The Truth About Books and Boys

two

been journaling all week. so glad i found time to write this. hope y'all are doing well. tell me what you think of Oliver and this chapter and everything, please! thanks for reading!

two

William Brooks. I was pretty sure that he had a roman numeral attached to his name, but that didn’t matter, because everybody just called him Will. Much like Tommy Miller, he had a nickname, which was essentially the perpetual stand in for his real name. Because of Will’s notorious older brother, Charlie Brooks—who was a senior when I was a freshman—Will had automatically risen to a state of high popularity, even before he entered the school. In addition to being a year older than me and popular due to familial connections, Will also happened to be one of Tommy Miller’s best friends.

I didn’t know much about Will. He wasn’t as outgoing as Tommy—that was for sure. Unlike Tommy, he wasn’t as willing to randomly greet people who he didn’t know. He stuck to his own friends and rarely branched out. Whenever I saw Will, I always got the sense that there was more to him than met the eye—as if he was more than just a toned down version of the heightened elite. Will was also a bit of a manslut, as I had heard. He hooked up with a lot of girls and had a bit of a reputation, but when the rare phase arrived that he had a girlfriend, he didn’t dick around. I didn’t know Will Brooks, but I respected him. Until of course, I actually met him.

Like most weekends, I was in the school library, reading The Fault In Our Stars (TFIOS) for the billionth time. I couldn’t contain myself, even though I was in a public place, so I happened to be lightly crying. The library was practically empty, as it always was, and I was sitting towards the back, knowing that my emotions would inevitably get the better of me once again. I had planned the seclusion before I even arrived, and I assumed that no one would see me in a state of such despair (Thalia hated when I cried over books, so I couldn’t read TFIOS in our room). But then someone decided to sit right next to me, despite the entire library of empty seats. It was Will Brooks.

“What book is that?” he asked softly, keeping with the basic library etiquette—Will was very polite, as Thalia had once told me in the midst of one of our infrequent conversations during freshman year.

I looked up from TFIOS and over to Will, trying to contain myself. He was so close to me and I had never realized how beautiful he was until that moment. Though Tommy was the one that most girls pined after, Will was really the dark horse. “Uh, The Fault in Our Stars,” I told him, unsure why someone like him was talking to someone like me.

“Never heard of it,” he commented.

At that, I shut TFIOS and stared at him in absolute shock. If I had been reading any other book, he wouldn’t have gotten the response that he did, but because it was TFIOS—something so entrenched in popular culture and the media—I was stunned. “You’ve never heard of it?”

“Nope,” he shook his head. “Who’s it by?”

“J—John Green,” I stumbled out, “he’s basically G-d.” I didn’t know why I had made such a bold parallel, but I would attribute that to Will Brooks’ presence and his lack of knowledge about TFIOS.

“Can I see the book?” he asked me. I tentatively handed my blue bible to Will Brooks, and his eyes flitted over the back. When he was done, he said, “Oh, it’s a cancer story.”

“No,” I replied sharply, “it’s a love story that just so happens to involve cancer.” There was a difference, and just because I happened to be talking to Will Brooks didn’t mean that I was about to disregard that very important distinction.