Will Grayson, Will Grayson(41)
Author: John Green

I wave very slightly, my hand not even rising above my head. Jane puts a finger to her lips, and then dramatically tiptoes out of the house and very slowly closes the door behind her. She walks down the steps of the porch, and in the porch light I can see that she’s wearing the same green hoodie but now with red flannel pajama pants and socks. No shoes.

She walks up to me and whisper-says, “It’s a slightly creepy delight to see you.”

And I say, “I have a science question.”

She smiles and nods. “Of course you do. You’re wondering how it’s scientifically possible that you’re paying oh-so-much attention to me now that I have a boyfriend when you were totally uninterested in me before. Sadly, science is baffled by the mysteries of boy psychology.”

But I do have a science question—about Tiny and me, and about her, and about cats. “Can you explain to me about Schrödinger’s cat?”

“Come on,” she says, and reaches out for my coat and pulls me down the sidewalk. I’m walking beside her, not saying anything, and she’s mumbling, “God God God God God God God,” and I say, “What’s wrong?” and she says, “You. You, Grayson. You’re what’s wrong,” and I say, “What?” and she says, “You know,” and I say, “No I don’t,” and she—still walking and not looking at me—says, “There are probably some girls who don’t want guys to show up at their house randomly on a Tuesday night with questions about Edwin Schrödinger. I am sure such girls exist. But they don’t live at my house.”

We get five or six houses past Jane’s, near to where my car is parked, and then she turns toward a house with a FOR SALE sign and walks up the stairs to a porch swing. She sits down and pats a place next to her.

“Nobody lives here?” I ask.

“No. It’s been for sale for, like, a year.”

“You’ve probably made out with the Douche on this swing.”

“I probably have,” she answers. “Schrödinger was doing a thought experiment. Okay, so, this paper had just come out arguing that if, like, an electron might be in any one of four different places, it is sort of in all four places at the same time until the moment someone determines which of the four places it’s in. Does that make sense?”

“No,” I say. She’s wearing little white socks, and I can see her ankle when she kicks up her feet to keep the swing swinging.

“Right, it totally doesn’t make sense. It’s mind-bendingly weird. So Schrödinger tries to point this out. He says: put a cat inside a sealed box with a little bit of radioactive stuff that might or might not—depending on the location of its subatomic particles—cause a radiation detector to trip a hammer that releases poison into the box and kills the cat. Got it?”

“I think so,” I say.

“So, according to the theory that electrons are in all-possible-positions until they are measured, the cat is both alive and dead until we open the box and find out if it is alive or dead. He was not endorsing cat-killing or anything. He was just saying that it seemed a little improbable that a cat could be simultaneously alive and dead.”

But it doesn’t seem that improbable to me. It seems to me that all the things we keep in sealed boxes are both alive and dead until we open the box, that the unobserved is both there and not. Maybe that’s why I can’t stop thinking about the other Will Grayson’s huge eyes in Frenchy’s: because he had just rendered the dead-and-alive cat dead. I realize that’s why I never put myself in a situation where I really need Tiny, and why I followed the rules instead of kissing her when she was available: I chose the closed box. “Okay,” I say. I don’t look at her. “I think I get it.”

“Well, that’s not all, actually. It turns out to be somewhat more complicated.”

“I don’t think I’m smart enough to handle more complicated,” I say.

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” she says.

The porch swing creaks as I try to think everything through. I look over at her.

“Eventually, they figured out that keeping the box closed doesn’t actually keep the cat alive-and-dead. Even if you don’t observe the cat in whatever state it’s in, the air in the box does. So keeping the box closed just keeps you in the dark, not the universe.”

“Got it,” I say. “But failing to open the box doesn’t kill the cat.” We aren’t talking about physics anymore.

“No,” she says. “The cat was already dead—or alive, as the case may be.”

“Well, the cat has a boyfriend,” I say.

“Maybe the physicist likes that the cat has a boyfriend.”

“Possible,” I say.

“Friends,” she says.

“Friends,” I say. We shake on it.

Chapter fourteen

mom insists that before i go anywhere with tiny, he has to come over for dinner. i’m sure she checks all the sex predator websites beforehand. she doesn’t trust that i met him over the internet. and, given the circumstances, i can’t really blame her. she’s a little surprised when i go along with the plan, even if i do tell her

me: just don’t ask about his forty-three ex-boyfriends, okay? or ask him about why he’s carrying around an axe.

mom: . . .

me: i’m kidding about the axe part.

but really, nothing i can say can calm the woman down. it’s insane. she puts on those yellow rubber gloves and starts scrubbing with the intensity you usually reserve for when someone’s thrown up all over the furniture. i tell her she really doesn’t have to do that, because it’s not like tiny’s going to be eating off the floor. but she just waves me away and tells me to clean up my room.

I mean to clean up my room. really, i do. but all i manage to do is wipe the history from my web browser, and then i’m totally exhausted. it’s not like i don’t wipe the snot flakes from my bed in the morning. i’m a pretty clean guy. all the dirty clothes are shoved in the bottom of my closet. he’s not going to see them.

finally, it’s time for him to get here. at school, gideon asks me if i’m nervous about tiny coming over, and i tell him i’m totally not. but, yeah, that’s a lie. mostly i’m nervous about my mom and how she’s going to act.

I’m waiting for him in the kitchen, and mom’s running around like a madwoman.

mom: i should fix the salad.