Looking for Alaska (24 page)

“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.”

“Yessir,” 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.”

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 l’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.”

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 the COFFEE 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 the A.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.