by Green, John
By five o’clock, he was perilously close. He had captured the Katherine roller coaster eighteen times. But what he hadn’t done was quite important—he hadn’t gotten Katherine III on paper, and one cannot take an equation that predicts eighteen out of nineteen Katherines to the Nobel Prize Committee.70 For the next two hours, he thought of every facet of Katherine III (given name: Katherine Mutsensberger) with the precision and clarity that made his brain so unusual. And yet he could not fix what he came to call the III Anomaly. The equation that correctly predicted the other eighteen came out looking like this:
The graph’s smiley-facedness indicated that Colin had not been dumped by III but had dumped her, which was ludicrous. He could remember everything about Katherine III, and the rest of them, too, of course—he remembered everything about everything—and yet something about Katherine III clearly eluded him.
As he worked on the Theorem, Colin was so focused that the world outside his notebook seemed not to exist, so he jolted upright in surprise when he heard, from behind him, Lindsey say, “Time for dinner, dude.” He turned around to see her head peeking through the open door. She wore a blue cotton tank top with tight blue jeans, Converse All Stars, and—as if she knew what he liked—no makeup. She looked, well, pretty—even not smiling. Colin glanced down at his jeans and yellow KranialKidz T-shirt. “Don’t dress up on account of me,” Lindsey said, smiling. “We gotta get going, anyway.”
They came downstairs just in time to look through the screen door and see Hassan get into Katrina’s SUV. Hassan handed her a sagging pink rose he’d plucked from the mansion’s garden. She smiled, and then they kissed. Lord. Colin had seen it with his own eyes: Hassan kissing a girl who had to have been Homecoming Queen.
“Was Katrina Homecoming Queen?”
“No I was,” Lindsey responded immediately.
“Really?”
Lindsey pursed her lips. “Well, no, but you don’t have to sound so surprised about it! Katrina was on the Court, though.” She stopped and shouted toward the kitchen, “Hey, Hollis! We’re leaving. We might be back late. Hot sex and all!”
“Have fun!” replied Hollis. “Call if you’ll be out past twelve!”
They drove downtown, to the gas station/Taco Hell, where they ordered at the drive-thru. They both peered through the accordion window, Lindsey leaning over Colin to catch a glimpse of Hassan and Katrina eating.
“She seems to really like him,” Lindsey said. “I mean, I really like him, too. I don’t want to sound mean. I’m just surprised. She usually goes for, um, the dumb, hot ones.”
“So she’s like you.”
“Watch it. I’m paying for your dinner, after all.”
They took their chicken soft tacos and drove off, and finally Colin decided to ask what was going on.
“Um, why are we going out for dinner together?”
“Well, three reasons. First, because I’ve been thinking about our Theorem and I have a question. How does it work if you’re gay?”
“Huh?”
“Well it’s all graph-going-up means boy dumps girl and graph-going-down means girl dumps boy, right? But what if they’re both boys?”
“It doesn’t matter. You just assign a position to each person. Instead of being ‘b’ and ‘g,’ it could just as easily be ‘b1’ and ‘b2.’ That’s how algebra works.”
“Which would explain my C-minus. Okay. Thank God. I was really worried that it would only help the straights, and that’s not much of a Theorem. Reason two is I’m trying to get Hollis to like me, and she likes you, so if I like you, she’ll like me.” Colin was looking at her, confused. “C-minus in algebra; A-plus in coolology. See, popularity is complicated, yo. You have to spend a lot of time thinking about liking; you have to really like being liked, and also sorta like being disliked.” Colin listened intently, nibbling the inside of his thumb. Listening to Lindsey talk about popularity made him feel a little bit of the mysterium tremendum. “Anyway,” she went on, “I need to find out what’s going on with her selling land. That guy Marcus built this cookie-cutter house subdivision south of Bradford. I mean, it’s vomitous. Hollis would never stand for that shit.”
“Oh, okay,” Colin said, feeling a bit like a pawn.
“And reason three,” Lindsey said, “is I gotta teach you how to shoot so you don’t embarrass yourself.”
“Shoot a gun?”
“A shotgun. I put one in your trunk this afternoon.” Colin nervously glanced toward the back. “It won’t bite,” Lindsey said.
“Where did you get a gun?”
“Where did I get it? Smartypants, getting a gun in Gutshot, Tennessee, is easier than getting chlamydia from a hooker.”
• • •
Twenty minutes later, they were sitting in a grassy field on the edge of a thick forested area that, Lindsey said, belonged to Hollis but would soon belong to Marcus. The field, overgrown with wildflowers and the occasional tree sapling, was nonetheless fenced in by an interweaving series of chopped logs.
“Why is there a fence?”
“Used to be we had a horse named Hobbit that grazed here, but then he died.”
“He was your horse?”
“Yup. Well, Hollis’s, too. Hollis got him from my father as a wedding present, and then when I was born—six months later—Hollis gave him to me. He was the gentlest horse, Hobbit. I could ride him from the time I was three.”
“So are your parents divorced?”
“No, not officially. But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.” Colin laughed. “He left when I was one. He calls a couple times a year, but Hollis never makes me talk to him. I don’t know the guy, and I don’t really care to. How ’bout you?”
“My parents are still married. I have to call them at the same time every night—in thirty minutes, actually. They’re overprotective, I guess, but normal. We’re really boring.”
“You’re not boring. You’ve got to stop saying that, or people will start believing you. Now, about the gun.” Lindsey jumped up and ran back across the field and hurdled the fence. Colin followed her at a more sustainable pace. He did not, as a rule, believe in running. “Pop the trunk,” Lindsey shouted.
Colin unlocked the trunk and found a long, double-barreled shotgun with a stained wooden handle. Lindsey picked up the gun, handed it to Colin, and said, “Point it at the sky.” She grabbed a square paper box, and then they marched back, over the fence and across the field.
Looking like an expert, Lindsey cracked open the gun, pulled two cylindrical shells from the paper box, and inserted them. “When this shit is loaded, you don’t point it at me, hear?” She snapped the gun shut, held it up to her shoulder, and then carefully handed it over to Colin.
She moved behind him and helped him hold the gun against his shoulder. He could feel her breasts against his shoulder blades, her feet by his feet, her stomach against his back. “Tuck it tight against your shoulder,” she said, and he did. “The safety’s here,” she said, reaching up and guiding his hand to a steel switch on the side of the gun. He’d never held a gun before. It felt simultaneously exciting and deeply wrong.
“Now when you shoot it,” she said, her breath against the nape of his neck, “you don’t pull the trigger. You just reach in there and you squeeze it. Just squeeze it softly. I’m going to take a step back and then you just squeeze, okay?”
“What should I aim at?”
“You couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, so just aim straight ahead.” Colin felt the absence of Lindsey on his back, and then he—ever so softly—squeezed the trigger.
The blast hit his ears at the same moment it hit his right shoulder, and the force of the gun caused his arm to pull up and his legs to fall out from under him and he found himself sitting on his ass in a field of wildflowers with the gun pointing to the sky. “Well,” he said. “That was fun.”
Lindsey was laughing. “See, that
’s why we’re here, so you don’t fall on your ass in front of Colin and Chase and everybody. You’ve got to learn to prepare for that kick.”
And so over the course of the next hour, Colin shot the holy living hell out of the oak trees before him, pausing only to reload the gun and call his parents. He shot forty-four shells into the forest, and then, when his right arm was numb and he felt like he’d been punched repeatedly in the shoulder by a champion boxer, he said, “Why don’t you try?” Lindsey shook her head and sat down on the grass. Colin followed her down.
“Oh, I don’t shoot guns. I’m terrified of them,” she said.
“Are you shitting me?”
“No. Plus that’s a ten-gauge. I wouldn’t shoot a ten-gauge for a thousand dollars. They kick like a goddamned mule.”
“Then why did—”
“Like I said, I don’t want you to look like a pussy.”
Colin wanted to continue the conversation but didn’t quite know how, so he lay back and rubbed his sore shoulder. On the whole, Gutshot had been physically unkind to him: a puffy scar above his eye, forty-four distinct shoulder bruises, and of course a still-painful gaping hole in his gut. And yet, somehow, he liked the place.
He noticed that she was lying next to him, her arms crossed beneath her head. She kicked at his shin playfully to get his attention. “What?” he asked.
“I was thinking about this girl you love so much,” she said. “And this place I love so much. And how that happens. How you can just fall into it. This land Hollis is selling, the thing about it is—well, I’m partly mad because I don’t want there to be some bullshit McMansion subdivision up there, but also partly because my secret hideout is up there.”
“Your what?”
“My secret hideout. My super, incredibly top secret location that no one on earth knows about.” Lindsey paused and turned her head away from the starstruck sky and toward Colin. “You wanna see it?”
The End (of the Middle)
“I don’t want to flatter myself,” said Katherine I in between sips of coffee at Café Sel Marie, “but it does feel a little special, that it all began with me.”
“Well,” said Colin, who was drinking milk with a shot of coffee in it, “there’s three ways to look at it. Either (1) it’s a massive coincidence that all the girls I ever liked happen to share the same nine letters, or (2) I just happen to think it a particularly beautiful name, or (3) I never got over our two-and-a-half-minute relationship.”
“You were very cute then, you know,” she said. She blew on the coffee through pursed lips. “I remember thinking that. You were dork chic before dork chic was chic.”
“I’m leaning toward explanation 3 at the moment.” He smiled. Dishes clattered around them. The place was crowded. He could see into the kitchen, where their waiter was smoking a long, thin cigarette.
“I think maybe you try to be odd on purpose. I think you like that. It makes you you and not someone else.”
“You sound like your father,” he said, referencing Krazy Keith.
“I’ve found you insanely attractive since I saw you when I was freaking out about my French test,” she answered. She didn’t blink, didn’t let go of his stare. Those eyes as blue as the sky ought to be. And then she smiled. “Do I sound like my father now?”
“Yeah, weirdly enough. He also sucks at French.” She laughed. Colin saw the waiter put out his cigarette, and then he came over to their table and asked if they wanted anything more. Katherine I said no, and then she turned to Colin and said, “Do you know anything about Pythagoras?”
And Colin said, “I know his Theorem.”
And she said, “No, I mean the guy. He was weird. He thought everything could be expressed numerically, that—like—math could unlock the world. I mean, everything.”
“What, like, even love?” Colin asked, only vaguely annoyed that she knew something he didn’t.
“Particularly love,” Katherine I said. “And you’ve taught me enough French for me to say: 10-5 space 16-5-14-19-5 space 17-21-5 space 10-5 space 20-1-9-13-5.” For a long moment Colin stared at her wordlessly. He cracked the code pretty quickly, but he stayed silent, trying to figure out when she’d come up with it, when she’d memorized it. Even he couldn’t have translated French letters to Arabic numerals that quickly. Je pense que je t’aime, she’d said numerically—“I think that I like you.” Or, “I think that I love you.” The French verb aimer has two meanings. And that’s why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.
He stayed quiet until he had a fully formulated response, one that would keep her interest alive without quite satiating it. Colin Singleton, let it be said, couldn’t play the ninth inning of a relationship to save his life, but he could damn well score in the first.
“You’re just saying that because I’m on a TV show that no one watches,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe,” he said, “you’re saying it because you’re flattered I’ve spent eight years of my life chasing after the nine letters in your name.”
“Maybe,” she allowed. And then Colin’s phone rang. His mom. Their sneak-out was over. But by then it was too late. In his mind, Katherine I was already becoming Katherine XIX. She would soon retake the throne that, all along, had rightfully been hers.
69 The pretty one, with all the letters.
70 Although there is not a Nobel Prize in Mathematics, he might have had an outside chance at the Peace Prize.
(fourteen)
“The thing about your stories,” Lindsey was saying in the darkness as they approached the forest in front of them, “is that they still don’t have any morals, and you can’t do a good girl voice, and you don’t really talk enough about everyone else—the story’s still about you. But anyway, I can imagine this Katherine now, a little bit. She’s clever. And she’s just a little mean to you. I think you get off on that. Most guys do. That’s how I got Colin, really. Katrina was hotter and wanted him worse. They’d been dating for a while when he fell for me. But she was too easy. I know she’s my friend and possibly Hassan’s girlfriend and whatever, but Katrina’s easier than a four-piece jigsaw puzzle.”
Colin laughed, and Lindsey went on talking. “Getting people to like you is so easy, really. It’s a wonder more people don’t do it.”
“It’s not so easy for me.”
“Whatever, I like you, and I never really like anybody. Hassan likes you, and I can tell that he never really likes anybody, either. You just need more people who don’t like people.”
“You don’t ever really like anybody?”
They passed into the woods, following a narrow, periodically invisible trail. Lindsey motioned toward the trees and said, “You sure shot the holy hell out of this forest, Smartypants. Wouldn’t that be something if you bagged a hog.”
“I don’t really want to kill a pig,” Colin noted. He had read Charlotte’s Web, see. Then he repeated himself. “You don’t ever really like anybody?”
“Well, that’s an exaggeration, I guess,” she answered. “It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.”
“Well, but you care about a lot of people. The oldsters?” Colin offered.
“Well, the oldsters are different,” she said, and then stopped walking and turned around to Colin, who was already out of breath as he struggled up the hill behind her. “The thing about the oldsters, I think, is that they never screwed with me, so I don’t worry about them. So yeah, oldsters and babies are the exceptions.”
They walked in silence for a long time through dense, flat brush with thin trees rising straight and high all around them. The trail became increasingly steep, zigzagging up the hill, until they finally came to a rocky outcropping perhaps fifteen feet high, and Lindsey Lee Wells said, “Now comes the rock climbing.”
Colin looked up at the craggy face of the stone. There are pro
bably people who can successfully negotiate their way up that rock, he thought, but I am not one of them. “No way,” he said. She turned back toward him, her cheeks flushed and glistening with sweat. “I’m kidding.” She scampered up a wet, mossy boulder, and Colin followed. Immediately, he saw a narrow, chest-high crack covered over by a spiderweb. “See, I’m taking you here because you’re the only guy I know who’s skinny enough. Squeeze on through,” she said.
Colin pushed the spiderweb aside—sorry, Charlotte. He turned sideways, crouched down, and inched away from the fading light outside. Soon he was completely blind, his knees and back and head all against the rock, and for a moment he panicked, thinking Lindsey had tricked him, and would leave him, wedged in here. But he kept shuffling his feet forward. Something glided against his back. He screamed.
“Relax. It’s me,” she said. Her hands found his shoulders, and she said, “Take one more step,” and then he could no longer feel the rock pressing in on him. She turned him so that he was facing forward. “Keep walking,” she said. “You can stand up straight now.” And then her hands disappeared, and he heard her sweeping at the ground, and she said, “I keep a flashlight here, but I can’t f—got it.” She pressed the flashlight into his hands and he fumbled with it and then the world lit up.
“Wow,” said Colin. Approximately square, the cave’s only room was big enough to lie down comfortably in any direction, although the gray-brown ceiling sloped down toward the back, making it hard to stand in a lot of places. It contained a blanket, a sleeping bag, several old throw pillows, and one unmarked Mason jar filled with some sort of liquid. He nudged it with his foot. “Booze,” Lindsey explained.
“Where’d you get it?”
“There’s a guy out in Danville who makes corn whiskey moonshine. No shit. And he’ll sell it to you if you’ve got ten dollars and are old enough to walk. Colin gave it to me. I told him I drank it, but really I brought it out here, ’cause it adds ambience.” Colin moved the flashlight slowly around the cave’s walls. “Sit down,” Lindsey said. “And turn off the light.”