Looking for Alaska (26 page)

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

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

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

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

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

“Does it magically know it’s me calling from the pay phone?” She laughed. “No, it just says ‘pay phone’ and the area code. So I deduced. How are you?” she asked, a warm concern in her voice.

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

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

“Miles?”

“Yeah, sorry, Mom. Sorry. Chip’s here. We gotta go study. I gotta go.”

“Will you call us later, then? I’m sure Dad wants to talk to you.”

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like, a memorial prank?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All right, then,” Takumi said. “Let’s get to work.”

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

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

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

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

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

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

“Greatest Culver Creek prank ever,” he responded proudly.

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

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Miles. I don’t want you getting in any trouble.”

“Well, I won’t. The whole junior class is planning it. And it’s not like anyone is going to get hurt or anything. Because, well, remember Speaker Day?”

“
God
that was boring. That was almost worse than class.”

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

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

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

“Okay, my name is Dr. William Morse, and I’m a psychology professor, and—adolescent sexuality?”

“Yup. You’re the best, Dad.”

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

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

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

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

“Aiming for controversy, are we?”

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

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

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

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

The first four “agencies” the Colonel called turned us down. It wasn’t until we got to the
B
’s in the “Entertainment” section of the Yellow Pages that we found Bachelorette Parties R Us. The owner of the aforementioned establishment liked the idea a great deal, but, he said, “Maxx is gonna love that. But no nudity. Not in front of the kids.” We agreed—with some reluctance.

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