodie, and me making jokes about the Latin names of the plants, and her saying that ficaria verna would be a good name for a nerdcore hip-hop crew that only raps in Latin, and so on. I can picture the whole damned thing, actually, and it almost makes me desperate enough to complain to Mom about the situation, but that will only mean questions about Jane for the next seven to ten years. My parents get so few details about my private life that whenever they do stumble upon some morsel, they cling to it for eons. I wish they’d do a better job of hiding their desire for me to have tons of friends and girlfriends.