“May I be excused for a moment?” he asked.
“Is it important?”
“I think I have an eyelash in my pupillary sphincter,” replied Colin, and the class erupted into laughter. Ms. Sorenstein sent him on his way, and then Colin went into the bathroom and, staring in the mirror, plucked the eyelash from his eye, where the pupillary sphincter is located.
After class, Hassan found Colin eating a peanut butter and no jelly sandwich on the wide stone staircase at the school’s back entrance.
“Look,” Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.”
“It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.”
“Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.”
And so they were friends.
• • •
“I’ve gotta say, I don’t think much of Kentucky,” Hassan said. Colin tilted his head up, resting his chin on his arms. He scanned the rest-stop parking lot for a moment. His missing piece was nowhere to be found.
“Everything here reminds me of her, too. We used to talk about going to Paris. I mean, I don’t even want to go to Paris, but I just keep imagining how excited she’d be at the Louvre. We’d go to great restaurants and maybe drink red wine. We even looked for hotels on the Web. We could have done that on the KranialKidz money.”12
“Dude, if Kentucky is going to remind you of Paris, we’re in a hell of a pickle.”
Colin sat up and looked across the poorly kept lawn of the rest stop. And then he looked down at Hassan’s clever handiwork. “Baguettes,” Colin explained.
“Oh, my God. Give me the keys.” Colin reached into his pocket and tossed the keys lazily across the picnic table. Hassan snatched them as he stood, then made his way to Satan’s Hearse. Colin followed, forlorn.
Forty miles down the road, still in Kentucky, Colin had curled up against the passenger window and was starting to fall asleep when Hassan announced, “World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix—Next Exit!”
“We’re not stopping to see the World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix.”
“We shitsure are,” Hassan said. “It must be huge!”
“Hass, why would we stop and see the World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix?”
“It’s a road trip! It’s about adventure!” Hassan pounded on the steering wheel to emphasize his excitement. “It’s not like we have somewhere to go. Do you really want to die having never seen the World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix?”
Colin thought it over. “Yes. First off, neither of us is Christian. Second off, spending the summer chasing after idiotic roadside attractions is not going to fix anything. Third off, crucifixes remind me of her.”
“Of who?”
“Of her.”
“Kafir, she was an atheist!”
“Not always,” Colin said softly. “She used to wear one a long time ago. Before we dated.” He stared out the window, pine trees rushing past. His immaculate memory called forth the silver crucifix.
“Your sitzpinkling disgusts me,” Hassan said, but he gave the Hearse some extra gas and shot past the exit.
11 But anyway, it’s called fetor hepaticus, and it’s a symptom of late-stage liver failure. Basically, what happens is that your breath literally smells like a rotting corpse.
12 More on that later, but basically: about a year before, Colin had come into some cash.
(five)
Two hours after passing the World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix, Hassan brought it back up.
“Did you already know that the World’s Largest Wooden Crucifix was in Kentucky?” he shouted, his window down and his left hand waving through the fast-passing air.
“Not before today,” Colin answered. “But I did know that the world’s largest wooden church is in Finland.”
“Not interesting,” Hassan said. Hassan’s not-interestings had helped Colin figure out what other people did and did not enjoy hearing about. Colin had never gotten that before Hassan, because everyone else either humored or ignored him. Or, in the case of Katherines, humored then ignored. Thanks to Colin’s collected list of things that weren’t interesting,13 he could hold a halfway normal conversation.
Two hundred miles and one pit stop later, safely removed from Kentucky, they were midway between Nashville and Memphis. The wind through the open windows dried their sweat without actually cooling them much, and Colin was wondering how they could get to a place with air-conditioning when he noticed the hand-painted billboard towering above a field of cotton or corn or soybeans or something.14 EXIT 212—SEE THE GRAVE OF ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND—THE CORPSE THAT STARTED WORLD WAR I.