I think about how much depends upon a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don’t scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it’s not.
It’s stupid to blame the other Will Grayson for something that was happening before the other Will Grayson existed. And yet.
And yet I keep thinking about him, and thinking about his eyes unblinking in Frenchy’s, waiting for someone who didn’t exist. In my memory, his eyes get bigger and bigger, almost like he’s a manga character. And then I’m thinking about that guy, Isaac, who was a girl. But the things that were said that made Will go to Frenchy’s to meet that guy—those things were said. They were real.
All at once I grab my phone from off my bedside table and call Jane. Voice mail. I look at the clock on the phone: it’s 9:42. I call Gary. He picks up on the fifth ring.
“Will?”
“Hey, Gary. Do you know Jane’s address?”
“Um, yes?”
“Can you give it to me?”
He pauses. “Are you going all stalker on me, Will?”
“No, I swear, I have a question about science,” I say.
“You have a Tuesday night at nine forty-two question about science?”
“Correct.”
“Seventeen twelve Wesley.”
“And where is her bedroom?”
“I have to tell you, man, that my stalker meter is kind of registering in the red zone right now.” I say nothing, waiting. And then finally he says, “If you’re facing the house, it’s front and left.”
“Awesome, thanks.”
I grab the keys off the kitchen counter on my way out, and Dad asks where I’m going, and I try just getting by with, “Out,” but that just results in the pausing of the TV. He comes up close as if to remind me he is just a little bit taller than I am, and sternly asks, “Out with whom and to where?”
“Tiny wants my help with his stupid play.”
“Back by eleven,” Mom says from the couch.
“Okay,” I say.
I walk down the street to the car. I can see my breath, but I don’t feel cold except on my gloveless hands, and I stand outside the car for a second, looking at the sky, the orange light coming from the city to the south, the leafless streetside trees quiet in the breeze. I open the door, which cracks the silence, and drive the mile to Jane’s house. I find a spot half a block down and walk back up the street to an old, two-story house with a big porch. Those houses don’t come cheap. There’s a light on in the front-left room, but as soon as I get there, I don’t want to walk up. What if she’s changing? What if she’s lying in bed and she sees a creepy guy face pressed against the glass? What if she’s making out with Randall McBitchsquealer? So I send her a text: “Take this in the least stalkery way possible: Im outside ur house.” It’s 9:47. I figure I’ll wait until the clock turns over to 9:50 and then leave. I shove one hand into my jeans and hold the phone with the other, pressing the volume up button each time the screen goes blank. It’s been 9:49 for at least ten seconds when the front door opens and Jane peers outside.
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.”