The John Green Collection(14)

He was a dying man staring down on the surgeons trying to save him. With an almost comfortable distance from the thing itself as it really was, Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. What a dirty lie. This, right here, was the true abdominal snowman: it felt like something freezing in his stomach.

“I love you so much and I just want you to love me like I love you,” he said as softly as he could.

“You don’t need a girlfriend, Colin. You need a robot who says nothing but ‘I love you.”’ And it felt like being stoned and sticked from the inside, a fluttering and then a sharp pain in his lower rib cage, and then he felt for the first time that a piece of his gut had been wrenched out of him.

She tried to get out as quickly and painlessly as possible, but after she begged curfew, he began to cry. She held his head against her collarbone. And even though he felt pitiful and ridiculous, he didn’t want it to end, because he knew the absence of her would hurt more than any breakup ever could.

But she left anyway, and he was alone in his room, searching out anagrams for mymissingpiece in a vain attempt to fall asleep.

13 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.

14 Crop identification not being among Colin’s talents.

15 The original Greek, for the curious:

16 To put it Venn Diagrammatically, Colin would have argued that the world looked like this:



17 “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.

18 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.





(six)


It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.

He felt the thrill of it surge through him, his eyes blinking fast as he fought to remember the idea in its completeness. Lying there on his back in the sticky, thick air, the Eureka moment felt like a thousand orgasms all at once, except not as messy.

“Eureka?” Hassan asked, the excitement evident in his voice. He’d been waiting for it, too.

“I need to write this down,” Colin said. He sat up. His head hurt like hell, but he reached into his pocket and pulled out the little notebook he kept at all times, and a #2 pencil, which was broken in the middle from his fall, but still wrote okay. He sketched:



Where x = time, and y = happiness, y = 0 beginning of relationship and breakup, y negative = breakup by m, and y positive = breakup by f: my relationship with K-19.



He was still sketching when he heard Lindsey Lee Wells coming and opened his eyes to see her wearing a fresh T-shirt (it read GUTSHOT!) and toting a first-aid box with an honest-to-God red cross on it.

She knelt beside him and pulled the T-shirt off his head slowly, and then she said, “This is going to sting,” and dug into the cut with a long Q-tip soaked in what seemed to be cayenne pepper sauce.

“FUG!” shouted Colin, wincing, and he looked up and saw her round, brown eyes blinking away sweat as she worked.

“I know. I’m sorry. Okay, done. You don’t need stitches, but you’re going to have a little scar, I bet. Is that okay?”

“What’s another scar?” he said absentmindedly as she pulled a wide gauze bandage taut against his forehead. “I feel like someone punched me in the brain.”

“Possible concussion,” Lindsey noted. “What day is it? Where are you?”

“It’s Tuesday, and I’m in Tennessee.”

“Who was the junior senator from New Hampshire in 1873?” asked Hassan.

“Bainbridge Wadleigh,” answered Colin. “I don’t think I have a concussion.”

“Is that for real?” asked Lindsey. “I mean, did you really know that?”

Colin nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I know all the senators. Also, that’s an easy one to remember—because I always think about how much your parents have to fugging hate you to name you Bainbridge Wadleigh.”