The John Green Collection(50)
“Thanks,” said Colin, and then they got out of the car, and they met in front of the hood, and Colin held his arms out a little, and Hassan shoved him playfully, and then they hustled into the store.
TOC was restocking some beef jerky sticks while Lindsey sat on the stool behind the counter reading a celebrity magazine, her bare feet up on the counter beside the cash register.
“Hey,” TOC said. “Heard you got a date tonight, big guy.”
“Yeah, and it’s all thanks to your excellent driving. If you’d missed that pothole, she never would have ended up in my arms.”
“Well, you’re welcome. She’s a hottie, ain’t she?”
“Hey!” said Lindsey without looking up from her magazine. “I’m the hottie!”
“Oh, baby, hush,” TOC said.
“So, Colin,” said TOC. “Hass says you aren’t much for cruising, but you gotta come out hunting with us next weekend.”
“That’s nice of you to offer,” Colin said. And it was sorta nice. No quarterback or cornerback or anyone else in any way associated with football had ever invited him to do anything. But Colin thought immediately of the reason he chose Katherine XIX over Marie Caravolli. In this world, Colin figured, you’re best off staying with your kind. “I don’t know how to shoot, though.”
“Oh, I bet you’ll bag a hogzilla,” said TOC. Colin glanced over at Hassan, who opened his eyes wide and nodded subtly. For a split second, Colin thought of passing on the hog hunt, but he figured he owed it to Hassan. Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friends even when you don’t want to. Even if they could result in the death of a wild hog. “Okay,” Colin said, looking not at TOC but at Hass.
And TOC said, “Sounds good. Listen, since y’all is here to look after the store till closing, I’m gonna head off. I gotta meet the boys down at the factory. We’re going bowling.”
Now Lindsey put down the magazine. “I like bowling,” she said.
“Boys night out, baby.”
Lindsey fake-pouted, then smiled, and stood up to kiss TOC good-bye. He leaned across the counter, pecked her on the mouth, and strode out.
• • •
They closed up the store early and went home, even though Hollis did not like to be interrupted before five-thirty. She was lying on the couch in the living room saying, “We need your help here. If you look at the price point—” and then she saw them walking in and said, “I need to call you back.” She hung up the phone. “Now I’ve told y’all—I work until five-thirty and I can’t be interrupted.”
“Hollis, why are you selling land to that guy Marcus?”
“That’s none of your business and I’ll thank you not to try and change the subject. Y’all stay out of the house until five-thirty. I’m paying you to work, remember. And Lindsey Lee Wells, I know you weren’t down at Mr. Jaffrey’s house today. Don’t think I don’t find these things out.”
“I’ve got a date tonight, so I’ll be skipping dinner,” Hassan interjected.
“And I’m taking Colin to dinner,” Lindsey said. “This Colin,” she clarified, her extended pointer finger poking his bicep. Hollis beamed; Colin looked over at Lindsey with equal parts surprise and confusion.
“Well, I guess I can do some work this evening with y’all out then,” Hollis said.
• • •
Colin spent his remaining pre-“date” hours working on the Theorem. Within thirty minutes, he’d nailed K-19. The problem, as it turned out, was not so much bad math as false hope: Colin had been trying to tweak the Theorem to make K-19’s graph look like:
In short, he had been counting upon a reunion . He’d been assuming that the Theorem could see into the future, when K-19 would return to him. But the Theorem, he decided, couldn’t take into account its own influence. So then with the same formula he’d worked out before, in the car with Lindsey,69 Colin managed to get it to reflect his relationship with Katherine XIX up until now:
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: