The John Green Collection (25 page)

nine days after

“I’VE GOT A THEORY,”
the Colonel said as I walked in the door after a miserable day of classes. The cold had begun to let up, but word had not spread to whoever ran the furnaces, so the classrooms were all stuffy and overheated, and I just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep until the time came to do it all over again.

“Missed you in class today,” I noted as I sat down on my bed. The Colonel sat at his desk, hunched over a notebook. I lay down on my back and pulled the covers up over my head, but the Colonel was undiscouraged.

“Right, well, I was busy coming up with the theory, which isn’t
terribly likely, admittedly, but it’s plausible. So, listen. She kisses you. That night, someone calls. Jake, I imagine. They have a fight—about cheating or about something else—who knows. So she’s upset, and she wants to go see him. She comes back to the room crying, and she tells us to help her get off campus. And she’s freaked out, because, I don’t know, let’s say because if she can’t go visit him, Jake will break up with her. That’s just a hypothetical reason. So she gets off campus, drunk and all pissed off, and she’s furious at herself over whatever it is, and she’s driving along and sees the cop car and then in a flash everything comes together and the end to her labyrinthine mystery is staring her right in the face and she just does it, straight and fast, just aims at the cop car and never swerves, not because she’s drunk but because she killed herself.”

“That’s ridiculous. She wasn’t thinking about Jake or fighting with Jake.
She was making out with me.
I tried to bring up the whole Jake thing, but she just shushed me.”

“So who called her?”

I kicked off my comforter and, my fist balled, smashed my hand against the wall with each syllable as I said, “I! DON’T! KNOW! And you know what, it doesn’t matter. She’s dead. Is the brilliant Colonel going to figure out something that’s gonna make her less freaking dead?” But it did matter, of course, which is why I kept pounding at our cinder-block walls and why the questions had floated beneath the surface for a week. Who’d called? What was wrong? Why did she leave? Jake had not gone to her funeral. Nor had he called us to say he was sorry, or to ask us what happened. He had just disappeared, and of course, 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.

“Maybe she was driving there to break up with Jake, then,” the
Colonel said, his voice suddenly edgeless. He sat down on the corner of my bed.

“I don’t know. I don’t really want to know.”

“Yeah, well,” he said. “I want to know. Because if she knew what she was doing, Pudge, she made us accomplices. And I hate her for that. I mean, God, look at us. We can’t even talk to anyone anymore. So listen, I wrote out a game plan:
One.
Talk to eyewitnesses.
Two.
Figure out how drunk she was.
Three.
Figure out where she was going, and why.”

“I don’t want to talk to Jake,” I said halfheartedly, already resigned to the Colonel’s incessant planning.“If he knows, I definitely don’t want to talk to him. And if he doesn’t, I don’t want to pretend like it didn’t happen.”

The Colonel stood up and sighed. “You know what, Pudge? I feel bad for you. I do. I know you kissed her, and I know you’re broken up about it. But honestly, shut up. If Jake knows, you’re not gonna make it any worse. And if he doesn’t, he won’t find out. So just stop worrying about your goddamned self for one minute and think about your dead friend. Sorry. Long day.”

“It’s fine,” I said, pulling the covers back over my head. “It’s fine,” I repeated. And, whatever. It
was
fine. It had to be. I couldn’t afford to lose the Colonel.

thirteen days after

BECAUSE OUR MAIN SOURCE
of vehicular transportation was interred in Vine Station, Alabama, the Colonel and I were forced to walk to the Pelham Police Department to search for eyewitnesses. We left after eating dinner in the cafeteria, the night falling fast and early, and trudged up Highway 119 for a mile and a half before coming to a single-story stucco building situated between a Waffle House and a gas station.

Inside, a long desk that rose to the Colonel’s solar plexus separated us from the police station proper, which seemed to consist of three uniformed officers sitting at three desks, all of them talking on the phone.

“I’m Alaska Young’s brother,” the Colonel announced brazenly. “And I want to talk to the cop who saw her die.”

A pale, thin man with a reddish blond beard spoke quickly into the phone and then hung up.“I seen ’er,” he said. “She hit mah cruiser.”

“Can we talk to you outside?” the Colonel asked.

“Yup.”

The cop grabbed a coat and walked toward us, and as he approached, I could see the blue veins through the translucent skin of his face. For a cop, he didn’t seem to get out much. Once outside, the Colonel lit a cigarette.

“You nineteen?” the cop asked. In Alabama, you can get married at eighteen (fourteen with Mom and Dad’s permission), but you have to be nineteen to smoke.

“So fine me. I just need to know what you saw.”

“Ah most always work from six t’ midnight, but I was coverin’ the graveyard shift. We got a call ’bout a jackknifed truck, and I’s only about a mile away, so I headed over, and I’d just pulled up. I’s still in mah cruiser, and I seen out the corner a’ my eye the headlights, and my lights was on and I turned the siren on, but the lights just kept comin’ straight at me, son, and I got out quick and run off and she just barreled inta me. I seen plenty, but I ain’t never seen that. She didn’t tarn. She didn’t brake. She jest hit it. I wa’n’t more than ten feet from the cruiser when she hit it. I thought I’d die, but here ah am.”

For the first time, the Colonel’s theory seemed plausible. She didn’t hear
the siren?
She didn’t see
the lights?
She was sober enough to kiss well, I thought. Surely she was sober enough to swerve.

“Did you see her face before she hit the car? Was she asleep?” the Colonel asked.

“That I cain’t tell ya. I didn’t see ’er. There wa’n’t much time.”

“I understand. She was dead when you got to the car?” he asked.

“I—I did everything I could. Ah run right up to her, but the steerin’ wheel—well, ah reached in there, thought if ah could git that steerin’ wheel loose, but there weren’t no gettin’ her outta that car alive. It fairly well crushed her chest, see.”

I winced at the image. “Did she say anything?” I asked.

“She was passed on, son,” he said, shaking his head, and my last hope of last words faded.

“Do you think it was an accident?” the Colonel asked as I stood beside him, my shoulders slouching, wanting a cigarette but nervous to be as audacious as him.

“Ah been an officer here twenty-six years, and ah’ve seen more drunks than you’n count, and ah ain’t never seen someone so drunk they cain’t swerve. But ah don’t know. The coroner said it was an accident, and maybe it was. That ain’t my field, y’know. I s’pose that’s ’tween her and the Lord now.”

“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.”

“Was there anything in the car?” the Colonel asked. “Anything, like, unusual that you remember?”

“I remember them brochures from colleges—places in Maine and Ohia and Texas—I thought t’ myself that girl must be from Culver Crick and that was mighty sad, see a girl like that lookin’ t’ go t’ college. That’s a goddamned shame. And they’s flowers. They was flowers in her backseat. Like, from a florist. Tulips.”

Tulips? I thought immediately of the tulips Jake had sent her. “Were they white?” I asked.

“They sure was,” the cop answered. Why would she have taken
his tulips with her? But the cop wouldn’t have an answer for that one.

“Ah hope y’all find out whatever y’all’s lookin’ for. I have thought it over some, ’cause I never seen nothing like that before. Ah’ve thought hard on it, wondered if I’da started up the cruiser real quick and drove it off, if she’da been all right. There mightn’t’ve been time. No knowing now. But it don’t matter, t’ my mind, whether it were an accident or it weren’t. It’s a goddamned shame either way.”

“There was nothing you could have done,” the Colonel said softly. “You did your job, and we appreciate it.”

“Well. Thanks. Y’all go ’long now, and take care, and let me know if ya have any other questions. This is mah card if you need anything.”

The Colonel put the card in his fake leather wallet, and we walked toward home.

“White tulips,” I said. “Jake’s tulips. Why?”

“One time last year, she and Takumi and I were at the Smoking Hole, and there was this little white daisy on the bank of the creek, and all of a sudden she just jumped waist-deep into the water and waded across and grabbed it. She put it behind her ear, and when I asked her about it, she told me that her parents always put white flowers in her hair when she was little. Maybe she wanted to die with white flowers.”

“Maybe she was going to return them to Jake,” I said.

“Maybe. But that cop just shit sure convinced me that it might have been a suicide.”

“Maybe we should just let her be dead,” I said, frustrated. It seemed to me that nothing we might find out would make anything any better, and I could not get the image of the steering wheel careening into her chest out of my mind, her chest “fairly well crushed” while she sucked for a last breath that would never come,
and no, this was not making anything better. “What if she
did
do it?” I asked the Colonel. “We’re not any less guilty. All it does is make her into this awful, selfish bitch.”

“Christ, Pudge. Do you even remember the person she actually
was?
Do you remember how she
could
be a selfish bitch? That was part of her, and you used to know it. It’s like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.”

I sped up, walking ahead of the Colonel, silent. 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.
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. Whatever their faults, I’d never known my school friends in Florida to die on me.

After a considerable distance, the Colonel jogged up to me and said, “I just want it to be normal again,” he said. “You and me. Normal. Fun. Just, normal. And I feel like if we knew—”

“Okay, fine,” I cut him off. “Fine. We’ll keep looking.”

The Colonel shook his head, but then he smiled. “I have always appreciated your enthusiasm, Pudge. And I’m just going to go ahead and pretend you still have it until it comes back. Now let’s go home and find out why people off themselves.”

fourteen days after

WARNING SIGNS OF SUICIDE
the Colonel and I found on the Web:

Previous suicide attempts

Verbally threatening suicide

Giving away prized possessions

Collecting and discussing methods of suicide

Expressions of hopelessness and anger at oneself and/or the world

Writing, talking, reading, and drawing about death and/or depression

Suggesting that the person would not be missed if s/he were gone

Self-injury

Recent loss of a friend or family member through death or suicide

Sudden and dramatic decline in academic performance

Eating disorders, sleeplessness, excessive sleeping, chronic headaches

Use (or increased use) of mind-altering substances

Loss of interest in sex, hobbies, and other activities previously enjoyed

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. She did talk about dying, but she always seemed to be at least half kidding.

“I make jokes about death all the time,” the Colonel said. “I made a joke last week about hanging myself with my tie. And I’m not gonna off myself. So that doesn’t count. And she didn’t give anything away, and she sure as hell didn’t lose interest in sex. One would have to like sex an awful lot to make out with your scrawny ass.”

“Funny,” I said.

“I know. God, I’m a genius. And her grades were good. And I don’t recall her talking about killing herself.”

“Once, with the cigarettes, remember? ‘You smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.’”

“That was a
joke
.”

But when prodded by the Colonel, maybe to prove to him that I could remember Alaska as she really was and not just as I wanted her to be, I kept returning the conversation to those times when she would be mean and moody, when she didn’t feel like answering
how, when, why, who,
or
what
questions. “She could seem so
angry
,” I thought aloud.

“What, and I can’t?” the Colonel retorted. “I’m plenty angry, Pudge. And you haven’t been the picture of placidity of late, either, and you aren’t going to off yourself. Wait, are you?”

“No,” I said. And maybe it was only because Alaska couldn’t hit the brakes and I couldn’t hit the accelerator. Maybe she just had an odd kind of courage that I lacked, but no.

“Good to know. So yeah, she was up and down—from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes. But partly, this year at least, it was the whole Marya thing. Look, Pudge, she obviously wasn’t thinking about killing herself when she was making out with you. After that, she was asleep until the phone rang. So she decided to kill herself at some point between that ringing phone and crashing, or it was an accident.”