An Abundance of Katherines: Chapters 1-6

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.

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.

Colin extricated himself from the hugs and sat down on his bed.

Guts on the walls; his prodigious brain emptied out onto his bedspread.

“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.

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.”

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.

It hurt like this until shortly before 10 P.M., when a rather fat, hirsute guy of Lebanese descent burst into Colin's room without knocking.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and softly kicked Colin's prostrate body.

“Kafir” is a not-nice Arabic word meaning “non-Muslim” that is usually translated as “infidel.”

As Colin had explained to Hassan countless times, there's a stark difference between the words prodigy and genius.

He had an overstuffed duffel bag at his feet and a backpack stretched taut, which contained only books.

Colin's mother shook her head rhythmically, like a disapproving metronome.

“It's one thing to accuse me of laziness. But to malign the good name of America's greatest television judge—that's below the belt.”

A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other.

Colin saw the Dumper/Dumpee dichotomy on a bell curve.

And so the periodically incontinent prodigy ended up in a small, windowless office on the South Side, talking to a woman with horn-rimmed glasses, who asked Colin to find patterns in strings of letters and numbers.

Colin emphatically pushed the book cover shut when he finished reading.

He'd walk up to Robert Caseman with a knees-locked gait, his arms swinging stiffly.

In second grade, Robert Caseman and his ilk matured a bit.

Colin followed, forlorn.

His immaculate memory called forth the silver crucifix.

Among many, many others, the following things were definitely not interesting: the pupillary sphincter, mitosis, baroque architecture, jokes that have physics equations as punch lines, the British monarchy, Russian grammar, and the significant role that salt has played in human history.

Colin drove cautiously, but still, the worn shocks of the Hearse creaked and groaned at the endless potholes and waving undulations of pavement.

Hassan rolled on with his diatribe, and Colin laughed and smiled at all the right places, but he just kept driving, calculating the odds that the Archduke, who died in Sarajevo more than ninety years before, and who'd randomly popped into Colin's brain the previous night, would end up between Colin and wherever he was heading.

Hassan placed twenty-two dollars on the counter, which the girl promptly slid into a pocket of her shorts, flagrantly disregarding the cash register before her.

“Yeah. And much to my ever-loving chagrin, I am your tour guide.”

But he just didn't get Hassan's apathy.

Although then again, when you have just gone on a road trip to escape the memory of your nineteenth Katherine and are traipsing through south-central Tennessee on your way to see the grave of a dead Austro-Hungarian Archduke, maybe you don't have a right to go and think anything odd.

He could just never see anything coming, and as he lay on the solid, uneven ground with Hassan pressing too hard on his forehead, Colin Singleton's distance from his glasses made him realize the problem: myopia.

He knew a little conversational Japanese, but chopsticks eluded him.

What have I done? I won a fugging game show a year ago? That's my indelible mark on human history?

Paradoxically, he felt as if his getting dumped was the only thing happening on the entire dark and silent planet, and also as if it weren't happening at all.

With an almost comfortable distance from the thing itself as it really was, Colin thought about the dork mantra: sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.

She fell into conversation with them so quickly and so naturally that Colin was already revising his Celebrity Living theorem.

You just got me all riled up and your big revelation is that you like getting dumped?

You just got me all riled up and your big revelation is that you like getting dumped?

And then after those dinners, the parents would sit in the living room laughing louder as time passed, Keith shouting that he couldn't possibly drive home, that he needed a cup of coffee after all that wine—your home is an Alamo for oenophiles, he'd cry.

An actual, if very obscure, English word, which means “the spending of too much money on food."