Looking for Alaska

the day after

The colonel slept the not-restful sleep of the drunk, and I lay on my back on the bottom bunk, my mouth tingling and alive as if still kissing, and we would have likely slept through our morning classes had the Eagle not awoken us at 8:00 with three quick knocks. I rolled over as he opened the door, and the morning light rushed into the room.

"I need y'all to go to the gym," he said. I squinted toward him, the Eagle himself backlit into invisibility by the too bright sun.

"Now," he added, and I knew it. We were done for. Caught. Too many progress reports. Too much drinking in too short a time. Why did they have to drink last night? And then I could taste her again, the wine and the cigarette smoke and the Chap Stick and Alaska, and I wondered if she had kissed me because she was drunk. Don't expel me, I thought. Don't I have just begun to kiss her.

And as if answering my prayers, the Eagle said, "You're not in any trouble. But you need to go to the gym now."

I heard the Colonel rolling over above me. "What's wrong?"

"Something terrible has happened," the Eagle said, and then closed the door.

As he grabbed a pair of jeans lying on the floor, the Colonel said, "This happened a couple years ago. When Hyde's wife died. I guess it's the Old Man himself now. Poor bastard really didn't have many breaths left." He looked up at me, his half-open eyes bloodshot, and yawned.

"You look a little hungover," I observed.

He closed his eyes. "Well, then I'm putting up a good front, Pudge, 'cause I'm actually a lot hungover."

"I kissed Alaska."

"Yeah. I wasn't that drunk. Let's go."

We walked across the dorm circle to the gym. I sported baggy jeans, a sweatshirt with no shirt underneath, and a bad case of bedhead. All the teachers were in the dorm circle knocking on doors, but I didn't see Dr. Hyde. I imagined him lying dead in his house, wondered who had found him, how they even knew he was missing before he failed to show up for class.

"I don't see Dr. Hyde," I told the Colonel.

"Poor bastard."

The gym was half full by the time we arrived. A podium had been set up in the middle of the basketball court, close to the bleachers. I sat in the second row, with the Colonel directly in front of me. My thoughts were split between sadness for Dr. Hyde and excitement about Alaska, remembering the up-close sight of her mouth whispering, "To be continued?"

And it did not occur to me — not even when Dr. Hyde shuffled into the gym, taking tiny, slow steps toward the Colonel and me.

I tapped the Colonel on the shoulder and said, "Hyde's here," and the Colonel said, "Oh shit," and I said, "What?"

and he said, "Where's Alaska?" and I said, "No," and he said, "Pudge, is she here or not?" and then we both stood up and scanned the faces in the gym.

The Eagle walked up to the podium and said, "Is everyone here?"

"No," I said to him. "Alaska isn't here."

The Eagle looked down. "Is everyone else here?"

"Alaska isn't here!"

"Okay, Miles. Thank you."

"We can't start without Alaska."

The Eagle looked at me. He was crying, noiselessly. Tears just rolled from his eyes to his chin and then fell onto his corduroy pants. He stared at me, but it was not the Look of Doom. His eyes blinking the tears down his face, the Eagle looked, for all the world, sorry.

"Please, sir," I said. "Can we please wait for Alaska?" I felt all of them staring at us, trying to understand what I now knew, but didn't quite believe.

The Eagle looked down and bit his lower lip. "Last night, Alaska Young was in a terrible accident." His tears came faster, then. "And she was killed. Alaska has passed away."

For a moment, everyone in the gym was silent, and the place had never been so quiet, not even in the moments before the Colonel ridiculed opponents at the free-throw stripe. I stared down at the back of the Colonel's head. I just stared, looking at his thick and bushy hair. For a moment, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of not-breathing, the vacuum created by 190 students shocked out of air.

I thought: It's all my fault I thought: I don't feel very good.

I thought: I'm going to throw up.

I stood up and ran outside. I made it to a trash can outside the gym, five feet from the double doors, and heaved toward Gatorade bottles and half-eaten McDonald's. But nothing much came out. I just heaved, my stomach muscles tightening and my throat opening and a gasping, guttural blech, going through the motions of vomiting over and over again. In between gags and coughs, I sucked air in hard. Her mouth. Her dead, cold mouth. To not be continued. I knew she was drunk. Upset. Obviously you don't let someone drive drunk and pissed off.

Obviously. And Christ, Miles, what the hell is wrong with you? And then comes the puke, finally, splashing onto the trash. And here is whatever of her I had left in my mouth, here in this trash can. And then it comes again, more — and then okay, calm down, okay, seriously, she's not dead.

She's not dead. She's alive. She's alive somewhere. She's in the woods. Alaska is hiding in the woods and she's not dead, she's just hiding. She's just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It's Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes.

And then I felt much better, because she had not died at all.

I walked back into the gym, and everyone seemed to be in various stages of disintegration. It was like something you see on TV, like a National Geographic special on funeral rituals. I saw Takumi standing over Lara, his hands on her shoulders. I saw Kevin with his crew cut, his head buried between his knees. A girl named Molly Tan, who'd studied with us for precalc, wailed, beating balled fists against her thighs. All these people I sort of knew and sort of didn't, and all of them disintegrating, and then I saw the Colonel, his knees tucked into his chest, lying on his side on the bleachers, Madame O'Malley sitting next to him, reaching toward his shoulder but not actually touching it. The Colonel was screaming. He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream.

I thought, at first, that it was only yelling. But after a few breaths, I noticed a rhythm. And after a few more, I realized that the Colonel was saying words. He was screaming, "I'm so sorry."

Madame O'Malley grabbed his hand. "You've got nothing to be sorry for, Chip. There was nothing you could have done." But if only she knew.

And I just stood there, looking at the scene, thinking about her not dead, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the Eagle, and I said, "I think she's playing a dumb prank," and he said, "No, Miles, no, I'm sorry," and I felt the heat in my cheeks and said, "She's really good. She could pull this off," and he said, "I saw her. I'm sorry."

"What happened?"

"Somebody was setting off firecrackers in the woods," he said, and I closed my eyes tight, the ineluctable fact of the matter at hand: I had killed her. "I went out after them, and I guess she drove off campus. It was late. She was on I-65 just south of downtown. A truck had jackknifed, blocking both lanes. A police car had just gotten to the scene. She hit the cruiser without ever swerving. I believe she must have been very intoxicated. The police said they smelled alcohol."

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I saw her, Miles. I talked to the police. It was instant. The steering wheel hit her chest. I'm so sorry."

And I said, you saw her and he said yes and I said how did she look and he said, just a bit of blood coming out of her nose, and I sat down on the floor of the gym. I could hear the Colonel still screaming, and I could feel hands on my back as I hunched forward, but I could only see her lying naked on a metal table, a small trickle of blood falling out of her half-teardrop nose, her green eyes open, staring off into the distance, her mouth turned up just enough to suggest the idea of a smile, and she had felt so warm against me, her mouth soft and warm on mine.

The Colonel and I are walking back to our dorm room in silence. I am staring at the ground beneath me. I cannot stop thinking that she is dead, and I cannot stop thinking that she cannot possibly be dead. People do not just die.

I can't catch my breath. I feel afraid, like someone has told me they're going to kick my ass after school and now it's sixth period and I know full well what's coming. It is so cold today — literally freezing — and I imagine running to the creek and diving in headfirst, the creek so shallow that my hands scrape against the rocks, and my body slides into the cold water, the shock of the cold giving way to numbness, and I would stay there, float down with that water first to the Cahaba River, then to the Alabama River, then to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

I want to melt into the brown, crunchy grass that the Colonel and I step on as we silently make our way back to our room. His feet are so large, too large for his short body, and the new generic tennis shoes he wears since his old ones were pissed in look almost like clown shoes. I think of Alaska's flip-flops clinging to her blue toes as we swung on the swing down by the lake. Will the casket be open? Can a mortician re-create her smile? I could still hear her saying it: "This is so fun, but I'm so sleepy. To be continued?"

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and — God damnit— died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

I am several steps in front of him before I realize that the Colonel has fallen down. I turn around, and he is lying on his face. "We have to get up, Chip. We have to get up. We just have to get to the room."

The Colonel turns his face from the ground to me and looks me dead in the eye and says, "I. Can't. Breathe."

But he can breathe, and I know this because he is hyperventilating, breathing as if trying to blow air back into the dead. I pick him up, and he grabs onto me and starts sobbing, again saying, "I'm so sorry," over and over again.

We have never hugged before, me and the Colonel, and there is nothing much to say, because he ought to be sorry, and I just put my hand on the back of his head and say the only true thing. "I'm sorry, too."

two days after

I didn't sleep that night. Dawn was slow in coming, and even when it did, the sun shining bright through the blinds, the rickety radiator couldn't keep us warm, so the Colonel and I sat wordlessly on the couch. He read the almanac.

The night before, I'd braved the cold to call my parents, and this time when I said, "Hey, it's Miles," and my mom answered with, "What's wrong? Is everything okay?" I could safely tell her no, everything was not okay. My dad picked up the line then.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Don't yell," my mother said.

"I'm not yelling; it's just the phone."

"Well, talk quieter," she said, and so it took some time before I could say anything, and then once I could, it took some time to say the words in order — my friend Alaska died in a car crash. I stared at the numbers and messages scrawled on the wall by the phone.

"Oh, Miles," Mom said. "I'm so sorry, Miles. Do you want to come home?"

"No," I said. "I want to be here…I can't believe it," which was still partly true.

"That's just awful," my dad said. "Her poor parents." Poor parent, I thought, and wondered about her dad. I couldn't even imagine what my parents would do if I died. Driving drunk. God, if her father ever found out, he would disembowel the Colonel and me.

"What can we do for you right now?" my mom asked.

"I just needed you to pick up. I just needed you to answer the phone, and you did." I heard a sniffle behind me — from cold or grief, I didn't know — and told my parents, "Someone's waiting for the phone. I gotta go."

All night, I felt paralyzed into silence, terrorized. What was I so afraid of, anyway? The thing had happened. She was dead. She was warm and soft against my skin, my tongue in her mouth, and she was laughing, trying to teach me, make me better, promising to be continued. And now.

And now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is the fear: I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it It is fear like if someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do without Just before eight in the morning, the Colonel announced to no one in particular, "I think there are bufriedos at lunch today."

"Yeah," I said. "Are you hungry?"

"God no. But she named them, you know. They were called fried burritos when we got here, and Alaska started calling them bufriedos, and then everyone did, and then finally Maureen officially changed the name." He paused.

"I don't know what to do, Miles."

"Yeah. I know."

"I finished memorizing the capitals," he said.

"Of the states?"

"No. That was fifth grade. Of the countries. Name a country."

"Canada," I said.

"Something hard."

"Urn. Uzbekistan?"

"Tashkent." He didn't even take a moment to think. It was just there, at the tip of his tongue, as if he'd been waiting for me to say "Uzbekistan" all along. "Let's smoke."

We walked to the bathroom and turned on the shower, and the Colonel pulled a pack of matches from his jeans and struck a match against the matchbook. It didn't light. Again, he tried and failed, and again, smacking at the matchbook with a crescendoing fury until he finally threw the matches to the ground and screamed, "GODDAMN IT!"

"It's okay," I said, reaching into my pocket for a lighter.

"No, Pudge, it's not," he said, throwing down his cigarette and standing up, suddenly pissed. "Goddamn it! God, how did this happen? How could she be so stupid! She just never thought anything through. So goddamned impulsive. Christ. It is not okay. I can't believe she was so stupid!"

"We should have stopped her," I said.

He reached into the stall to turn off the dribbling shower and then pounded an open palm against the tile wall.

"Yeah, I know we should have stopped her, damn it. I am shit sure keenly aware that we should have stopped her.

But we shouldn't have had to. You had to watch her like a three-year-old. You do one thing wrong, and then she just dies. Christ! I'm losing it. I'm going on a walk."

"Okay," I answered, trying to keep my voice calm.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I feel so screwed up. I feel like I might die."

"You might," I said.

"Yeah. Yeah. I might. You never know. It's just. It's like. POOF. And you're gone."

I followed him into the room. He grabbed the almanac from his bunk, zipped his jacket, closed the door, and POOF. He was gone.

With morning came visitors. An hour after the Colonel left, resident stoner Hank Walsten dropped by to offer me some weed, which I graciously turned down. Hank hugged me and said, "At least it was instant. At least there wasn't any pain."

I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the bathroom, dry-heaving.

And what is an "instant" death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

Was there time for her life to flash before her eyes? Was I there? Was Jake? And she promised, I remembered, she promised to be continued, but I knew, too, that she was driving north when she died, north toward Nashville, toward Jake. Maybe it hadn't meant anything to her, had been nothing more than another grand impulsivity. And as Hank stood in the doorway, I just looked past him, looking across the too-quiet dorm circle, wondering if it had mattered to her, and I can only tell myself that of course, yes, she had promised. To be continued.

Lara came next, her eyes heavy with swelling. "What happeened?" she asked me as I held her, standing on my tiptoes so I could place my chin on top of her head.

"I don't know," I said.

"Deed you see her that night?" she asked, speaking into my collarbone.

"She got drunk," I told her. "The Colonel and I went to sleep, and I guess she drove off campus." And that became the standard lie.

I felt Lara's fingers, wet with her tears, press against my palm, and before I could think better of it, I pulled my hand away. "I'm sorry," I said.

"Eet's okay," she said. "I'll be een my room eef you want to come by." I did not drop by. I didn't know what to say to her — I was caught in a love triangle with one dead side.

That afternoon, we all filed into the gym again for a town meeting. The Eagle announced that the school would charter a bus on Sunday to the funeral in Vine Station. As we got up to leave, I noticed Takumi and Lara walking toward me. Lara caught my eye and smiled wanly. I smiled back, but quickly turned and hid myself amid the mass of mourners filing out of the gym.

I am sleeping, and Alaska flies into the room. She is naked, and intact. Her breasts, which I felt only very briefly and in the dark, are luminously full as they hang down from her body. She hovers inches above me, her breath warm and sweet against my face like a breeze passing through tall grass.

"Hi," I say. "I've missed you."

"You look good, Pudge."

"So do you."

"I'm so naked," she says, and laughs. "How did I get so naked?"

"I just want you to stay," I say.

"No," she says, and her weight falls dead on me, crushing my chest, stealing away my breath, and she is cold and wet, like melting ice. Her head is split in half and a pink-gray sludge oozes from the fracture in her skull and drips down onto my face, and she stinks of formaldehyde and rotting meat. I gag and push her off me, terrified.

I woke up falling, and landed with a thud on the floor. Thank God I'm a bottom-bunk man. I had slept for fourteen hours. It was morning. Wednesday, I thought. Her funeral Sunday. I wondered if the Colonel would get back by then, where he was. He had to come back for the funeral, because I could not go alone, and going with anyone other than the Colonel would amount to alone.

The cold wind buffeted against the door, and the trees outside the back window shook with such force that I could hear it from our room, and I sat in my bed and thought of the Colonel out there somewhere, his head down, his teeth clenched, walking into the wind.

four days after

It was five in the morning and I was reading a biography of the explorer Meriwether Lewis (of & Clark fame) and trying to stay awake when the door opened and the Colonel walked in.

His pale hands shook, and the almanac he held looked like a puppet dancing without strings.

"Are you cold?" I asked.

He nodded, slipped off his sneakers, and climbed into my bed on the bottom bunk, pulling up the covers. His teeth chattered like Morse code.

"Jesus. Are you all right?"

"Better now. Warmer," he said. A small, ghost white hand appeared from beneath the comforter. "Hold my hand, will ya?"

"All right, but that's it. No kissing." The quilt shook with his laughter.

"Where have you been?"

"I walked to Montevallo."

"Forty miles?!"

"Forty-two," he corrected me. "Well. Forty-two there. Forty-two back. Eighty-two miles. No. Eighty-four. Yes. Eighty-four miles in forty-five hours."

"What the hell's in Montevallo?" I asked.

"Not much. I just walked till I got too cold, and then I turned around."

"You didn't sleep?"

"No! The dreams are terrible. In my dreams, she doesn't even look like herself anymore. I don't even remember what she lookedlike."

I let go of his hand, grabbed last year's yearbook, and found her picture. In the black-and-white photograph, she's wearing her orange tank top and cutoff jeans that stretch halfway down her skinny thighs, her mouth open wide in a frozen laugh as her left arm holds Takumi in a headlock. Her hair falls over her face just enough to obscure her cheeks.

"Right," the Colonel said. "Yeah. I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason. The way she would get sulky and make references to the freaking oppressive weight of tragedy or whatever but then never said what was wrong, never have any goddamned reason to be sad. And I just think you ought to have a reason. My girlfriend dumped me, so I'm sad. I got caught smoking, so I'm pissed off. My head hurts, so I'm cranky. She never had a reason, Pudge. I was just so tired of putting up with her drama. And I just let her go. Christ."

Her moodiness had annoyed me, too, sometimes, but not that night. That night I let her go because she told me to. It was that simple for me, and that stupid.

The Colonel's hand was so little, and I grabbed it tight, his cold seeping into me and my warmth into him. "I memorized the populations," he said.

"Uzbekistan."

"Twenty-four million seven hundred fifty-five thousand five hundred and nineteen."

"Cameroon," I said, but it was too late. He was asleep, his hand limp in mine. I placed it back under the quilt and climbed up into his bed, a top-bunk man for this night at least. I fell asleep listening to his slow, even breaths, his stubbornness finally melting away in the face of insurmountable fatigue.

six days after

That Sunday,Igot up after three hours of sleep and showered for the first time in a long while. I put on my only suit. I almost hadn't brought it, but my mom insisted that you never know when you're going to need a suit, and sure enough.

The Colonel did not own a suit, and by virtue of his stature could not borrow one from anyone at the Creek, so he wore black slacks and a gray button-down.

"I don't suppose I can wear the flamingo tie," he said as he pulled on black socks.

"It's a bit festive, given the occasion," I responded.

"Can't wear it to the opera," said the Colonel, almost smiling.

"Can't wear it to a funeral. Can't use it to hang myself. It's a bit useless, as ties go." I gave him a tie.

The school had chartered buses to ferry students north to Alaska's hometown of Vine Station, but Lara, the Colonel, Takumi, and I drove in Takumi's SUV, taking the back roads so we didn't have to drive past the spot on the highway. I stared out the window, watching as the suburban sprawl surrounding Birmingham faded into the slow-sloping hills and fields of northern Alabama.

Up front, Takumi told Lara about the time Alaska got her boob honked over the summer, and Lara laughed. That was the first time I had seen her, and now we were coming to the last. More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

Meriwether Lewis's last words were, "I am not a coward, but I am so strong. So hard to die." I don't doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind. I thought of Lewis as I followed Lara into the A-frame chapel attached to the single-story funeral home in Vine Station, Alabama, a town every bit as depressed and depressing as Alaska had always made it out to be. The place smelled of mildew and disinfectant, and the yellow wallpaper in the foyer was peeling at the corners.

"Are y'all here for Ms. Young?" a guy asked the Colonel, and the Colonel nodded. We were led to a large room with rows of folding chairs populated by only one man. He knelt before a coffin at the front of the chapel. The coffin was closed. Closed. Never going to see her again. Can't kiss her forehead. Can't see her one last time. But I needed to, I needed to see her, and much too loud, I asked, "Why is it closed?" and the man, whose potbelly pushed out from his too-tight suit, turned around and walked toward me.

"Her mother," he said. "Her mother had an open casket, and Alaska told me, 'Don't ever let them see me dead, Daddy,' and so that's that. Anyway, son, she's not in there. She's with the Lord."

And he put his hands on my shoulders, this man who had grown fat since he'd last had to wear a suit, and I couldn't believe what I had done to him, his eyes glittering green like Alaska's but sunk deep into dark sockets, like a green-eyed, still-breathing ghost, and don't no don't don't die, Alaska. Don't die. And I walked out of his embrace and past Lara and Takumi to her casket and knelt before it and placed my hands on the finished wood, the dark mahogany, the color of her hair. I felt the Colonel's small hands on my shoulders, and a tear dripped onto my head, and for a few moments, it was just the three of us — the buses of students hadn't arrived, and Takumi and Lara had faded away, and it was just the three of us — three bodies and two people — the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us, too much keeping us from one another. The Colonel said, "I just want to save her so bad," and I said, "Chip, she's gone," and he said, "I thought I'd feel her looking down on us, but you're right. She's just gone," and I said, "Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense. The Colonel knelt down beside me and put his lips to the coffin and whispered, "I am sorry, Alaska. You deserved a better friend."

Is it so hard to die, Mr. Lewis? Is that labyrinth really worse than this one?

seven days after

I spent the next day in our room, playing football on mute, at once unable to do nothing and unable to do anything much. It was Martin Luther King Day, our last day before classes started again, and I could think of nothing but having killed her. The Colonel spent the morning with me, but then he decided to go to the cafeteria for meat loaf.

"Let's go," he said.

"Not hungry."

"You have to eat."

"Wanna bet?" I asked without looking up from the game.

"Christ. Fine." He sighed and left, slamming the door behind him. He's still very angry, I found myself thinking with a bit of pity. No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness, the frank knowledge that you killed her and robbed her of a future and a life. Getting pissed wouldn't fix it. Damn it.

"How's the meat loaf?" I asked the Colonel when he returned.

"About as you remember it. Neither meaty nor loafy."The Colonel sat down next to me. "The Eagle ate with me.

He wanted to know if we set off the fireworks." I paused the game and turned to him. With one hand, he picked at one of the last remaining pieces of blue vinyl on our foam couch.

"And you said?" I asked.

"I didn't rat. Anyway, he said her aunt or something is coming tomorrow to clean out her room. So if there's anything that's ours, or anything her aunt wouldn't want to find…"

I turned back to the game and said, "I'm not up for it today."

"Then I'll do it alone," he answered. He turned and walked outside, leaving the door open, and the bitter remnants of the cold snap quickly overwhelmed the radiator, so I paused the game and stood up to close the door, and when I peeked around the corner to see if the Colonel had entered her room, he was standing there, just outside our door, and he grabbed onto my sweatshirt, smiled, and said, "I knew you wouldn't make me do that alone. I knew it." I shook my head and rolled my eyes but followed him down the sidewalk, past the pay phone, and into her room.

I hadn't thought of her smell since she died. But when the Colonel opened the door, I caught the edge of her scent: wet dirt and grass and cigarette smoke, and beneath that the vestiges of vanilla-scented skin lotion. She flooded into my present, and only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her dresser. It looked as I remembered it: hundreds of books stacked against the walls, her lavender comforter crumpled at the foot of her bed, a precarious stack of books on her bedside table, her volcanic candle just peaking out from beneath the bed. It looked as I knew it would, but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me. I stood in the center of the room, my eyes shut, inhaling slowly through my nose, the vanilla and the uncut autumn grass, but with each slow breath, the smell faded as I became accustomed to it, and soon she was gone again.

"This is unbearable," I said matter-of-factly, because it was.

"God. These books she'll never read. Her Life's Library."

"Bought at garage sales and now probably destined for another one."

"Ashes to ashes. Garage sale to garage sale," I said.

"Right. Okay, down to business. Get anything her aunt wouldn't want to find," the Colonel said, and I saw him kneeling at her desk, the drawer beneath her computer pulled open, his small fingers pulling out groups of stapled papers. "Christ, she kept every paper she ever wrote. Moby-Dick. Ethan Frome."

I reached between her mattress and box spring for the condoms I knew she hid for Jake's visits. I pocketed them, and then went over to her dresser, searching through her underwear for hidden bottles of liquor or sex toys or God knows what. I found nothing. And then I settled on the books, staring at them stacked on their sides, spines out, the haphazard collection of literature that was Alaska. There was one book I wanted to take with me, but I couldn't find it.

The Colonel was sitting on the floor next to her bed, his head bent toward the floor, looking under her bed frame.

"She sure didn't leave any booze, did she?" he asked.

And I almost said, She buried it in the woods out by the soccer field, but I realized that the Colonel didn't know, that she never took him to the edge of the woods and told him to dig for buried treasure, that she and I had shared that alone, and I kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead to its dissipation.

"Do you see The General in His Labyrinth anywhere?" I asked while scanning the titles on the book spines. "It has a lot of green on the cover, I think. It's a paperback, and it got flooded, so the pages are probably bloated, but I don't think she—" and then he cut me off with, "Yeah, it's right here," and I turned around and he was holding it, the pages fanned out like an accordion from Longwell, Jeff, and Kevin's prank, and I walked over to him and took it and sat down on her bed. The places she'd underlined and the little notes she'd written had all been blurred out by the soaking, but the book was still mostly readable, and I was thinking I would take it back to my room and try to read it even though it wasn't a biography when I flipped to that page, toward the back: He was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. "Damn it," he sighed. "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!"

The whole passage was underlined in bleeding, water-soaked black ink. But there was another ink, this one a crisp blue, post-flood, and an arrow led from "How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!" to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight & Fast.

"Hey, she wrote something in here after the flood," I said. "But it's weird. Look. Page one ninety-two." I tossed the book to the Colonel, and he flipped to the page and then looked up at me. "Straight and fast," he said.

"Yeah. Weird, huh? The way out of the labyrinth, I guess."

"Wait, how did it happen? What happened?"

And because there was only one it, I knew to what he was referring. "I told you what the Eagle told me. A truck jackknifed on the road. A cop car showed up to stop traffic, and she ran into the cop car. She was so drunk she didn't even swerve."

"So drunk? So drunk? The cop car would have had its lights on. Pudge, she ran into a cop car that had its lights on," he said hurriedly. "Straight and fast. Straight and fast. Out of the labyrinth."

"No," I said, but even as I said it, I could see it. I could see her drunk enough and pissed off enough. (About what — about cheating on Jake? About hurting me? About wanting me and not him? Still pissed about ratting out Marya?) I could see her staring down the cop car and aiming for it and not giving a shit about anyone else, not thinking of her promise to me, not thinking of her father or anyone, and that bitch, that bitch, she killed herself.

But no. No. That was not her. No. She said To be continued. Of course. "No."

"Yeah, you're probably right," the Colonel said. He dropped the book, sat down on the bed next to me, and put his forehead in his hands. "Who drives six miles off campus to kill herself? Doesn't make any sense. But 'straight and fast.' Bit of an odd premonition, isn't it? And we still don't really know what happened, if you think about it.

Where she was going, why. Who called. Someone called, right, or did I make—" And the Colonel kept talking, puzzling it out, while I picked up the book and found my way to that page where the general's headlong race came to its end, and we were both stuck in our heads, the distance between us unbridgeable, and I could not listen to the Colonel, because I was busy trying to get the last hints of her smell, busy telling myself that of course she had not done it. It was me — I had done it, and so had the Colonel. He could try to puzzle his way out of it, but I knew better, knew that we could never be anything but wholly, unforgivably guilty.

eight days after

Tuesday — we had schoolfor the first time. Madame O'Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling.

"Awful," a girl said.

"En francais,"Madame O'Malley replied. "En francais."

Everything looked the same, but more still: the Weekday Warriors still sat on the benches outside the library, but their gossip was quiet, understated. The cafeteria clamored with the sounds of plastic trays against wooden tables and forks scraping plates, but any conversations were muted. But more than the noiselessness of everyone else was the silence where she should have been, the bubbling bursting storytelling Alaska, but instead it felt like those times when she had withdrawn into herself, like she was refusing to answer how or why questions, only this time for good.

The Colonel sat down next to me in religion class, sighed, and said, "You reek of smoke, Pudge."

"Ask me if I give a shit."

Dr. Hyde shuffled into class then, our final exams stacked underneath one arm. He sat down, took a series of labored breaths, and began to talk. "It is a law that parents should not have to bury their children," he said. "And someone should enforce it. This semester, we're going to continue studying the religious traditions to which you were introduced this fall. But there's no doubting that the questions we'll be asking have more immediacy now than they did just a few days ago. What happens to us after we die, for instance, is no longer a question of idle philosophical interest. It is a question we must ask about our classmate. And how to live in the shadow of grief is not something nameless Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims have to explore. The questions of religious thought have become, I suspect, personal."

He shuffled through our exams, pulling one out from the pile before him. "I have here Alaska's final. You'll recall that you were asked what the most important question facing people is, and how the three traditions we're studying this year address that question. This was Alaska's question."

With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?—A. Y.

"I'm going to leave that up for the rest of the semester," he said.

"Because everybody who has ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska, and I don't want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we're trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers — how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called 'people's rotten lots in life.'" Hyde sat down. "So, how are you guys doing?"

The Colonel and I said nothing, while a bunch of people who didn't know Alaska extolled her virtues and professed to be devastated, and at first, it bothered me. I didn't want the people she didn't know — and the people she didn't like — to be sad. They'd never cared about her, and now they were carrying on as if she were a sister. But I guess I didn't know her completely, either. If I had, I'd have known what she'd meant by "To be continued?" And if I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

So they didn't bother me, really. But next to me, the Colonel breathed slowly and deeply through his nose like a bull about to charge.

He actually rolled his eyes when Weekday Warrior Brooke Blakely, whose parents had received a progress report courtesy of Alaska, said, "I'm just sad I never told her I loved her. I just don't understand why."

"That's such bullshit," the Colonel said as we walked to lunch. "As if Brooke Blakely gives two shits about Alaska."

"If Brooke Blakely died, wouldn't you be sad?" I asked.

"I guess, but I wouldn't bemoan the fact I never told her I loved her. I don't love her. She's an idiot."

I thought everyone else had a better excuse to grieve than we did — after all, they hadn't killed her — but I knew better than to try to talk to the Colonel when he was mad.

nine days after

"I've got a theory,"the Colonel said as I walked in the door after a miserable day of classes. The cold had begun to let up, but word had not spread to whoever ran the furnaces, so the classrooms were all stuffy and overheated, and I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep until the time came to do it all over again.

"Missed you in class today," I noted as I sat down on my bed. The Colonel sat at his desk, hunched over a notebook. I lay down on my back and pulled the covers up over my head, but the Colonel was undiscouraged.

"Right, well, I was busy coming up with the theory, which isn't terribly likely, admittedly, but it's plausible. So, listen. She kisses you. That night, someone calls. Jake, I imagine. They have a fight — about cheating or about something else — who knows. So she's upset, and she wants to go see him. She comes back to the room crying, and she tells us to help her get off campus. And she's freaked out, because, I don't know, let's say because if she can't go visit him, Jake will break up with her. That's just a hypothetical reason. So she gets off campus, drunk and all pissed off, and she's furious at herself over whatever it is, and she's driving along and sees the cop car and then in a flash everything comes together and the end to her labyrinthine mystery is staring her right in the face and she just does it, straight and fast, just aims at the cop car and never swerves, not because she's drunk but because she killed herself."

"That's ridiculous. She wasn't thinking about Jake or fighting with Jake. She was making out with me. I tried to bring up the whole Jake thing, but she just shushed me."

"So who called her?"

I kicked off my comforter and, my fist balled, smashed my hand against the wall with each syllable as I said, "I!

DON'T! KNOW! And you know what, it doesn't matter. She's dead. Is the brilliant Colonel going to figure out something that's gonna make her less freaking dead?" But it did matter, of course, which is why I kept pounding at our cinder-block walls and why the questions had floated beneath the surface for a week. Who'd called? What was wrong? Why did she leave? Jake had not gone to her funeral. Nor had he called us to say he was sorry, or to ask us what happened. He had just disappeared, and of course, I had wondered. I had wondered if she had any intention of keeping her promise that we would be continued. I had wondered who called, and why, and what made her so upset. But I'd rather wonder than get answers I couldn't live with.

"Maybe she was driving there to break up with Jake, then," the Colonel said, his voice suddenly edgeless. He sat down on the cornerof my bed.

"I don't know. I don't really want to know."

"Yeah, well," he said. "I want to know. Because if she knew what she was doing, Pudge, she made us accomplices.

And I hate her for that. I mean, God, look at us. We can't even talk to anyone anymore. So listen, I wrote out a game plan: One. Talk to eyewitnesses. Two. Figure out how drunk she was. Three. Figure out where she was going, and why."

"I don't want to talk to Jake," I said halfheartedly, already resigned to the Colonel's incessant planning. "If he knows, I definitely don't want to talk to him. And if he doesn't, I don't want to pretend like it didn't happen."

The Colonel stood up and sighed. "You know what, Pudge? I feel bad for you. I do. I know you kissed her, and I know you're broken up about it. But honestly, shut up. If Jake knows, you're not gonna make it any worse. And if he doesn't, he won't find out. So just stop worrying about your goddamned self for one minute and think about your dead friend. Sorry. Long day."

"It's fine," I said, pulling the covers back over my head. "It's fine," I repeated. And, whatever. It was fine. It had to be. I couldn't afford to lose the Colonel.

thirteen days after

Because our main source of vehicular transportation was interred in Vine Station, Alabama, the Colonel and I were forced to walk to the Pelham Police Department to search for eyewitnesses. We left after eating dinner in the cafeteria, the night falling fast and early, and trudged up Highway 119 for a mile and a half before coming to a single-story stucco building situated between a Waffle House and a gas station.

Inside, a long desk that rose to the Colonel's solar plexus separated us from the police station proper, which seemed to consist of three uniformed officers sitting at three desks, all of them talking on the phone.

"I'm Alaska Young's brother," the Colonel announced brazenly.

"And I want to talk to the cop who saw her die."

A pale, thin man with a reddish blond beard spoke quickly into the phone and then hung up. "I seen 'er," he said.

"She hit mah cruiser."

"Can we talk to you outside?" the Colonel asked.

"Yup."

The cop grabbed a coat and walked toward us, and as he approached, I could see the blue veins through the translucent skin of his face. For a cop, he didn't seem to get out much. Once outside, the Colonel lit a cigarette.

"You nineteen?" the cop asked. In Alabama, you can get married at eighteen (fourteen with Mom and Dad's permission), but you have to be nineteen to smoke.

"So fine me. I just need to know what you saw."

"Ah most always work from six t' midnight, but I was coverin' the graveyard shift. We got a call 'bout a jackknifed truck, and I's only about a mile away, so I headed over, and I'd just pulled up. I's still in mah cruiser, and I seen out the corner a' my eye the headlights, and my lights was on and I turned the siren on, but the lights just kept comin' straight at me, son, and I got out quick and run off and she just barreled inta me. I seen plenty, but I ain't never seen that. She didn't tarn. She didn't brake. She jest hit it. I wa'n't more than ten feet from the cruiser when she hit it. I thought I'd die, but here ah am."

For the first time, the Colonel's theory seemed plausible. She didn't hear the siren? She didn't see the lights? She was sober enough to kiss well, I thought. Surely she was sober enough to swerve.

"Did you see her face before she hit the car? Was she asleep?" the Colonel asked.

"That I cain't tell ya. I didn't see 'er. There wa'n't much time."

"I understand. She was dead when you got to the car?" he asked.

"I–I did everything I could. Ah run right up to her, but the steerin' wheel — well, ah reached in there, thought if ah could git that steerin' wheel loose, but there weren't no gettin' her outta that car alive. It fairly well crushed her chest, see."

I winced at the image. "Did she say anything?" I asked.

"She was passed on, son," he said, shaking his head, and my last hope of last words faded.

"Do you think it was an accident?" the Colonel asked as I stood beside him, my shoulders slouching, wanting a cigarette but nervous to be as audacious as him.

"Ah been an officer here twenty-six years, and ah've seen more drunks than you'n count, and ah ain't never seen someone so drunk they cain't swerve. But ah don't know. The coroner said it was an accident, and maybe it was.

That ain't my field, y'know. I s'pose that's 'tween her and the Lord now."

"How drunk was she?" I asked. "Like, did they test her?"

"Yeah. Her BAL was point twenty-four. That's drunk, certainly. That's a powerful drunk."

"Was there anything in the car?" the Colonel asked. "Anything, like, unusual that you remember?"

"I remember them brochures from colleges — places in Maine and Ohia and Texas — I thought t' myself that girl must be from Culver Crick and that was mighty sad, see a girl like that lookin't' go t' college. That's a goddamned shame. And they's flowers. They was flowers in her backseat. Like, from a florist. Tulips."

Tulips? I thought immediately of the tulips Jake had sent her. "Were they white?" I asked.

"They sure was," the cop answered. Why would she have taken his tulips with her? But the cop wouldn't have an answer for that one.

"Ah hope y'all find out whatever y'all's lookin' for. I have thought it over some, 'cause I never seen nothing like that before. Ah've thought hard on it, wondered if I'da started up the cruiser real quick and drove it off, if she'da been all right. There mightn't've been time. No knowing now. But it don't matter, t' my mind, whether it were an accident or it weren't. It's a goddamned shame either way."

"There was nothing you could have done," the Colonel said softly. "You did your job, and we appreciate it."

"Well. Thanks. Y'all go 'long now, and take care, and let me know if ya have any other questions. This is mah card if you need anything."

The Colonel put the card in his fake leather wallet, and we walked toward home.

"White tulips," I said. "Jake's tulips. Why?"

"One time last year, she and Takumi and I were at the Smoking Hole, and there was this little white daisy on the bank of the creek, and all of a sudden she just jumped waist-deep into the water and waded across and grabbed it.

She put it behind her ear, and when I asked her about it, she told me that her parents always put white flowers in her hair when she was little. Maybe she wanted to die with white flowers."

"Maybe she was going to return them to Jake," I said.

"Maybe. But that cop just shit sure convinced me that it might have been a suicide."

"Maybe we should just let her be dead," I said, frustrated. It seemed to me that nothing we might find out would make anything any better, and I could not get the image of the steering wheel careening into her chest out of my mind, her chest "fairly well crushed" while she sucked for a last breath that would never come, and no, this was not making anything better. "What if she did do it?" I asked the Colonel. "We're not any less guilty. All it does is make her into this awful, selfish bitch."

"Christ, Pudge. Do you even remember the person she actually was? Do you remember how she could be a selfish bitch? That was part of her, and you used to know it. It's like now you only care about the Alaska you made up."

I sped up, walking ahead of the Colonel, silent. And he couldn't know, because he wasn't the last person she kissed, because he hadn't been left with an unkeepable promise, because he wasn't me. Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. Whatever their faults, I'd never known my school friends in Florida to die on me.

After a considerable distance, the Colonel jogged up to me and said, "I just want it to be normal again," he said.

"You and me. Normal. Fun. Just, normal. And I feel like if we knew—" "Okay, fine," I cut him off. "Fine. We'll keep looking."

The Colonel shook his head, but then he smiled. "I have always appreciated your enthusiasm, Pudge. And I'm just going to go ahead and pretend you still have it until it comes back. Now let's go home and find out why people off themselves."

fourteen days after

Warning signs of suicide the Colonel and I found on the Web:

— Previous suicide attempts Verbally threatening suicide Giving away prized possessions Collecting and discussing methods of suicide

— Expressions of hopelessness and anger at oneself and/or the world

— Writing, talking, reading, and drawing about death and/or depression Suggesting that the person would not be missed if s/he were gone

— Self-injury

— Recent loss of a friend or family member through death or suicide

— Sudden and dramatic decline in academic performance

— Eating disorders, sleeplessness, excessive sleeping, chronic headaches Use (or increased use) of mind-altering substances Loss of interest in sex, hobbies, and other activities previously enjoyed Alaska displayed two of those warning signs. She had lost, although not recently, her mother. And her drinking, always pretty steady, had definitely increased in the last month of her life. She did talk about dying, but she always seemed to be at least half kidding.

"I make jokes about death all the time," the Colonel said. "I made a joke last week about hanging myself with my tie. And I'm not gonna off myself. So that doesn't count. And she didn't give anything away, and she sure as hell didn't lose interest in sex. One would have to like sex an awful lot to make out with your scrawny ass."

"Funny," I said.

"I know. God, I'm a genius. And her grades were good. And I don't recall her talking about killing herself."

"Once, with the cigarettes, remember? 'You smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.'" "That was a joke."

But when prodded by the Colonel, maybe to prove to him that I could remember Alaska as she really was and not just as I wanted her to be, I kept returning the conversation to those times when she would be mean and moody, when she didn't feel like answering how, when, why, who, or what questions. "She could seem so angry," I thought aloud.

"What, and I can't?" the Colonel retorted. "I'm plenty angry, Pudge. And you haven't been the picture of placidity of late, either, and you aren't going to off yourself. Wait, are you?"

"No," I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn't hit the brakes and I couldn't hit the accelerator.

Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked, but no.

"Good to know. So yeah, she was up and down — from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes. But partly, this year at least, it was the whole Marya thing. Look, Pudge, she obviously wasn't thinking about killing herself when she was making out with you. After that, she was asleep until the phone rang. So she decided to kill herself at some point between that ringing phone and crashing, or it was an accident."

"But why wait until you're six miles off campus to die?" I asked.

He sighed and shook his head. "She did like being mysterious. Maybe she wanted it like this." I laughed then, and the Colonel said, "What?"

"I was just thinking— Why do you run head-on into a cop car with its lights on? and then I thought, Weil, she hated authority figures."

The Colonel laughed. "Hey, look at that. Pudge made a funny!"

It felt almost normal, and then my distance from the event itself seemed to evaporate and I found myself back in the gym, hearing the news for the first time, the Eagle's tears dripping onto his pants, and I looked over at the Colonel and thought of all the hours we'd spent on this foam couch in the past two weeks — everything she'd ruined. Too pissed off to cry, I said, "This is only making me hate her. I don't want to hate her. And what's the point, if that's all it's making me do?" Still refusing to answer how and why questions. Still insisting on an aura of mystery.

I leaned forward, head between my knees, and the Colonel placed a hand on my upper back. "The point is that there are always answers, Pudge." And then he pushed air out between his pursed lips and I could hear the angry quiver in his voice as he repeated, "There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough. The Web says that suicides usually involve carefully thought-out plans. So clearly she did not commit suicide." I felt embarrassed to be still falling apart two weeks later when the Colonel could take his medicine so stoically, and I sat up.

"Okay, fine" I answered. "It wasn't suicide."

"Although it sure doesn't make sense as an accident," the Colonel said.

I laughed. "We sure are making progress."

We were interrupted by Holly Moser, the senior I knew primarily from viewing her nude self-portraits over Thanksgiving with Alaska. Holly hung with the Weekday Warriors, which explains why I'd previously said about two words to her in my life, but she just came in without knocking and said that she'd had a mystical indicator of Alaska's presence.

"I was in the Waffle House, and suddenly all the lights went off, except for, like, the light over my booth, which started flashing. It would be like on for a second and then off for a while and then on for a couple of seconds and then off. And I realized, you know, it was Alaska. I think she was trying to talk to me in Morse code. But, like, I don't know Morse code. She probably didn't know that. Anyway, I thought you guys should know."

"Thanks," I said curtly, and she stood for a while, looking at us, her mouth opening as if to speak, but the Colonel was staring at her through half-closed eyes, his jaw jutting out and his distaste uncontained. I understood how he felt: I didn't believe in ghosts who used Morse code to communicate with people they'd never liked. And I disliked the possibility that Alaska would give someone else peace but not me.

"God, people like that shouldn't be allowed to live," he said after she left.

"It was pretty stupid."

"It's not just stupid, Pudge. I mean, as if Alaska would talk to Holly Moser. God! I can't stand these fake grievers.

Stupid bitch."

I almost told him that Alaska wouldn't want him to call any woman a bitch, but there was no use fighting with the Colonel.

twenty days after

It was Sunday,and the Colonel and I decided against the cafeteria for dinner, instead walking off campus and across Highway 119 to the Sunny Konvenience Kiosk, where we indulged in a well-balanced meal of two oatmeal cream pies apiece. Seven hundred calories. Enough energy to sustain a man for half a day. We sat on the curb in front of the store, and I finished dinner in four bites.

"I'm going to call Jake tomorrow, just so you know. I got his phone number from Takumi."

"Fine," I said.

I heard a bell jangle behind me and turned toward the opening door.

"Y'all's loitering," said the woman who'd just sold us dinner.

"We're eating," the Colonel answered.

The woman shook her head and ordered, as if to a dog, "Git."

So we walked behind the store and sat by the stinking, fetid Dumpster.

"Enough with the fine's already, Pudge. That's ridiculous. I'm going to call Jake, and I'm going to write down everything he says, and then we're going to sit down together and try and figure out what happened."

"No. You're on your own with that. I don't want to know what happened between her and Jake."

The Colonel sighed and pulled a pack of Pudge Fund cigarettes of his jeans pocket. "Why not?"

"Because I don't want to! Do I have provide you with an in-depth analysis of every decision I make?"

The Colonel lit the cigarette with a lighter I'd paid for and took a drag. "Whatever. It needs to be figured out, and I need your help to do it, because between the two of us we knew her pretty well. So that's that."

I stood up and stared down at him sitting smugly, and he blew a thin stream of smoke at my face, and I'd had enough. "I'm tired of following orders, asshole! I'm not going to sit with you and discuss the finer points of her relationship with Jake, goddamn it. I can't say it any clearer: / don't want to know about them. I already know what she told me, and that's all I need to know, and you can be a condescending prick as long as you'd like, but I'm not going to sit around and chat with you about how goddamned much she loved Jake! Now give me my cigarettes." The Colonel threw the pack on the ground and was up in a flash, a fistful of my sweater in his hand, trying but failing to pull me down to his height.

"You don't even care about her!" he shouted. "All that matters is you and your precious fucking fantasy that you and Alaska had this goddamned secret love affair and she was going to leave Jake for you and you'd live happily ever after. But she kissed a lot of guys, Pudge. And if she were here, we both know that she would still be Jake's girlfriend and that there'd be nothing but drama between the two of you — not love, not sex, just you pining after her and her like, 'You're cute, Pudge, but I love Jake.' If she loved you so much, why did she leave you that night?

And if you loved her so much, why'd you help her go? I was drunk. What's your excuse?"

The Colonel let go of my sweater, and I reached down and picked up the cigarettes. Not screaming, not through clenched teeth, not with the veins pulsing in my forehead, but calmly. Calmly. I looked down at the Colonel and said, "Fuck you."

The vein-pulsing screaming came later, after I had jogged across Highway 119 and through the dorm circle and across the soccer field and down the dirt road to the bridge, when I found myself at the Smoking Hole. I picked up a blue chair and threw it against the concrete wall, and the clang of plastic on concrete echoed beneath the bridge as the chair fell limply on its side, and then I lay on my back with my knees hanging over the precipice and screamed. I screamed because the Colonel was a self-satisfied, condescending bastard, and I screamed because he was right, for I did want to believe that I'd had a secret love affair with Alaska. Did she love me? Would she have left Jake for me? Or was it just another impulsive Alaska moment? It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed.

I wanted to be the last one she loved. And I knew I wasn't. I knew it, and I hated her for it. I hated her for not caring about me. I hated her for leaving that night, and I hated myself, too, not only because I let her go but because if I had been enough for her, she wouldn't have even wanted to leave. She would have just lain with me and talked and cried, and I would have listened and kissed at her tears as they pooled in her eyes.

I turned my head and looked at one of the little blue plastic chairs on its side. I wondered if there would ever be a day when I didn't think about Alaska, wondered whether I should hope for a time when she would be a distant memory — recalled only on the anniversary of her death, or maybe a couple of weeks after, remembering only after having forgotten.

I knew that I would know more dead people. The bodies pile up. Could there be a space in my memory for each of them, or would I forget a little of Alaska every day for the rest of my life?

Once, early on in the year, she and I had walked down to the Smoking Hole, and she jumped into Culver Creek with her flip-flops still on. She stepped across the creek, picking her steps carefully over the mossy rocks, and grabbed a waterlogged stick from the creek bank. As I sat on the concrete, my feet dangling toward the water, she overturned rocks with the stick and pointed out the skittering crawfish.

"You boil 'em and then suck the heads out," she said excitedly.

"That's where all the good stuff is — the heads."

She taught me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.

I lit a cigarette and spit into the creek. "You can't just make me different and then leave," I said out loud to her.

"Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was fine with just me and last words and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die." For she had embodied the Great Perhaps — she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps. I could call everything the Colonel said and did "fine." I could try to pretend that I didn't care anymore, but it could never be true again. You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different, and I'm sorry I let you go, yes, but you made the choice. You left me Perhapsless, stuck in your goddamned labyrinth. And now I don't even know if you chose the straight and fast way out, if you left me like this on purpose. And so I never knew you, did I? I can't remember, because I never knew.

And as I stood up to walk home and make my peace with the Colonel, I tried to imagine her in that chair, but I could not remember whether she crossed her legs. I could still see her smiling at me with half of Mona Lisa's smirk, but I couldn't picture her hands well enough to see her holding a cigarette. I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

At Room 43, after quickly offered and accepted apologies, the Colonel said, "We've made a tactical decision to push back calling Jake. We're going to pursue some other avenues first."

twenty-one days after

As Dr. Hyde shuffled into class the next morning, Takumi sat down next to me and wrote a note on the edge of his notebook. Lunch at Mclnedible, it read.

I scribbled Okay on my own notebook and then turned to a blank page as Dr. Hyde started talking about Sufism, the mystical sect of Islam. I'd only scanned through the reading — I'd been studying only enough not to fail— but in my scanning, I'd come across great last words. This poor Sufi dressed in rags walked into a jewelry store owned by a rich merchant and asked him, "Do you know how you're going to die?" The merchant answered, "No. No one knows how they're going to die." And the Sufi said, "I do."

"How?" asked the merchant.

And the Sufi lay down, crossed his arms, said, "Like this," and died, whereupon the merchant promptly gave up his store to live a life of poverty in pursuit of the kind of spiritual wealth the dead Sufi had acquired.

But Dr. Hyde was telling a different story, one that I'd skipped. "Karl Marx famously called religion 'the opiate of the masses.' Buddhism, particularly as it is popularly practiced, promises improvement through karma. Islam and Christianity promise eternal paradise to the faithful. And that is a powerful opiate, certainly, the hope of a better life to come. But there's a Sufi story that challenges the notion that people believe only because they need an opiate. Rabe'a al-Adiwiyah, a great woman saint of Sufism, was seen running through the streets of her hometown, Basra, carrying a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. When someone asked her what she was doing, she answered, 'I am going to take this bucket of water and pour it on the flames of hell, and then I am going to use this torch to burn down the gates of paradise so that people will not love God for want of heaven or fear of hell, but because He is God.'" A woman so strong she burns heaven and drenches hell. Alaska would have liked this Rabe'a woman, I wrote in my notebook. But even so, the afterlife mattered to me. Heaven and hell and reincarnation. As much as I wanted to know how Alaska had died, I wanted to know where she was now, if anywhere. I liked to imagine her looking down on us, still aware of us, but it seemed like a fantasy, and I never really felt it — just as the Colonel had said at the funeral that she wasn't there, wasn't anywhere. I couldn't honestly imagine her as anything but dead, her body rotting in Vine Station, the rest of her just a ghost alive only in our remembering. Like Rabe'a, I didn't think people should believe in God because of heaven and hell. But I didn't feel a need to run around with a torch. You can't burn down a made-up place.

After class, as Takumi picked through his fries at Mclnedible, eating only the crunchiest, I felt the total loss of her, still reeling from the idea that she was not only gone from this world but from all of them.

"How have you been?" I asked.

"Uh," he said, a mouth full of fries, "nan good. You?"

"Not good." I took a bite of cheeseburger. I'd gotten a plastic stock car with my Happy Meal, and it sat overturned on the table. I spun the wheels.

"I miss her,"Takumi said, pushing away his tray, uninterested in the remaining soggy fries.

"Yeah. I do, too. I'm sorry, Takumi," and I meant it in the largest possible way. I was sorry we ended up like this, spinning wheels at a McDonald's. Sorry the person who had brought us together now lay dead between us. I was sorry I let her die. Sorry I haven't talked to you because you couldn't know the truth about the Colonel and me, and I hated being around you and having to pretend that my grief is this uncomplicated thing — pretending that she died and I miss her instead of that she died because of me.

"Me too. You're not dating Lara anymore, are you?"

"I don't think so."

"Okay. She was kind of wondering."

I had been ignoring her, but by then she had begun to ignore me back, so I figured it was over, but maybe not.

"Well," I told Takumi, "I just can't — I don't know, man. That's pretty complicated."

"Sure. She'll understand. Sure. All good."

"Okay."

"Listen, Pudge. I — ah, I don't know. It sucks, huh?"

"Yeah."

twenty-seven days after

Six days later four Sundays after the last Sunday, the Colonel and I were trying to shoot each other with paintball guns while turning 900s in a half pipe. "We need booze. And we need to borrow the Eagle's Breathalyzer."

"Borrow it? Do you know where it is?"

"Yeah. He's never made you take one?"

"Urn. No. He thinks I'm a nerd."

"You are a nerd, Pudge. But you're not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking." Actually, I hadn't drunk since that night, and didn't feel particularly inclined to ever take it up ever again.

Then I nearly elbowed the Colonel in the face, swinging my arms wildly as if contorting my body in the right ways mattered as much as pressing the right buttons at the right moments — the same video-game-playing delusion that had always gripped Alaska. But the Colonel was so focused on the game he didn't even notice. "Do you have a plan for how, exactly, we're going to steal the Breathalyzer from inside the Eagle's house?"

The Colonel looked over at me and said, "Do you suck at this game?" and then, without turning back to the screen, shot my skater in the balls with a blue paint blast. "But first, we gotta get some liquor, because the ambrosia's sour and my booze connection is—" "POOF.Gone," I finished.

When I opened his door, Takumi was sitting at his desk, boxy headphones surrounding his entire head, bouncing his head to the beat. He seemed oblivious to us. "Hey," I said. Nothing. "Takumi!" Nothing. "TAKUMI!" He turned around and pulled off his headphones. I closed the door behind me and said, "You got any alcohol?"

"Why?" he asked.

"Uh, because we want to get drunk?" the Colonel answered.

"Great. I'll join you."

"Takumi," the Colonel said. "This is — we need to do this alone."

"No. I've had enough of that shit." Takumi stood up, walked into his bathroom, and came out with a Gatorade bottle filled with clear liquid. "I keep it in the medicine cabinet," Takumi said. "On account of how it's medicine."

He pocketed the bottle and then walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. A moment later, he peeked his head back in and, brilliantly mimicking the Colonel's bossy bass voice, said, "Christ, you comin' or what?"

"Takumi," the Colonel said. "Okay. Look, what we're doing is a little dangerous, and I don't want you caught up in it. Honestly. But, listen, we'll tell you everything starting tomorrow."

"I'm tired of all this secret shit. She was my friend, too."

"Tomorrow. Honestly."

He pulled the bottle out of his pocket and tossed it to me.

"Tomorrow," he said.

"I don't really want him to know," I said as we walked back to the room, the Gatorade bottle stuffed in the pocket of my sweatshirt.

"He'll hate us."

"Yeah, well, he'll hate us more if we keep pretending he doesn't exist," the Colonel answered.

Fifteen minutes later, I stood at the Eagle's doorstep.

He opened the door with a spatula in hand, smiled, and said, "Miles, come in. I was just making an egg sandwich.

Want one?"

"No thanks," I said, following the Eagle into his kitchen.

My job was to keep him out of his living room for thirty seconds so the Colonel could get the Breathalyzer undetected. I coughed loudly to let the Colonel know the coast was clear. The Eagle picked up his egg sandwich and took a bite. "To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?" he asked.

"I just wanted to tell you that the Colonel — I mean, Chip Martin — he's my roommate, you know, he's having a tough time in Latin."

"Well, he's not attending the class, from what I understand, which can make it very difficult to learn the language." He walked toward me. I coughed again, and backpedaled, the Eagle and I tangoing our way toward his living room.

"Right, well, he's up all night every night thinking about Alaska," I said, standing up straight and tall, trying to block the Eagle's view of the living room with my none-too-wide shoulders. "They were very close, you know."

"I know that—" he said, and in the living room, the Colonel's sneakers squeaked against the hardwood floor. The Eagle looked at me quizzically and sidestepped me. I quickly said, "Is that burner on?" and pointed toward the frying pan.

The Eagle wheeled around, looked at the clearly not-on burner, then dashed into the living room.

Empty. He turned back to me. "Are you up to something, Miles?"

"No, sir. Honestly. I just wanted to talk about Chip."

He arched his eyebrows, skeptical. "Well, I understand that this is a devastating loss for Alaska's close friends.

It's just awful. There's no comfort to this grief, is there?"

"No sir."

"I'm sympathetic to Chip's troubles. But school is important. Alaska would have wanted, I'm sure, for Chip's studies to continue unimpeded."

I'm sure,I thought. I thanked the Eagle, and he promised me an egg sandwich at some point in the future, which made me nervous that he would just show up at our room one afternoon with an egg sandwich in hand to find us A. illegally smoking while the Colonel B. illegally drank milk and vodka out of a gallon jug.

Halfway across the dorm circle, the Colonel ran up to me. "That was smooth, with the 'Is that burner on?' If you hadn't pulled that, I was toast. Although I guess I'll have to start going to Latin. Stupid Latin."

"Did you get it?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah. God, I hope he doesn't go looking for it tonight. Although, really, he could never suspect anything. Why would someone steal a Breathalyzer?"

At two o'clock in the morning, the Colonel took his sixth shot of vodka, grimaced, then frantically motioned with his hand toward the bottle of Mountain Dew I was drinking. I handed it to him, and he took a long pull on it.

"I don't think I'll be able to go to Latin tomorrow," he said. His words were slightly slurred, as if his tongue were swollen.

"One more," I pleaded.

"Okay. This is it, though." He poured a sip of vodka into a Dixie cup, swallowed, pursed his lips, and squeezed his hands into tight little fists. "Oh God, this is bad. It's so much better with milk. This better be point two-four."

"We have to wait for fifteen minutes after your last drink before we test it," I said, having downloaded instructions for the Breathalyzer off the Internet. "Do you feel drunk?"

"If drunk were cookies, I'd be Famous Amos."

We laughed. "Chips Ahoy! would have been funnier," I said.

"Forgive me. Not at my best."

I held the Breathalyzer in my hand, a sleek, silver gadget about the size of a small remote control. Beneath an LCD screen was a small hole. I blew into it to test it: 0.00, it read. I figured it was working.

After fifteen minutes, I handed it to the Colonel. "Blow really hard onto it for at least two seconds," I said.

He looked up at me. "Is that what you told Lara in the TV room? Because, see, Pudge, they only call it a blow job."

"Shut up and blow," I said.

His cheeks puffed out, the Colonel blew into the hole hard and long, his face turning red.

"Oh no," the Colonel said. "Oh God."

"You're two-thirds of the way there," I said encouragingly.

"Yeah, but I'm like three-fourths of the way to puking."

"Well, obviously it's possible. She did it. C'mon! You can out drink a girl, can't you?"

"Give me the Mountain Dew," he said stoically.

And then I heard footsteps outside. Footsteps. We'd waited till 1:00 to turn on the lights, figuring everyone would be long asleep — it was a school night after all— but footsteps, shit, and as the Colonel looked at me confused, I grabbed the Breathalyzer from him and stuffed it between the foam cushions of the couch and grabbed the Dixie cup and the Gatorade bottle of vodka and stashed them behind the coffee table, and in one motion I grabbed a cigarette from a pack and lit it, hoping the smell of smoke would cover up the smell of booze. I puffed the cigarette without inhaling, trying to smoke up the room, and I was almost back to the couch when the three quick knocks came against the door and the Colonel looked at me, his eyes wide, his suddenly unpromising future flashing before his eyes, and I whispered, "Cry," as the Eagle turned the knob.

The Colonel hunched forward, his head between his knees and his shoulders shaking, and I put my arm around him as the Eagle came in.

"I'm sorry," I said before the Eagle could say anything. "He's having a tough night."

"Are you smoking?" the Eagle asked. "In your room? Four hours after lights-out?"

I dropped the cigarette into a half-empty Coke can. "I'm sorry, sir. I'm just trying to stay awake with him."

The Eagle walked up toward the couch, and I felt the Colonel start to rise, but I held his shoulders down firmly, because if the Eagle smelled the Colonel's breath we were done for sure. "Miles," the Eagle said. "I understand that this is a difficult time for you. But you will respect the rules of this school, or you will matriculate someplace else. I'll see you in Jury tomorrow. Is there anything I can do for you, Chip?"

Without looking up, the Colonel answered in a quivering, tear-soaked voice, "No, sir. I'm just glad I have Miles."

"Well, I am, too," the Eagle said. "Perhaps you should encourage him to live within the confines of our rules, lest he risk his place on this campus."

"Yes sir," the Colonel said.

"Y'all can leave your lights on until you're ready to go to bed. I'll see you tomorrow, Miles."

"Good night, sir," I said, imagining the Colonel sneaking the Breathalyzer back into the Eagle's house while I got harangued at Jury. As the Eagle closed the door behind him, the Colonel shot up, smiling at me, and still nervous that the Eagle might be outside, whispered, "That was a thing of beauty."

"I learned from the best," I said. "Now drink."

An hour later, the Gatorade bottle mostly empty, the Colonel hit. 24.

"Thank you, Jesus!" he exclaimed, and then added, "This is awful. This is not fun drunk."

I got up and cleared the coffee table out of the way so the Colonel could walk the length of the room without hitting any obstacles, and said, "Okay, can you stand?"

The Colonel pushed his arms into the foam of the couch and began to rise, but then fell backward onto the couch, lying on his back. "Spinning room," he observed. "Gonna puke."

"Don't puke. That will ruin everything."

I decided to give him a field sobriety test, like the cops do. "Okay. Get over here and try to walk a straight line."

He rolled off the couch and fell to the floor, and I caught him beneath his armpits and held him up. I positioned him in between two tiles of the linoleum floor. "Follow that line of tiles. Walk straight, toe to heel." He raised one leg and immediately leaned to the left, his arms windmilling. He took a single unsteady step, sort of a waddle, as his feet were seemingly unable to land directly in front of each other. He regained his balance briefly, then took a step backward and landed on the couch. "I fail," he said matter-of-factly.

"Okay, how's your depth perception?"

"My what perwhatshun?"

"Look at me. Is there one of me? Are there two of me? Could you accidentally drive into me if I were a cop car?"

"Everything's very spinny, but I don't think so. This is bad. Was she really like this?"

"Apparently. Could you drive like this?"

"Oh God no. No. No. She was really drunk, huh."

"Yeah."

"We were really stupid."

"Yeah."

"I'm spinning. But no. No cop car. I can see."

"So there's your evidence."

"Maybe she fell asleep. I feel awfully sleepy."

"We'll find out," I said, trying to play the role that the Colonel had always played for me.

"Not tonight," he answered. "Tonight, we're gonna throw up a little, and then we are going to sleep through our hangover."

"Don't forget about Latin."

"Right. Fucking Latin."

twenty-eight days after

The colonel made it to Latin the next morning—"I feel awesome right now, because I'm still drunk. But God help me in a couple of hours" — and I took a French test for which I had studied un petit peu. I did all right on the multiple choice (which-verb-tense-makes-sense-here type questions), but the essay question, In Le Petit Prince, what is the significance of the rose? threw me a bit.

Had I read The Little Prince in English or French, I suspect this question might have been quite easy.

Unfortunately, I'd spent the evening getting the Colonel drunk. So I answered, Elle symbolise I'amour ("It symbolizes love"). Madame O'Malley had left us with an entire page to answer the question, but I figured I'd covered it nicely in three words.

I'd kept up in my classes well enough to get B-minuses and not worry my parents, but I didn't really care much anymore. The significance of the rose? I thought. Who gives a shit? What's the significance of the white tulips?

There was a question worth answering.

After I'd gotten a lecture and ten work hours at Jury, I came back to Room 43 to find the Colonel telling Takumi everything — well, everything except the kiss. I walked in to the Colonel saying, "So we helped her go."

"You set off the fireworks," he said.

"How'd you know about the fireworks?"

"I've been doing a bit of investigating," Takumi answered. "Well, anyway, that was dumb. You shouldn't have done it. But we all let her go, really," he said, and I wondered what the hell he meant by that, but I didn't have time to ask before he said to me, "So you think it was suicide?"

"Maybe," I said. "I don't see how she could have hit the cop by accident unless she was asleep."

"Maybe she was going to visit her father," Takumi said. "Vine Station is on the way."

"Maybe," I said. "Everything's a maybe, isn't it?"

The Colonel reached in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. "Well, here's another one: Maybe Jake has the answers," he said. "We've exhausted other strategies, so I'm calling him tomorrow, okay?"

I wanted answers now, too, but not to some questions. "Yeah, okay," I said. "But listen — don't tell me anything that's not relevant. I don't want to know anything unless it's going to help me know where she was going and why."

"Me neither, actually," Takumi said. "I feel like maybe some of that shit should stay private."

The Colonel stuffed a towel under the door, lit a cigarette, and said, "Fair enough, kids. We'll work on a need-to-know basis."

twenty-nine days after

As I walked home from classes the next day, I saw the Colonel sitting on the bench outside the pay phone, scribbling into a notebook balanced on his knees as he cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder.

I hurried into Room 43, where I found Takumi playing the racing game on mute. "How long has he been on the phone?" I asked.

"Dunno. He was on when I got here twenty minutes ago. He must have skipped Smart Boy Math. Why, are you scared Jake's gonna drive down here and kick your ass for letting her go?"

"Whatever," I said, thinking, This is precisely why we shouldn't have told him. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and lit a cigarette. Takumi came in not long after.

"What's up?" he said.

"Nothing. I just want to know what happened to her."

"Like you really want to know the truth? Or like you want to find out that she fought with him and was on her way to break up with him and was going to come back here and fall into your arms and you were going to make hot, sweet love and have genius babies who memorized last words and poetry?"

"If you're pissed at me, just say so."

"I'm not pissed at you for letting her go. But I'm tired of you acting like you were the only guy who ever wanted her. Like you had some monopoly on liking her," Takumi answered. I stood up, lifted the toilet seat, and flushed my unfinished cigarette.

I stared at him for a moment, and then said, "I kissed her that night, and I've got a monopoly on that."

"What?" he stammered.

"I kissed her."

His mouth opened as if to speak, but he said nothing. We stared at each other for a while, and I felt ashamed of myself for what amounted to bragging, and finally I said, "I — look, you know how she was. She wanted to do something, and she did it. I was probably just the guy who happened to be there."

"Yeah. Well, I was never that guy," he said. "I — well, Pudge, God knows I can't blame you."

"Don't tell Lara."

He was nodding as we heard the three quick knocks on the front door that meant the Eagle, and I thought, Shit, caught twice in a week, and Takumi pointed into the shower, and so we jumped in together and pulled the curtain shut, the too-low showerhead spitting water onto us from rib cage down. Forced to stand closer together than seemed entirely necessary, we stayed there, silent, the sputtering shower slowly soaking our T-shirts and jeans for a few long minutes, while we waited for the steam to lift the smoke into the vents. But the Eagle never knocked on the bathroom door, and eventually Takumi turned off the shower. I opened the bathroom door a crack and peeked out to see the Colonel sitting on the foam couch, his feet propped up on thecoffee table, finishing Takumi's NASCAR race. I opened the door and Takumi and I walked out, fully clothed and dripping wet.

"Well, there's something you don't see every day," the Colonel said nonchalantly.

"What the hell?" I asked.

"I knocked like the Eagle to scare you." He smiled. "But shit, if y'all need privacy, just leave a note on the door next time."

Takumi and I laughed, and then Takumi said, "Yeah, Pudge and I were getting a little testy, but man, ever since we showered together, Pudge, I feel really close to you."

"So how'd it go?" I asked. I sat down on the coffee table, and Takumi plopped down on the couch next to the Colonel, both of us wet and vaguely cold but more concerned with the Colonel's talk with Jake than with getting dry.

"It was interesting. Here's what you need to know: He gave her those flowers, like we thought. They didn't fight.

He just called because he had promised to call at the exact moment of their eight-month anniversary, which happened to be three-oh-two in thea.m., which — let's agree — is a little ridiculous, and I guess somehow she heard the phone ringing. So they talked about nothing for like five minutes, and then completely out of nowhere, she freaked out."

"Completely out of nowhere?" Takumi asked.

"Allow me to consult my notes." The Colonel flipped through his notebook. "Okay. Jake says, 'Did you have a nice anniversary?' and then Alaska says, "I had a splendid anniversary,'" and I could hear in the Colonel's reading the excitement of her voice, the way she leaped onto certain words like splendid and fantastic and absolutely.

"Then it's quiet, then Jake says, 'What are you doing?' and Alaska says, 'Nothing, just doodling,' and then she says, 'Oh God.' And then she says, 'Shit shit shit' and starts sobbing, and told him she had to go but she'd talk to him later, but she didn't say she was driving to see him, and Jake doesn't think she was. He doesn't know where she was going, but he says she always asked if she could come up and see him, and she didn't ask, so she must not have been coming. Hold on, lemme find the quote." He flipped a page in the notebook. "Okay, here: "She said she'd talk to me later, not that she'd see me.'" "She tells me 'To be continued' and tells him she'll talk to him later," I observed.

"Yes. Noted. Planning for a future. Admittedly inconsistent with suicide. So then she comes back into her room screaming about forgetting something. And then her headlong race comes to its end. So no answers, really."

"Well, we know where she wasn't going."

"Unless she was feeling particularly impulsive," Takumi said. He looked at me. "And from the sound of things, she was feeling rather impulsive that night."

The Colonel looked over at me curiously, and I nodded.

"Yeah," Takumi said. "I know."

"Okay, then. And you were pissed, but then you took a shower with Pudge and it's all good. Excellent. So, so that night…" the Colonel continued.

And we tried to resurrect the conversation that last night as best we could for Takumi, but neither of us remembered it terribly well, partly because the Colonel was drunk and I wasn't paying attention until she brought up Truth or Dare. And, anyway, we didn't know how much it might mean. Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows that someone's about to die.

"I mean," the Colonel said, "I think she and I were talking about how much I adored skateboarding on the computer but how it would never even occur to me to try and step on a skateboard in real life, and then she said, "Let's play Truth or Dare' and then you fucked her."

"Wait, you fucked her? In front of the Colonel?" Takumi cried.

"I didn't fuck her."

"Calm down, guys," the Colonel said, throwing up his hands. "It's a euphemism."

"For what?" Takumi asked.

"Kissing."

"Brilliant euphemism." Takumi rolled his eyes. "Am I the only one who thinks that might be significant?"

"Yeah, that never occurred to me before," I deadpanned. "But now I don't know. She didn't tell Jake. It couldn't have been that important."

"Maybe she was racked with guilt," he said.

"Jake said she seemed normal on the phone before she freaked out," the Colonel said. "But it must have been that phone call. Something happened that we aren't seeing." The Colonel ran his hands through his thick hair, frustrated. "Christ, something. Something inside of her. And now we just have to figure out what that was."

"So we just have to read the mind of a dead person," Takumi said. "Easy enough."

"Precisely. Want to get shitfaced?" the Colonel asked.

"I don't feel like drinking," I said.

The Colonel reached into the foam recesses of the couch and pulled out Takumi's Gatorade bottle. Takumi didn't want any either, but the Colonel just smirked and said, "More for me," and chugged.

thirty-seven days after

The next Wednesday,I ran into Lara after religion class — literally. I'd seen her, of course. I'd seen her almost every day — in English or sitting in the library whispering to her roommate, Katie. I saw her at lunch and dinner at the cafeteria, and I probably would have seen her at breakfast, if I'd ever gotten up for it. And surely, she saw me as well, but we hadn't, until that morning, looked at each other simultaneously.

By now, I assumed she'd forgotten me. After all, we only dated for about a day, albeit an eventful one. But when I plowed right into her left shoulder as I hustled toward precalc, she spun around and looked up at me. Angry, and not because of the bump. "I'm sorry," I blurted out, and she just squinted at me like someone about to either fight or cry, and disappeared silently into a classroom. First two words I'd said to her in a month.

I wanted to want to talk to her. I knew I'd been awful— Imagine, I kept telling myself, if you were Lara, with a dead friend and a silent ex-boy friend — but I only had room for one true want, and she was dead, and I wanted to know the how and why of it, and Lara couldn't tell me, and that was all that mattered.

forty-five days after

For weeks,the Colonel and I had relied on charity to support our cigarette habit — we'd gotten free or cheap packs from everyone from Molly Tan to the once-crew-cutted Longwell Chase. It was as if people wanted to help and couldn't think of a better way. But by the end of February, we ran out of charity. Just as well, really. I never felt right taking people's gifts, because they did not know that we'd loaded the bullets and put the gun in her hand.

So after our classes, Takumi drove us to Coosa "We Cater to Your Spiritual Needs" Liquors. That afternoon, Takumi and I had learned the disheartening results of our first major precalc test of the semester. Possibly because Alaska was no longer available to teach us precalc over a pile of Mclnedible french fries and possibly because neither of us had really studied, we were both in danger of getting progress reports sent home.

"The thing is that I just don't find precalc very interesting," Takumi said matter-of-factly.

"It might be hard to explain that to the director of admissions at Harvard," the Colonel responded.

"I don't know," I said. "I find it pretty compelling."

And we laughed, but the laughs drifted into a thick, pervasive silence, and I knew we were all thinking of her, dead and laughless, cold, no longer Alaska. The idea that Alaska didn't exist still stunned me every time I thought about it. She's rotting underground in Vine Station, Alabama, I thought, but even that wasn't quite it. Her body was there, but she was nowhere, nothing, POOF.

The times that were the most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realized how utterly, totally gone she was.

I bought the cigarettes. I'd never entered Coosa Liquors, but it was every bit as desolate as Alaska described. The dusty wooden floor creaked as I made my way to the counter, and I saw a large barrel filled with brackish water that purported to containlive bait, but in fact contained a veritable school of dead, floating minnows. The woman behind the counter smiled at me with all four of her teeth when I asked her for a carton of Marlboro Lights.

"You go t' Culver Creek?" she asked me, and I did not know whether to answer truthfully, since no high-school student was likely to be nineteen, but she grabbed the carton of cigarettes from beneath her and put it on the counter without asking for an ID, so I said, "Yes, ma'am."

"How's school?" she asked.

"Pretty good," I answered.

"Heard y'all had a death up there."

"Yes'm," I say.

"I's awful sorry t' hear it."

"Yes'm."

The woman, whose name I did not know because this was not the sort of commercial establishment to waste money on name tags, had one long, white hair growing from a mole on her left cheek. It wasn't disgusting, exactly, but I couldn't stop glancing at it and then looking away.

Back in the car, I handed a pack of cigarettes to the Colonel.

We rolled down the windows, although the February cold bit at my face and the loud wind made conversation impossible. I sat in my quarter of the car and smoked, wondering why the old woman at Coosa Liquors didn't just pull that one hair out of her mole. The wind blew through Takumi's rolled-down window in front of me and against my face. I scooted to the middle of the backseat and looked up at the Colonel sitting shotgun, smiling, his face turned to the wind blowing in through his window.

forty-six days after

I didn't want to talk to lara,but the next day at lunch, Takumi pulled the ultimate guilt trip. "How do you think Alaska would feel about this shit?" he asked as he stared across the cafeteria at Lara. She was sitting three tables away from us with her roommate, Katie, who was telling some story, and Lara smiled whenever Katie laughed at one of her own jokes. Lara scooped up a forkful of canned corn and held it above her plate, moving her mouth to it and bowing her head toward her lap as she took the bite from the fork — a quiet eater.

"She could talk to me," I told Takumi.

Takumi shook his head. His open mouth gooey with mashed potatoes, he said, "Yuh ha' to." He swallowed. "Let me ask you a question, Pudge. When you're old and gray and your grandchildren are sitting on your knee and look up at you and say, 'Grandpappy, who gave you your first blow job?' do you want to have to tell them it was some girl you spent the rest of high school ignoring? No!" He smiled. "You want to say, 'My dear friend Lara Buterskaya. Lovely girl. Prettier than your grandma by a wide margin.'" I laughed. So yeah, okay. I had to talk to Lara.

After classes, I walked over to Lara's room and knocked, and then she stood in the doorway, looking like, What?

What now? You've done the damage you could, Pudge, and I looked past her, into the room I'd only entered once, where I learned that kissing or no, I couldn't talk to her — and before the silence could get too uncomfortable, I talked. "I'm sorry," I said.

"For what?" she asked, still looking toward me but not quite at me.

"For ignoring you. For everything," I said.

"You deedn't have to be my boyfriend." She looked so pretty, her big eyes blinking fast, her cheeks soft and round, and still the roundness could only remind me of Alaska's thin face and her high cheekbones. But I could live with it — and, anyway, I had to. "You could have just been my friend," she said.

"I know. I screwed up. I'm sorry."

"Don't forgive that asshole," Katie cried from inside the room.

"I forgeeve you." Lara smiled and hugged me, her hands tight around the small of my back. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and smelled violets in her hair.

"I don't forgive you," Katie said, appearing in the doorway. And although Katie and I were not well acquainted, she felt comfortable enough to knee me in the balls. She smiled then, and as I crumpled into a bow, Katie said, "Now I forgive you."

Lara and I took a walk to the lake — sans Katie — and we talked. We talked — about Alaska and about the past month, about how she had to miss me and miss Alaska, while I only had to miss Alaska (which was true enough). I told her as much of the truth as I could, from the firecrackers to the Pelham Police Department and the white tulips.

"I loved her," I said, and Lara said she loved her, too, and I said, "I know, but that's why. I loved her, and after she died I couldn't think about anything else. It felt, like, dishonest.

Like cheating."

"That's not a good reason," she said.

"I know," I answered.

She laughed softly. "Well, good then. As long as you know." I knew I wasn't going to erase that anger, but we were talking.

As darkness spread that evening, the frogs croaked and a few newly resurrected insects buzzed about campus, and the four of us — Takumi, Lara, the Colonel, and I — walked through the cold gray light of a full moon to the Smoking Hole.

"Hey, Colonel, why do you call eet the Smoking Hole?" Lara asked. "Eet's, like, a tunnel."

"It's like fishing hole," the Colonel said. "Like, if we fished, we'd fish here. But we smoke. I don't know. I think Alaska named it." The Colonel pulled a cigarette out of his pack and threw it into the water.

"What the hell?" I asked.

"For her," he said.

I half smiled and followed his lead, throwing in a cigarette of my own. I handed Takumi and Lara cigarettes, and they followed suit. The smokes bounced and danced in the stream for a few moments, and then they floated out of sight.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering. In China, the Old Man had told us, there are days reserved for grave cleaning, where you make gifts to the dead. And I imagined that Alaska would want a smoke, and so it seemed to me that the Colonel had begun an excellent ritual.

The Colonel spit into the stream and broke the silence. "Funny thing, talking to ghosts," he said. "You can't tell if you're making up their answers or if they are really talking to you."

"I say we make a list," Takumi said, steering clear of introspective talk. "What kind of proof do we have of suicide?" The Colonel pulled out his omnipresent notebook.

"She never hit the brakes," I said, and the Colonel started scribbling.

And she was awfully upset about something, although she'd been awfully upset without committing suicide many times before. We considered that maybe the flowers were some kind of memorial to herself — like a funeral arrangement or something. But that didn't seem very Alaskan to us. She was cryptic, sure, but if you're going to plan your suicide down to the flowers, you probably have a plan as to how you're actually going to die, and Alaska had no way of knowing a police car was going to present itself on I-65 for the occasion.

And the evidence suggesting an accident?

"She was really drunk, so she could have thought she wasn't going to hit the cop, although I don't know how," Takumi said.

"She could have fallen asleep," Lara offered.

"Yeah, we've thought about that," I said. "But I don't think you keep driving straight if you fall asleep."

"I can't think of a way to find out that does not put our lives in considerable danger," the Colonel deadpanned.

"Anyway, she didn't show warning signs of suicide. I mean, she didn't talk about wanting to die or give away her stuff or anything."

"That's two. Drunk and no plans to die," Takumi said. This wasn't going anywhere. Just a different dance with the same question. What we needed wasn't more thinking. We needed more evidence.

"We have to find out where she was going," the Colonel said.

"The last people she talked to were me, you, and Jake," I said to him. "And we don't know. So how the hell are we going to find out?"

Takumi looked over at the Colonel and sighed. "I don't think it would help, to know where she was going. I think that would make it worse for us. Just a gut feeling."

"Well, my gut wants to know," Lara said, and only then did I realize what Takumi meant the day we'd showered together — I may have kissed her, but I really didn't have a monopoly on Alaska; the Colonel and I weren't the only ones who cared about her, and weren't alone in trying to figure out how she died and why.

"Well, regardless," said the Colonel, "we're at a dead end. So one of you think of something to do. Because I'm out of investigative tools."

He flicked his cigarette butt into the creek, stood up, and left. We followed him. Even in defeat, he was still the Colonel.

fifty-one days after

The investigation stalled,I took to reading for religion class again, which seemed to please the Old Man, whose pop quizzes I'd been failing consistently for a solid six weeks. We had one that Wednesday morning: Share an example of a Buddhist koan. A koan is like a riddle that's supposed to help you toward enlightenment in Zen Buddhism. For my answer, I wrote about this guy Banzan. He was walking through the market one day when he overheard someone ask a butcher for his best piece of meat. The butcher answered, "Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find a piece of meat that is not the best." Upon hearing this, Banzan realized that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is, and poof, he reached enlightenment. Reading it the night before, I'd wondered if it would be like that for me — if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I'd played in her dying. But I wasn't convinced enlightenment struck like lightning.

After we'd passed our quizzes, the Old Man, sitting, grabbed his cane and motioned toward Alaska's fading question on the blackboard. "Let's look at one sentence on page ninety-four of this very entertaining introduction to Zen that I had you read this week. 'Everything that comes together falls apart,'" the Old Man said. "Everything.

The chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you you — they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn't prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart."

We are all going,I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed,I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The Colonel, who had driven the Investigation from the start, who had cared about what happened to her when I only cared if she loved me, had given up on it, answerless. And I didn't like what answers I had: She hadn't even cared enough about what happened between us to tell Jake; instead, she had just talked cute with him, giving him no reason to think that minutes before, I'd tasted her boozy breath. And then something invisible snapped inside her, and that which had come together commenced to fall apart.

And maybe that was the only answer we'd ever have. She fell apart because that's what happens. The Colonel seemed resigned to that, but if the Investigation had once been his idea, it was now the thing that held me together, and I still hoped for enlightenment.

sixty-two days after

The next Sunday,I slept in until the late-morning sunlight slivered through the blinds and found its way to my face. I pulled the comforter over my head, but the air got hot and stale, so I got up to call my parents.

"Miles!" my mom said before I even said hello. "We just got caller identification."

"Does it magically know it's me calling from the pay phone?"

She laughed. "No, it just says *pay phone' and the area code. So I deduced. How are you?" she asked, a warm concern in her voice.

"I'm doing okay. I kinda screwed up some of my classes for a while, but I'm back to studying now, so it should be fine," I said, and that was mostly true.

"I know it's been hard on you, buddy," she said. "Oh! Guess who your dad and I saw at a party last night? Mrs. Forrester. Your fourth-grade teacher! Remember? She remembered you perfectly, and spoke very highly of you, and we just talked" — and while I was pleased to know that Mrs. Forrester held my fourth-grade self in high regard, I only half listened as I read the scribbled notes on the white-painted pine wall on either side of the phone, looking for any new ones I might be able to decode (Lacy's — Friday, 10 were the when and where of a Weekday Warrior party, I figured)—"and we had dinner with the Johnstons last night and I'm afraid that Dad had too much wine. We played charades and he was just awful." She laughed, and I felt so tired, but someone had dragged the bench away from the pay phone, so I sat my bony butt down on the hard concrete, pulling the silver cord of the phone taut and preparing for a serious soliloquy from my mom, and then down below all the other notes and scribbles, I saw a drawing of a flower. Twelve oblong petals around a filled-in circle against the daisy-white paint, and daisies, white daisies, and I could hear her saying, What do you see, Pudge? Look, and I could see her sitting drunk on the phone with Jake talking about nothing and What are you doing? and she says, Nothing, just doodling, just doodling. And then, Oh God.

"Miles?"

"Yeah, sorry, Mom. Sorry. Chip's here. We gotta go study. I gotta go."

"Will you call us later, then? I'm sure Dad wants to talk to you."

"Yeah, Mom; yeah, of course. I love you, okay? Okay, I gotta go."

"I think I found something!" I shouted at the Colonel, invisible beneath his blanket, but the urgency in my voice and the promise of something, anything, found, woke the Colonel up instantly, and he jumped from his bunk to the linoleum. Before I could say anything, he grabbed yesterday's jeans and sweatshirt from the floor, pulled them on, and followed me outside.

"Look." I pointed, and he squatted down beside the phone and said, "Yeah. She drew that. She was always doodling those flowers."

"And 'just doodling,' remember? Jake asked her what she was doing and she said 'just doodling,' and then she said 'Oh God' and freaked out. She looked at the doodle and remembered something."

"Good memory, Pudge," he acknowledged, and I wondered why the Colonel wouldn't just get excited about it.

"And then she freaked out," I repeated, "and went and got the tulips while we were getting the fireworks. She saw the doodle, remembered whatever she'd forgotten, and then freaked out."

"Maybe," he said, still staring at the flower, trying perhaps to see it as she had. He stood up finally and said, "It's a solid theory, Pudge," and reached up and patted my shoulder, like a coach complimenting a player. "But we still don't know what she forgot."

sixty-nine days after

A week after the discovery of the doodled flower, I'd resigned myself to its insignificance — I wasn't Banzan in the meat market after all — and as the maples around campus began to hint of resurrection and the maintenance crew began mowing the grass in the dorm circle again, it seemed to me we had finally lost her.

The Colonel and I walked into the woods down by the lake that afternoon and smoked a cigarette in the precise spot where the Eagle had caught us so many months before. We'd just come from a town meeting, where the Eagle announced the school was going to build a playground by the lake in memory of Alaska. She did like swings, I guess, but a playground? Lara stood up at the meeting — surely a first for her — and said they should do something funnier, something Alaska herself would have done.

Now, by the lake, sitting on a mossy, half-rotten log, the Colonel said to me, "Lara was right. We should do something for her. A prank. Something she would have loved."

"Like, a memorial prank?"

"Exactly. The Alaska Young Memorial Prank. We can make it an annual event. Anyway, she came up with this idea last year. But she wanted to save it to be our senior prank. But it's good. It's really good. It's historic."

"Are you going to tell me?" I asked, thinking back to the time when he and Alaska had left me out of prank planning for Barn Night.

"Sure," he said. "The prank is entitled 'Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.'" And he told me, and I have to say, Alaska left us with the crown jewel of pranks, the Mona Lisa of high-school hilarity, the culmination of generations of Culver Creek pranking. And if the Colonel could pull it off, it would be etched in the memory of everyone at the Creek, and Alaska deserved nothing less. Best of all, it did not, technically, involve any expellable offenses.

The Colonel got up and dusted the dirt and moss off his pants. "I think we owe her that."

And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh. And maybe — just maybe — she would give us the clue we needed.

eighty-three days after

Two weeks later,the Colonel returned from spring break with two notebooks filled with the minutiae of prank planning, sketches of various locations, and a forty-page, two-column list of problems that might crop up and their solutions. He calculated all times to a tenth of a second, and all distances to the inch, and then he recalculated, as if he could not bear the thought of failing her again. And then on that Sunday, the Colonel woke up late and rolled over. I was reading The Sound and the Fury, which I was supposed to have read in mid-February, and I looked up as I heard the rustling in the bed, and the Colonel said, "Let's get the band back together." And so I ventured out into the overcast spring and woke up Lara and Takumi, then brought them back to Room 43. The Barn Night crew was intact — or as close as it ever would be — for the Alaska Young Memorial Prank.

The three of us sat on the couch while the Colonel stood in front of us, outlining the plan and our parts in it with an excitement I hadn't seen in him since Before. When he finished, he asked, "Any questions?"

"Yeah," Takumi said. "Is that seriously going to work?"

"Well, first we gotta find a stripper. And second Pudge has to work some magic with his dad."

"All right, then," Takumi said. "Let's get to work."

eighty-four days after

Every spring,Culver Creek took one Friday afternoon off from classes, and all the students, faculty, and staff were required to go to the gym for Speaker Day. Speaker Day featured two speakers — usually small-time celebrities or small-time politicians or small-time academics, the kind of people who would come and speak at a school for the measly three hundred bucks the school budgeted. The junior class picked the first speaker and the seniors the second, and anyone who had ever attended a Speaker Day agreed that they were torturously boring. We planned to shake Speaker Day up a bit.

All we needed to do was convince the Eagle to let "Dr. William Morse," a "friend of my dad's" and a "preeminent scholar of deviant sexuality in adolescents," be the junior class's speaker.

So I called my dad at work, and his secretary, Paul, asked me if everything was all right, and I wondered why everyone, everyone, asked me if everything was all right when I called at any time other than Sunday morning.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

My dad picked up. "Hey, Miles. Is everything all right?"

I laughed and spoke quietly into the phone, since people were milling about. "Yeah, Dad. Everything is fine. Hey, remember when you stole the school bell and buried it in the cemetery?"

"Greatest Culver Creek prank ever," he responded proudly.

"It was, Dad. It was. So listen, I wonder if you'd help out with the new greatest Culver Creek prank ever."

"Oh, I don't know about that, Miles. I don't want you getting in any trouble."

"Well, I won't. The whole junior class is planning it. And it's not like anyone is going to get hurt or anything.

Because, well, remember Speaker Day?"

"God that was boring. That was almost worse than class."

"Yeah, well, I need you to pretend to be our speaker. Dr. William Morse, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and an expert in adolescent understandings of sexuality."

He was quiet for a long time, and I looked down at Alaska's last daisy and waited for him to ask what the prank was, and I would have told him, but I just heard him breathe slowly into the phone, and then he said, "I won't even ask. Hmm." He sighed. "Swear to God you'll never tell your mother."

"I swear to God." I paused. It took me a second to remember the Eagle's real name. "Mr. Starnes is going to call you in about ten minutes."

"Okay, my name is Dr. William Morse, and I'm a psychology professor, and — adolescent sexuality?"

"Yup. You're the best, Dad."

"I just want to see if you can top me," he said, laughing.

Although it killed the Colonel to do it, the prank could not work without the assistance of the Weekday Warriors — specifically junior-class president Longwell Chase, who by now had grown his silly surfer mop back. But the Warriors loved the idea, so I met Longwell in his room and said, "Let's go."

Longwell Chase and I had nothing to talk about and no desire to pretend otherwise, so we walked silently to the Eagle's house. The Eagle came to the door before we even knocked. He cocked his head a little when he saw us, looking confused — and, indeed, we made an odd couple, with Long well's pressed and pleated khaki pants and my I-keep-meaning-to-do-laundry blue jeans.

"The speaker we picked is a friend of Miles's dad," Longwell said. "Dr. William Morse. He's a professor at a university down in Florida, and he studies adolescent sexuality."

"Aiming for controversy, are we?"

"Oh no," I said. "I've met Dr. Morse. He's interesting, but he's not controversial. He just studies the, uh, the way that adolescents' understanding of sex is still changing and growing. I mean, he's opposed to premarital sex."

"Well. What's his phone number?" I gave the Eagle a piece of paper, and he walked to a phone on the wall and dialed. "Yes, hello. I'm calling to speak with Dr. Morse?…Okay, thanks…Hello, Dr. Morse. I have Miles Halter here in my home, and he tells me…great, wonderful…Well, I was wondering" — the Eagle paused, twisting the cord around his finger—"wondering, I guess, whether you — just so long as you understand that these are impressionable young people. We wouldn't want explicit discussions…. Excellent. Excellent. I'm glad you understand…. You, too, sir. See you soon!" The Eagle hung up the phone, smiling, and said, "Good choice! He seems like a very interesting man."

"Oh yeah," Longwell said very seriously. "I think he will be extraordinarily interesting."

one hundred two days after

My father played Dr. William Morse on the phone, but the man playing him in real life went by the name of Maxx with two x's, except that his name was actually Stan, except on Speaker Day his name was, obviously, Dr. William Morse. He was a veritable existential identity crisis, a male stripper with more aliases than a covert CIA agent.

The first four "agencies" the Colonel called turned us down. It wasn't until we got to the B's in the "Entertainment" section of the Yellow Pages that we found Bachelorette Parties R Us. The owner of the aforementioned establishment liked the idea a great deal, but, he said, "Maxx is gonna love that. But no nudity.

Not in front of the kids." We agreed — with some reluctance.

To ensure that none of us would get expelled, Takumi and I collected five dollars from every junior at Culver Creek to cover "Dr. William Morse's" appearance fee, since we doubted the Eagle would be keen on paying him after witnessing the, uh, speech. I paid the Colonel's five bucks. "I feel that I have earned your charity," he said, gesturing to the spiral notebooks he'd filled with plans.

As I sat through my classes that morning, I could think of nothing else. Every junior in the school had known for two weeks, and so far not even the faintest rumor had leaked out. But the Creek was rife with gossipsparticularly the Weekday Warriors, and if just one person told one friend who told one friend who told one friend who told the Eagle, everything would fall apart.

The Creek's don't-rat ethos withstood the test nicely, but when Maxx/Stan/Dr. Morse didn't shown up by 11:50 that morning, I thought the Colonel would lose his shit. He sat on the bumper of a car in the student parking lot, his head bowed, his hands running through his thick mop of dark hair over and over again, as if he were trying to find something in there. Maxx had promised to arrive by 11:40, twenty minutes before the official start of Speaker Day, giving him time to learn the speech and everything. I stood next to the Colonel, worried but quiet, waiting.

We'd sent Takumi to call "the agency" and learn the whereabouts of "the performer."

"Of all the things I thought could go wrong, this was not one of them. We have no solution for this."

Takumi ran up, careful not to speak to us until he was near. Kids were starting to file into the gym. Late late late late. We asked so little of our performer, really. We had written his speech. We had planned everything for him.

All Maxx had to do was show up with his outfit on. And yet…

"The agency," said Takumi, "says the performer is on his way."

"On his way?" the Colonel said, clawing at his hair with a new vigor. "On his way? He's already late."

"They said he should be—" and then suddenly our worries disappeared as a blue minivan rounded the corner toward the parking lot, and I saw a man inside wearing a suit.

"That'd better be Maxx," the Colonel said as the car parked. He jogged up to the front door.

"I'm Maxx," the guy said upon opening the door.

"I am a nameless and faceless representative of the junior class," the Colonel answered, shaking Maxx's hand. He was thirtyish, tan and wide-shouldered, with a strong jaw and a dark, close-cropped goatee.

We gave Maxx a copy of his speech, and he read through it quickly.

"Any questions?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah. Given the nature of this event, I think y'all should pay me in advance."

He struck me as very articulate, even professorial, and I felt a supreme confidence, as if Alaska had found the best male stripper in central Alabama and led us right to him.

Takumi popped the trunk of his SUV and grabbed a paper grocery bag with $320 in it. "Here you go, Maxx," he said. "Okay, Pudge here is going to sit down there with you, because you are friends with Pudge's dad. That's in the speech. But, uh, we're hoping that if you get interrogated when this is all over, you can find it in your heart to say that the whole junior class called on a conference call to hire you, because we wouldn't want Pudge here to get in any trouble."

He laughed. "Sounds good to me. I took this gig because I thought it was hilarious. Wish I'd thought of this in high school."

As I walked into the gym, Maxx/Dr. William Morse at my side, Takumi and the Colonel trailing a good bit behind me, I knew I was more likely to get busted than anyone else. But I'd been reading the Culver Creek Handbook pretty closely the last couple weeks, and I reminded myself of my two-pronged defense, in the event I got in trouble: 1. There is not, technically, a rule against paying a stripper to dance in front of the school. 2. It cannot be proven that I was responsible for the incident. It can only be proven that I brought a person onto campus who I presumed to be an expert on sexual deviancy in adolescence and who turned out to be an actual sexual deviant.

I sat down with Dr. William Morse in the middle of the front row of bleachers. Some ninth graders sat behind me, but when the Colonel walked up with Lara a moment later, he politely told them, "Thanks for holding our seats," and ushered them away. As per the plan, Takumi was in the supply room on the second floor, connecting his stereo equipment to the gym's loudspeakers. I turned to Dr. Morse and said, "We should look at each other with great interest and talk like you're friends with my parents."

He smiled and nodded his head. "He is a great man, your father. And your mother — so beautiful." I rolled my eyes, a bit disgusted. Still, I liked this stripper fellow. The Eagle came in at noon on the nose, greeted the senior-class speaker — a former Alabama state attorney general — and then came over to Dr. Morse, who stood with great aplomb and half bowed as he shook the Eagle's hand — maybe too formal — and the Eagle said, "We're certainly very glad to have you here," and Maxx replied, "Thank you. I hope I don't disappoint."

I wasn't worried about getting expelled. I wasn't even worried about getting the Colonel expelled, although maybe I should have been. I was worried that it wouldn't work because Alaska hadn't planned it. Maybe no prank worthy of her could be pulled off without her.

The Eagle stood behind the podium.

"This is a day of historic significance at Culver Creek. It was the vision of our founder Phillip Garden that you, as students and we, as faculty, might take one afternoon a year to benefit from the wisdom of voices outside the school, and so we meet here annually to learn from them, to see the world as others see it. Today, our junior-class speaker is Dr. William Morse, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and a widely respected scholar. He is here today to talk about teenagers and sexuality, a topic I'm sure you'll find considerably interesting. So please help me welcome Dr. Morse to the podium."

We applauded. My heart beat in my chest like it wanted to applaud, too. As Maxx walked up to the podium, Lara leaned down to me and whispered, "He ees really hot."

"Thank you, Mr. Starnes." Maxx smiled and nodded to the Eagle, then straightened his papers and placed them on the podium. Even I almost believed he was a professor of psychology. I wondered if maybe he was an actor supplementing his income.

He read directly from the speech without looking up, but he read with the confident, airy tone of a slightly snooty academic. "I'm here today to talk with you about the fascinating subject of teenage sexuality. My research is in the field of sexual linguistics, specifically the way that young people discuss sex and related questions. So, for instance, I'm interested in why my saying the word arm might not make you laugh, but my saying the word vagina might." And, indeed, there were some nervous twitters from the audience. "The way young people speak about one another's bodies says a great deal about our society. In today's world, boys are much more likely to objectify girls' bodies than the other way around. Boys will say amongst themselves that so-and-so has a nice rack, while girls will more likely say that a boy is cute, a term that describes both physical and emotional characteristics. This has the effect of turning girls into mere objects, while boys are seen by girls as whole people—" And then Lara stood up, and in her delicate, innocent accent, cut Dr. William Morse off. "You're so hot! I weesh you'd shut up and take off your clothes."

The students laughed, but all of the teachers turned around and looked at her, stunned silent. She sat down.

"What's your name, dear?"

"Lara," she said.

"Now, Lara," Maxx said, looking down at his paper to remember the line, "what we have here is a very interesting case study — a female objectifying me, a male. It's so unusual that I can only assume you're making an attempt at humor."

Lara stood up again and shouted, "I'm not keeding! Take off your clothes."

He nervously looked down at the paper, and then looked up at all of us, smiling. "Well, it is certainly important to subvert the patriarchal paradigm, and I suppose this is a way. All right, then," he said, stepping to the left of the podium. And then he shouted, loud enough that Takumi could hear him upstairs, "This one's for Alaska Young."

As the fast, pumping bass of Prince's "Get Off" started from the loudspeakers, Dr. William Morse grabbed the leg of his pants with one hand and the lapel of his coat with the other, and the Velcro parted and his stage costume came apart, revealing Maxx with two x's, a stunningly muscular man with an eight-pack in his stomach and bulging pec muscles, and Maxx stood before us, smiling, wearing only briefs that were surely tighty, but not whitey — black leather.

His feet in place, Maxx swayed his arms to the music, and the crowd erupted with laughter and deafening, sustained applause — the largest ovation by a good measure in Speaker Day history. The Eagle was up in a flash, and as soon as he stood, Maxx stopped dancing, but he flexed his pec muscles so that they jumped up and down quickly in time to the music before the Eagle, not smiling but sucking his lips in as if not smiling required effort, indicated with a thumb that Maxx should go on home, and Maxx did.

My eyes followed Maxx out the door, and I saw Takumi standing in the doorway, fists raised in the air in triumph, before he ran back upstairs to cut the music. I was glad he'd gotten to see at least a bit of the show.

Takumi had plenty of time to get his equipment out, because the laughing and talking went on for several minutes while the Eagle kept repeating, "Okay. Okay. Let's settle down now. Settle down, y'all. Let's settle down."

The senior-class speaker spoke next. He blew. And as we left the gym, nonjuniors crowded around us, asking, "Was it you?" and I just smiled and said no, for it had not been me, or the Colonel or Takumi or Lara or Longwell Chase or anyone else in that gym. It had been Alaska's prank through and through. The hardest part about pranking, Alaska told me once, is not being able to confess. But I could confess on her behalf now. And as I slowly made my way out of the gym, I told anyone who would listen, "No. It wasn't us. It was Alaska."

The four of us returned to Room 43, aglow in the success of it, convinced that the Creek would never again see such a prank, and it didn't even occur to me that I might get in trouble until the Eagle opened the door to our room and stood above us, and shook his head disdainfully.

"I know it was y'all," said the Eagle.

We look at him silently. He often bluffed. Maybe he was bluffing.

"Don't ever do anything like that again," he said. "But, Lord, 'subverting the patriarchal paradigm'—it's like she wrote the speech." He smiled and closed the door.

one hundred fourteen days after

A week and Ahalf later,I walked back from my afternoon classes, the sun bearing down on my skin in a constant reminder that spring in Alabama had come and gone in a matter of hours, and now, early May, summer had returned for a six-month visit, and I felt the sweat dribble down my back and longed for the bitter winds of January. When I got to my room, I found Takumi sitting on the couch, reading my biography of Tolstoy.

"Uh, hi," I said.

He closed the book and placed it beside him and said, "January10."

"What?" I asked.

"January 10. That date ring a bell?"

"Yeah, it's the day Alaska died." Technically, she died three hours into January 11, but it was still, to us anyway, Monday night, January 10.

"Yeah, but something else, Pudge. January 9. Alaska's mom took her to the zoo."

"Wait. No. How do you know that?"

"She told us at Barn Night. Remember?"

Of course I didn't remember. If I could remember numbers, I wouldn't be struggling toward a C-plus in precalc.

"Holy shit," I said as the Colonel walked in.

"What?" the Colonel asked.

"January 9, 1997," I told him. "Alaska liked the bears. Her mom liked the monkeys." The Colonel looked at me blankly for a moment and then took his backpack off and slung it across the room in a single motion.

"Holy shit," he said. "WHY THE HELL DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT!"

Within a minute, the Colonel had the best solution either of us would ever come up with. "Okay. She's sleeping.

Jake calls, and she talks to him, and she's doodling, and she looks at her white flower, and 'Oh God my mom liked white flowers and put them in my hair when I was little,' and then she flips out. She comes back into her room and starts screaming at us that she forgot — forgot about her mom, of course — so she takes the flowers, drives off campus, on her way to — what?" He looked at me. "What? Her mom's grave?"

And I said, "Yeah, probably. Yeah. So she gets into the car, and she just wants to get to her mom's grave, but there's this jackknifed truck and the cops there, and she's drunk and pissed off and she's in a hurry, so she thinks she can squeeze past the cop car, and she's not even thinking straight, but she has to get to her mom, and she thinks she can get past it somehow and POOF."

Takumi nods slowly, thinking, and then says, "Or, she gets into the car with the flowers. But she's already missed the anniversary. She's probably thinking that she screwed things up with her mom again — first she doesn't call 911, and now she can't even remember the freaking anniversary. And she's furious and she hates herself, and she decides, 'That's it, I'm doing it,' and she sees the cop car and there's her chance and she just floors it."

The Colonel reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapping it upside down against thecoffee table. "Well," he said. "That clears things up nicely."

one hundred eighteen days after

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could.

She made it impossible for me. And the accicide, the suident, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask, Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?

Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.

But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it out, she had made us closer — the Colonel and Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.

"There's one more thing we should do," the Colonel said as we played a video game together with the sound onjust the two of us, like in the first days of the Investigation.

"There's nothing more we can do."

"I want to drive through it," he said. "Like she did."

We couldn't risk leaving campus in the middle of the night like she had, so we left about twelve hours earlier, at 3:00 in the afternoon, with the Colonel behind the wheel of Takumi's SUV. We asked Lara and Takumi to come along, but they were tired of chasing ghosts, and besides, finals were coming.

It was a bright afternoon, and the sun bore down on the asphalt so that the ribbon of road before us quivered with heat. We drove a mile down Highway 119 and then merged onto I-65 northbound, heading toward the accident scene and Vine Station.

The Colonel drove fast, and we were quiet, staring straight ahead. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking, trying again to see through time and space, to get inside her head just for a moment. An ambulance, lights and sirens blaring, sped past us, going in the opposite direction, toward school, and for an instant, I felt a nervous excitement and thought, It could be someone I know. I almost wished it was someone I knew, to give new form and depth to the sadness I still felt.

The silence broke: "Sometimes I liked it," I said. "Sometimes I liked it that she was dead."

"You mean it felt good?"

"No. I don't know. It felt..pure."

"Yeah," he said, dropping his usual eloquence. "Yeah. I know. Me, too. It's natural. I mean, it must be natural."

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

Five miles north of school, the Colonel moved into the left lane of the interstate and began to accelerate. I gritted my teeth, and then before us, broken glass glittered in the blare of the sun like the road was wearing jewelry, and that spot must be the spot. He was still accelerating.

I thought: This would not be a bad way to go.

I thought: Straight and fast Maybe she just decided at the last second.

And POOF we are through the moment of her death. We are driving through the place that she could not drive through, passing onto asphalt she never saw, and we are not dead. We are not dead! We are breathing and we are crying and now slowing down and moving back into the right lane.

We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

one hundred nineteen days after

The colonel and I threw ourselves into school once we gave up, knowing that we'd both need to ace our finals to achieve our GPA goals (I wanted a 3.0 and the Colonel wouldn't settle for even a 3.98). Our room became Study Central for the four of us, with Takumi and Lara over till all hours of the night talking about The Sound and the Fury and meiosis and the Battle of the Bulge. The Colonel taught us a semester's worth of precalc, although he was too good at math to teach it very well—"Of course it makes sense. Just trust me. Christ, it's not that hard" — and I missed Alaska.

And when I could not catch up, I cheated. Takumi and I shared copies of Cliffs Notes for Things Fall Apart and A Farewell to Arms ("These things are just too damned long\" he exclaimed at one point).

We didn't talk much. But we didn't need to.

one hundred twenty-two days after

A cool breeze had beaten back the onslaught of summer, and on the morning the Old Man gave us our final exams, he suggested we have class outside. I wondered why we could have an entire class outside when I'd been kicked out of class last semester for merely glancing outside, but the Old Man wanted to have class outside, so we did.

The Old Man sat in a chair that Kevin Richman carried out for him, and we sat on the grass, my notebook at first perched awkwardly in my lap and then against the thick green grass, and the bumpy ground did not lend itself to writing, and the gnats hovered. We were too close to the lake for comfortable sitting, really, but the Old Man seemed happy.

"I have here your final exam. Last semester, I gave you nearly two months to complete your final paper. This time, you get two weeks." He paused. "Well, nothing to be done about that, I guess." He laughed. "To be honest, I just decided once and for all to use this paper topic last night. It rather goes against my nature. Anyway, pass these around." When the pile came to me, I read the question: How will you — you personally — ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? Now that you've wrestled with three major religious traditions, apply your newly enlightened mind to Alaska's question.

After the exams had been passed out, the Old Man said, "You need not specifically discuss the perspectives of different religions in your essay, so no research is necessary. Your knowledge, or lack thereof, has been established in the quizzes you've taken this semester. I am interested in how you are able to fit the uncontestable fact of suffering into your understanding of the world, and how you hope to navigate through life in spite of it.

"Next year, assuming my lungs hold out, we'll study Taoism, Hinduism, and Judaism together—" The Old Man coughed and then started to laugh, which caused him to cough again. "Lord, maybe I won't last. But about the three traditions we've studied this year, I'd like to say one thing. Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism each have founder figures — Muhammad, Jesus, and the Buddha, respectively. And in thinking about these founder figures, I believe we must finally conclude that each brought a message of radical hope. To seventh-century Arabia, Muhammad brought the promise that anyone could find fulfillment and everlasting life through allegiance to the one true God. The Buddha held out hope that suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that the last shall be first, that even the tax collectors and lepers — the outcasts — had cause for hope. And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause for hope?"

Back at Room 43, the Colonel was smoking in the room. Even though I still had one evening left of washing dishes in the cafeteria to work off my smoking conviction, we didn't much fear the Eagle. We had fifteen days left, and if we got caught, we'd just have to start senior year with some work hours. "So how will we ever get out of this labyrinth, Colonel?" I asked.

"If only I knew," he said.

"That's probably not gonna get you an A."

"Also it doesn't do much to put my soul to rest."

"Or hers," I said.

"Right. I'd forgotten about her." He shook his head. "That keeps happening."

"Well, you have to write something," I argued.

"After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out — but I choose the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it."

one hundred thirty-six days after

Two weeks later,I still hadn't finished my final for the Old Man, and the semester was just twenty-four hours from ending. I was walking home from my final test, a difficult but ultimately (I hoped) successful battle with precalculus that would win me the B-minus I so richly desired. It was genuinely hot out again, warm like she was.

And I felt okay. Tomorrow, my parents would come and load up my stuff, and we'd watch graduation and then go back to Florida. The Colonel was going home to his mother to spend the summer watching the soybeans grow, but I could call him long-distance, so we'd be in touch plenty. Takumi was going to Japan for the summer, and Lara was again to be driven home via green limo. I was just thinking that it was all right not to know quite where Alaska was and quite where she was going that night, when I opened the door to my room and noticed a folded slip of paper on the linoleum floor. It was a single piece of lime green stationery. At the top, it read in calligraphy: From the Desk of..Takumi Hikohito Pudge/Colonel: I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of everything hurt me, and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad anymore, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret.

You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night. I'd stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, and I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother's grave on the anniversary, but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early — too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide.

She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn't. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk, just trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something.

She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking.

So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.

Takumi I ran out of the room, like I'd never smoked a cigarette, like I ran with Takumi on Barn Night, across the dorm circle to his room, but Takumi was gone. His bunk was bare vinyl; his desk empty; an outline of dust where his stereo had been. He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

And as I walked back to give Takumi's note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring, and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

I got back to Room 43, but the Colonel wasn't home yet, so I left the note on the top bunk and sat down at the computer, and I wrote my way out of the labyrinth: Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no sugarcoating it: She deserved better friends.

When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.

Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I know: I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her — green eyes, half a smirk, the soft curves of her legs — would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe "the afterlife" is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.

Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her mother and her friends and herself — those are awful things, but she did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die.

Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were: "It's very beautiful over there."

I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope it's beautiful.