An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

the formula grew increasingly complicated, until it began to seem almost—how to put this not so dorkily—well, beautiful.

The ladies couldn’t talk about anything but how hot you were. You’re missing a whole demographic of Katherines by not chasing the over-eighty market.”

so God wants you to marry the girl who believed I was a Frenchman suffering from hemorrhoidal Tourette’s?”

“Don’t be an asshole,”

And I came home with that story psyched to tell you because I’ve finally got a story of my own after four years of listening to yours.

You’re so goddamned scared of the idea that someone might dump you that your whole fugging life is built around not getting left behind.

Part of not being a self-centered asshole, Colin reasoned, is doing things with your friends even when you don’t want to.

But you know what they say about Gutshot: the population never goes up and never goes down, because every time a woman gets pregnant, a man leaves town.”

He’d never held a gun before. It felt simultaneously exciting and deeply wrong.

“I was thinking about this girl you love so much,” she said. “And this place I love so much. And how that happens. How you can just fall into it.

And that’s why he liked her, and loved her. She spoke to him in a language that, no matter how hard you studied it, could not be completely understood.

one that would keep her interest alive without quite satiating it.

“Getting people to like you is so easy, really. It’s a wonder more people don’t do it.”

Colin pushed the spiderweb aside—sorry, Charlotte.

“We’re invisible. I’ve never been here with someone else. It’s different being invisible with someone.”

“Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you?

If people could see me the way I see myself—if they could live in my memories—would anyone, anyone, love me?”

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real.

I’m what I need to be at any moment to stay above the ground but below the radar.

You’re okay with me seeing inside you a little.”

It’s more like you found a way to hijack their cool.

he couldn’t have a girlfriend without a finished Theorem. And anyway, she was a Lindsey.

He wasn’t really going on a hunt anyway. He was going for a stroll through the woods. With a gun.

It was the first time since arriving in Gutshot that he’d beaten the rooster to waking.

Right, Colin thought. We have guns and the pigs have snouts. Dangerous, indeed.

can’t

*can

Colin spent the next ninety minutes thinking, without ceasing, about a girl he’d known for less than two weeks.

He had, indeed, remarked eighteen and snubbed the rest.

I’ve only ever been two things,” he said softly. “I’m a child prodigy, and I’m dumped by Katherines. But now I’m—” “Neither,”

“You gotta see the humor in it, baby. I’m bug-bit, hornet-stung, bramble-cut, covered in chaw, and wearing camouflage. A feral hog, some hornets, and a prodigy led me through the woods so that I might stumble upon the first girl I ever kissed riding TOC like he’s a thoroughbred next to the grave of an Austro-Hungarian Archduke. That,” Hassan said to Colin emphatically, “is funny.”

He just wanted to take her to her cave and tell her there, so she wouldn’t have to go through it all in the light.

“Pussy,” TOC said, showing the grace and eloquence for which he was widely famous.

His head scrambled, Colin crawled to the Archduke’s obelisk, the only geographical location in the world that wasn’t currently spinning.

Nuts, arms, stomachs—they never hurt. All hurt is brain hurt.

“In the brain,” Colin said, getting it right this time.

I could do it all over again,”

“I’d just let myself be trampled to death by the Satan Pig.”

On the drive, no one talked. There was too much to discuss.

I’m actually just going to issue a blanket dingleberries on all attempts to psychoanalyze me.”

Like you always say, kafir, everything ends in breakup, divorce, or death. I want to narrow my misery options to divorce or death—that’s all.

“I only registered for two classes in the fall, so don’t start creaming yourself.

Her presence made him shoot immediately awake.

He’d never found single life so interesting before.

It was no Chicago, but Colin had missed skyscrapers.

“Five years is a long time, Mom,” she said. “It is and it isn’t,”

People don’t like to know that

their paychecks have less to do with their company’s profitability than its owner’s compassion.

“See, I just did something. Usually,” he said, “I would have thrown that shit in the backseat, where I wouldn’t have to look at it and you’d have to clean it up the next time you had a date with a Katherine. But I’m leaving it here, so I remember to pick it up when we get to the Pink Mansion.

“Yeah, I’m getting there. Although—if I’m going to be an all-out, full-on doer,” Hassan noted, faux morose, “I should probably register for three classes. It’s a hard life, kafir.”

the thick rotting floor of the forest crunching beneath his feet, reminding him of where we all go. To seed, to ground.