Looking for Alaska

The nature of the labyrinth,I scribbled into my spiral notebook, and the way out of it.This teacher rocked. I hated discussion classes. I hated talking, and I hated listening to everyone else stumble on their words and try to phrase things in the vaguest possible way so they wouldn't sound dumb, and I hated how it was all just a game of trying to figure out what the teacher wanted to hear and then saying it. I'm in class,so teach me.And teach me he did: In those fifty minutes, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them. And then he assigned us fifty pages of reading for the next day — from a book called Religious Studies.

That afternoon, I had two classes and two free periods. We had nine fifty-minute class periods each day, which means that most everyone had three "study periods" (except for the Colonel, who had an extra independent-study math class on account of being an Extra Special Genius). The Colonel and I had biology together, where I pointed out the other guy who'd duct-taped me the night before. In the top corner of his notebook, the Colonel wrote, Longwell Chase. Senior W-day Warrior. Friends w/Sara. Weird.It took me a minute to remember who Sara was: the Colonel's girlfriend.

I spent my free periods in my room trying to read about religion. I learned that mythdoesn't mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their world view and what they hold sacred.

Interesting. I also learned that after the events of the previous night, I was far too tired to care about myths or anything else, so I slept on top of the covers for most of the afternoon, until I awoke to Alaska singing, "WAKE UP, LITTLE PUHHHHHDGIE!" directly into my left ear canal. I held the religion book close up against my chest like a small paperback security blanket.

"That was terrible," I said. "What do I need to do to ensure that never happens to me again?"

"Nothing you can do!" she said excitedly. "I'm unpredictable. God, don't you hate Dr. Hyde? Don't you? He's so condescending."

I sat up and said, "I think he's a genius," partly because I thought it was true and partly because I just felt like disagreeing with her.

She sat down on the bed. "Do you always sleep in your clothes?"

"Yup."

"Funny," she said. "You weren't wearing much last night." I just glared at her.

"C'mon, Pudge. I'm teasing. You have to be tough here. I didn't know how bad it was — and I'm sorry, and they'll regret it — but you have to be tough." And then she left. That was all she had to say on the subject. She's cute,I thought, but you don't need to like a girl who treats you like you're ten: You've already got a mom.

one hundred twenty-two days before

After my last class of my first week at Culver Creek, I entered Room 43 to an unlikely sight: the diminutive and shirtless Colonel, hunched over an ironing board, attacking a pink button-down shirt. Sweat trickled down his forehead and chest as he ironed with great enthusiasm, his right arm pushing the iron across the length of the shirt with such vigor that his breathing nearly duplicated Dr. Hyde's.

"I have a date," he explained. "This is an emergency." He paused to catch his breath. "Do you know" — breath—"how to iron?"

I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. "I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?" I said. "I don't know. I didn't even know we hadan iron."

"We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, `You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me.'Oh, God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?

"By the way," he said as I followed him into the bathroom, "if you want to smoke inside during the day, just turn on the shower. The smoke follows the steam up the vents."

Though this made no scientific sense, it seemed to work. The shower's shortage of water pressure and low showerhead made it all but useless for showering, but it worked great as a smoke screen.

Sadly, it made a poor iron. The Colonel tried ironing the shirt once more ("I'm just gonna push really hard and see if that helps") and finally put it on wrinkled. He matched the shirt with a blue tie decorated with horizontal lines of little pink flamingos.

"The one thing my lousy father taught me," the Colonel said as his hands nimbly threaded the tie into a perfect knot, "was how to tie a tie. Which is odd, since I can't imagine when he ever had to wear one."

Just then, Sara knocked on the door. I'd seen her once or twice before, but the Colonel never introduced me to her and didn't have a chance to that night.

"Oh. My God. Can't you at least press your shirt?" she asked, even though the Colonel was standing in front of the ironing board.

"We're going out with my parents."Sara looked awfully nice in her blue summer dress. Her long, pale blond hair was pulled up into a twist, with a strand of hair falling down each side of her face. She looked like a movie star — a bitchy one.

"Look, I did my best. We don't all have maids to do our ironing."

"Chip, that chip on your shoulder makes you look even shorter."

"Christ, can't we get out the door without fighting?"

"I'm just saying. It's the opera.It's a big deal to my parents. Whatever. Let's go." I felt like leaving, but it seemed stupid to hide in the bathroom, and Sara was standing in the doorway, one hand cocked on her hip and the other fiddling with her car keys as if to say, Let's go.

"I could wear a tuxedo and your parents would still hate me!" he shouted.

"That's not my fault! You antagonize them!" She held up the car keys in front of him. "Look, we're going now or we're not going."

"Fuck it. I'm not going anywhere with you," the Colonel said.

"Fine. Have a great night." Sara slammed the door so hard that a sizable biography of Leo Tolstoy (last words: "The truth is…I care a great deal…what they…") fell off my bookshelf and landed with a thud on our checkered floor like an echo of the slamming door.

"AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!"he screamed.

"So that's Sara," I said.

"Yes."

"She seems nice."

The Colonel laughed, knelt down next to the mini fridge, and pulled out a gallon of milk. He opened it, took a swig, winced, half coughed, and sat down on the couch with the milk between his legs.

"Is it sour or something?"

"Oh, I should have mentioned that earlier. This isn't milk. It's five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can't catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes like sour milk and rubbing alcohol, but it's Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch. Want some?"

"I think I'll pass." Aside from a few sips of champagne on New Year's under the watchful eye of my parents, I'd never really drunk any alcohol, and "ambrosia" didn't seem like the drink with which to start. Outside, I heard the pay phone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders shared five pay phones, I was amazed at how infrequently it rang. We weren't supposed to have cell phones, but I'd noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot.