will & bentley

chapter one-just to see what'll happen

Being the new kid sucks. Being the new kid sucks even more when your first name and last name are one letter apart. I took pity on William Williams when he walked into Mrs. McCormick's second grade classroom. 

She sat him up in the front of the room and had him share his name and shit. In all three years of my schooling up until this point, I had a zero-friend streak going, and I thought it was great. Of course, at this point Will wasn't my friend.

As he walked back to take the empty seat next to mine, I suddenly realized that Will would sit by himself at lunch, and I felt bad for him. So I punched him in the arm.

"Ow." Will said. "Asshole." 

In this glorious, magical moment of my life, Will had exposed me to my first swear word. It was not my last.  I had always loved words and these words were even more exciting than spizzericum or panjandrum. 

"Sit next to me from now on." I whispered back. 

"Okay. What's your name anyway?" Will murmured.

"Bentley. I was named after the guitars." 

We sat together at lunch that day. Will told me he thought that his parents hated him because of "his damn stupid name." I told him that God must hate me, because I just wont die. 

"You can too." Will said.

"I can't. I swear." I retorted. I found this out last summer when I rode my bike off of the cliff by the lake behind my house. I should've drowned. I should've died. But I didn't, and now I'm going to show Will.

There is a gap between the chainlink fence, so wecrawled through it and ran to the woods behind my house. My mom works and I live three minutes away, so we arrived there in no time.

"Just so you know," Will said, "I'm just coming to see what'll happen." 

I would later learn that will loves to do stuff "just to see what'll happen." He tried out for the basketball team "just to see what'll happen," and look at where that got him. He was the point guard for our high school team, the Parktown Panthers. But that's not important right now.

We arrived at the cliff overlooking the lake. It was a good 100 feet to the bottom. I grabbed Will by the hand.

"See you at the bottom."  I yelled, jumping to what should've been my death. I thrashed around in the lake water, it filling my lungs. I thrashed around and coughed, the water pulling my small, skinny legs under it's waves. I swam to the shore. 

The first thing I saw when I wiped the water out of my eyes was Will's blond hair. Will had messy blond hair he kept in a shorter hairstyle than mine, and a few freckles lining his nose. I loved Will's hair. It was the second thing you noticed about him. The first thing you notice is the fact that he is the tallest person I'd ever met. By the time we were juniors, he was already 6"8. He was the tallest on the basketball team.  He had a somewhat dopey smile that slanted upward on the right. Will was beautiful.

His clammy hands slid into mine.

"Shit dude!" He yelled. "I thought you were gonna die!" 

"Me too," I said. "I never do."

+++

move to the mountains by clock opera

and i tried, but i couldn't see the curve, 

that's running 'round the earth

'til I saw you