Now and Again Read Free

yet to receive even a single form letter in reply. Now she guessed she never would.
    1.3 Will
    W ill Rayburn slouched in front of the television set and watched the penguins string out single file across the ice. Each step transformed four or five inches of the snowy expanse in front of them into the snowy expanse behind as the sturdy bodies trudged across the ice floe, shuffling footstep after shuffling footstep, a testament to survival through unquestioning singleness of purpose. The scenery was bleak—gorgeous and deadly. The narrator announced that the temperature was eighty degrees below zero, that Antarctic winds rose regularly to one hundred miles per hour, and still the penguins put one stubby leg in front of the other as they made their way back to the ancestral birthplace—home! Will’s blue eyes watered to think of it. There was honor in conformity, beauty in unquestioning obedience to instinct, comfort in knowing what the next step was, even if it was genetically programmed and identical to the last million steps, which, he calculated in his head, was how many four-inch increments it was from the edge of the ice to the inland nesting ground.
    A commercial for deodorant came on just as his mother entered the room. “Are you crying?” she asked. “What are you crying for?”
    “Just something in my eye,” said Will without looking up. It certainly wasn’t because he, too, struggled with hormonally induced odor or because neither of his parents had thought to clue him in about bodily changes in general or about the difference between antiperspirant and deodorant in particular, both of which it appeared he needed, or because Tula Santos had turned him down that afternoon when he’d finally gotten up the nerve to ask her out.
    “Here, let me see.”
    “No, no, it’s gone now,” said Will, batting her hand away and sinking farther into the shapeless cushions of the couch.
    “Well, you can’t sit in front of the television all day. Don’t you have homework?”
    “Okay, okay,” said Will, hoping she would leave the room. He liked to be alone. He liked to think of himself as coming from and going nowhere—untethered, unaffiliated, even unnamed. But he couldn’t figure out whether conformity or nonconformity was what he wanted. Of course he wanted to be an individual, of course he wanted to do something no human being had ever before done, but he also wanted to fit in. He wanted to merge with something bigger than himself, to be an integral part of something transformative and grand, though he also wanted to be completely recognizable and unique in case Tula ever looked in his direction and said “Hey” in the breathy way Sammi Green said “Hey” to whichever of the football players she was dating at the time.
    “Look, Will. This letter is addressed to you.”
    His mother was going on about something from the state university she had found among the junk mail and bills, an envelope with his name on it—what did it have to do with him! The show was coming on again, a distant shot of a lone penguin, a tiny black speck against the ice. Just as the narrator, his voice heavy with inevitability, started to explain what happened to stragglers, his mother hit the off button and repeated, “You can’t sit here all day.” Then she went out of the room, leaving Will behind to ponder what lessons the penguin’s plight might hold for his own.
    He couldn’t sit there all day.
    He knew he couldn’t, but somehow he was powerless to move. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, he told himself the way his parents had always told him, as if his name conferred special powers, but all he could do was twitch his wrist in the direction of the remote control, which had fallen to the floor on top of the envelope from the university. Not that he had any doubt about what happened to stragglers and not that the next day wouldn’t find him going through the motions at school—not because of some burning desire to