Will Cooper

Quick Facts

• Role: Protagonist; primary love interest and central obstacle in a story of Forbidden Love and Obstacles
• Age: 21; Occupation: high school English teacher and slam poet
• First appearance: Chapter 1, as the charming neighbor across from Layken Cohen
• Family: Sole guardian to his nine-year-old brother, Caulder Cooper, after their parents’ deaths
• Defining tension: Balances duty to Caulder and his career against his love for Layken

Who They Are

At first glance, Will Cooper is the boy next door—tall, athletic, carefully put together, and immediately magnetic. Layken notices his maturity and presence before she learns why: years of surviving grief have aged him. He’s the neighbor who makes grilled cheese and plays “Would You Rather,” the teacher whose face drains in the hallway when he realizes who’s in his class, and the poet who bleeds honesty onstage. The contradiction is the point—Will is a careful life built around duty, cracked open by connection.

Details of his appearance—olive skin, black hair, and striking green eyes inherited from his mother—carry emotional weight; the eyes link him to a family he’s lost, a reminder that the boy with the playful grin also carries a private vigil of grief.

Personality & Traits

Will’s personality is the product of collision: a young man forced into adulthood who still aches to feel joy. He keeps strict boundaries to protect what he’s built for Caulder, yet onstage he refuses to hide. His defining struggle isn’t choosing between love and duty—it’s learning how to hold both without breaking.

• Responsible and prematurely mature: Parenting at nineteen shapes every choice. He urges Lake to change classes, enforces distance after the hallway reveal, and treats his job as nonnegotiable. This maps to Responsibility and Premature Maturity, where adulthood arrives before he’s ready, but he answers it anyway.
• Passionate and expressive: Slam gives him permission to be honest. At Club N9NE, his poem “Death” exposes the raw wound of losing his parents, embodying The Power of Poetry and Self-Expression.
• Conflicted and guarded: He’s torn between rule and feeling—asking Lake to withdraw, insisting they “can’t be friends,” and labeling the laundry-room kiss a “weak moment.” Guardedness is his attempt at ethics.
• Protective: He defends Lake from Javi and structures life around Caulder’s stability, even if it costs him personally. Protection is love in action.
• Playful under pressure: On their first date, he’s witty, curious, and game-playing—proof there’s a boy inside the man duty made.

Character Journey

Will begins the novel split in two: guardian-teacher by day, grieving poet by night. Lake’s arrival collapses that partition. The hallway revelation forces him to choose caution, and he doubles down on boundaries—detentions, distance, refusals—because the stakes include a child and a career he needs to keep that child safe. Yet shared losses (and Lake’s own family crisis) teach him that life can’t be lived as a list. His final poem, “Better than Third,” marks the synthesis: he rejects ranking love beneath duty and work. Instead, he claims a life where responsibility and desire coexist, choosing openly, not apologetically. Will’s arc moves from survival mode to integrated living—he stops letting circumstance write his story and starts writing it himself.

Key Relationships

• Layken Cohen: Lake is both Will’s mirror and his challenge. Their instant connection—music, poetry, and the ache of loss—meets an immediate boundary when she becomes his student. Lake forces Will to test whether ethics must mean erasure; with her, he learns love can be principled without being punitive.

• Caulder Cooper: Caulder is Will’s true north. Everything—from the steady job to the rigid rules—exists to protect his brother’s childhood. The fear of jeopardizing Caulder’s safety explains Will’s severity after missteps; when Will chooses Lake “first,” it’s not a demotion of Caulder, but a reimagining of what a whole family can be.

• Julia Cohen: Julia sees past the scandal to the character beneath. Though she confronts Will, she ultimately affirms his motives and nudges Lake toward him, recognizing that his restraint was an act of care—not just for himself, but for Lake and her relationship with her mother.

• Eddie: As the perceptive friend, Eddie pieces together the secret and becomes a safe listener. Will’s candid confession during “detention” signals how badly he needed someone—anyone—to understand the weight he carries.

Defining Moments

Will’s milestones trace the tension between rule and feeling, and the slow reordering of his priorities.

• The First Date (Chapter 2, Club N9NE)

  • What happens: Will introduces Lake to slam and performs “Death,” laying bare his family’s tragedy and resilience.
  • Why it matters: It’s the first time Lake sees the truth behind his charm: grief, honesty, and a need to speak. It ties Will to the arc of Grief, Loss, and Acceptance.

• The Hallway Revelation (Chapter 3)

  • What happens: Teacher and student lock eyes; Will’s “Lake, no…” collapses the fantasy into a rule.
  • Why it matters: It defines the novel’s central conflict. His immediate withdrawal is ethical reflex, not lack of feeling.

• The “Detention” (Chapter 13)

  • What happens: Will confronts Lake and Eddie, then reveals the story of his parents and why his job “is a very big deal.”
  • Why it matters: This turns Will’s guardedness into context. Duty isn’t a posture—it’s his survival plan.

• The Laundry Room (Chapter 18)

  • What happens: Will breaks his own rules in a moment of passion, then retreats and calls it weakness.
  • Why it matters: The backslide proves boundaries alone can’t solve desire; shame sharpens, but doesn’t settle, the question of how to live with both.

• “Better than Third” (Chapter 21)

  • What happens: Onstage, Will rejects ranking love beneath career and guardianship and names Lake “first.”
  • Why it matters: It’s the synthesis of his arc—choosing integration over compartmentalization, love without abandoning responsibility.

Essential Quotes

I met a girl in a U-Haul.
A beautiful girl
And I fell for her.
I fell hard.
Unfortunately, sometimes life gets in the way.
Life definitely got in my way.
(Chapter 21, from “Better than Third”)

This frames the novel’s thesis: love colliding with circumstance. The matter-of-fact cadence (“life gets in the way”) turns epic feeling into lived reality, showing how Will refuses melodrama even as he admits depth.

Death. The only thing inevitable in life.
People don’t like to talk about death because
it makes them sad.
They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them,
all the people they love will briefly grieve
but continue to breathe.
(Chapter 2, from “Death”)

Will’s language is plain, relentless, and unsparing—an acceptance speech to mortality. By imagining grief continuing without him, he signals why he clings to stability for Caulder: the world keeps breathing, so he must build something that lasts.

"I've spent the last two years of my life trying to convince myself that I made the right decision for him. So my job? My career? This life I'm trying to build for this little boy? It is a big deal. It's a very big deal to me."
(Chapter 13)

This is Will’s ethical core stated outright. The repetition (“big deal”) isn’t rhetoric—it’s defense. He names the costs so others see that restraint is love, not cowardice.

"Life wants you to fight it.
Learn how to make it your own.
It wants you to grab an axe and hack through the wood.
It wants you to get a sledgehammer and break through the concrete.
It wants you to grab a torch and burn through the metal and steel until you
can reach through and grab it."
(Chapter 21, from “Better than Third”)

The escalating tools—axe, sledgehammer, torch—dramatize Will’s shift from passive endurance to active authorship. He’s done ranking; he’s remaking.

"I love you, Lake," he smiles as he presses his forehead against mine. "You deserve to come first."
(Chapter 21)

A simple line, but it overturns the novel’s central hierarchy. “First” isn’t a demotion of duty; it’s the end of false separations. Love, in Will’s new order, is part of how he keeps his promises.