The John Green Collection (61 page)

Hassan nodded, and sat down on the sectional couch with her. Colin’s brain started working. He had to find an unsuspicious way out of the Pink Mansion as soon as possible, he realized.

“Can I do anything to help you?” asked Hassan, and Hollis brightened and said, “Sure. Sure. You can sit here with me and brainstorm—all night, if you’ve got the time.” And Hassan said, “Cool.”

Colin sort of half-coughed, and started speaking rapidly. “I may go out for a while. I think I’m going to go camping. I’ll probably
sitzpinkler
out and sleep in the car, but still—I’m gonna give it a try.”

“What?” asked Hassan, incredulous.

“Camping,” Colin said.

“With the pigs and the hornets and the TOCs and the whatnot?”

“Yes, camping,” said Colin, and then he tried to give Hassan an extremely meaningful look.

After staring back quizzically for a moment, Hassan’s eyes shot open, and he said, “Well, I’m not going with you. As we’ve learned, I’m an inside cat.”

“Keep your phone on,” Hollis said. “Do you have a tent?”

“No, but it’s pretty out and I’ll just take a sleeping bag if that’s all right.”

And then before Hollis could further object, he climbed the stairs two at a time, grabbed his supplies, and headed out.

•  •  •

It was early evening—the fields receding into a pink invisibility as they rose back into the horizon. Colin felt his heart slamming in his chest. He wondered if she even wanted to see him. He’d taken “sleeping over at Janet’s” as a hint, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she really
was
sleeping at Janet’s, whoever that was—which would mean a lot of hiking for naught.

After five minutes of driving, he reached the fenced-in field that had once been home to Hobbit the horse. He climbed over the tri-logged fence and jogged across the field. Colin, of course, did not believe in running when walking would suffice—but here and now, walking would not. He slowed down, however, as he made his way up the hill, the flashlight a thin and shaky beam of yellow light against the darkening landscape. He kept it directly before him as he picked through bushes and vines and trees, the thick rotting floor of the forest crunching beneath his feet, reminding him of where we all go. To seed, to ground. And even then he couldn’t help but anagram. To ground—Run, Godot; Donor Gut. And the magic through which “to ground” can become “donor gut,” combined with his newfound feeling that he had at some recent point
received
a donor gut, kept his pace quick. Even as the darkness became so complete that trees and rocks became not objects but mere shadows, he climbed, until finally he reached the stone outcropping. He walked along the rock, his flashlight scanning up and down, until the light passed over the crack. He leaned his head in and said, “Lindsey?”

“Christ, I thought you were a bear.”

“Quite the opposite. I was just in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop by,” he said. He heard her laugh echo through the cave. “But I don’t want to impose.”

“Come on in,” she said, and he squeezed through the jagged crack and shuffled sideways until he reached the room. She turned on her flashlight; they were blinding each other. “I thought you might come,” she said.

“Well you told your mom you were sleeping at Janet’s.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was kind of a code.”

Lindsey pointed the light next to her, and then drew a line back to Colin, like she was bringing an airplane into the gate. He walked over, and she arranged a couple of pillows into a chair, and he sat beside her.

“Out, damn light,” she said, and it was dark again.

•  •  •

“The most upsetting part of it is that I’m not even upset. About Colin, I mean. Because I—in the end I just didn’t care. About him, about his liking me, about his screwing Katrina. I just—don’t care. Hey, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Here. Hi.”

“Oh, hi.”

“So go on.”

“Right. So, I don’t know. It was just so easy to dismiss. I keep thinking I’m going to get upset, but it’s been three days, and I just don’t even think about him. Remember when I told you that unlike me, he was
real
? I don’t think he is, actually. I think he’s just boring. I’m so pissed off about it, because—I mean, I wasted so much of my life with him and then he
cheats
on me and I’m not even particularly, like,
depressed
about it?”

“I would love to be like that.”

“Yeah, except you wouldn’t, I don’t think. People are
supposed
to care. It’s good that people mean something to you, that you miss people when they’re gone. I don’t miss Colin at all. I mean, literally. I only ever liked the
idea
of being his girlfriend—and that is just such a goddamned waste! That’s what I realized—
that’s
what I cried about the whole way home. Here’s Hollis, really doing something for people. I mean, she works all the goddamned time and now I know it’s not for herself; it’s for all these fugging people in Sunset Acres who get a pension that pays for their diapers. And it’s for everybody at the factory.”

“. . .”

“I used to be an okay person, you know. But now I. Never. Do. Anything. For anybody. Except retards I don’t even give a shit about.”

“But people still like you. All the oldsters, everybody at the factory . . .”

“Right. Yeah. But they like me as they remember me, not as I am now. I mean, honestly, Colin, I’m the world’s most self-centered person.”

“. . .”

“Are you there?”

“It just occurred to me that in point of fact what you just said can’t be true because
I
am the world’s most self-centered person.”

“Huh?”

“Or maybe we’re tied. Because I’m the same, right? What did I ever do for anyone?”

“Didn’t you stay behind Hassan and let, like, a thousand hornets sting you?”

“Oh. Yeah. There was that. Okay, you’re the world’s most self-centered person after all. But I’m close!”

“Come here.”

“I am here.”

“More here.”

“Okay. There?”

“Yes. Better.”

“So what do you do about it? How do you fix it?”

“That’s what I was thinking about before you came. I was thinking about your mattering business. I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you. You matter as much as the things that matter to you do. And I got so backwards, trying to make myself matter to him. All this time, there were real things to care about: real, good people who care about me, and this place. It’s so easy to get stuck. You just get caught in being something, being special or cool or whatever, to the point where you don’t even know why you need it; you just think you do.”

“You don’t even know why you need to be world-famous; you just think you do.”

“Yeah. Exactly. We’re in the same boat, Colin Singleton. But it didn’t really fix the problem, getting popular.”

“I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost. Like getting TOC to date you doesn’tfix the Alpwo event. I don’t think your missing pieces ever fit inside you again once they go missing. Like Katherine. That’s what I realized: if I did get her back somehow, she wouldn’t fill the hole that losing her created.”

“Maybe no girl can fill it.”

“Right. Being a world-famous Theorem-creator wouldn’t, either. That’s what I’ve been thinking, that maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers. Wait, what’s funny?”

“Nothing it’s just, like—I was thinking that your realization is like if a heroin addict suddenly said, ‘You know, maybe instead of always doing
more
heroin, I should, like,
not
do heroin.”’

“. . .”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“I think I know who’s buried in the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s tomb, and I don’t think it’s the Archduke.”

“I knew you’d figure it out! Yeah, I already know. My great-grandfather.”

“You knew?! Fred N. Dinzanfar, that anagramming bastard.”

“All the old-timers here know. He insisted on it in his will, supposedly. But then a couple years ago, Hollis had us put up the sign and start giving tours—now I realize it was probably for the money.”

“It’s funny, what people will do to be remembered.”

“Well, or to be forgotten, because someday no one will know who’s really buried there. Already a lot of kids at school and stuff think the Archduke is really buried here, and I like that. I like knowing one story and having everyone else know another. That’s why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they’ll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.”

“Where’d your hand go?”

“It’s sweaty.”

“I don’t mi—oh hi.”

“Hi.”

“. . .”

“. . .”

“Did I tell you I dumped one of the Katherines?”

“You what? No.”

“I did, apparently. Katherine the Third. I just completely misremembered it. I mean, I always assumed that all the things I
did
remember were
true.
”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Well, but it’s not as good a story if you dumped her. That’s how I remember things, anyway. I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don’t fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky. Hassan told me once you think like that, too—that you see connections everywhere—so you’re a natural born storyteller, it turns out.”

“I never thought about it like that. I—huh. It makes sense.”

“So tell me the story.”

“What? The whole thing?”

“Yeah. Romance, adventure, morals, everything.”

The Beginning, and the Middle, and the End

“Katherine I was the daughter of my tutor Krazy Keith, and she asked me to be her boyfriend one night at my house, and I said yes, and then about two minutes and thirty seconds later she dumped me, which seemed funny at the time, but now, in retrospect, it’s possible that those two minutes and thirty seconds were among the most significant time periods of my life.

“K-2 was a slightly pudgy eight-year-old from school, and she showed up at my house one day and said there was a dead rat in the alley and, being eight, I ran outside to see the dead rat, but instead I found only her best friend Amy, and Amy said, ’Katherine likes you and will you be her boyfriend?’ and I said yes, and then eight days later Amy showed up at my door again to say that Katherine didn’t like me anymore and wouldn’t be going with me from there on out.

“Katherine III was a perfectly charming little brunette whom I met my first summer at smart-kid camp, which would in time come to be
the
place for child prodigies to pick up chicks, and since it makes a better story, I choose to remember that she dumped me one morning on the archery course after this math prodigy named Jerome ran in front of her bow and fell to the ground, claiming he’d been shot by Cupid’s arrow.

“Katherine IV, aka Katherine the Red, was a mousy redhead with red-plastic rimmed glasses whom I met in Suzuki violin lessons and she played beautifully and I played hardly at all because I could never be bothered to practice and so after four days she dumped me for a piano prodigy named Robert Vaughan who ended up playing a solo concert at Carnegie Hall when he was eleven, so I guess she made the right call there.

“In fifth grade, I went out with K-5, widely reputed to be the nastiest girl in school because she always seemed to be the one who started lice outbreaks, and she kissed me on the lips out of nowhere during recess one day while I was trying to read
Huck Finn
in the sandbox, and that was my first kiss, and later that day she dumped me because boys were gross.

“Then after a six-month dry spell, I met Katherine VI during my third year at smart-kid summer camp, and we went together for a record seventeen days and she was excellent at both pottery and pull-ups, two fields of endeavor at which I have never excelled, and although between us we could have made an unstoppable force of intelligence and upper-body strength and coffee mug-making, she dumped me anyway.

“And then came middle school and the severe unpopularity commenced in earnest, but the nice thing about being on the near end of the cool curve is that periodically people will take pity on you, such as sixth grade’s Katherine the Kind, a sweetheart who wore a frequently snapped training bra and whom everyone called pizza face due to an acne problem that wasn’t even that bad, and who eventually broke up with me not because she realized I was damaging what minuscule social standing she had but because she felt that our month-long relationship had hurt my academic pursuits, which she believed to be very important.

“The Eighth wasn’t quite so sweet, and maybe I should have known it since her name, Katherine Barker, anagrams into Heart Breaker, Ink, like she’s a veritable CEO of Dumping, but anyway she asked me out on a date and then I said yes and then she called me a freak and said I didn’t have any pubes and that she would never seriously go out with me—all of which, to be fair, was true.

“K-9 was in sixth grade when I was in seventh, and she was by far the best-looking Katherine to date with her cute chin and the dimples in her cheeks, and her skin perennially tan, not unlike you, and she thought that dating an older man might be good for her social status, but she was wrong.

“Katherine X—and yes by then I had realized certainly that this was an awfully odd statistical anomaly, but I wasn’t actively pursuing Katherines so much as I was actively pursuing girlfriends—was a smart-kid-summer-camp conquer, and I won her heart by, you guessed it, running in front of her bow on the archery course and claiming I’d been shot by Cupid’s arrow, and she was the first girl I ever French-kissed, and I didn’t know what to do so I sort of kept darting my tongue out from behind closed lips like I was a snake, and it didn’t take very much of that for her to want to be just friends.