The John Green Collection (21 page)

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.”

Just as I was falling asleep, the Colonel spoke. “Dude, did you just make out with Alaska?”

“Yeah.”

“This is going to end poorly,” he said to himself.

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. And then I heard the phone ring. I think. And I think, although I can’t know, that I felt Alaska get up. I think I heard her leave. I think. How long she was gone is impossible to know.

But the Colonel and I both woke up when she returned, whenever that was, because she slammed the door. She was sobbing, like that post-Thanksgiving morning but worse.

“I have to get out of here!” she cried.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I forgot! God, how many times can I fuck up?” she said. I didn’t even have time to wonder what she forgot before she screamed, “I JUST HAVE TO GO. HELP ME GET OUT OF HERE!”

“Where do you need to go?”

She sat down and put her head between her legs, sobbing. “Just please distract the Eagle right now so I can go. Please.”

The Colonel and I, at the same moment, equal in our guilt, said, “Okay.”

“Just don’t turn on your lights,” the Colonel said. “Just drive slow and don’t turn on your lights. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Fuck,” she said. “Just get rid of the Eagle for me,” she said, her sobs childlike half screams. “God oh God, I’m so sorry.”

“Okay,” the Colonel said. “Start the car when you hear the second string.”

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.

We walked to our bathroom, grabbed the three strings of leftover firecrackers from beneath the sink, and ran to the Eagle’s. We weren’t sure that it would work again.

But it worked well enough. The Eagle tore out of his house as soon as the first string of firecrackers started popping—he was waiting
for us, I suppose—and we headed for the woods and got him in deeply enough that he never heard her drive away. The Colonel and I doubled back, wading through the creek to save time, slipped in through the back window of Room 43, and slept like babies.

after

the day after

THE COLONEL SLEPT
the not-restful sleep of the drunk, and I lay on my back on the bottom bunk, my mouth tingling and alive as if still kissing, and we would have likely slept through our morning classes had the Eagle not awoken us at 8:00 with three quick knocks. I rolled over as he opened the door, and the morning light rushed into the room.

“I need y’all to go to the gym,” he said. I squinted toward him, the Eagle himself backlit into invisibility by the too bright sun. “Now,” he added, and I knew it. We were done for. Caught. Too many progress reports. Too much drinking in too short a time. Why did they have to drink last night? And then I could taste her again, the wine and the cigarette smoke and the Chap Stick and Alaska, and I wondered if she had kissed me because she was drunk.
Don’t expel me
, I thought.
Don’t. I have just begun to kiss her.

And as if answering my prayers, the Eagle said, “You’re not in any trouble. But you need to go to the gym now.”

I heard the Colonel rolling over above me. “What’s wrong?”

“Something terrible has happened,” the Eagle said, and then closed the door.

As he grabbed a pair of jeans lying on the floor, the Colonel said, “This happened a couple years ago. When Hyde’s wife died. I guess it’s the Old Man himself now. Poor bastard really
didn’t
have many breaths left.” He looked up at me, his half-open eyes bloodshot, and yawned.

“You look a little hungover,” I observed.

He closed his eyes. “Well, then I’m putting up a good front, Pudge, ’cause I’m actually a lot hungover.”

“I kissed Alaska.”

“Yeah. I wasn’t
that
drunk. Let’s go.”

We walked across the dorm circle to the gym. I sported baggy jeans, a sweatshirt with no shirt underneath, and a bad case of bedhead. All the teachers were in the dorm circle knocking on doors, but I didn’t see Dr. Hyde. I imagined him lying dead in his house, wondered who had found him, how they even knew he was missing before he failed to show up for class.

“I don’t see Dr. Hyde,” I told the Colonel.

“Poor bastard.”

The gym was half full by the time we arrived. A podium had been set up in the middle of the basketball court, close to the bleachers. I sat in the second row, with the Colonel directly in front of me. My thoughts were split between sadness for Dr. Hyde and excitement about Alaska, remembering the up-close sight of her mouth whispering, “To be continued?”

And it did not occur to me—not even when Dr. Hyde shuffled into the gym, taking tiny, slow steps toward the Colonel and me.

I tapped the Colonel on the shoulder and said, “Hyde’s here,” and the Colonel said, “Oh shit,” and I said, “What?” and he said,
“Where’s Alaska?” and I said, “No,” and he said, “Pudge, is she here or not?” and then we both stood up and scanned the faces in the gym.

The Eagle walked up to the podium and said, “Is everyone here?”

“No,” I said to him. “Alaska isn’t here.”

The Eagle looked down. “Is everyone else here?”

“Alaska isn’t here!”

“Okay, Miles. Thank you.”

“We can’t start without Alaska.”

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.

“Please, sir,” I said. “Can we please wait for Alaska?” I felt all of them staring at us, trying to understand what I now knew, but didn’t quite believe.

The Eagle looked down and bit his lower lip. “Last night, Alaska Young was in a terrible accident.” His tears came faster, then. “And she was killed. Alaska has passed away.”

For a moment, everyone in the gym was silent, and the place had never been so quiet, not even in the moments before the Colonel ridiculed opponents at the free-throw stripe. I stared down at the back of the Colonel’s head. I just stared, looking at his thick and bushy hair. For a moment, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of not-breathing, the vacuum created by 190 students shocked out of air.

I thought:
It’s all my fault.

I thought:
I don’t feel very good.

I thought:
I’m going to throw up.

I stood up and ran outside. I made it to a trash can outside the gym, five feet from the double doors, and heaved toward Gatorade bottles and half-eaten McDonald’s. But nothing much came out. I just heaved, my stomach muscles tightening and my throat opening and a gasping, guttural
blech,
going through the motions of vomiting over and over again. In between gags and coughs, I sucked air in hard. Her mouth. Her dead, cold mouth. To not be continued. I knew she was drunk. Upset. Obviously you don’t let someone drive drunk and pissed off.
Obviously
. And Christ, Miles, what the hell is wrong with you? And then comes the puke, finally, splashing onto the trash. And here is whatever of her I had left in my mouth, here in this trash can. And then it comes again, more—and then okay, calm down, okay, seriously, she’s not dead.

She’s not dead. She’s alive. She’s alive somewhere. She’s in the woods. Alaska is hiding in the woods and she’s not dead, she’s just hiding. 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.

And then I felt much better, because she had not died at all.

I walked back into the gym, and everyone seemed to be in various stages of disintegration. It was like something you see on TV, like a
National Geographic
special on funeral rituals. I saw Takumi standing over Lara, his hands on her shoulders. I saw Kevin with his crew cut, his head buried between his knees. A girl named Molly Tan, who’d studied with us for precalc, wailed, beating balled fists against her thighs. All these people I sort of knew and sort of didn’t, and all of them disintegrating, and then I saw the Colonel, his knees tucked into his chest, lying on his side on the bleachers, Madame O’Malley sitting next to him, reaching toward his shoulder but not actually touching it. The Colonel was screaming. He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream.

I thought, at first, that it was only yelling. But after a few breaths,
I noticed a rhythm. And after a few more, I realized that the Colonel was saying words. He was screaming, “I’m so sorry.”

Madame O’Malley grabbed his hand. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, Chip. There was nothing you could have done.” But if only she knew.

And I just stood there, looking at the scene, thinking about her not dead, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the Eagle, and I said, “I think she’s playing a dumb prank,” and he said, “No, Miles, no, I’m sorry,” and I felt the heat in my cheeks and said, “She’s really good. She could pull this off,” and he said, “I saw her. I’m sorry.”

“What happened?”

“Somebody was setting off firecrackers in the woods,” he said, and I closed my eyes tight, the ineluctable fact of the matter at hand: I had killed her. “I went out after them, and I guess she drove off campus. It was late. She was on I-65 just south of downtown. A truck had jackknifed, blocking both lanes. A police car had just gotten to the scene. She hit the cruiser without ever swerving. I believe she must have been very intoxicated. The police said they smelled alcohol.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I saw her, Miles. I talked to the police. It was instant. The steering wheel hit her chest. I’m so sorry.”

And I said, you saw her and he said yes and I said how did she look and he said, just a bit of blood coming out of her nose, and I sat down on the floor of the gym. I could hear the Colonel still 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 soft and warm on mine.

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. I feel afraid, like someone has told me they’re going to kick my ass after school and now it’s sixth period and I know full well what’s coming. It is so cold today—literally freezing—and I imagine running to the creek and diving in headfirst, the creek so shallow that my hands scrape against the rocks, and my body slides into the cold water, the shock of the cold giving way to numbness, and I would stay there, float down with that water first to the Cahaba River, then to the Alabama River, then to Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.