Wil Peregrine

excerpt from Willa: A Biography

... I wonder if Krister feared others found him unlikeable, or if he was perhaps too unhappy to care. Like a ray of hope, his computer chimed with an instant message: someone from Milwaukee, whom he had met online earlier that week, wanted his attention.

----Ninety miles north, in a slower moving city at once both colder and more warm, Krister's new internet acquaintance, William Casten, stood tall and naked, with rounded shoulders and strong fingers, typing rapidly, resolutely, almost too passionately for a man nearly thirty who knew so little about his friend in Chicago. But William was anything but typical for a man his age, and the word "boy" equally missed its mark. He wore his hair long, past his shoulders, not as a veil but a mane, as natural and proud as a lion. He had a serious, thoughtful face, and his eyes fixed intently on his words as he typed, as if he saw there the entire unfolding of a conversation, a relationship, a lifetime—as if he could see all potential for happiness and torment in a single line of text.