The John Green Collection Read Free

coated thick with layers of white paint and a green-and-white-checkered linoleum floor, the place looked more like a hospital than the dorm room of my fantasies. A bunk bed of unfinished wood with vinyl mattresses was pushed against the room’s back window. The desks and dressers and bookshelves were all attached to the walls in order to prevent creative floor planning. And no air-conditioning .
    I sat on the lower bunk while Mom opened the trunk, grabbed a stack of the biographies my dad had agreed to part with, and placed them on the bookshelves.
    “I can unpack, Mom,” I said. My dad stood. He was ready to go.
    “Let me at least make your bed,” Mom said.
    “No, really. I can do it. It’s okay.” Because you simply cannotdraw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.
    “God, we’ll miss you,” Mom said suddenly, stepping through the minefield of suitcases to get to the bed. I stood and hugged her. My dad walked over, too, and we formed a sort of huddle. It was too hot, and we were too sweaty, for the hug to last terribly long. I knew I ought to cry, but I’d lived with my parents for sixteen years, and a trial separation seemed overdue.
    “Don’t worry.” I smiled. “I’s a-gonna learn how t’talk right Southern.” Mom laughed.
    “Don’t do anything stupid,” my dad said.
    “Okay.”
    “No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.” As an alumnus of Culver Creek, he had done the things I had only heard about: the secret parties, streaking through hay fields (he always whined about how it was all boys back then), drugs, drinking, and cigarettes. It had taken him a while to kick smoking, but his badass days were now well behind him.
    “I love you,” they both blurted out simultaneously. It needed to be said, but the words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss.
    “I love you, too. I’ll call every Sunday.” Our rooms had no phone lines, but my parents had requested I be placed in a room near one of Culver Creek’s five pay phones.
    They hugged me again—Mom, then Dad—and it was over. Out the back window, I watched them drive the winding road off campus. I should have felt a gooey, sentimental sadness, perhaps. But mostly I just wanted to cool off, so I grabbed one of the desk chairs and sat down outside my door in the shade of the overhanging eaves, waiting for a breeze that never arrived. The air outside sat as still and oppressive as the air inside. I stared out over my new digs: Six one-story buildings, each with sixteen dorm rooms, werearranged in a hexagram around a large circle of grass. It looked like an oversize old motel. Everywhere, boys and girls hugged and smiled and walked together. I vaguely hoped that someone would come up and talk to me. I imagined the conversation:
    “Hey. Is this your first year?”
    “Yeah. Yeah. I’m from Florida.”
    “That’s cool. So you’re used to the heat.”
    “I wouldn’t be used to this heat if I were from Hades,” I’d joke. I’d make a good first impression. Oh, he’s funny. That guy Miles is a riot.
    That didn’t happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined them.
    Bored, I went back inside, took off my shirt, lay down on the heat-soaked vinyl of the lower bunk mattress, and closed my eyes. I’d never been born again with the baptism and weeping and all that, but it couldn’t feel much better than being born again as a guy with no known past. I thought of the people I’d read about—John F. Kennedy, James Joyce, Humphrey Bogart—who went to boarding school, and their adventures—Kennedy, for example, loved pranks. I thought of the Great Perhaps and the things that might happen and the people I might meet and who my roommate might be (I’d gotten a letter a few weeks before that gave me his name, Chip Martin, but no other information). Whoever Chip Martin was, I hoped to God he would bring an