The John Green Collection (45 page)

Hassan was good at his job, no doubt—Colin felt a rush of affection toward him, and the recitation of the words caused something to wash over the omnipresent hole in his gut. It felt, just for a moment, like medicine.

Lindsey smiled at Colin through the rearview mirror. “Lord, my cup of Colins runneth over.” She smiled. “One to teach me French, one to French me.” She laughed at her own joke, then said, “Well, okay. I’ll go. I wouldn’t want to see Colin get his nuts chopped off, after all. Either Colin, really. But you gotta take me to the store after.” Hassan agreed, and then Lindsey led them down past what she called the “Taco Hell” to a little side street lined with small, single-story houses. They pulled into a driveway. “Most people’re at work,” she explained. “But Starnes should be home.”

He greeted them at the door. Starnes’s lower jaw was missing; he appeared to have a kind of duck bill covered in skin instead of a chin or jaw or teeth. And yet he still tried to smile for Lindsey. “Sugar,” he said, “how are you?”

“I’m always good when I get to see you, Starnes,” she said, hugging him. His eyes lit up, and then Lindsey introduced him to Colin and Hassan. When the old man noticed Colin staring, Starnes explained, “Cancer. Now, y’all come in and sit.”

The house smelled like musty old couches and unfinished wood. It smelled, Colin thought, like cobwebs or hazy memories. It smelled like K-19’s basement. And the smell brought him back so viscerally, to a time when she loved him—or he at least felt like she did—that his gut ached anew. He closed his eyes tight for a second and waited for the feeling to pass, but it wouldn’t. For Colin, nothing ever passed.

The Beginning (of the End)

Katherine XIX wasn’t quite yet the XIX when they hung out alone together for the third time. Although the signs seemed positive, he couldn’t bring himself to ask her if she wanted to date him, and he certainly couldn’t just lean in and kiss her. Colin frequently faltered when it came to the step of actual kissing. He had a theory on this subject, actually, entitled the Rejection Minimization Theorem (RMT):

The act of leaning in to kiss someone, or asking to kiss them, is fraught with the possibility of rejection, so the person least likely to get rejected should do the leaning in or the asking. And that person, at least in high-school heterosexual relationships,
is definitely the girl.
Think about it: boys, basically, want to kiss girls. Guys want to make out. Always. Hassan aside, there’s rarely a time when a boy is thinking, “Eh, I think I’d rather not kiss a girl today.” Maybe if a guy is actually, literally on fire, he won’t be thinking about hooking up. But that’s about it. Whereas girls are very fickle about the business of kissing. Sometimes they want to make out; sometimes they don’t. They’re an impenetrable fortress of unknowability, really.

Ergo: girls should always make the first move, because (a) they are, on the whole, less likely to be rejected than guys, and (b) that way, girls will never get kissed unless they want to be kissed.

Unfortunately for Colin, there is nothing logical about kissing, and so his theory never worked. But because he always waited so incredibly long to kiss a girl, he rarely faced rejection.

He called the future Katherine XIX that Friday after school and asked her out for coffee the next day, and she said yes. It was the same coffee shop where they’d had their first two meetings—perfectly pleasant events filled with so much sexual tension that he couldn’t help but get a little bit turned on just from her casually touching his hand. He would put his hands up on the table, in fact, because he wanted them within her reach.

The coffee shop was a few miles from Katherine’s house and four buildings down from Colin’s. Called
Café Sel Marie
, it served some of the best coffee in Chicago, which didn’t matter at all to Colin, because Colin didn’t like coffee. He liked the
idea
of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals. But coffee itself tasted to him like caffeinated stomach bile. So he did an end-around on the unfortunate taste by drowning his java in cream, for which Katherine gently teased him that afternoon. It rather goes without saying that Katherine drank her coffee black. Katherines do, generally. They like their coffee like they like their ex-boyfriends: bitter.

Hours later, after four cups of coffee between them, she wanted to show him a movie. “It’s called
The Royal Tenenbaums
,” she said. “It’s about a family of prodigies.”

Colin and Katherine took the Brown Line southeast toward Wrigleyville, and then walked five blocks to her house, a narrow, two-story building. Katherine led him down to her basement. Floored with wavy linoleum tiles, the damp, dank place featured an old couch, no windows, and very low ceilings (they were 6'3" to Colin’s 6'1"). It made for a poor living area, but it was an awesome theater. It was so dark that you could sink into the couch and disappear into the movie.

Colin liked the movie pretty well; he laughed a lot, anyway, and he found comfort in a world where all the characters who had been smart children grew up to be really fascinating, unique adults (even if they were all screwed up). When it was over, Katherine and Colin sat in the dark together. The basement was the only genuinely dark place Colin had ever seen in
Chicago—day and night, orange-gray light seeped through any place with windows.

“I just love the sound track,” Katherine said. “It has such a cool feel.”

“Yeah,” Colin said. “And I liked the characters. I even liked the horrible dad a little.”

“Right, me too,” Katherine said. He could see her blond hair and the outline of her face but little else. His hand, which had been holding hers since about thirty minutes into the movie, was cramped and sweaty, but he didn’t want to be the one to pull away. She went on, “I mean, he’s selfish, but everyone is selfish.”

“Right,” Colin said.

“So is that what it’s like? To be a, uh, prodigy or whatever?”

“Um, not really. All the prodigies in that movie were really hot, for instance,” he joked, and she laughed and said, “So are all the ones I know,” and then he exhaled sharply and looked up at her and almost—but no. He wasn’t sure and couldn’t handle the thought of rejection. “Anyway, plus in that movie it’s like they are all just born talented. I’m not like that, you know. I mean, I’ve worked at least ten hours a day, every day, since I was three,” he said, with no small measure of pride. He
did
think of it as work—the reading and the practicing of languages and pronunciation, the recitation of facts, the careful examination of every text laid before him.

“So what are you good at, exactly, anyway? I mean, I know you’re good at everything, but what are you
so
good at besides languages?”

“I’m good with codes and stuff. And I’m good at, like, linguistic tricks like anagramming. That’s my favorite thing, really. I can anagram anything.” He’d never before told a Katherine about his anagramming. He’d always figured it would bore them.

“Anything?”

“Night, nay,” he answered quickly, and she laughed and then said, “Katherine Carter.”

He wanted so much to put his hand around the nape of her neck and pull her into him and taste her mouth, full and soft in the darkness. But not yet. He wasn’t sure. His heart pounded. “Um, okay. Her karate cretin—um, oh. I like this one: their arcane trek.”

She laughed and pulled her hand away and placed it flat against his knee. Her fingers were soft. He could suddenly smell her over the dank basement. She smelled like lilacs, and then he knew that it was almost time. But he didn’t dare look at her, not yet. He just watched the blank TV screen. He wanted to draw out the moment before the moment—because as good as kissing feels, nothing feels as good as the anticipation of it.

“How do you
do
that?” she asked.

“Practice, mostly. I’ve been doing it a long time. I see the letters and pull out a good word first—like, karate, or arcane—and then I try to use the remaining letters to make—oh God, this is boring,” he said, hoping it wasn’t.

“No it’s not.”

“I just try to make grammatical sense with the remaining letters. Anyway, it’s just a trick.”

“Okay, so anagrams. That’s one. Got any other charming talents?” she asked, and now he felt confident.

Finally, Colin turned to her, gathering in his gut the slim measure of courage available to him, and said, “Well, I’m a fair kisser.”

³⁸
He found forty, of which he only really liked two: “rose rot” and “to err so.”

³⁹
See inbred girl; lie breeds grin; leering debris; greed be nil, sir; be idle re. rings; ringside rebel; residing rebel; etc.

⁴⁰
That’s true. Much of the meter in
Don Juan
only works if you read
Juan
as bi-syllabic.

⁴¹
Spanish.

⁴²
Italian.

⁴³
German.

⁴⁴
French and English.

⁴⁵
Russian.

⁴⁶
Greek.

⁴⁷
Latin.

⁴⁸
Arabic.

(
nine
)

“Y’all make yourselves
at home. Hollis said you might’n come over here to interview me and find out about my fascinating life,” Starnes said, and Colin sat down on a musty couch not unlike the one on which he and K-19 had shared their first kiss. Lindsey introduced Colin and Hassan, and then Colin started asking questions. The room was not air-conditioned, and as Colin pressed the record button of the digital mini-recorder and placed it on Starnes’s coffee table, he felt the first bead of sweat form on his neck. It would be a long day.

“When did you come to Gutshot?” Lindsey asked.

“I was born in the country
⁴⁹
nineteen hundred and twenty. Born here, raised up here, always lived here, and gonna die here, I’m sure,” he said, and then winked at Lindsey.

“Aww, Starnes, don’t say that,” Lindsey said. “What the hell would I do ’round here without you?”

“Prob’ly run around with that Lyford boy,” Starnes answered. Starnes turned to the boys and then said, “I don’t think too highly of that boy’s daddy.”

“You just want me all to yourself,” Lindsey said, laughing. “Tell us about the factory, Starnes. These boys ain’t ever been.” Around Starnes, for some reason, Lindsey spoke with a thick accent.

“The factory opened up three years ’fore I was born, and I worked there from when I was fourteen. I suppose if I hadn’t, I would have farmed—that’s what my father did until the factory came along. We made everything back then; T-shirts and handkerchiefs and bandannas, and it was hard work. But your family was always fair—first Dr. Dinzanfar and then his son-in-law Corville Wells. Then there was that sumbitch Alex, who I know was your daddy, Lindsey, so you’ll have to forgive me. And then Hollis, who took good care of us every one. I worked in that factory sixty years to the day. I have the world record. They named the break room after me, because that’s where I spent most of my time.” His upper lip smiled, but Starnes’s jawless chin couldn’t follow suit.

Already, the house felt like a hot tub without the water and bubbles.
This is a hard way to make a hundred dollars
, Colin thought.

“Y’all want some tea?” Starnes asked. Without waiting for an answer, he stood up and walked into the kitchen.

At once sweet and bitter, it tasted a little like lemonade, except somehow more grown-up. Colin loved it—it was everything he’d hoped coffee would be—and helped himself to several glasses while Starnes talked, pausing only to take his medication (once) and go to the bathroom (four times; old people do that—they seem to love bathrooms).

“Well, the first thing that you have to understand is that in the country we weren’t ever poor. Even in the Depression, I wasn’t ever hungry, because when Dr. Dinzanfar had to lay people off, he never fired more than one person from a family.”

Something about Dr. Dinzanfar led Starnes elsewhere. “You know they’ve been calling the country Gutshot for a long-ass time, and Lindsey, I bet you don’t even know why.” Lindsey shook her head politely, and Starnes leaned forward out of his La-Z-Boy and said, “Aw, see. Now y’all haven’t heard a damn thing about the place then! Back in the old days, so old that even this old man weren’t born yet, prizefighting was illegal. And if you wanted to break the law, Gutshot was a fine place to do it.

“Always has been, really. I saw the inside of the Carver County Jail a few times myself, you know. I was drunk in public in 1948; I was a public nuisance in 1956; and then I was in jail for two days on illegal discharging of a firearm when I killed Caroline Clayton’s rat snake in 1974. Mary wouldn’t bail me out after I kilt that God-forsaken snake, you know. But how on earth am I supposed to tell it’s a pet? I go into Caroline Clayton’s house looking for the hammer she borrowed from me six months before, and there’s a by-God rat snake slitherin’ across the kitchen. What would you do, son?” he asked Colin.

Colin mulled the situation over. “You went into someone else’s house without knocking?” he asked.

“No, I knocked, but she wa’n’t home.”

“That’s a crime also,” Colin pointed out. “Trespassing.”

“Well thank the Lord
you
didn’t arrest me, boy,” Starnes said. “Anyway, you see a snake, you kill it. That’s just how I was raised up. So I shot it. Split it right in two. And that evening Caroline Clayton come over to my house—she’s passed on now, bless her heart—and she’s screaming and crying that I killed Jake, and I told her that someone else musta killed Jake, whoever the hell he was, ’cause all I did was shoot up a goddamned rat snake. But then turns out that Jake
was
the snake, and that she loved it like the child she never had. She never married, of course. Uglier than sin, bless her heart.”