Looking for Alaska

"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 splendidanniversary,'" and I could hear in the Colonel's reading the excitement of her voice, the way she leaped onto certain words like splendidand fantasticand 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 seeme.'" "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 fuckedher? 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 — butI 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.