“Did you tell your mom?” he asked, because her mom had loved him. All moms loved him.
“Yeah. She was sad. But she said you always wanted to be attached to my hip, which wasn’t healthy.”
“A better fate than this,” he said mostly to himself.
He could hear her eyes rolling as she said, “You are probably the only person I’ve ever known who wants to be a Siamese twin.”
“Conjoined twin,” Colin corrected. “Did you know that there is a word for a person who is not a conjoined twin?” he asked her.
“No. What is it? Normal person?”
“Singleton,” he said. “The word is Singleton.” And she said, “That’s funny, Col. Listen, I really have to go. I’ve got to pack for camp. Maybe we shouldn’t talk till I get back. Just some time away from it would be good for you, I think.” And even though he wanted to say, We’re supposed to be FRIENDS, remember? And What is it? New boyfriend? And I love you entirely, he just mumbled, “Just please listen to the message,” and then she said, “Okay. Bye,” and he didn’t say anything because he wasn’t going to be the person who ended the conversation or hung up, and then he heard the deadness in his ear and it was over. Colin lay down on the dry, orange dirt and let the tall grass swallow him up, making him invisible. The sweat pouring down his face was indistinguishable from his tears. He was finally—finally—crying. He remembered their arms entangled, their stupid little inside jokes, the way he felt when he would come over to her house after school and see her reading through the window. He missed it all. He thought of being with her in college, having the freedom to sleep over whenever they wanted, both of them at Northwestern together. He missed that, too, and it hadn’t even happened. He missed his imagined future.
You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.
• • •
He waited on the side of the road for twenty minutes before Hassan came by, with Lindsey riding shotgun.
“You were right,” Colin said. “Not a good idea.”
“Daddy’s sorry,” Hassan said. “It’s a shitty situation. Maybe you had to call her.”
Lindsey turned around in her seat. “You really love this girl, huh?”
And then Colin started crying again, and Lindsey crawled into the backseat and put her arm around him, and Colin’s head was up against the side of her head. He tried not to sob much, because the plain fact of the matter is that boy-sobbing is exceedingly unattractive. Lindsey said, “Let it out, let it out,” and then Colin said, “But I can’t, because if I let it out it’ll sound like a bullfrog’s mating call,” and everyone, including Colin, laughed.
• • •
He worked on the Theorem from the time they got home until 11 P.M. Lindsey brought him some kind of chicken taco salad from Taco Hell, but Colin only ate a few bites. Generally, he didn’t think all that highly of eating, particularly when he was working. But his work that night came to naught. He couldn’t make the Theorem work, and he realized that his Eureka moment had been a false alarm. Imagining the Theorem only required a prodigy, but actually completing it would take a genius. Proving the Theorem, in short, required more mattering than Colin brought to the table.
“I’m going to burn you,” he said out loud to the notebook. “I’m going to throw you in the fire.” Which was a fine idea—only there was no fire. There don’t tend to be a lot of crackling fireplaces during the Tennessee summer, and Colin didn’t smoke, so no matches were on hand. He rousted about the empty drawers of his adopted desk for matches or a lighter, but he could find nothing. He was hell-bent on burning that goddamned notebook with all his Theoremizing, though. So he walked through the bathroom and cracked open the door to Hassan’s darkened room.
“Dude, do you have a match?” Colin asked, failing at whispering.
“Your daddy is sleeping.”
“I know, but do you have a lighter or a match or something?”
“Daddy is trying really fugging hard to think of a not-terrifying reason why you’d wake Daddy up in the middle of the night to ask that fugging question. But no. No. Daddy does not have a match or a lighter. And, okay, enough of the Daddy shit. Anyway, you’ll just have to wait till morning to douse yourself in gasoline and self-annimilate.”
“Self-immolate,” Colin corrected, and then pulled the door shut.
He walked downstairs and shuffled past Hollis Wells, who was too distracted by all the papers around her and the blaring Home Shopping Network to notice him. Down a hallway, he came to what he believed to be Lindsey’s room. He’d never technically seen it, but he’d seen her enter the living room from this approximate side of the house. Also, a light was on. He knocked softly.