and then there are nights like tonight, when the truth is what comes out, because it’s what we need the most. or maybe just one of us needs it the most, but the other knows the right time to give it.

like now, when what i want most in the universe is to have him beside me. he knows this, and he says

boundbydad: if i was there, i would stand behind your chair and put my hands on your shoulders, lightly, and would rub them gently until you finished your last sentence

boundbydad: then i would lean forward and trace my hands down your arms and curve my neck into yours and let you turn into me and rest there for a while

boundbydad: rest

boundbydad: and when you were ready, i’d kiss you once and lift myself away, sit back on your bed and wait for you there, just so we could lie there, and you could hold me, and i could hold you

boundbydad: and it would be so peaceful. completely peaceful. like the feeling of sleep, but being awake in it together.

grayscale: that would be so wonderful. boundbydad: i know. i would love it, too.

I can’t imagine us saying these things to each other out loud. but even if i can’t imagine hearing these words, i can imagine living them. i don’t even picture it. instead i’m in it. how i would feel with him here. that peace. it would be so happy, and it makes me sad because it only exists in words.

early on, isaac let me know that he always finds pauses awkward - if too much time went by without me responding, he’d think i was typing something else in another window, or had left the computer, or was IMing twelve other boys besides him. and i had to admit that i felt the same fears. so now we do this thing whenever we’re pausing. we just type

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: i’m here

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: i’m here

until the next sentence comes.

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: i’m here

grayscale: i’m here

boundbydad: what are we doing?

grayscale: ???

boundbydad: i think it’s time

boundbydad: time for us to meet

grayscale: !!!

grayscale: seriously?

boundbydad: deliriously

grayscale: you mean i would get a chance to see you

boundbydad: hold you for real

grayscale: for real

boundbydad: yes

grayscale: yes?

boundbydad: yes.

grayscale: yes!

boundbydad: am i crazy?

grayscale: yes! ☺

boundbydad: i’ll go crazy if we don’t.

grayscale: we should.

boundbydad: we should.

grayscale: ohmygodwow

boundbydad: it’s going to happen, isn’t it?

grayscale: we can’t go back now.

boundbydad: i’m so excited . . .

grayscale: and terrified

boundbydad: . . . and terrified

grayscale: . . . but most of all excited?

boundbydad: but most of all excited.

It’s going to happen. i know it’s going to happen.

giddily, terrifyingly, we pick a date.

friday. six days away

only six days.

In six days, maybe my life will actually begin.

this is so insane.

and the most insane thing of all is that i’m so excited that i want to immediately tell isaac all about it, even though he’s the one person who already knows it’s happened. not maura, not simon, not derek, not my mom - nobody in this whole wide world but isaac. he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.

I have to believe that’s a sign.

Chapter five

It’s one of those weekends where I don’t leave the house at all—literally—except briefly with Mom to go to the White Hen. Such weekends usually don’t bother me, but I keep sort of hoping Tiny Cooper and/or Jane might call and give me an excuse to use the ID I’ve hidden in the pages of Persuasion on my bookshelf. But no one calls; neither Tiny nor Jane even shows up online; and it’s colder than a witch’s tit in a steel bra, so I just stay in the house and catch up on homework. I do my precalc homework, and then when I’m done I actually sit with the textbook for like three hours and try to understand what I just did. That’s the kind of weekend it is—the kind where you have so much time you go past the answers and start looking into the ideas.

Then on Sunday night while I’m at the computer checking to see if anyone’s online, my dad’s head appears in my doorway. “Will,” he says, “do you have a sec to talk in the living room?” I spin around in the desk chair and stand up. My stomach flips a bit because the living room is the room least likely to be lived in, the room where the nonexistence of Santa is revealed, where grandmothers die, where grades are frowned upon, and where one learns that a man’s station wagon goes inside a woman’s garage, and then exits the garage, and then enters again, and so on until an egg is fertilized, and etc.

My dad is very tall, and very thin, and very bald, and he has long thin fingers, which he taps against an arm of a floral-print couch. I sit across from him in an overstuffed, overgreen armchair. The finger tapping goes on for about thirty-four years, but he doesn’t say anything, and then finally I say, “Hey, Dad.”

He has a very formalized, intense way of talking, my dad. He always talks to you as if he’s informing you that you have terminal cancer—which is actually a big part of his job, so it makes sense. He looks at me with those sad, intense you-have-cancer eyes, and he says, “Your mother and I are wondering about your plans.”

And I say, “Uh, well. I thought I would, uh, go to bed pretty soon. And then, just go to school. I’m going to a concert on Friday. I already told Mom.”

He nods. “Yes, but after that.”

“Uh, after that? You mean, like, get into college and get a job and get married and give you grandchildren and stay off drugs and live happily ever after?”

He almost smiles. It is an exceedingly hard thing, to get my dad to smile. “There’s one facet of that process in which your mother and I are particularly interested at this particular juncture in your life.”

“College?”

“College,” he says.

“Don’t have to worry about it until next year,” I point out.

“It’s never too early to plan,” he says. And then he starts talking about this program at Northwestern where you do both college and medical school in, like, six years so that you can be in residency by the time you’re twenty-five, and you can stay close to home but of course live on campus and whatever whatever whatever, because after about eleven seconds, I realize he and Mom have decided I should go to this particular program, and that they are introducing me to the idea early, and that they will periodically bring this program up over the next year, pushing and pushing and pushing. And I realize, too, that if I can get in, I will probably go. There are worse ways to make a living.

You know how people are always saying your parents are always right? “Follow your parents’ advice; they know what’s good for you.” And you know how no one ever listens to this advice, because even if it’s true it’s so annoying and condescending that it just makes you want to go, like, develop a meth addiction and have unprotected sex with eighty-seven thousand anonymous partners? Well, I listen to my parents. They know what’s good for me. I’ll listen to anyone, frankly. Almost everyone knows better than I do.

Andbutso little does my dad know, but all his explanation of this future is lost on me; I’m already fine with it. No, I’m thinking about how little I feel in this absurdly immense chair, and I’m thinking about the fake ID warming up Jane Austen’s pages, and I’m thinking about whether I’m more mad at Tiny or in awe of him, and thinking about Friday, steering clear of Tiny in the mosh pit as he tries to dance like everyone else, and the heat turned on too high in the club and everyone sweating through their clothes and the music so uptempo and goose bumps that I don’t even care what they’re singing about.

And I say, “Yeah, it sounds really cool, Dad,” and he’s talking about how he knows people there, and I’m just nodding nodding nodding.

I’m at school Monday morning twenty minutes early because Mom has to get to the hospital by seven—I guess someone has an extralarge tumor or something. So I lean against the flagpole on the lawn in front of school waiting for Tiny Cooper, shivering in spite of the gloves and the hat and the coat and the hood. The wind tears across the lawn, and I can hear it whipping the flag above me, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to enter that building a nanosecond before the first period bell rings.

The buses let off, and the lawn starts to fill up with freshmen, none of whom seems particularly impressed by me. And then I see Clint, a tenured member of my former Group of Friends, walking toward me from the junior parking lot, and I’m able to convince myself that he’s not really walking toward me until his visible breath is blowing over me like a small, malodorous cloud. And I’m not going to lie: I kind of hope he’s about to apologize for the smallmindedness of certain of his friends.

“Hey, fucker,” he says. He calls everyone fucker. Is it a compliment? An insult? Or maybe it is both at once, which is precisely what makes it so useful.

I wince a little from the sourness of his breath, and then just say, “Hey.” Equally noncommittal. Every conversation I ever had with Clint or any of the Group of Friends is identical: all the words we use are stripped bare, so that no one ever knows what anyone else is saying, so that all kindness is cruelty, all selfishness generous, all care callous.

And he says, “Got a call from Tiny this weekend about his musical. Wants student council to fund it.” Clint is student council vice president. “He told me all the fuck about it. A musical about a big gay bastard and his best friend who uses tweezers to jack off ’cause his dick’s so small.” He’s saying all this with a smile. He’s not being mean. Not exactly.

And I want to say, That’s so incredibly original. Where do you come up with these zingers, Clint? Do you own some kind of joke factory in Indonesia where you’ve got eight-yearolds working ninety hours a week to deliver you that kind of top-quality witticism? There are boy bands with more original material. But I say nothing.

“So yeah,” Clint finally continues. “I think I might help Tiny out at the meeting tomorrow. Because that play sounds like a fantastic idea. I’ve only got one question: are you going to sing your own songs? Because I’d pay to see that.”

I laugh a little, but not too much. “I’m not much for drama,” I say, finally. Right then, I feel an enormous presence behind me. Clint raises his chin way the hell up to look at Tiny and then nods at him. He says, “’Sup, Tiny,” and then walks away.

“He trying to steal you back?” Tiny asks.

I turn around, and now I can talk. “You go all weekend without logging on or calling me and yet you find time to call him in your continuing attempts to ruin my social life through the magic of song?”

“First off, Tiny Dancer isn’t going to ruin your social life, because you don’t have a social life. Second off, you didn’t call me, either. Third off, I was so busy! Nick and I spent almost the entire weekend together.”

“I thought I explained to you why you couldn’t date Nick,” I say, and Tiny’s just starting to talk again when I see Jane, hunched forward, plowing through the wind. She’s wearing a not-thick-enough hoodie and walking up to us.

I say hi, and she says hi, and she comes and stands next to me as if I’m a space heater or something, and she squints into the wind, and I say, “Hey, take my coat.” I take it off and she buries herself in it. I’m still trying to think of a question to ask Jane when the bell goes off, and we all hustle inside.

I don’t see Jane at all during the entire school day, which is a little frustrating, because it’s even-the-hallways-are-freezing cold, and I keep worrying that after school I’m gonna freeze to death on the walk to Tiny’s car. After my last class, I race downstairs and unlock my locker. My coat is stuffed inside it.

Now, it is possible to slip a note into a locked locker through the vents. Even, with some pushing, a pencil. Once, Tiny Cooper slipped a Happy Bunny book into my locker. But I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine how Jane, who, after all, is not the world’s strongest individual, managed to stuff an entire winter coat through the tiny slits in my locker.

But I’m not here to ask questions, so I put my coat on and walk out to the parking lot, where Tiny Cooper is sharing one of those hand-shake-followed-by-one-armed-hug things with none other than Clint. I open the passenger door and get into Tiny’s Acura. He shows up soon afterward, and although I’m pissed at him, even I am able to appreciate the fascinating and complex geometry involved in Tiny Cooper inserting himself into a tiny car.

“I have a proposition,” I tell him as he engages in another miracle of engineering—that of fastening his seat belt.

“I’m flattered, but I’m not gonna sleep with you,” Tiny answers.

“Not funny. Listen, my proposition is that if you back off this Tiny Dancer business, I will—well, what do you want me to do? Because I’ll do anything.”

“Well, I want you to hook up with Jane. Or at least call her. After I so artfully arranged for you to be alone together, she seems to have gotten the impression that you don’t want to date her.”

“I don’t,” I say. Which is entirely true and entirely not. The stupid, all-encompassing truth.

“What do you think this is, eighteen thirty-two? When you like someone and they like you, you fucking put your lips against their lips and then you open your mouth a little, and then just a little hint of tongue to spice things up. I mean, God, Grayson. Everybody’s always got their panties in a twist about how the youth of America are debaucherous, sex-crazed maniacs passing out handjobs like they were lollipops, and you can’t even kiss a girl who definitely likes you?”