Jane’s standing by my locker with her hands behind her back when I get there after first period, and when I get to her, there’s this awkward but not unpleasant should-we-kiss moment, or at least I think that’s what the moment is, but then she says, “Sucks about Tiny, huh?”
“What does?” I ask.
“He and the other Will Grayson. Kaput.”
I tilt my head at her, baffled. “No, he just said they were fine. I asked him in precalc.”
“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.”
“Then why didn’t he tell me?” I hear my voice catch as I say it.
Jane grabs my hand and stands up to say into my ear, “Hey,” and then I look back at her, trying to act like it doesn’t matter. “Hey,” she says again.
“Hey,” I say.
“Just go back to normal with him, huh? Just talk to him, Will. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but everything goes better for you when you talk to people.”
“You wanna come over after school?” I ask.
“Absolutely.” She smiles, then spins a half-circle in place and walks off. She takes a few steps before turning back and saying, “Talk. To. Tiny.”
For a while, I just stand there at my locker. Even after the bell rings. I know why he didn’t tell me: it isn’t because he feels weird that for the first time in human history, he’s single and I’m taken(ish). He said the other Will Grayson was fine because I don’t matter.
Tiny might ignore you when he’s in love. But when Tiny Cooper lies to you about his heartbreak, the Geiger counter has tripped the hammer. The radiation has been released. The friendship is dead.
That day after school Jane’s at my house, sitting across a Scrabble board from me. I spell hallow, which is a great word but also opens up a triple-word-score spot for her. “Oh my God, I love you,” she says, and it must be close enough to true, because if she’d said that a week before I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, and now it hangs in the air forever until she finally bursts the awkwardness by saying, “That would be a weird thing to say to someone you just started dating! Boy-howdy, is this awkward!” After a moment of silence, she keeps going, “Hey, to extend the weird, are we dating?”
And the word turns my stomach a little and I say, “Can we be not not-dating?”
She smiles and spells cowed for thirty-six points. It’s absolutely amazing, the whole thing. Her shoulder blades are amazing. Her passionately ironic love for 1980s television dramas is amazing. The way she laughs at my jokes really loudly is amazing—all of which only makes it more amazing that she doesn’t fill the Tiny hole left by his absence.
To be perfectly honest, I felt it last semester when he went off to become the GSA president and I fell into the Group of Friends. Probably that’s why I wrote the letter to the editor and signed it. Not because I wanted the school to know I’d written it, but because I wanted Tiny to know.
The next day, Mom drops me off early. I go in and slip a note in Jane’s locker, which I’ve gotten in the habit of doing. 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. I said I wouldn’t be the kind of boyfriend who reads her poetry, and I’m not, but I guess I am the kind of cheesy bastard who slips lines of poetry into her mornings.
Today’s: I see thee better in the dark / I do not need a light.—Emily Dickinson
And then I settle into my precalc seat twenty minutes early. I try to study a little for chem but give up within twenty seconds. I get out my phone and check my email. Nothing. I keep looking over at his empty chair, the chair he fills with a completeness unimaginable to the rest of us.
I decide to write him an email, thumbing it out on my tiny keyboard. I’m just passing time, really. I keep using unnecessarily long words because they make the writing soak up the minutes.
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.
The first bell finally rings. I save the email as a draft.
Tiny sits down next to me and says, “Hey, Grayson,” and I say, “Hey, how’s it going?” and he says, “Good, man. Dress rehearsal today,” and I say, “Awesome,” and he says, “What’s going on with you?” and I say, “This paper for English is killing me,” and he says, “Yeah, my grades are in the tank,” and I say, “Yeah,” and the second bell rings and we turn our attention to Mr. Applebaum.
Four hours later: I’m in the middle of the line of people rushing out of the physics classroom fifth period when I see Tiny walking past the window. He stops, dramatically pivots toward the door, and waits for me.
“We broke up,” he says matter-of-factly.
“So I heard. Thanks for letting me know—after telling everyone else.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. People weave around us like we’re a blood clot in the hallway’s artery. “Rehearsal’s gonna go late—we’re gonna do a run-through after dress—but you wanna get some late-night dinner? Hot Dog Palace or something?
I consider it a minute, thinking about the unsent email in my drafts folder, and the other Will Grayson, and Tiny up onstage telling me the truth behind my back, and then I say, “I don’t think so. I’m tired of being your Plan B, Tiny.”
It doesn’t faze him, of course. “Well, I guess I’ll see you at the play then.”
“I don’t know if I can make it, but yeah, I’ll try.”
It’s hard to read Tiny’s face for some reason, but I think I’ve gotten a shot in. I don’t know exactly why I want to make him feel like crap, but I do.
I’m walking to Jane’s locker to find her when she comes up behind me and says, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”