The John Green Collection (41 page)

“Je m’appelle Pierre,”
Colin blurted out after the boys had introduced themselves.
“Quand je vais dans le métro, je fais aussi de la musique de prouts.”
²³

“We get a lot of foreign tourists here,” said the only girl besides Lindsey,
who was tall and thoroughly Abercrombified in her tight tank top. The girl also had—how to put this politely—gigantic gazoombas. She was incredibly hot—in that popular-girl-with-bleached-teeth-and-anorexia kind of way, which was Colin’s least favorite way of being hot. “I’m Katrina, by the way.”
Close
, Colin thought,
but no cigar.

“Amour aime aimer amour!”
²⁴
Colin announced quite loudly.

“Pierre,” said Hassan. “He has the disease with the talking. The, uh, with the bad words. In France, we say it the
Toorettes.
I do not know how you say in English.”

“He has Tourette’s?” asked Katrina.

“
MERDE
!”
²⁵
shouted Colin.

“Yes,” said Hassan excitedly. “Same word both language, like hemorrhoid. That one we learned yesterday because Pierre had the fire in his bottom. He has the
Toorettes.
And the hemorrhoid. But, is good boy.”

“
Ne dis pas que j’ai des hémorroïdes
!
Je n’ai pas d’hémorroïde
,”
²⁶
Colin shouted, at once trying to continue the game and get Hassan on to a different topic.

Hassan looked at Colin, nodded knowingly, and then told Katrina, “He just said that your face, it is beautiful like the hemorrhoid.” At which point Lindsey Lee Wells burst out laughing and said, “Okay. Okay. Enough.”

Colin turned to Hassan and said, “Why’d it have to be hemorrhoids? How the hell did that idea pop into your mind?” And then The Other Colin (TOC) and Jeans Are Too Tight (JATT) and Short One Chewing Tobacco (SOCT) and Katrina were all abuzz, talking and laughing and asking Lindsey questions.

“My dad went to France last year, dude,” explained Hassan, “and he told this story about getting a hemorrhoid and having to point at his butt and say the French word for fire over and over again until it came out that
the word was hemorrhoid in both languages. And I didn’t know any other fugging French words. Plus that’s some funny shit, you having Tourette’s
and
hemorrhoids.”

“Whatever,” Colin said, his face flushed. And then he overheard TOC saying, “That’s awful funny. Hollis would love them, huh?” And Lindsey laughed and reached up on her tiptoes to kiss him and then said, “I got you good, baby,” and he said, “Well,
they
got me,” and Lindsey faked like she was pouting, and TOC leaned down to kiss her forehead, and she brightened. The same scene had played out in Colin’s own life frequently—although he’d usually been the fake pouter.

They trudged back through the field as a group, Colin’s sweat-soaked T-shirt sticky and tight against his back, his eye still throbbing.
The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability
, he thought. Even the name rang true. He had waited so long for his breakthrough, despaired so many times, and he just wanted to be alone for a little while with a pencil and some paper and a calculator and no talking. In the car would work. Colin tugged softly on Hassan’s shirt and gave him a meaningful look.

“I just need some Gatorade,” Hassan responded. “Then we’ll go.”

“I’ll need to open up the store for ya, then,” Lindsey said. She turned to TOC. “Come with me, baby.” The gooey softness of her voice reminded Colin of K-19.

“I would,” TOC said, “’cept Hollis is sitting out on the steps. Me and Chase is supposed to be at work, but we skipped out.” TOC picked her off her feet and squeezed her tight, his biceps flexing. She squirmed a little but kissed him hard, her mouth open. Then he dropped her down, winked, and trudged off with his entourage toward a red pickup truck.

When Lindsey, Hassan, and Colin arrived back at the Gutshot General Store, a large woman wearing a pink floral dress was sitting on the steps talking to a man with a bushy brown beard. As they approached, Colin could hear the woman telling a story.

“So Starnes is out there to mow the lawn,” she was saying. “And he turns
off the mower and looks up and appraises the situation for a bit and then calls out to me, ‘Hollis! What the hell is wrong with that dog?’ and I says to him that the dog’s got inflamed anal sacs that I just drained, and Starnes chews that one over for a while and then finally he says, ‘I reckon you could go ahead and shoot that dog and git you another one with regular anal sacs and wouldn’t nobody be the wiser.’ And I tell him, ‘Starnes, this town ain’t got any men worth loving, so I might as well love my dog.”’ The bearded guy bent over in laughter, and then the storyteller looked over at Lindsey.

“You were on a tour?” Hollis asked. When Lindsey nodded, Hollis went on. “Well, you sure-God took your time.”

“Sorry,” mumbled Lindsey. Nodding to the guys, she said, “Hollis, this is Hassan and Colin. Boys, this is Hollis.”

“Also known as Lindsey’s mother,” Hollis explained.

“Christ, Hollis. Don’t go bragging about it,” Lindsey said. She walked past her mom, unlocked the store, and everyone walked into the sweet air-conditioning. As Colin passed, Hollis put a hand on his shoulder, spun him around, and stared at his face.

“I know you,” she said.

“I don’t know you,” Colin responded, and then added, by way of explanation, “I don’t forget many faces.” Hollis Wells continued to stare at him, but he was sure they had never met.

“He means that literally,” Hassan added, peering up from behind a rack of comic books. “Do you guys get newspapers here?” From behind the counter, Lindsey Lee Wells produced a
USA Today.
Hassan paged through the front section and finally folded the paper carefully to reveal only a small black-and-white picture of a thick-haired bespectacled white male. “Do you know this guy?” Hassan asked.

Colin squinted at the paper and thought for a moment. “I don’t personally know him, but his name is Gil Stabel and he is the CEO of a company called Fortiscom.”

“Good work. Except he’s not the CEO of Fortiscom.”

“Yes, he is,” Colin said, quite confident.

“No, he’s not. He’s not the CEO of anything. He’s dead.” Hassan unfolded the paper, and Colin leaned in to read the caption:
FORTISCOM
CEO
DIES
IN
PLANE
CRASH
.

“
KranialKidz
!” Hollis shouted triumphantly.

Colin looked up at her, wide-eyed. He sighed.
No one
watched that show. Its Nielsen share was 0.0. The show had been on for one season and not a single soul among Chicago’s three million residents had ever recognized him. And yet, here in Gutshot, Tennessee . . .

“Oh my God!” Hollis shouted. “What are you doing
here
?”

Colin, flushed for a moment with a feeling of famousness, thought about it. “I cracked up; then we went on a road trip; then we saw the sign for the Archduke; then I cut my head; then I had a Eureka moment; then we met her friends; now we’re going back to the car, but we haven’t left yet.”

Hollis stepped forward and examined his bandage. She smiled, and with one hand reached up for his Jew-fro and mussed his hair like she was his aunt and he was a seven-year-old who’d just done something exceedingly cute. “You’re not leaving yet, either,” she said, “because I’m going to cook you dinner.”

Hassan clapped his hands together. “I
am
hungry.”

“Close her down, Linds.” Lindsey rolled her eyes and walked slowly out from behind the register. “You drive with Colin in case he gets lost,” Hollis told Lindsey. “I’ll take—what did you say your name was?”

“I’m not a terrorist,” Hassan said by way of answering.

“Well. That’s a relief.” Hollis smiled.

•  •  •

Hollis drove a new and impressively pink pickup truck, and Colin followed in the Hearse with Lindsey riding shotgun. “Nice car,” she said sarcastically.

Colin didn’t respond. He liked Lindsey Lee Wells, but sometimes it felt like she was trying to get his goat.
²⁷
He had the same problem with Hassan. “Thanks for not saying anything when I was Pierre and Hassan was Salinger.”

“Yeah, well. It was pretty funny. And plus Colin was being sort of a dick and needed to be taken down a peg.”

“I see,” said Colin, which is what he had learned to say when he had nothing to say.

“So,” she said. “You’re a genius?”

“I’m a washed-up child prodigy,” Colin said.

“What are you good at, other than just already knowing everything?”

“Um, languages. Word games. Trivia. Nothing useful.”

He felt her glance at him. “Languages are useful. What do you speak?”

“I’m pretty good in eleven. German, French, Latin, Greek, Dutch, Arabic, Spanish, Russian—”

“I get the picture,” she said, cutting him off. “I think that
meine Mutter denkt, daβ sie gut für mich sind
”
²⁸
she said. “That’s why we’re in this car together.”

“
Warum denkt sie das?
”
²⁹

“Okay, we’ve both proven we speak German. She’s been on my ass like crazy to go to college and become, I don’t know, a doctor or something. Only I’m not going. I’m staying here. I already made up my mind about that. So I’m thinking maybe she wants you to inspire me or something.”

“Doctors make more money than paramedics-in-training,” Colin pointed out.

“Right, but I don’t need money.” She paused, and the car rumbled beneath them. Finally, he glanced over at her. “I need my life,” she explained,
“which is good and which is here. Anyway, I might go to the community college in Bradford to shut Hollis up, but that’s it.” The road took a sharp, banked turn to the right and, past a stand of trees, a town emerged. Small but well-kept houses lined the road. They all had porches, it seemed, and a lot of people were sitting out on them, even though it was hotter than hell in summertime. On the main road, Colin noted a newish combination gas station and Taco Bell, a hair salon, and the Gutshot, TN, Post Office, which appeared from the road to be the size of a spacious walk-in closet. Lindsey pointed out Colin’s window. “Out there’s the factory,” she said, and in the middle distance Colin saw a complex of low-lying buildings. It didn’t look much like a factory—no towering steel silos or smokestacks billowing carbon monoxide, just a few buildings that vaguely reminded him of airplane hangars.

“What does it make?” Colin asked.

“It makes jobs. It makes all the good jobs this town has. My great-grandfather started the plant in 1917.” Colin slowed down, pulling to the shoulder so that a speeding SUV could pass him while he looked out at the factory with Lindsey.

“Right, but what gets
made
there?” he asked.

“You’ll laugh.”

“I won’t laugh.”

“Swear not to laugh,” she said.

“I swear.”

“It’s a textile mill. These days we mostly make, uh, tampon strings.”

Colin did not laugh. Instead, he thought,
Tampons have strings? Why?
Of all the major human mysteries—God, the nature of the universe, etc.—he knew the least about tampons. To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he’d never seen one in the wild, and didn’t really care to.

In lieu of Colin’s laugh came a period of unbreachable silence. He followed Hollis’s pink truck down a newly paved side street that sloped up precipitously, causing the Hearse’s worn-out engine to rev for its very life. As they climbed the hill, it became clear that the street was actually a long driveway, which dead-ended into the largest single-family residence that Colin had ever personally laid eyes upon. Also, it was glaringly, bubble-gummingly, Pepto-Bismolly pink. He pulled into the driveway. Colin was staring at it somewhat slack-jawed when Lindsey poked him softly on the arm. Lindsey shrugged, as if embarrassed. “It ain’t much,” she said. “But it’s home.”

A broad staircase led up to a heavily columned front porch. Hollis opened the door and Colin and Hassan walked into a cavernous living room outfitted with a couch long enough for both of them to lie down without touching. “Y’all make yourselves at home. Lindsey and I are going to get dinner ready.”

“You can probably handle that on your own,” Lindsey said, leaning against the front door.

“I probably could, but I ain’t gonna.”

Hassan sat down on the couch. “That Hollis is a riot, man. On the way over here she was telling me that she owns a factory that makes tampon strings.” Colin still did not find this fact particularly hilarious.

“You know,” Colin said, “the movie star Jayne Mansfield lived in a pink mansion.” He walked around the living room, reading the spines of Hollis’s books and looking at framed photographs. A picture on the mantel above their fireplace caught Colin’s eye, and he walked over to it. A slightly younger, slightly thinner Hollis was standing in front of Niagara Falls. Beside her stood a girl who looked a little like Lindsey Lee Wells, except the girl wore a black trench coat over a ratty old Blink-182 T-shirt. Her eyeliner was thick and stretched back toward her temples, her black jeans tight and tapered, her Doc Martens well-polished. “Does she have a sister?” asked Colin.

“What?”

“Lindsey,” Colin elaborated. “Come here and look at this.”

Hassan came over and briefly appraised the picture before saying, “That’s the most pathetic attempt I’ve ever seen to be goth. Goth kids don’t like Blink-182. God, even I know that.”

“Um, do you like green beans?” Lindsey asked, and Colin suddenly realized she was behind them.

“Is this your sister?” asked Colin.

“Uh, no,” she said to Colin. “I’m an only child. Can’t you tell by how adorably self-involved I am?”

“He was too busy being adorably self-involved to notice,” Hassan interjected.

“So who is this?” Colin asked Lindsey.

“It’s me in eighth grade.”

“Oh,” said Colin and Hassan simultaneously, both embarrassed. “Yeah, I like green beans,” Hassan said, trying to change the subject as quickly as possible. Lindsey pulled shut the kitchen door behind her, and Hassan shrugged toward Colin and smirked, then returned to the couch.