Will Grayson, Will Grayson: Chapters 17-20

"Happened yesterday, at least according to Gary and Nick and the twenty-three other people who told me about it. On a swing set, apparently. Oh, the metaphorical resonance."

It's always just a line or two that I found from some poem in the gigantic poetry anthology my sophomore English teacher taught from.

it's not like i feel some urgent desire to be friends, but i wish we could be one thing or the other, this, even though rationally i know that your departure from my life is a bountiful blessing, that on most days you are nothing but a 300-pound burden shackled to me, and that you clearly never liked me.

i always complained about you and your general hugeness, and now i miss it. typical guy, you'd say. they don't know what they've got till it's gone, and maybe you're right, tiny, i'm sorry about will grayson. both of us.

"You said yesterday that we were not not-dating, and like it's not a big deal, and I realize that it has been one week and one week only, but I actually don't want to not not-date you; I want to be your girlfriend or not, and I would think by now you're qualified to make at least a temporary decision on the topic, because I know I am."

Tiny is awfully talented at puncturing the love bubble I felt for him.

You get obsessed with the play and totally ignore me except to insult me to our friend behind my back, and you exploit your life and the people you say you care about so that your little play can make people love you and think how awesome you are and how liberated you are and how wondrously gay you are, but you know what?

I'm shouting, my arms whirling with gesticulations, and I don't even notice until I run out of important questions that Tiny is crying.

i start holding my breath, not like you do when you pass a graveyard or something like that. no. i'm trying to see how long i can do it before i pass out or die. it's a really convenient pastime — you can do it pretty much anywhere, class, lunch, at the urinal, in the discomfort of your own room.

i know it sounds like teenage idiocy — the needles! in my heart! and my eyes! — but the pattern seems inescapable.

it's not like i think he'll completely understand, yeah, we have the same name, but it's not like we're psychic twins, it's not like he'll wince in pain if i burn myself or anything, but that one night in chicago, i felt he understood a little of it.

WGrayson7: well, i agree that 'trial and error' is a pretty pessimistic name for it. and maybe that's what it is most of the time.

mom notices my unparalleled self-hatred at breakfast, it's probably the way i drown the cocoa puffs until the milk overflows that tips her off.

i mean, i have some pills that might interest you, but i think you're supposed to have a prescription, it's okay — it only takes up an hour of your time for them to diagnose it.

it's not like i'd been planning on advertising the fact that i'm angry, she kinda traps me into it.

gideon: because you're my friend, wingnut. because underneath all that denial, you're someone who's deeply, deeply nice, and because ever since you first mentioned it to me, i've been dying to see this musical

because both of us poured the toxins into our toxic friendship, and while i didn't exactly invent an imaginary boyfriend trap, i certainly contributed enough errors to our trials, there's no way we're ever going to find an ideal state of it.

i want to see through all the performance and all the pretending and get right to the truth, and maybe this is the most truth that maura and i will ever find — an acknowledgment of the lie, and of the feelings that fell behind it.

Jane and I spend the hours before Opening Night constructing the perfect preshow playlist, which comprises—as requested—odd-numbered pop punk songs and even-numbered tunes from musicals.

Also, he's wearing my clothes, which I delivered to him yesterday: khakis; a short-sleeve, plaid button-down I love; and my black Chucks. The entire effect would be surreal except the clothes are ridiculously wrinkled.

He and I realize simultaneously: the central voice of the show is shot.

I step off to the side, standing in cave-darkness next to Jane, whose fingers interlace with mine.

I can tell from his sloping shoulders and meek look that Gary's me.

Behind the two Tinys singing arm in arm, the guys in the chorus—including Ethan—pull off a hilariously elaborate old-fashioned, high-stepping, highly choreographed dance, their bats used as canes and their ball caps as top hats.

And then the song turns into a call and response, with Tiny singing his surprise that I knew he was gay and me singing that it was obvious.

"It got a lot better when I made it about love." He looks at me, smiling with half his mouth, and I know that's as close as he'll ever come. Tiny's the gay one, but I'm the sentimentalist.

Just after that scene, there's one with Tiny drunk at a party in which the character Janey gets her only time onstage—a duet with Phil Wrayson sung on opposite sides of a passed-out Tiny, the song culminating in Gary's voice suddenly toughening into confidence and then Janey and me leaning over Tiny's mumbling half-conscious body and kissing.

"Compassion is hot," she says as we kiss.

I jolt up and start to run onstage to pick him up, but Jane grabs a fistful of my shirt as Tiny raises his head toward the audience and says, "I fall and I fall and I fall and I fall and I fall."

now that we've made it, i'm guessing there's no way our plan is going to work, it's both insane and genius, which is what tiny deserves, and it required me to do a lot of things i don't usually do, including:
• talking to strangers
• asking strangers for favors
• being willing to make a complete fool of myself
• letting someone else (gideon) help me

it also relies on a number of things beyond my control, including:
• the kindness of strangers
• the ability of strangers to be spontaneous
• the ability of strangers to drive quickly
• tiny's musical lasting more than one act

i'm sure it's going to be a total disaster, but i guess the point is that i'm going to do it anyway.

it's so cute — there are like two hundred different emotions that flash across his face when he says her name — everything from extreme anxiety to utter bliss.

almost all the ex-boyfriends are like this — never really three-dimensional, but it soon becomes apparent that this is deliberate, that tiny's showing how he never got to know all of their dimensions, that he was so caught up in being in love that he didn't really take the time to think about what he was in love with, it's agonizingly truthful, at least for exes like me.

suddenly, tiny's in the spotlight, on the swing, and it's like my life has rewound and is playing back to me, only in musical form, it's exactly as i remember it . . . until it's not, and tiny's inventing this new dialogue for us.

he's swinging higher now, kicking his legs hard, the swing set groaning, it looks like he's going to bring the whole contraption down, but he just keeps pumping his legs and pulling against the chain with his arms and talking.

i can't tell whether the kid playing me is supposed to be in character or out of character when he asks tiny if he's all right, whatever the case, tiny waves the imitation me away, motions to the conductor, and a moment later, it starts

there's a silence then, people are waiting for the curtain to go down, for the show to definitely be over, for the ovations to start, i have less than a second, i squeeze gideon's pinkie tight, then let go.

me: my name is will grayson. and i appreciate you, tiny cooper!

then there's a rustling from the dark part of the stage, the other will grayson walks out of the chorus, he walks right up to tiny and looks him in the eye.