455 Awesome Looking For Alaska Quotes You Will Love To Recall

How could I abandon my parents, who were nice enough to pay for my education at Culver Creek, my parents who had always loved me,

We laughed and drank our wine, and then after the meal, we each listed our gratitudes. My family always did that before the meal, and

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

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

The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive.

C’mon Pudge. I’m teasing. You have to be tough. 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 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 that could have happened to me, 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.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, your parents never have to know, though. The school doesn’t want your parents to think you became a fuckup here any more than you want your parents think you’re a fuckup.

You should have stopped her! She never thought anything through. She was so god damn impulsive you had to watch her like a three-year-old. You do one thing wrong, and she dies. How the fuck could you let her go?

God, it’s over. Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people’s problems and get some of your own.

Forgive me. Not at my best.

Alaska: I think the problem is that you spend so much time worried about what’s up there that you’re missing out on the real party down here.
Lara: I guess for some of us, parties aren’t so important.
Alaska: It was a metaphor.

Alaska pulling the controller up and to the right, as if that would help her escape certain death. I had the same bad habit.

An ambulance, lights and sirens blaring, sped past us, going in the opposite direction, towards the 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 felt.

And how to live in the shadow of grief is not something nameless, Buddhists, Christians and Muslims have to explore.

I worried about it for a moment as I held the bottle by the neck, but I wanted to trust her, and so I did. I took a minor sip, and as soon as I swallowed, I felt my body rejecting the stinging syrup of it. It washed back up my esophagus, but I swallowed hard, and there, yes, I did it. I was drinking on campus.

I finally found something that can stop the fox. The fox cannot summit Strawberry Hill.

“How can you read and talk at the same time?” I asked.
“Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.”

I found his last words without too much searching. Captured by the Bolivian army, Guevara said, ‘Shoot, coward. You are only going to kill a man.’

She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor.

I just needed you to pick up. I just needed you to answer the phone, and you did.

“Have you really read all those books in your room?”

Alaska laughing- “Oh God no. I’ve maybe read a third of ‘em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I’ll have more time for reading when I’m old and boring.”

I hated being careful, too – or wanted to, at least.

I vaguely hoped that someone would come up and talk to me.

The opposing team’s cheerleaders tried to answer our cheers with “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! Hell is in your future if you give in to desire,” but we could always do them one better.
“Buy!”
“SELL!”
“Trade!”
“BARTER!”
“YOU’RE MUCH BIGGER, BUT WE ARE SMARTER!”

Never have I so wanted to be Crest Complete.

I’m tired of you acting like you were the only guy who ever wanted her. Like you had some monopoly on liking her.

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.

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 gossips — particularly 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.

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?

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.”

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.

The times that were 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 gone she was.

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.

I wasn’t disappointed. My expectations had been met.

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.

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 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.

She’s the only girl I slept with. I don’t know. Even though we fought, like, ninety-four percent of the time, I’m really sad.

Last night, Alaska Young was in a terrible accident, and she was killed. Alaska Young has passed away.

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 to 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.

No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.

Why did we drink? For me, it was just fun, particularly since we were risking expulsion.

“Hungover?”
“Like an alcoholic preacher on Sunday morning.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t drink so much,” I suggested.
“Pudge.” She shook her head and sipped the cold coffee and wine. “Pudge, what you must understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.”

“We have to slow down or I’ll puke,” I remarked after we finished the first bottle.

“I’m sorry, Pudge. I wasn’t aware that someone was holding open your throat and pouring wine down it,” the Colonel responded.

We left.
We did not say: Don’t drive, You’re drunk.
We did not say: We aren’t letting you in that car when you are upset.
We did not say: We insist on going with you.
We did not say: This can wait until tomorrow. Anything – everything – can wait.

‘I walked to Montevallo.’
‘Forty miles?!’
‘Forty-two,’ he corrected me. ‘Well. Forty-two there. Forty-two back. Eight-two miles. No. Eight-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 looked like.’

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.

“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.”

Mrs. Halter: But why do you have to go now, that’s what college is for.
Miles: I’ve told you why.
Mrs. Halter: Because of some French poet’s last words. A Great Perhaps? What does that even mean?
Miles: That’s what I need to find out.

Pudge: But it’s so beautiful.
Colonel: The dangerous ones always are.

Pudge: Wasn’t Alaska gonna meet us? Feel like it might be rude if she showed up, and we were both gone.
Colonel: One boob Jesus. It’s Alaska. Who the hell knows what she’s gonna do.

You’re smart like him, cute too. But I didn’t just say that because I love my boyfriend.

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

Mrs. Halter. : I just hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for: Your Great Perhaps?
Miles: I think I have. I think I have.

Great Perhaps. I like it. It’s just ambiguous enough. Unquantifiable. Kind of magical. Hell of a metaphor. It’s also a pretentious way of saying you wanna get laid.

You broke the chain of command, but never have I been so glad to have my orders ignored. That was some funny shit, and I’m not just referring to what they had to hose off the Weekday Warriors.

Alaska YoungKevin: Wanna say that to my face ’cause you’re talking to my sternum.
Colonel: Closer to your heart when I rip it out.

It’s the only way to actually connect with others, to see them as they truly are.

Colonel: Hey ladies, if it ain’t Abercrombie and Bitch.
Longwell: Nice to see you too, Chip.

You do know that you’re going on a date with Lara not Alaska right?

Small moments forge deep bonds.

This is all happening because of you. You are in this position because of the choices you made.

Maybe that’s what it is, the labyrinth. What if it’s suffering?

I’m not flirting, I’m just tired.

Life’s a beach Pudge. Enjoy the waves.

Muting mortal combat would be like only reading every other word of Jane Eyre.

I’m all in. No matter what you tell me, I would never walk away from you.

Pudge: She wants to sleep in the same bed together. Be cool, Miles.
Dolores: It’s a small trailer, son.

I know you care about people in need. That girl right there, she needs you right now. She’s lonelier than you think.

I didn’t say it earlier, but the thing I’m most grateful for is you.

Nice to know I represent rock bottom.

I’m not rushing, I’m realizing. I’ve been chasing after Alaska and maybe this whole time the girl I was supposed to be with was right in front of me. Maybe everything that’s happened has lead me to this moment, to this dance.

Colonel: Gotta admit you’re pretty clever, for a rat.
Alaska: We are the most intelligent of the rodents.

Dr. Hyde: People don’t have eternal souls. Instead they are a bundle of energy, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment. Meaning, as painful as this is, it will change.
Alaska: I fucking love you Hyde.

I like Miles, and I think he likes me. I am good for him.

Lara: Does it need stitches? I can sew, well crotchet.
Pudge: Wait, my ass is not a quilt.

Alaska: I was afraid of what you’d think when you knew the truth. Now you know. You’re still here. Why are you still here?
Pudge: Because I’m your friend.
Alaska: Cool. Friend.

Pudge: Who died?
Colonel: My future. Congratulations Pudge. As of tomorrow, you have a single.

Pudge: Why are all these people crying? She’s not dead. She does pranks. This is a prank. She’s really good at pranks.
The Eagle: Miles, Miles, I saw her. I’m sorry.

Colonel: The bell will ring, everyone will go back to class, and pretty soon I’ll be a distant memory, even to ya’ll. I’ll just be that funny little black dude you knew back in the day, until one day years from now, you’ll just be thinking, “Hey, I wonder what happened to Chip Martin. I wonder what he would have made of himself if he never would have got expelled all those years ago.” Chances are you won’t remember why, nobody will.
Alaska: That is not true. We will always be friends.
Colonel: No we won’t. We can’t. Starting tomorrow I’ll be the guy who got kicked out of school ‘cause of you and you’ll always feel guilty and I’ll always feel resentful and that’s no recipe for a friendship now is it?

Pudge: We already feel guilty.
Takumi: You should.

I set off the fireworks. ‘Cause she said she needed to go and I didn’t know where. She said she was fine to drive, and I believed her, and I let her go. So it’s all my fault, so kick me out, just kick me out. Kick me out, please.

You broke her. Hey, you broke her. If you were ever there for her, none of this would’ve happened. She wouldn’t have been so sad. She wouldn’t have drank so much. She would have had a car with fucking airbags. It should have been you. It shouldn’t have been her. It should have been fucking you.

Pudge: This unbearable.
Colonel: I know, but we have to.

There are answers to every mystery, just gotta know where to look.

Pudge: She must have been wasted. Why did we believe her when she said she wasn’t?
Takumi: Because we never knew if she was drunk or not. If she was happy or not, and we always did what she wanted.

Tonight, we were invincible.

And it occured to me that I could have made up any last words for Millard Fillmore and Kevin probably would have believed me if I’d used that same tone of voice, the Colonel’s confidence rubbing off on me.

The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going away party. To say that I had low expectations would be to underestimate the matter dramatically.

Like Emily Dickinson, I ain’t afraid of slant rhyme / And that’s the end of this verse; emcee’s out on a high.

I really would give you this clover. Except luck is for suckers. There, now you’re not a genetic freak anymore.

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 seem 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.’

And I vaguely remember Lara smiling at me from the doorway, the glittering ambiguity of a girl’s smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is too simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or LIKE me?

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.

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.

But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.

Was there time for her life to flash before her eyes? Was I there?

Because they did not know that we’d loaded the bullets and put the gun in her hand.

Alaska had called shotgun. She usually drove, but when she didn’t, she was shotgun-calling queen of the world.

Um, okay. So what is it?

What happens to us after we die, for instance, is no longer a question of idle philosophical interest.

You’ll spend Thanksgiving with me, silly. Here.

In reality, there’d been more homework than adventure.

And now is as good a time as any to say that she was beautiful.

Karl Marx famously called religion ‘the opiate of the masses.’

It is a law that parents should not have to bury their children. And someone should enforce it.

Christmas vacation wasn’t really a vacation, on account of how it was our last chance to study for exams, which started the day after we got back.

“I have one. You start.”
“Okay. Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” said Alaska.
I looked at her blankly. About a minute later, I got it, and laughed.

Christ. That wretched beast, drama, draws nigh.

It was worse than the Duct Tape Incident, because I already knew that the Kevin Richmans of the world didn’t like me. But my teachers had always been card-carrying members of the Miles Halter Fan Club.

I’m going to leave that up for the rest of the semester.

When Alaska Young is sitting with her legs crossed in a brittle, periodically green clover patch leaning forward in search of four-leaf clovers, the pale skin of her sizable cleavage clearly visible, it is a plain fact of human physiology that it becomes impossible to join in her clover search.

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.

We can’t love our neighbors until we know how crooked their hearts are. Don’t you like porn?

I sat back down on the couch, between my mom and my dad, and my dad put his arm around me, and we stayed there like that, quiet on the couch together, for a long time, until it seemed okay to turn on the TV, and then we ate artichoke dip for dinner and watched the History Channel, and as going-away parties go, it certainly could have been worse.

I didn’t feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn’t feel like fighting.

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

I wanted to like booze more than I actually did (which is more or less the precise opposite of how I felt about Alaska).

Chips Ahoy! would have been funnier.

“Who’s there?” replied Alaska.
“Who.”
“Who Who?”
“What are you, an owl?” I finished. Lame.

My name, is Dr. Hyde. I have a first name, of course. So far as you are concerned, it is Doctor. Your parents pay a great deal of money so that you can attend school here, and I expect that you will offer them some return on their investment by reading what I tell you to read when I tell you to read it and consistently attending this class. And when you are here, you will listen to what I say.

I came back into the room and excitedly said, “They love their hair.”

“Precisely!” she shouted. “Look on the top bunk.” Perilously positioned on the thin wooden headboard of the bed, a bottle of STA-WET gel. “Kevin doesn’t just wake up with that spiky bedhead look, Pudge. He works for it. He loves that hair. They leave their hair products here, Pudge, because they have duplicates at home. All those boys do. And you know why?”

“Because they’re compensating for their tiny little penises?” I asked.

“Ha ha. No. That’s why they’re macho assholes. They love their hair because they aren’t smart enough to love something more interesting. So we hit them where it hurts: the scalp.”

She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes.

Most Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven and a hell, though there’s a lot of disagreement within both religions over what, exactly, will get you into one afterlife or the other.

And I wasn’t great at talking for myself either. We had something important in common, then, a personality quirk I didn’t share with Alaska or anybody else, although almost by definition Lara and I couldn’t express it to each other.

The fireworks bangbangbanged in sync with my heartbeat.

The rain made hermits of us all.

“What did you say?” I asked, walking to her, putting my hand on the small of her back.
“Shhhh,” she said. “I’m sleeping.”

That was the day I stopped caring what people did. I just never cared anymore, about being a loser or not having friends or any of that. So I guess it was good for me in a way, but that moment was awful.

God, I understand whale anatomy. Can we move on now, Herman?

He’ll eat you alive, shit you out and then piss on his dump.

How could the girl who told that joke three hours before become a sobbing mess?

Prick us, we bleed. Prick him, he pops.

So instead of naming me Harmony or Mary, they agreed to let me decide… And then on my seventh birthday, my present was that I got to pick my name. Cool, huh? So I spent the whole day looking at my dad’s globe for a really cool name. And so my first choice was Chad, like the country in Africa. But then my dad said that was a boy’s name, so I picked Alaska.

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.

I thought we were in the clear as we began to round the corner of the bleachers, but then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a cylindrical orange object getting bigger and bigger, like a fast-approaching sun.
I thought: I think that is going to hit me.
I thought: I should duck.

God, ‘I love you’ really is the gateway drug of breaking up. Saying ‘I love you’ while walking across the dorm circle inevitably leads to saying ‘I love you’ while you’re doing it.

In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette except for when she smoked, when the burning cherry of the cigarette washed her face in pale red light. But even in the dark, I could see her eyes – fierce emeralds.

I keep it in the medicine cabinet. On account of how it’s medicine.

“Two nights in a row is maybe pushing our luck,” Takumi said as Alaska opened the wine.

“Luck is for suckers.” She smiled and put the bottle to her lips.

The prank is entitled “Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm”.

I felt the fight-or-flight reflex swell up in me over and over again, but I knew that neither fight nor flight had ever worked for me before.

Hands on her shoulders, I noted. Fast, but not too fast or it’s going to be over, fast. Keep your grunting to a minimum.

THAT’S THE POINT, SHERLOCK!

What the hell is in swan saliva that burns so badly?

“You’re fine,” Takumi said as he jogged back towards me. “Let’s get out of here before we’re killed.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t get up. I have suffered a mild concussion.”
Lara ran out and sat down next to me.
“Are you OK?”
“I am concussed,” I said.
Takumi sat down with me and looked me in the eye. “Do you know what happened to you?”
“The beast got me.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“I’m on a triple-and-a-half date.”
“You’re fine,” Takumi said. “Let’s go.”
And then I leaned forward and threw up on Lara’s pants.

I might have asked a question about Jesus Christ Superstar, except that 1. I didn’t know what it was, and 2. I didn’t care to learn, and 3. I never really excelled at small talk.

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.

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.

That night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of the wine in my stomach spread through my body. I didn’t like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier.

The afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall.

I don’t understand why you’re so obsessed with figuring out everything that happens here, like we have to unravel every mystery.

“Yeah,” I said. “What is that? A bird?”
“It’s the swan,” he said.
“Wow. A school with a swan. Wow.”

God! I can’t stand these fake grievers.

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.

Then they picked me up and hurled me into the water. Sinking. Sinking, but instead of feeling panic or anything else, I realized that “Please guys, don’t” were terrible last words. But then the great miracle of the human species — our buoyancy — came through, and as I felt myself floating toward the surface…

Unfortunately for the Culver Creek Nothings, we weren’t playing the deaf-and-blind school. We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick beards and a strong distaste for turning the other cheek.

God, people like that shouldn’t be allowed to live.

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.”

I thought: We are not close enough.
I though: He will not hear it.
I thought: He will hear it and be out so fast that we will have no chance.
I thought: Twenty seconds. I was breathing hard and fast.

Life’s about disappointing those in charge of us. I learned that a long time ago.

…feeling – probably for the first time in my life – the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what’s going to happen or when.

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.”

One thing I learned from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed.

I learned that myth doesn’t mean a lie; it means a traditional story that tells you something about people and their worldview and what they hold sacred. Interesting.

Does it seem all odd to you that you enjoy biographies of great writers a lot more than you enjoy their actual writings?

I imagined a scrawny eight years old Alaska with dirty fingers, looking down at her mother convulsing. So, she sat down with her dead-or-maybe-not-dead mother, who I imagine was not breathing by then but wasn’t yet cold either. And in the time between dying and death, a little Alaska sat with her mother in silence.

Someone said, ‘Mr. President, you sure can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,’ and then he said, ‘That’s obvious,’ and then he got shot.

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

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!

Before the adventure comes the unpacking.

I raised my arm as she collapsed into my skinny chest and cried. I felt bad for her, but she’d done it to herself. She didn’t have to rat.

“The Colonel and I will work that out. No need to get you into trouble — yet.”

“Oh. Okay. Um, I’m gonna go for a cigarette, then.”

I left. It wasn’t the first time Alaska had left me out of the loop, certainly, but after we’d been together so much over Thanksgiving, it seemed ridiculous to plan the prank with the Colonel but without me.

And POOF we are driving 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.

I pulled away again. “What about Lara? Jake?” Again, she sshed me. “Less tongue, more lips,” she said, and I tried my best.

No one talked for a minute, and then Takumi asked, “Your dad blamed you?”

“Well, not after that first moment. But yeah. How could he not?”

“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’m fine, Mom. I think — if it’s okay with you, I think I might stay here for Thanksgiving. A lot of my friends are staying” — lie — “and I have a lot of work to do” — double lie. “I had no idea how hard the classes would be, Mom” — truth.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” the Colonel asked, his voice soft.

“It never came up.” And then we stopped asking questions.

I called her yesterday and asked her to cover for me, and she didn’t even ask why. She just said, ‘I sure trust you, son,’ and hot damn she does.

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?

I could hear the Colonel 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 so soft and warm on mine.

“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.”

How long have you been dating her?

The final exam: What is the most important question human beings must answer? Choose your question wisely, and then examine how Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity attempt to answer it.

“I hope that poor bastard lives the rest of the school year,” the Colonel said as we jogged home through the rain, “because I’m sure starting to enjoy that class. What’s your most important question?”

After thirty seconds of running, I was already winded. “What happens… to us… when we die?”

I spent that afternoon with Lara. We were very cutesy, even though we didn’t know the first thing about each other and barely talked. But we made out. She grabbed my butt at one point, and I sort of jumped.

I opened my mouth again but this time not to speak, and she reached up and put a finger to my lips and said, “Shh. Shh. Don’t ruin it.”

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.

We were kissing. Zero layers between us. Our tongues dancing back and forth in each other’s mouth until there was no her mouth and my mouth but only our mouths intertwined.

Afterward, I was embarrassed and nervous, and so, clearly, was Lara, who finally broke the silence by asking, “So, want to do some homework?”

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

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

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.

The day after my mom took me to the zoo where she liked the monkeys and I liked the bears, it was a Friday. I came home from school. She gave me a hug and told me to go do my homework in my room so I could watch TV later. I went into my room, and she sat down at the kitchen table, I guess, and then she screamed, and I ran out, and she had fallen over. She was lying on the floor, holding her head and jerking. And I freaked out. I should have called 911, but I just started screaming and crying until finally she stopped jerking, and I thought she had fallen asleep and that whatever had hurt didn’t hurt anymore. So I just sat there on the floor with her until my dad got home an hour later.

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.

You don’t even care about her! All that matters is you and your precious f***ing 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.’

“All I remember is that she had a lot of sex.”

“I know. She’s my hero,” Alaska said without a trace of irony.

Yeah. I was a little kid. Little kids can dial 911. They do it all the time. Give me the wine.

I have a fake ID, but it sucks. So every time I go to the liquor store, I try to buy ten bottles of this, and some vodka for the Colonel. And so when it finally works, I’m covered for a semester. And then I give the Colonel his vodka, and he puts it wherever he puts it, and I take mine and bury it.

“Well, my gut wants to know,” Lara said, and only then did I realize […] — 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.

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.

I know it was y’all. Don’t ever do anything like that again. But, Lord, ‘subverting the patriarchal paradigm’ — it’s like she wrote the speech.

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.

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 nice thing about the constant threat of expulsion at Culver Creek is that it lends excitement to every moment of illicit pleasure. The bad thing, of course, is that there is always the possibility of actual expulsion.

When the firecrackers finished, I heard, “STOP OR I’LL CALL THE POLICE!” And though the voice was distant, I could feel his Look of Doom bearing down on me. […]

The Colonel warned us about the police threat, told us not to worry. The Eagle didn’t like to bring the police to campus. Bad publicity.

“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.”

She and the Colonel had been celebrating a lot the past couple days, and I didn’t feel up to climbing Strawberry Hill, so I sat and munched on pretzels while Alaska and the Colonel drank wine from paper cups with flowers on them.

I’d never been born again with the baptism and weeping and all that, but it couldn’t feel much better than being born again as a guy with no known past. I thought of the people I’d read about — John F. Kennedy, James Joyce, Humphrey Bogart — who went to boarding school, and their adventures — Kennedy, for example, loved pranks. I thought of the Great Perhaps and the things that might happen and the people I might meet and who my roommate might be.

But this is the seventh time I’ve been caught smoking. I just don’t want — whatever. I don’t want to upset my dad.

We are definitely going to get expelled.

“Is this why you want to leave, Miles?” Mom asked.

I mulled it over for a while, careful not to look at her. “Uh, no,” I said.

“Well, why then?” she asked. This was not the first time she had posed the question. Mom was not particularly keen on letting me go to boarding school and had made no secret of it.

Front Three: The Progress Reports: We’re going to hack into the faculty computer network and use their grading database to send out letters to Kevin et al.’s families saying that they are failing some of their classes.

I sat in the back of the hatchback on the drive home — and that is how I thought of it: home — and fell asleep to the highway’s monotonous lullaby.

Just to be safe: Trust no one.

Takumi shook his head, his hands pushing aside leaves to dig into the still-wet dirt beneath. “I just don’t get why she’d be so afraid of getting expelled. I’d hate to get expelled, but you have to take your lumps. I don’t get it.”

“Well, she obviously doesn’t like home.”

“True. She only goes home over Christmas and the summer, when Jake is there. But whatever. I don’t like home, either.”

What if we don’t figure anything out?

The Colonel gave an obligatory laugh, then asked, “Want a smoke?” I had never smoked a cigarette, but when in Rome…

“Is it safe here?”

“Maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of going home or something?”

She pulled away from me and gave me a Look of Doom that would have made the Eagle proud, and I felt like she hated me or hated my question or both, and then she looked away, out the window, toward the soccer field, and said, “There’s no home.”

It was the central moment of Alaska’s life. When she cried and told me that she fucked everything up, I knew what she meant now. And when she said she failed everyone, I know whom she meant. It was the everything and the everyone of her life.

I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college.

Lying in bed and reading felt pleasantly familiar.

They just don’t make sex look fun for women. The girl is just an object.

Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys and my boxers between us I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touching.

That’s a what. I’m not doing what’s right now.

I just heard, “UP! Do you know what time it is?!”
I looked at the clock and groggily muttered, “It’s seven thirty-six.”
“No, Pudge. It’s party time!”

I wondered: If someone punches me in the face, I’m supposed to insist that I ran into a door? It seemed a little stupid. How do you deal with bullies and assholes if you can’t get them in trouble?

The only real geniuses are artists: Yeats, Picasso, García Márquez: geniuses.

And that quieted them. I was after a Great Perhaps, and they knew as well as I did that I wasn’t going to find it with the likes of Will and Marie.

“It wasn’t a big deal. I got out fine.”
“You could have died.” And I could have, I suppose. But I didn’t.

…and Alaska was ever Alaska, the larger-than-life creative force behind them.

Undiluted industrial-strength blue number-five hair dye.

As he held her by the waist, she leaned forward, her pouty lips parted, her head just slightly tilted, and eveloped his mouth with such passion that I felt I should look away but couldn’t.

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.

I thought the way he treated you was just awful. I wanted to cry. I just wanted to kiss you and make it better.

I wondered why no one had shown the common courtesy to tell me to put on shoes, and why was I out there in my underwear, chicken legs exposed to the world?

“I suppose we could use some rain,” and the Colonel looked up at the low clouds coming in fast and threatening, and then he said, “Well, use it or not, we’re sure as shit going to get some.” And we sure as shit did.

“Who’s my date?” the Colonel asked.
“Your girlfriend is your date.”
“All right,” he said, and then deadpanned, “but we don’t get along very well.”

Twenty minutes into French class, Madame O’Malley was conjugating the verb to believe in the subjunctive. Que je croie. Que tu croies. Qu’il ou qu’elle croie. She said it over and over, like it wasn’t a verb so much as a Buddhist mantra. Que je croie; que tu croies; qu’il ou qu’elle croie. What a funny thing to say over and over again: I would believe; you would believe; he or she would believe. Believe what? I thought, and right then, the rain came.

I wouldn’t have cared if my girlfriend was a Jaguar-driving Cyclops with a beard – I’d have been grateful just to have someone to make out with.

This is unbearable … God. These books she’ll never read. Her Life’s Library.

“Not Really,” he said then lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped for breath. Coughed again. Considered vomiting. Grabbed the swinging bench, head spinning, and threw the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it, convinced my Great Perhaps did not involve cigarettes.

“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.”

Just spend a few more months playing video games. That hand-eye coordination will come in handy when you get to third base.

“No,” I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn’t hit the brakes and I couldn’t hit the accelerator.

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.

Shit, if I can teach you precalc, I can teach anybody. Like maybe kids with autism.

Miles, as in ‘to go before I sleep’?

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.

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.

Tuesday — we had school for 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 français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.”

“Fighting,” I said, and then, confused, barely able to drive, I added, “is nice.”
“Right. I don’t know what I’ll do now. I mean, it was nice to have her. I’m a mad guy, Pudge. What do I do with that?”

I was so tired of her getting upset for no reason. The way she would get sulky and make references to the freaking oppressive nature 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.

I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais) I’d never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (“NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS”).

And people are moody, dude. You gotta get used to living with people.

The significance of the rose? I thought. Who gives a shit? What’s the significance of the white tulips? That was a question worth answering.

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, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad’s study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read. It was stupid, to feel as upset as I did. I ditched them, but it felt the other way around. Still, I felt unmistakably homesick.

And then we heard a branch break. It might have been a deer, but the Colonel busted out anyway. A voice directly behind us said, “Don’t run, Chipper,” and the Colonel stopped, turned around, and returned to us sheepishly.

The Eagle walked toward us slowly, his lips pursed in disgust. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, like always. He gave each of us in turn the Look of Doom.

“Y’all smell like a North Carolina tobacco field in a wildfire,” he said.

We stood silent. I felt disproportionately terrible, like I had just been caught fleeing the scene of a murder. Would he call my parents?

“The whole place is soaking wet. My copy of The General in His Labyrinth is absolutely ruined.”
“That’s pretty good,” the Colonel said, like an artist admiring another’s work.
“Hey!” she shouted.
“Sorry. Don’t worry, dude,” he said. “God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.”

“I’ll see you in Jury tomorrow at five,” he announced, and then walked away. Alaska crouched down, picked up the cigarette she had thrown away, and started smoking again. The Eagle wheeled around, his sixth sense detecting Insubordination To Authority Figures. Alaska dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. The Eagle shook his head, and even though he must have been crazy mad, I swear to God he smiled.

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.

Hating the cool kids takes an awful lot of energy, and I’d given up on it a long time ago.

It’s nice to have people who will feel guilty for you.

Now I did think, The smoke will drive the bugs away. And, to some degree, it did. I’d be lying, though, if I claimed I became a smoker to ward off insects. I became a smoker because 1. I was on an Adirondack swing by myself, and 2. I had cigarettes, and 3. I figured that if everyone else could smoke a cigarette without coughing, I could damn well, too. In short, I didn’t have a very good reason. So yeah, let’s just say that 4. it was the bugs. I made it through three drags before I felt nauseuos and dizzy and only semipleasantly buzzed. I got up to leave. As I stood, a voice behind me…

“So Friday? Do you have plans for Friday?” And then I laughed, because the Colonel and I didn’t have plans for this Friday, or for any other Friday for the rest of our lives.

Whatever. Great day. Today. Best day of my life.

Why do you smoke so damn fast?

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.

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.

The light filtered throught the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow.

Best day of my life was January 9, 1997. I was eight years old and my mom and I went to the zoo on a class trip. I liked the bears. She liked the monkeys. Best day ever. End of story.

Florida was plenty hot, certainly, and humid, too. Hot enough that your clothes stuck to you like Scotch tape, and sweat dripped like tears from your forehead into your eyes. But it was only hot outside, and generally I only went outside to walk from one air-conditioned location to another.

“Hey Pudge,” the Colonel said. “What do you think of a truce?”
“It reminds me of when the Germans demanded that the U.S. surrender at the Battle of the Bulge,” I said. “I guess I’d say to this truce offer what General McAuliffe said to that one: Nuts.”

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?

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 began to swim, an armless silver mermaid, using only my hips to generate motion, until finally my ass scraped against the lake’s mucky bottom. I turned then and used my hips and waist to roll three times, until I came ashore near a ratty green towel. They’d left me a towel. How thoughtful.

And we’ll call you…hmmm. Pudge. Because you’re skinny. It’s called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let’s go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.

It’s like my mom always says: ‘Ya think you’s a-walkin’ on water, but turns out you just got piss in your shoes.’

Pudge, my friend, we are indefuckingstructible.

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.

Getting pissed wouldn’t fix it. Damn it.

She was up and down — from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes.

And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh.

Why would you try to kill this guy, Kevin? He’s a genius. Nuts to your truce.

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.

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 on 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 was is, and poof, he reached enlightenment.

He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Chip did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.

This one’s for Alaska Young!

‘AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!’ he screamed.
‘So that’s Sara,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘She seems nice.’

She read aloud to me, her soft voice mingling with the frogs’ croaking and the grasshoppers landing softly around us. I did not hear her words so much as the cadence of her voice. She’d obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me.

Her hand just above my knee, the palm flat and soft against my jeans and her index finger making slow, lazy circles that crept toward the inside of my thigh, and with one layer between us, God I wanted her. And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs, the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time to say the Three Little Words. And I steeled myself to say them as I stared up at that starriest night, convinced myself that she felt it, too, that her hand so alive and vivid against my leg was more than playful, and fuck Lara and fuck Jake because I do, Alaska Young, I do love you and what else matters but that.

Anyway, when you get in trouble, just don’t tell on anyone. I mean, I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve for only dental work and my father. But that doesn’t mean I would rat them out. Pretty much the only important thing is never never never never rat.

I have guts, just not when it counts.

“I brought you a snack,” Takumi said, dropping an oatmeal cream pie onto my book.
“Very nutritious,” I smiled.
“You’ve got your oats. You’ve got your meal. You’ve got your cream. It’s a fuckin’ food pyramid.”

Right. I’d forgotten about her. That keeps happening.

SO THIS IS HOW NOAH FELT. You wake up one morning and God has forgiven you and you walk around squinting all day because you’ve forgotten how sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad, and the whole world is brighter and cleaner than ever before.

We fell. We got up. We ran.

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.

French. Feel. Finger. Fuck.

It was not an eventful day. I should have done extraordinary things. I should have sucked the marrow out of life. But on that day, I slept eighteen hours out of a possible twenty-four.

“We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

Yeah, Pudge is adorable / but you want incorrigible / so Jake is more endurable / ’cause he’s so – damn. Damn. I almost had four rhymes on adorable. But all I could think of was unfloorable, which isn’t even a word.

You never know. It’s just. It’s like. POOF. And you’re gone.

‘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 had an 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?’

Let’s make a deal: You figure out what the labyrinth is and how to get out of it, and I’ll get you laid.

I’m Chip Martin. I’d shake your hand, but I think you should hold on damn tight to that towel till you can get some clothes on.

Best day of my life hasn’t happened yet. But I know it. I see it every day. The best day of my life is the day I buy my mom a huge fucking house. And not just like out in the woods, but in the middle of Mountain Brook, with all the Weekday Warriors’ parents. With all y’all’s parents. And I’m not buying it with a mortgage either. I’m buying it with cash money, and I am driving my mom there, and I’m going to open her side of the car door and she’ll get out and look at this house — this house is like picket fence and two stories and everything, you know — and I’m going to hand her the keys to her house and I’ll say, ‘Thanks.’ Man, she helped fill out my application to this place. And she let me come here, and that’s no easy thing when you come from where we do, to let your son go away to school. So that’s the best day of my life.

I hated cranberry sauce, but for some reason my mom persisted in her lifelong belief that it was my very favorite food, even though every single Thanksgiving I politely declined to include it on my plate.

Pretty good? Sure, and bufriedos are pretty good. Sex is pretty fun. The sun is pretty hot. Jesus, it says so much about love and brokenness — it’s perfect.

And then I was asleep. That deep, can-still-taste-her-in-my-mouth sleep, that sleep that is not particularly restful but is difficult to wake from all the same.

He loves weed like Alaska loves sex. This is a man who once constructed a bong using only the barrel of an air rifle, a ripe pear, and an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of Anna Kournikova. Not the brightest gem in the jewelry shop, but you’ve got to admire his single-minded dedication to drug abuse.

I’ve gotten thrown out of thirty-seven straight games. Once or twice, I’ve had to go really crazy. I ran onto the court with eleven seconds left once and stole the ball from the other team. It wasn’t pretty. But, you know. I have a streak to maintain.

“How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” In reality, “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!” were probably not Simon Bolivar’s

…going out late at night and laying in the dewy field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.

It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I’d stumbled into what my mother referred to as “the wrong crowd,” but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart.

Could the two people who are making out please be quiet? Those of us who are not making out are drunk and tired.

I ran like a cheetah – well, like a cheetah that smoked too much.

“That’s pretty amazing, the countries thing,” I said.
“Yeah, everybody’s got a talent. I can memorize things. And you can…?”
“Um, I know a lot of people’s last words.” It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.

The Colonel explained to me that 1. this was Alaska’s room, and that 2. she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of last year, and that 3. Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether 4. I smoked, which 5. I didn’t.

Night falls fast. Today is in the past.

Not to ask the obvious question, but why Alaska?

I thought at first she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I thought about her alot like that, like someone’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’m the motherfucking fox, no one can catch the fox.

No woman should ever lie about another woman. You’ve violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?

If I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?

“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 you 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.”

“It’s fine,” I repeated. And whatever. It was fine. It had to be.

“She has great breasts,” the Colonel said without looking up from the whale.
“DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN’S BODIES!” Alaska shouted.
Now he looked up. “Sorry. Perky breasts.”
“That’s not any better!”

I said nothing — I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy.Miles “Pudge

We skipped stones across the creek, which sounds dumb but it wasn’t. I don’t know. Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn’t quite setting? That’s the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seems to be in that light.

We didn’t have sex. We never got naked. I never touched her bare breast, and her hands never got lower than my hips. It didn’t matter. As she slept, I whispered, “I love you, Alaska Young.”

Most loves don’t last. But some do.

Ask me if I give a shit.

…and we’re just chatting and then I’m in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk he reaches down and he honks my boob. HONK. A much-too-firm, two- to three-second HONK. And the first thing I thought was Okay, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can’t wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel.

So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with the expulsion, maybe she blurted out Marya’s name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that moment she didn’t want to get expelled and she couldn’t think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more importantly, maybe she’d been scared of being paralyzed by fear again.

And I wrote my way out of the labyrinth.

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 lightining.

But in the time between when something gets thought and when it gets done, the ball hit me square across the side of the face. I fell, the back of my head slamming against the gym floor. I then stood up immediately, as if unhurt, and left the gym.
Pride had gotten me off the floor of the gym, but as soon as I was outside, I sat down.
“I am concussed,” I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.

“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.

I hope you didn’t bring the Asian kid along thinking he’s a computer genius. Because I’m not.

Comment dis-tu ‘Oh my God, I don’t know nearly enough French to pass French II’ en français?

Ashes to ashes. Garage sale to garage sale.

I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers — where you repeat what you’ve already said with phrases like ‘In summation’, and ‘To conclude’. I didn’t do that — instead I talked about why I thought it was an important question.

“But why Alaska?” I asked her.
She smiled with the right side of her mouth. “Well, later, I found out what it means. It’s from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means ‘that which the sea breaks against,’ and I love that. But at the time, I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be. And it was damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like I wanted to be.”

“Example?”
“I like Henrik Ibsen’s. He was a playwright.” I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I’d never read any of his plays. I didn’t like reading plays. I liked reading biographies.
“Yeah, I know who he was,” said Chip.
“Right, well, he’d been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Ibsen looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.”
Chip laughed. “That’s morbid. But I like it.”

And not just beautiful, but hot, too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realized the importance of curves, of the thousand places where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.

“You can fight with me,” I said. I put my controller down and leaned back on our foam couch and was asleep. As I drifted off, I heard the Colonel say, “I can’t be mad at you, you harmless skinny bastard.”

You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can’t say Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers. In that first week at the Creek, the cafeteria served fried chicken, chicken fried steak, and fried okra, which marked my first foray into the delicacy that is the fried vegetable.

You’ve got a lifetime to mull over the Buddhist understanding of interconnectedness. But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And then, when it’s over, be present out there.

This mystery can’t be solved. We have to live with that for the rest of our lives.

The pigs can’t stop the fox; I’m too quick. I can rhyme while I run; I’m that slick.

It’s not imaginary. It’s my great perhaps.

I wondered whether I could find a Great Perhaps here at all or whether I had made a grand miscalculation.

That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.

If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.

I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.

Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.

How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?

When I look at my room, I see a girl who loves books.

My question? It has no answer.

You know what’s lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her… I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with. But I don’t know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.

The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.

Oh shit did you just dis the feminine gender
I’ll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender
You think I like Tori and Ani so I can’t rhyme
But I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime
Objectify women and it’s fuckin’ on
You’ll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.

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 by knees, and the Colonel placed a head on my upper back. ‘The point is that there are always alsweres, 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.’

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.”

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 Buddah held out hope that the suffering could be transcended. Jesus brought the message that even 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?

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 matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

Principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than “Boy, I wish you hadn’t mummified me and thrown me into the lake” hate.

Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food.

He loves me. He loves all y’all, too. He just loves the school more. That’s the thing. He thinks busting us is good for the school and good for us. It’s the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.

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

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.

You’re awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted.

Later, I walked towards the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said, “When you’re walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it’s silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?”

It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger but I told her, “Yeah, totally.”

For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, “Run run run run run,” and took off, pulling me behind her.

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.

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.

So why don’t you go home for vacations?

Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn’t even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad – my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice and they’d have a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there’s never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don’t we break up? I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I’m a bad boyfriend. She’s a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other.

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.

The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.

Scared isn’t a good excuse. Scared is the excuse everyone has always used.

There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone’s face is in close proximity to your penis.

This was not one of those times.

We were kissing.
I thought: This is good.
I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.
I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.
Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. “You slobbered on my nose,” she said, and laughed.

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.

Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.

And in my classes, I will talk most of the time, and you will listen most of the time. Because you may be smart, but I’ve been smart longer.

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.

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 the world run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn’t hate people who watched or played them.

And that’s when the fun started. The Colonel led all the cheers.
“Cornbread!” he screamed.
“CHICKEN!” the crowd responded.
“Rice!”
“PEAS!”
And then, all together: “WE GOT HIGHER SATs.”
“Hip Hip Hip Hooray!” the Colonel cried.
“YOU’LL BE WORKIN’ FOR US SOMEDAY!”

But I wanted to talk more about her and Vine Station and the future.
“Sometimes I don’t get you,” I said.
She didn’t even glance at me. She just smiled toward the television and said, “You never get me. That’s the whole point.”

Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, “I want to go too! I want to go too!” And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: “We are all going.”

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.

“Yeah, well. If you’re staying here in hopes of making out with Alaska, I sure wish you wouldn’t. If you unmoor her from the rock that is Jake, God have mercy on us all. That would be some drama, indeed. And as a rule, I like to avoid drama.”
“It’s not because I want to make out with her.”
“Hold on.” He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he’d just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. “I just did some calculations, and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of shit.”
And he was right.

“I know. I know. Just — hold on.” He pulled out a thick headband. It was brown, with a plush fox head on the front. He put it on his head.
I laughed. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s my fox hat.”
“Your fox hat?”
“Yeah, Pudge. My fox hat.”
“Why are you wearing your fox hat?” I asked.
“Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.”

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow – that, in short, we are all going.

And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.