An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.

But he wasn’t crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she’d taken the part of him that cried.

Babies are made through an act that you will eventually find intriguing but for right now will just sort of horrify you, and also sometimes people do stuff that involves baby-making parts that does not actually involve making babies, like for instance kiss each other in places that are not on the face.

He anagrammed “yrs forever” until he found one he liked: sorry fever. And then he lay there in his fever of sorry and repeated the now memorized note in his head and wanted to cry, but instead he only felt this aching behind his solar plexus.

Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears.

“I just want to crawl into a hole and die.” Colin spoke into the cream carpet with no audible emotion.

I don’t know why. This visual makes me laugh.

“I’m just—I’m just a failure. What if this is it? What if ten years from now I’m sitting in a fugging cubicle crunching numbers and memorizing baseball statistics so I can kick ass in my fantasy league and I don’t have her and I never do anything significant and I’m just a complete waste?” Hassan sat up, his hands on his knees. “See, this is why you need to believe in God. Because I don’t even expect to have a cube, and I’m happier than a pig in a pile of shit.”

“Right. Faith in God. That’s a good idea. I’d also like to believe that I could fly into outer space on the fluffy backs of giant penguins and screw Katherine XIX in zero gravity.”

“The problem exactly is that she dumped me. That I’m alone. Oh my God, I’m alone again. And not only that, but I’m a total failure in case you haven’t noticed. I’m washed up, I’m former. Formerly the boyfriend of Katherine XIX. Formerly a prodigy. Formerly full of potential. Currently full of shit.”

Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do. The vast majority of child prodigies don’t become adult geniuses.

“Because the genius thing,” Hassan went on as if Colin hasn’t just professed his love, “is nothing. That’s just about wanting to be famous.” “No, it’s not. I want to matter,” he said. “Right. Like I said, you want fame. Famous is the new popular. And you’re not going to be America’s fugging Next Top Model, that’s for goddamned sure. So you want to be America’s Next Top Genius and now you’re—and don’t take this personally—whining that it hasn’t happened yet.”

if only Colin had known that he was missing a piece, that his inability to see himself in the story of a circle was an unfixable problem, he might have known that the rest of the world would catch up with him as time passed.

It made him feel like no one liked him, which, in fact, no one did. His single consolation was that one day, he would matter. He’d be famous. And none of them ever would. That’s why, his mom said, they made fun of him in the first place. “They’re just jealous,” she said. But Colin knew better. They weren’t jealous. He just wasn’t likable. Sometimes it’s that simple.

What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable?

How very odd, to believe God gave you life, and yet not think that life asks more of you than watching TV.

“You’re just—you spend all your time worrying about losing your edge or getting dumped or whatever and you’re never for a second grateful. You’re the valedictorian. You’re going to a great school next year, for free. So maybe you’re not a child prodigy. That’s good. At least you’re not a child anymore. Or, you’re not supposed to be, anyway.”

To Colin, tampons were a little bit like grizzly bears: he was aware of their existence, but he’d never seen one in the wild, and didn’t really care to.

“Eternity bids thee to forget.”

Lindsey coughed, mumbled, “Bullshit,” and then coughed again. Hollis’s eyes grew wide. “Lindsey Lee Wells, you put a quarter in the swear jar right this minute!” “Shit,” Lindsey said. “Dick. Craptastic.” She glided over to the fireplace mantel, and placed a dollar bill in a glass Mason jar. “Don’t have any change, Hollis,” she said. Colin couldn’t help but laugh; Hollis glowered.

“No fugging way. That’s how horror movies start. We drop you off, walk into some stranger’s house, and five minutes later some psycho’s lobbing off my nuts with a machete while his schizophrenic wife makes Colin do push-ups on a bed of hot coals. You’re coming with us.”

Lindsey smiled at Colin through the rearview mirror. “Lord, my cup of Colins runneth over.” She smiled. “One to teach me French, one to French me.”

Starnes and Mary stayed in the pictures together, from their wedding to their fiftieth anniversary. I will have that, Colin thought. I will have it. I will. With Katherine. But I won’t be only that, he resolved. I will leave behind something more than one photo album where I always look old.

“Right, but you’re the Dumpee. Dumpees don’t call. You know that, kafir. Dumpees must never, never call. There’s no exception to that rule. None. Never call. Never. You can’t call.” Colin reached into his pocket. “Don’t do it, dude. You’re pulling the pin on a grenade. You’re covered in gasoline and the phone is a lit match.”

“That was a close one. Thank goodness for the Double Reverse Dingleberry.”

He knew that his mom wanted him to have an adventure. She’d always wished he could be a normal kid. Colin suspected she’d be secretly pleased if he came home one night at three in the morning reeking of booze, because that would be normal. Normal kids come home late; normal kids drink warm forties of malt liquor in alleys with their friends (normal kids have more than one friend). His father wanted Colin to transcend all that stuff, but maybe even he was starting to see the unlikelihood of Colin ever becoming extraordinary.

Colin thought, How strange that there would be exactly twenty-four German carpenters in Chicago when the all-night manicure place on the corner of Oakley and Lawrence is called “24/7 Nails.”

So it wasn’t just that things interested him because he didn’t know from boring—it was the connection his brain made, connections he couldn’t help but seek out.

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius. It was so quiet then that he could hear Princess breathing, and he felt the missing piece inside him. “I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.”

And the moral of the story is that a heroic girlfriend, combined with a giant winky, will save you from even the most desperate situations.”

“There’s no romance in geometry,” Lindsey answered. “Just you wait.”

In the first century CE, Roman authorities punished St. Apollonia by crushing her teeth one by one with pliers. Colin often thought about this in relationship to the monotony of dumping: we have thirty-two teeth. After a while, having each tooth individually destroyed probably gets repetitive, even dull. But it never stops hurting.

You can love someone so much, he thought. But you can never love people as much as you can miss them.

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.

“For sure, yo. Now go to bed before your day gets any worse.”

Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.

Complete fugging idiots shoot guns all the time. That’s why there are so many dead people.”

there was little correlation between a really high IQ and making a significant contribution to the world. Terman’s gifted children, in short, rarely ended up being as special as they initially promised to be.

Take, for instance, the curious case of George Hodel. With one of the highest IQs in the study, one might have expected Hodel to discover the structure of DNA or something. Instead, he was a fairly successful doctor in California who later lived in Asia. He never became a genius, but Hodel did manage to become infamous: he was quite probably a serial killer.* So much for the benefits of prodigy.

Colin had always been jealous of people, like Hassan, who just know how to make friends. But the risk of being able to win over anyone, he found himself thinking, was that you might pick the wrong people.

“Right. Well, when Mailer wrote the book, he didn’t use ‘fug.’ But then he sent it to the publisher and they were like, ‘This is a really excellent book you’ve written, Mr. Mailer. But no one here in 1948 is going to buy it, because it contains even more F-bombs than it does Regular Bombs.’ So Norman Mailer, as a kind of fug-you to the publisher, went through his 872-page book and changed every last F-word to ‘fug.’ So I told Hassan the story while he was reading the book and then he decided to start saying fug as an homage to Mailer—and because you can say it in class without getting in trouble.”

“What’s special about Gutshot?” by saying, “Well for starters that mill has got a right-good pension plan. I been retired for thirty years and Hollis Wells still buys my diapers. That’s right, I use ’em! I pee myself when I laugh,” she said gleefully, and then laughed disturbingly hard.

Son, if there’s one thing I know,” and Colin thought about how old people always like to tell you the one thing they know, “it’s that there’s some people in this world who you can just love and love and love no matter what.”

“Me? 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.”

said dingleberries, kafir. You will respect the goddamned dingleberries.

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. Well, it doesn’t work, kafir. It just—it’s not just dumb, it’s ineffective. Because then you’re not being a good friend or a good boyfriend or whatever, because you’re only thinking they-might-not-like-me-they-might-not-like-me, and guess what? When you act like that, no one likes you. There’s your goddamned Theorem.”

“How do you just stop being terrified of getting left behind and ending up by yourself forever and not meaning anything to the world?”

“You don’t ever really like anybody?” “Well, that’s an exaggeration, I guess,” she answered. “It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.”

The thing about chameleoning your way through life is that it gets to where nothing is real. Your problem is—how did you say it—that you’re not significant?” “Don’t matter. I don’t matter.”

Hassan shouted, “MapQuest 2246 Trial Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee 37501,” and Lindsey Lee Wells shouted back, “Awesome! Good work, Hassan!”

Mapquest? How old is this book?

“Whatcha throwing in the hole?” “Don’t know that it’s any of your business, on account of how you don’t own the hole.”