An Abundance of Katherines (27 page)
Read An Abundance of Katherines Online
Authors: John Green
“I decided during government that I would actually, literally suck donkey balls if it meant I could skip that class for the rest of the semester,” he said.
“You can learn a lot about government from donkey balls,” I said. “Hey, speaking of reasons you wish you had fourth-period lunch, we just dined with Angela.”
Ben smirked at Radar and said, “Yeah, she wants to know why she’s never been over to your house.”
Radar exhaled a long breath as he spun the combination to open his locker. He breathed for so long I thought he might pass out. “Crap,” he said finally.
“Are you embarrassed about something?” I asked, smiling.
“Shut up,” he answered, poking his elbow into my gut.
“You live in a lovely home,” I said.
“Seriously, bro,” added Ben. “She’s a really nice girl. I don’t see why you can’t introduce her to your parents and show her Casa Radar.”
Radar threw his books into his locker and shut it. The din of conversation around us quieted just a bit as he turned his eyes toward the heavens and shouted, “IT IS NOT MY FAULT THAT MY PARENTS OWN THE WORLD’S LARGEST COLLECTION OF BLACK SANTAS.”
I’d heard Radar say “the world’s largest collection of black Santas” perhaps a thousand times in my life, and it never became any less funny to me. But he wasn’t kidding. I remembered the first time I visited. I was maybe thirteen. It was spring, many months past Christmas, and yet black Santas lined the windowsills. Paper cutouts of black Santas hung from the stairway banister. Black Santa candles adorned the dining room table. A black Santa oil painting hung above the mantel, which was itself lined with black Santa figurines. They had a black Santa Pez dispenser purchased from Namibia. The light-up plastic black Santa that stood in their postage-stamp front yard from Thanksgiving to New Year’s spent the rest of the year proudly keeping watch in the corner of the guest bathroom, a bathroom with homemade black Santa wallpaper created with paint and a Santa-shaped sponge. In every room, save Radar’s, their home was awash in black Santadom—plaster and plastic and marble and clay and painted wood and resin and cloth. In total, Radar’s parents owned more than twelve hundred black Santas of various sorts. As a plaque beside their front door proclaimed, Radar’s house was an officially registered Santa Landmark according to the Society for Christmas.
“You just gotta tell her, man,” I said. “You just gotta say, ‘Angela, I really like you, but there’s something you need to know: when we go to my house and hook up, we’ll be watched by the twenty-four hundred eyes of twelve hundred black Santas.”
Radar ran a hand through his buzz cut and shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t think I’ll put it exactly like that, but I’ll deal with it.”
I headed off to government, Ben to an elective about video game design. I watched clocks through two more classes, and then finally the relief radiated out of my chest when I was finished—the end of each day like a dry run for our graduation less than a month away.
I went home. I ate two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as an early dinner. I watched poker on TV. My parents came home at six, hugged each other, and hugged me. We ate a macaroni casserole as a proper dinner. They asked me about school. They asked me about prom. They marveled at what a wonderful job they’d done raising me. They told me about their days dealing with people who had been raised less brilliantly. They went to watch TV. I went to my room to check my e-mail. I wrote a little bit about
The Great Gatsby
for English. I read some of
The Federalist Papers
as early prep for my government final. I IM’ed with Ben, and then Radar came online. In our conversation, he used the phrase “the world’s largest collection of black Santas” four times, and I laughed each time. I told him I was happy for him, having a girlfriend. He said it would be a great summer. I agreed. It was May fifth, but it didn’t have to be. My days had a pleasant identicalness about them. I had always liked that: I liked routine. I liked being bored. I didn’t want to, but I did. And so May fifth could have been any day—until just before midnight, when Margo Roth Spiegelman slid open my screenless bedroom window for the first time since telling me to close it nine years before.
The whole Britney/Presbyterians thing fascinates me because “Britney” is such an odd spelling. (It is less common than either Brittany or Brittney.) This begs a question: Did Britney Spears’ parents choose to spell her name eccentrically
because
of its anagrammatic potential?!
Example: I was on the ultimate Frisbee team at my high school, and I was of course the worst member of the team by a very wide margin, which is really saying something, because we were all pretty bad. And all I remember of playing ultimate Frisbee is running up and down a field, listening to my friends’ stories, and telling my own. I suppose that now and again I must have caught or thrown a Frisbee, but I only remember us telling each other these stories between heaving breaths as we ran back and forth across the field.
Greek: “I have found it.”
More on that later.
A German word, slang for “wimp,” that literally means “a man who sits to pee.” Those wacky Germans—they’ve got a word for everything.
“Kafir” is a not-nice Arabic word meaning “non-Muslim” that is usually translated as “infidel.”
The Islamic statement of faith, in transliterated Arabic: there is no God but God.
Which, pathetically enough, was true. Colin really
had
been wanting to learn Sanskrit. It’s sort of the Mount Everest of dead languages.
Arabic: “I love you.”
It might be helpful to think about this graphically. Colin saw the Dumper/Dumpee dichotomy on a bell curve. The majority of people are lumped somewhere in the middle; i.e., they’re either slight Dumpees or slight Dumpers. But then you have your Katherines and your Colins:
Like a smart monkey, Colin possessed an extensive vocabulary, but very little grammar. Also, he didn’t know “dead” was pronounced
ded
. Forgive him. He was two.
Which, for the record,
Colin
actually named. The others called it “The Stretch,” but then one time when they were about to do it to him, Colin shouted, “Don’t give me an abdominal snowman!” And the name was so clever that it stuck.
But anyway, it’s called
fetor hepaticus
, and it’s a symptom of late-stage liver failure. Basically, what happens is that your breath literally smells like a rotting corpse.
More on that later, but basically: about a year before, Colin had come into some cash.
Among many, many others, the following things were definitely not interesting: the pupillary sphincter, mitosis, baroque architecture, jokes that have physics equations as punch lines, the British monarchy, Russian grammar, and the significant role that salt has played in human history.
Crop identification not being among Colin’s talents.
The original Greek, for the curious: πυττuκατηγρετησηκαιτηµρα, όµωςηµρατυεναισυνήθωςαλλ ηηχώτυχαρακτήρακαιτωνπαθώντυ,των λαθώνκαιτωναδυναµιώντυ.
To put it Venn Diagrammatically, Colin would have argued that the world looked like this:
“It smells like I rubbed chewed raspberry Bubblicious on my neck,” she said, but it didn’t, exactly. It smelled like raspberry Bubblicious-flavored
perfume
, which actually smelled very good.
A British philosopher and political scientist who could read and write in Latin and Greek before the rest of us can tie our shoes.
19
Although you’ll no doubt notice that Colin still doesn’t
quite
get what the tortoise and the hare story is about, he had figured out by now that it was about more than a turtle and a rabbit.
But never did, because try as he might, he just wasn’t ambidextrous.
An actual, if very obscure, English word, which means “the spending of too much money on food.”
One no longer says AD or BC. It’s just not hip anymore. These days, one says either CE (for Common Era) or BCE (for Before Common Era).
“My name is Pierre. When I go to the metro, I also make fart music.”
“Love loves to love love.” A quote, translated into French, from James Joyce’s
Ulysses
.
“Shit!”
“Don’t say I have hemorrhoids! I don’t have hemorrhoids.”
Which is what Colin’s mom always called teasing, even though it never made a lick of sense to Colin.
“My mother thinks that you are good for me.”
“Why would she think that?”
Although of course he was certainly better than most people.
A fuller explanation of the math involved here would be really boring and also really long. There is a part of books specifically designed for the very long and the very boring, and that part is called “The Appendix,” which is precisely where one can find a semi-exhaustive explanation of the math invoked herein. As for the actual story itself: there will be no more math. None. Promise.
Stole
n
something, Colin wanted to say. But grammar isn’t interesting. 33 Which Colin did when he was ten, by making up a 99-word sentence in which the first letter of each word corresponded to the digit of pi (a=1, b=2, etc.; j=0). The sentence, if you’re curious: Catfish always drink alcoholic ether if begged, for every catfish enjoys heightened intoxication; gross indulgence can be calamitous, however; duly, garfish babysit for dirty catfish children, helping catfish babies get instructional education just because garfish get delight assisting infants’ growth and famously inspire confidence in immature catfish, giving experience (and joy even); however, blowfish jeer insightful garfish, disparaging inappropriately, doing damage, even insulting benevolent, charming, jovial garfish, hurting and frustrating deeply; joy fades but hurt feelings bring just grief; inevitable irritation hastens feeling blue; however, jovial children declare happiness, blowfishes’ evil causes dejection, blues; accordingly, always glorify jolly, friendly garfish!
“I don’t want to ruin your road trip—but for five hundred American dollars a week, I will.” 35 “The road trip has kind of sucked anyway, but I don’t want the job to take my time. I need to do the Theorem.”
“I’m not playing
Scrabble
against
Singleton
. God, if I want to be reminded of how dumb I am, I’ll just consult my verbal SAT scores, thanks.”
That’s absolutely true, about the eight glasses a day. There’s no reason whatsoever to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you, for whatever reason, particularly like the taste of water. Most experts agree that unless there’s something horribly wrong with you, you should just drink water whenever you’re—get this—thirsty.
He found forty, of which he only really liked two: “rose rot” and “to err so.”
See inbred girl; lie breeds grin; leering debris; greed be nil, sir; be idle re. rings; ringside rebel; residing rebel; etc.
That’s true. Much of the meter in
Don Juan
only works if you read
Juan
as bi-syllabic.
Spanish.
Italian.
German.
French and English.
Russian.
Greek.
Latin.
Arabic.
It eventually became clear to Colin that Starnes did not mean “the United States of America” but rather “this general area of south-central Tennessee.”
Haram
is an Arabic word that means “forbidden by Islam.”
It’s cheesy, but that’s what they always said to each other. “I love you like crazycakes; I miss you like crazycakes;” etc.
True.
And over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
The odd thing about that is that Nikola Tesla actually
did
love birds, but not one-legged chickens. Tesla, who did at least as much for electricity as Thomas Edison, had a quasi-romantic fascination with pigeons. He really fell for one particular white pigeon. Of her, he wrote, “I loved that pigeon. I loved her as a man loves a woman.”
A roach disk.
Who was not a child prodigy but did end up being something of a genius. Although a lot of Edison’s discoveries were not actually made by Edison. Like the lightbulb, for instance, was technically invented by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1811, but his lightbulb sort of sucked and burned out all the time. Edison improved upon the idea. Edison also stole ideas from Nikola Tesla, the aforementioned pigeon lover.
Hodel was likely guilty of the 1947 “Black Dahlia” murder, one of the most famous and long-unsolved murder cases in California history. (He was apparently pretty
good
at serial killing, as one might expect of a prodigy, since he never got caught and indeed probably no one would have ever known about Hodel except his son—true story—became a homicide detective in California, and through a series of amazing coincidences and some pretty solid police work, became convinced that his dad was a murderer.)
How does a kid named Herbie manage to be cool? This is one of life’s enduring mysteries, how guys named Herbie or Dilworth or Vagina or whatever so easily overcome the burden of their names to achieve a kind of legendary status, but Colin is forever linked with Colon.
Although there are admittedly not a lot of pools in Chicago.
The first being the date-asking itself.
Television was invented by a kid. In 1920, the memorably named Philo T. Farnsworth conceived the cathode ray vacuum tube used in most all twentieth-century TV sets. He was fourteen. Farnsworth built the first one when he was just twenty-one. (And shortly thereafter went on to a long and distinguished career of chronic alcoholism.)
To get this variable, Colin took the two people’s average age and subtracted five. By the way, all the footnotes on this page have math in them and are therefore
strictly optional
.
Which Colin arrived at by calculating the popularity difference between Person A and Person B on a scale of 1 to 1,000 (you can approximate) and then dividing by 75—positive numbers if the girl is more popular; negative if the guy is.
64
Which is calculated as a number between 0 and 5 based on the difference in attraction to each other. Positive numbers if the boy is more attracted to the girl; negative if vice versa.
Between 0 and 1, the relative distance between the two people on the Dumper/Dumpee range. A negative number if the boy is more of a Dumper; positive number if the girl is.
In the Theorem, this is the difference in outgoingness between two people calculated on a scale that goes from 0 to 5. Positive numbers if the girl is more outgoing; negative if the guy is.
The pretty one, with all the letters.
Although there is not a Nobel Prize in Mathematics, he might have had an outside chance at the Peace Prize.
That is, the hog.
Eating pork is
Haram
in Islam. It is also forbidden in Judaism, but (a) Colin was only half-Jewish, and (b) he wasn’t religious.
Arabic: “Pig”
Arabic: “What, pigs don’t speak Arabic?”
Arabic: “Satan.”
But there is an important difference, and that important difference was manifested in Colin’s throbbing pain. Bees sting people only once, and then die. Hornets, on the other hand, can sting repeatedly. Also, hornets, at least the way Colin figured it, are meaner. Bees just want to make honey. Hornets want to kill you.
William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had enough names for two people (or four Madonnas) but was only one man.
Arabic: “I swear to God.”
Arabic: “Record.”
Dutch. Literally,“horse’s penis.”
German: My hero.
And sure enough, that September ninth, Hassan would sit down in a class called English Composition at ten in the morning, even though it directly conflicted with his beloved companion, friend, and possible fantasy lover, Judge Judy.