“Your lack of ambition is truly remarkable.”
Hassan’s hand reached out from behind the shower and grabbed a towel monogrammed HLW. He emerged moments later, and walked into Colin’s room, towel around his sizable waist.
“Listen, kafir. Seriously. Lay off about me going to school. Let me be happy; I’ll let you be happy. Giving each other shit is fine, but there comes a point.”
“Sorry. I didn’t know the point had come.” Colin sat down on the bed, pulling on a KranialKidz T-shirt he’d been given.
“Well, you’ve brought it up like 284 consecutive days.”
“Maybe we should have a word,” Colin said. “For when it’s gone too far. Like, just a random word and then we’ll know to back off.”
Standing there in his towel, Hassan looked up at the ceiling and finally said, “Dingleberries.”
“Dingleberries.” Colin agreed, anagramming in his head. Dingleberries was an anagrammatic jackpot.39
“You’re anagramming, aren’t you, motherfugger?” asked Hassan.
“Yeah,” Colin said.
“Maybe that’s why she dumped you. Always anagramming, never listening.”
“Dingleberries,” said Colin.
“Just wanted to give you a chance to use it. Okay, let’s go eat. I’m hungrier than a kid on his third day of fat camp.” As they made their way down a hall to a spiral staircase that led to the living room, Colin asked—as close to a whisper as he could muster—“So why do you think Hollis wants to give us jobs, really?”
Hassan stopped on the staircase, and Colin with him. “She wants to make me happy. We fatties have a bond, dude. It’s like a Secret Society. We’ve got all kinds of shit you don’t know about. Handshakes, special fat people dances—we got these secret fugging lairs in the center of the earth and we go down there in the middle of the night when all the skinny kids are sleeping and eat cake and fried chicken and shit. Why d’you think Hollis is still sleeping, kafir? Because we were up all night in the secret lair injecting butter frosting into our veins. She’s giving us jobs because a fatty always trusts another fatty.”
“You’re not fat. You’re pudgy.”
“Dude, you just saw my man-tits when I got out of the shower.”
“They’re not that bad,” said Colin.
“Oh, that’s it! You asked for it!” Hassan pulled his T-shirt up to his collarbone and Colin glanced over at Hass’s hairy chest, which featured—okay, there’s no denying it—minor breasts. An A cup, but still. Hassan smiled with great satisfaction, pulled down his shirt, and headed down the stairs.
• • •
It took an hour for Hollis to get ready, during which time Hassan and Lindsey chatted and watched The Today Show while Colin sat at the far edge of the couch and read one of the books he’d stuffed in his backpack—a Lord Byron anthology including the poems Lara and Don Juan. He liked it pretty well. When Lindsey interrupted him, he’d just come to a line in Lara he liked quite a lot: “Eternity bids thee to forget.”
“Whatcha reading there, smartypants?” asked Lindsey. Colin held up the cover. “Don Juan,” she said, pronouncing the Juan like Wan. “Trying to learn how to avoid getting dumped?”
“Jew-un,” Colin corrected. “It’s pronounced Don Jew-un,” he said.40
“Not interesting,” Hassan pointed out. But Lindsey seemed to find it more aggravating than not-interesting. She rolled her eyes and picked up the breakfast plates from the coffee table. Hollis Wells came downstairs, wrapped in what looked, for all the world, like a flowery toga.
“What we’re doing,” she spoke quickly, “is we’re putting together an oral history of Gutshot, for future generations. I’ve been pulling people off the line to do interviews for a couple of weeks, but I ain’t gotta now that you’re here. Anyway, the downfall of this whole operation so far has been gossip—everybody chattering ’bout what everyone else says or doesn’t say. But y’all don’t have a reason in the world to talk about whether or not Ellie Mae liked her husband when she married him in 1937. So—it’s you two. And Linds, who everybody trusts—”
“I’m very honest,” Lindsey explained, cutting off her mom.
“To a fault, dear. But yes. So, you get these people talking and they won’t shut up, I assure you. I want six hours of new tape turned in to me every day. But steer them toward real history, if you can. I’m doing this for my grandkids, not for a gossip fest.”