“You’ve never physically seen this guy,” I say.
“No,” he says, “but I’ve seen him in like a thousand pictures.”
“He’s a fifty-year-old man,” I say, matter-of-factly. “He’s a pervert. One Will to another: No way that Isaac is who you think he is.”
“He’s probably just—I don’t know, maybe he met another freaking Isaac on the bus and he’s stuck in Bizarro World.”
“Why the hell would he ask you to go to Frenchy’s?”
“Good question. Why would someone go to a p**n store?” He kind of smirks at me.
“Fair point,” I say. “Yeah, that’s true. There’s a story to it, though.”
I wait for a second for Will Grayson to ask me about my story, but he doesn’t. Then I start telling him anyway. I tell him about Jane and Tiny Cooper and the Maybe Dead Cats and “Annus Miribalis” and Jane’s locker combination and the copy shop clerk who couldn’t count, and I weasel a couple of laughs out of him along the way, but mostly he just keeps glancing back toward Frenchy’s, waiting for Isaac. His face seems to alternate between hope and anger. He pays very little attention to me actually, which is fine, really, because I’m just telling my story to tell it, talking to a stranger because it’s the only safe kind of talking you can do, and the whole time my hand is in my pocket holding my phone, because I want to make sure I feel it vibrate if someone calls.
And then he tells me about Isaac, about how they’ve been friends for a year and that he always wanted to meet him because there’s just no one like Isaac out in the suburb where he lives, and it dawns on me pretty quickly that Will Grayson likes Isaac in a not-altogether-platonic way. “So, I mean what perverted fifty-year-old would do that?” Will says. “What pervert spends a year of his life talking to me, telling me everything about his fake self, while I tell him everything about my real self? And if a perverted fifty-year-old did do that, why wouldn’t he show up at Frenchy’s to rape and murder me? Even on a totally impossible night, that is totally impossible.”
I mull it over for a second. “I don’t know,” I say finally. “People are pretty f**king weird, if you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah.” He’s not looking back to Frenchy’s anymore, just forward. I can see him out of the corner of my eye, and I’m sure he can see me out of the corner of his, but mostly we are looking not at each other, but at the same spot on the street as cars rumble past, my brain trying to make sense of all the impossibilities, all the coincidences that brought me here, all the true-and-false things. And we’re quiet for a while, so long that I take my phone out of my pocket and look at it and confirm that no one has called and then put it back, and then finally I feel Will turning his head away from the spot on the street and toward me and he says, “What do you think it means?”
“What?” I ask.
“There aren’t that many Will Graysons,” he says. “It’s gotta mean something, one Will Grayson meeting another Will Grayson in a random p**n store where neither Will Grayson belongs.”
“Are you suggesting that God brought two of Chicago-land’s underage Will Graysons into Frenchy’s at the same time?”
“No, ass**le,” he says, “but I mean, it must mean something .”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s hard to believe in coincidence, but it’s even harder to believe in anything else.” And just then, the phone jumps to life in my hand, and as I am pulling it out of my pocket, Will Grayson’s phone starts ringing.
And even for me, that’s a lot of coincidences. He mutters, “God, it’s Maura,” as if I’m going to know who Maura is, and he just stares at the phone, seeming unsure of whether to answer. My call is from Tiny. Before I flip open the phone, I say to Will, “It’s my friend Tiny,” and I’m looking at Will—at cute, confuzzled Will.
I flip open the phone.
“Grayson!” Tiny shouts over the din of the music. “I’m in love with this band! We’re gonna stay for like two more songs and then I’m gonna come get you. Where are you, baby! Where’s my pretty little baby Grayson!”
“I’m across the street,” I shout back. “And you better get down on your knees and thank the sweet Lord, because man, Tiny, have I got a guy for you.”
Chapter eight
I am so freaked out, you could pull a clown out of my ass and i wouldn’t be at all surprised.
It would make maybe a little sense if this OTHER WILL GRAYSON standing right next to me wasn’t a will grayson at all but was instead the gold medal champion of the mindfuck olympics. it’s not like when i first saw him i thought to myself, hey, that kid must be named will grayson, too. no, the only thing i thought was, hey, that’s not isaac. i mean, right age, but entirely wrong face pic. so i ignored him. i turned back to the dvd case i was pretending to study, which was for this p**n o called the sound and the furry. it was all about ‘moo sex,’ with these people pictured on the cover wearing cow suits (one udder). i was glad that no real cows were harmed (or pleasured) in the making of the film. but still. not my thing. next to it was a dvd called as i get laid dying, which had a hospital scene on the front. it was like grey’s anatomy, only with less grey and more anatomy. i totally thought for a moment, i can’t wait to tell isaac about this, forgetting, of course, that he was supposed to be with me.
It’s not like i wouldn’t have noticed him come in; the place was empty except for me, o.w.g., and the clerk, who looked like the pillsbury doughboy if the dough had been left out for a week. i guess everyone else was using the internet to get their p**n . and frenchy’s wasn’t exactly inviting - it was lit like a 7-eleven, which made all the plastic seem much more plastic, and the metal seem much more metal, and the naked people on the covers of the dvd cases look even less hot and more like cheap p**n . passing up go down on moses and afternoon delight in august, i found myself in this bizarre penis produce section. because my mind is, at heart, full of f**ked up shit, i immediately started to picture this sequel to toy story called sex toy story, where all these dildos and vibrators and rabbit ears suddenly came to life and have to do things like cross the street in order to get back home.