The John Green Collection (50 page)

“But you’ll win,” his dad would say. “You have to imagine that, Colin, that one day they will all look back on their lives and wish they’d been you. You’ll have what everyone else wants in the end.”

•  •  •

But it did not take until the end. It took until
KranialKidz.

At the tail end of Christmas break his junior year, Colin received a call from a cable station he’d never heard of called CreaTVity. He didn’t watch much TV, but it wouldn’t have mattered, because
no one
had heard of CreaTVity. They’d gotten his number from Krazy Keith, who they’d contacted because of his scholarly articles about prodigy. They wanted Colin on their game show. His parents disapproved, but their “active, results-oriented” parenting meant that they gave Colin a measure of freedom to make his
own decisions. And he wanted to go on the show, because (a) the ten-thousand-dollar first prize was a lot of money, and (b) he would be on television, and (c) 10K is a
lot
of money.

They gave Colin a makeover when he arrived for the first taping, turning him into the cool, snide, troublemaking prodigy. They bought him glasses with rectangular wire rims and caked his hair with endless product so that he had a kind of curly, mussy ’do like the coolest kids at school. They gave him five outfits—including a pair of designer jeans, which hugged his ass like they were a needy boyfriend, and a T-shirt that read, in a handprinted scrawl:
SLACKER
. And then they taped all six preliminary rounds of the show in one day, pausing to change the prodigies into new outfits. Colin won all six rounds, leaving him ready for the finals. His opponent there was Karen Aronson, a towheaded twelve-year-old kid studying for her PhD in math. Karen had been cast as the adorable one. In the week between the first tapings and the final, Colin wore his new trendy kid button-downs and his designer jeans to school, and people asked him,
Are you really going to be on TV
? And then a cool kid named Herbie
⁵⁸
told Hassan that this girl Marie Caravolli liked Colin. And since Colin had, not too long before, been dumped by Katherine XVIII, Colin asked Marie out on a date, because Marie, a perennially tan Italian beauty who would have won Homecoming Queen if the Kalman School did that kind of thing, was the hottest girl he had ever, or would ever, come across. Let alone talk to. Let alone date. He’d wanted to keep his Katherine streak alive, of course. But Marie Caravolli was the kind of girl you break streaks for.

And that’s when the funny thing happened. He got off the train after school on the day of his date; everything was perfectly planned. He had just enough time to walk home, clean all the fast-food wrappers and soda cans out of the Hearse, take a shower, buy some flowers from the White Hen, and pick
up Marie. But when he turned onto his street, he saw Katherine I sitting on the steps outside his house. As he squinted at her, watching her pull her knees up almost to her chin, he realized he’d never seen Katherine without Krazy Keith.

“Is everything okay?” Colin asked as he approached.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry to drop by unannounced. It’s just I’ve got this French test?” she said as if it were a question. “Tomorrow? And I don’t want my dad to know what a dumbass I am in French and so I thought maybe—I tried to call, but I don’t have your cell number. So anyway, I figured that since I know a world-famous TV quiz show star, I could maybe get tutoring from him.” She smiled.

“Um,” Colin said. And in the next few seconds, he tried to work out what it would really be like to date Marie. Colin had always been jealous of people, like Hassan, who just know how to make friends. But the risk of being able to win over anyone, he found himself thinking, was that you might pick the wrong people.

He imagined the best possible scenario: Marie actually, improbably, ends up
liking
him, whereupon Colin and Hassan vault up the social ladder and get to eat lunch at a different table, and get invited to some parties. Now, Colin had seen enough movies to know what happens when dorks go to cool-kid parties: generally, the dorks either get thrown into the pool
⁵⁹
or they become drunk, vacuous cool kids themselves. Neither seemed like a good option. Also there was the fact that Colin did not, technically,
like
Marie. He didn’t even know her.

“Hold on,” he told Katherine I. And then he called Marie. She’d given him the number earlier that very day, during their second-ever conversation,
⁶⁰
a remarkable fact considering they’d attended the same school together for nearly a decade. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “But I’ve got a family
emergency. . . . Yeah, no, my uncle is in the hospital, and we have to go see him. . . . Well, yeah, I’m sure he’ll be fine. . . . Okay. Cool. Sorry, again.”

And so it came to pass that the only time Colin came anywhere close to ever dumping anyone, it was Marie Caravolli, who everyone agreed was the most attractive individual in American history. Instead, he tutored Katherine I. And one session turned into one each week, and then into two each week, and by the next month, she came over to his house with Krazy Keith to watch, with Colin’s parents and Hassan, as Colin annihilated a poor sap named Sanjiv Reddy in the first episode of
KranialKidz.
Later that night, after Hassan had gone home, while Krazy Keith and Colin’s parents were drinking red wine, Colin and Katherine Carter snuck out of the house to have a cup of coffee at
Café Sel Marie.

⁵⁶
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.

⁵⁷
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.)

⁵⁸
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.

⁵⁹
Although there are admittedly not a lot of pools in Chicago.

⁶⁰
The first being the date-asking itself.

(
twelve
)

The following Thursday
, Colin woke up to the sounds of the rooster mixing with Hassan’s prayers. Colin rolled out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt, peed, and then entered Hassan’s room through the bathroom. Hassan was back in bed, his eyes closed.

“Is there a way you could pray
less loudly
? I mean, shouldn’t God be able to hear you even if you whisper?” he asked.

“I’m calling in sick,” Hassan said without opening his eyes. “I think I have a sinus infection, and also I need a day off. Jesus. This working business is all right, but I need to sit in my boxers and watch
Judge Judy.
Do you realize that I haven’t seen
Judge Judy
in, like, twelve days? Imagine if
you
were separated from the love of
your
life for twelve days.” With his lips pursed, Colin stared at Hassan silently. Hassan blinked open his eyes. “Oh. Right. Sorry.”

“You can’t call in sick. Your boss works here. In the house. She’ll know you’re not sick.”

“She spends Thursdays at the factory, dumbass. You need to pay better attention. It’s the
perfect
day to call in sick. I just need to charge the emotional batteries.”

“You’ve been charging the batteries all year! You haven’t done anything in twelve months!”

Hassan smirked. “Don’t you have to go to work or something?”

“At least call your mom and tell her to send a deposit to Loyola. The deposit deadline is in four weeks. I looked online for you.”

Hassan didn’t open his eyes. “I’m trying to think of a word. God, it’s right on the tip of my tongue. Duh—doo—dii. Oh. Right. Dingleberries, motherfugger. Dingle. Berries.”

When Colin got downstairs, he saw that Hollis was up already—or maybe she’d just stayed up all night—and dressed in a pink pantsuit.

“Beautiful day in the country,” she said. “High’s only 83 today. But Lord, I sure am glad Thursday only comes around once a week.”

When Colin sat down beside her at the dining room table, he asked, “What do you do on Thursdays?”

“Oh, I just like to go in to the factory and check on things in the morning. And then around noon I drive to Memphis and visit our warehouse.”

“Why is the warehouse in Memphis instead of Gutshot?” asked Colin.

“Lord, you ask a lot of questions,” Hollis answered. “So listen. Y’all have interviewed most everyone who works at the factory now. So I’m gonna start sending you out to the other folks in Gutshot, factory retirees, and that sort of thing. I still just need you to ask the four questions, but you might want to stay a bit longer, just to look polite and all.”

Colin nodded. After a bit of silence, he said, “Hassan is sick. He has a sinus infection.”

“Poor thing. Okay, you’ll go out with Lindsey. It’s a bit of a drive today. You’re going to see the oldsters.”

“The oldsters?”

“That’s what Lindsey calls them. The folks at the nursing home in Bradford—a lot of them live off pensions from Gutshot Textiles. Lindsey used to visit those folks all the time before she started,” Hollis sighed, “dating that,” Hollis sighed again, “boy.” Hollis craned her neck around and shouted down the hall, “LINDSSSSEEEEY! GET YOUR LAZY ASS OUT OF BED!”

And even though the sound of Hollis’s thick voice had to carry down the hallway and through two closed doors to reach Lindsey, Lindsey shouted back moments later, “PUT A QUARTER IN THE GODDAMNED SWEAR JAR, HOLLIS. I’M ABOUT TO TAKE A SHOWER.”

Hollis got up, put a quarter in the swear jar on the mantel, walked back to Colin, mussed his Jew-fro, and said, “Listen, I’ll be late. Long drive back from Memphis. I’ll have my cell on. Y’all be safe.”

•  •  •

By the time Lindsey got downstairs, wearing khaki shorts and a tight-fitting black
GUTSHOT
! T-shirt, Hassan was on the couch, watching reruns of
Saturday Night Live.

“Who are our victims today?” asked Lindsey.

“The oldsters.”

“That’s cool, actually. I’m a veteran of that joint. Okay, off the couch, Hass.”

“Sorry, Linds. I called in sick,” he said.
I’ve never called her “Linds,”
Colin thought. Hassan laughed at some joke on the TV Lindsey blew hair out of her face and then she grabbed Colin by his upper arm and led him out to the Hearse.

“I can’t believe he’s calling in sick,” said Colin, but he started the car. “I’m fugging exhausted from staying up half the night reading a fugging book about the invention of the television,
⁶¹
and
he
gets to fugging call in sick?”

“Hey, why the fuck do you and Hassan say fug all the time?”

Colin exhaled slowly, his cheeks puffing out. “Have you ever read
The Naked and the Dead
by Norman Mailer?”

“I don’t even know who that is.”

“American novelist. Born in 1923. I was reading him when I first met
Hassan. And then later Hassan ended up reading it because it’s all about war, and Hassan likes actiony books. Anyway, it’s 872 pages, and it uses the word
fug
or
fugging
or
fugger
or whatever about thirty-seven thousand times. Every other word is a fug, pretty much. So anyway, after I read a novel, I like to read some literary criticism of it.”

“Color me surprised,” she said.

“Right. Well, when Mailer wrote the book, he didn’t use ‘fug.’ But then he sent it to the publisher and they were like, ‘This is a really excellent book you’ve written, Mr. Mailer. But no one here in 1948 is going to buy it, because it contains even more F-bombs than it does Regular Bombs.’ So Norman Mailer, as a kind of fug-you to the publisher, went through his 872-page book and changed every last F-word to ‘fug.’ So I told Hassan the story while he was reading the book and then he decided to start saying fug as an homage to Mailer—and because you can say it in class without getting in trouble.”

“That’s a good story. See? You can tell a story,” she said, her smile like bright white firecrackers in a starless sky. “It doesn’t have a moral, and it doesn’t contain any romance or adventure, but—it’s a story at least, and you didn’t share any meditations on hydration.” In his peripheral vision, Colin could see her smiling at him. “Turn left. We go down this fugging road forever and then—oh wait, wait, slow down that’s Chase’s car.”

A two-toned Chevy Bronco approached from the other direction. Reluctantly, Colin brought the Hearse to a stop. TOC was behind the wheel. Colin rolled down the window as TOC rolled down his. Lindsey leaned across Colin to look up at her boyfriend. “Hey, Lass,” TOC said.

“Not funny,” Lindsey said emphatically, as Chase, riding shotgun, howled with laughter.

“Listen, Chase and me are gonna meet Fulton tonight at the Camp. See you there?”