(one)
The morning after
noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got
dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he took a
bath. Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in
life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be
done lying down. He climbed into the tub as soon as the water got hot,
and he sat and watched with a curiously blank look on his face as the
water overtook him. The water inched up his legs, which were crossed and
folded into the tub. He did recognize, albeit faintly, that he was too
long, and too big, for this bathtub—he looked like a mostly grown person
playing at being a kid.
As the water began to splash over his
skinny but unmuscled stomach, he thought of Archimedes. When Colin was
about four, he read a book about Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who'd
discovered that volume could be mea sured by water displacement when he
sat down in the bathtub. Upon making this discovery, Archimedes
supposedly shouted 'Eureka!'1 and then ran naked through the streets.
The book said that many important discoveries contained a 'Eureka
moment.' And even then, Colin very much wanted to have some important
discoveries, so he asked his mom about it when she got home that
evening.
'Mommy, am I ever going to have a Eureka moment?'
'Oh, sweetie,' she said, taking his hand. 'What's wrong?'
1 Greek: 'I have found it.' 'I wanna have a Eureka moment,' he said, the way another kid might have expressed longing for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.
She
pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and smiled, her face so close
to his that he could smell coffee and makeup. 'Of course, Colin baby.
Of course you will.'
But mothers lie. It's in the job description.
Colin
took a deep breath and slid down, immersing his head. I am crying, he
thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water. I
feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it's impossible to tell
because I'm underwater. 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.
He opened the drain in the tub, stood up, toweled
off, and got dressed. When he exited the bathroom, his parents were
sitting together on his bed. It was never a good sign when both his
parents were in his room at the same time. Over the years it had meant:
- Your grandmother/ grandfather/ Aunt-Suzie-whom-you-never-met-buttrust-me-she-was-nice-and-it's-a-shame is dead.
- You're letting a girl named Katherine distract you from your studies.
- 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.
It never meant:
- A girl named
Katherine called while you were in the bathtub. She's sorry. She still
loves you and has made a terrible mistake and is waiting for you
downstairs.
***
But even so, Colin couldn't help
but hope that his parents were in the room to provide news of the Number
4 variety. He was a generally pessimistic person, but he seemed to make
an exception for Katherines: he always felt they would come back to
him. The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him,
and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe
it wasn't over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear
her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in
the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She said I
love you as if it were a secret, and an immense one.
His dad
stood up and stepped toward him. 'Katherine called my cell,' he said.
'She's worried about you.' Colin felt his dad's hand on his shoulder,
and then they both moved forward, and then they were hugging.
'We're
very concerned,' his mom said. She was a small woman with curly brown
hair that had one single shock of white toward the front. 'And stunned,'
she added. 'What happened?'
'I don't know,' Colin said softly
into his dad's shoulder. 'She's just— she'd had enough of me. She got
tired. That's what she said.' And then his mom got up and there was a
lot of hugging, arms every where, and his mom was crying. Colin
extricated himself from the hugs and sat down on his bed. He felt a
tremendous need to get them out of his room immediately, like if they
didn't leave he would blow up. Literally. Guts on the walls; his
prodigious brain emptied out onto his bedspread.
'Well, at some
point we need to sit down and assess your options,' his dad said. His
dad was big on assessing. 'Not to look for silver linings, but it seems
like you'll now have some free time this summer. A summer class at
Northwestern, maybe?'
'I really need to be alone, just for
today,' Colin answered, trying to convey a sense of calm so that they
would leave and he wouldn't blow up. 'So can we assess tomorrow?'
'Of
course, sweetie,' his mom said. 'We'll be here all day. You just come
down whenever you want and we love you and you're so so special, Colin,
and you can't possibly let this girl make you think otherwise because
you are the most magnificent, brilliant boy—' And right then, the most
special, magnificent, brilliant boy bolted into his bathroom and puked
his guts out. An explosion, sort of.
'Oh, Colin!' shouted his mom.
'I just need to be alone,' Colin insisted from the bathroom. 'Please.'
When he came out, they were gone.
For
the next fourteen hours without pausing to eat or drink or throw up
again, Colin read and reread his yearbook, which he had received just
four days before. Aside from the usual yearbook crap, it contained
seventy-two signatures. Twelve were just signatures, fifty-six cited his
intelligence, twenty-five said they wished they'd known him better,
eleven said it was fun to have him in En glish class, seven included the
words 'pupillary sphincter,'2 and a stunning seventeen ended, 'Stay
Cool!' Colin Singleton could no more stay cool than a blue whale could
stay skinny or Bangladesh could stay rich. Presumably, those seventeen
people were kidding. He mulled this over—and considered how twenty-five
of his classmates, some of whom he'd been attending school with for
twelve years, could possibly have wanted to 'know him better.' As if
they hadn't had a chance.
But mostly for those fourteen hours, he read and reread Katherine XIX's inscription:
Col,
Here's
to all the places we went. And all the places we'll go. And here's me,
whispering again and again and again and again: iloveyou.
yrs forever, K-a-t-h-e-r-i-n-e
2 More on that later. Eventually,
he found the bed too comfortable for his state of mind, so he lay down
on his back, his legs sprawled across the carpet. 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. But the
feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you,
minus something. He kept thinking about one word—forever—and felt the
burning ache just beneath his rib cage.
It hurt like the worst ass-kicking he'd ever gotten. And he'd gotten plenty.
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