Looking for Alaska

"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.

I want to melt into the brown, crunchy grass that the Colonel and I step on as we silently make our way back to our room. His feet are so large, too large for his short body, and the new generic tennis shoes he wears since his old ones were pissed in look almost like clown shoes. I think of Alaska's flip-flops clinging to her blue toes as we swung on the swing down by the lake. Will the casket be open? Can a mortician re-create her smile? I could still hear her saying it: "This is so fun, but I'm so sleepy. To be continued?"

Nineteenth-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher's last words were "Now comes the mystery." The poet Dylan Thomas, who liked a good drink at least as much as Alaska, said, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I do believe that's a record," before dying. Alaska's favorite was playwright Eugene O'Neill: "Born in a hotel room, and — God damnit— died in a hotel room." Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, "Oh God. What's happened?" Movie star James Dean said, "They've got to see us," just before slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know hers.

I am several steps in front of him before I realize that the Colonel has fallen down. I turn around, and he is lying on his face. "We have to get up, Chip. We have to get up. We just have to get to the room."

The Colonel turns his face from the ground to me and looks me dead in the eye and says, "I. Can't. Breathe."

But he canbreathe, and I know this because he is hyperventilating, breathing as if trying to blow air back into the dead. I pick him up, and he grabs onto me and starts sobbing, again saying, "I'm so sorry," over and over again.

We have never hugged before, me and the Colonel, and there is nothing much to say, because he ought to be sorry, and I just put my hand on the back of his head and say the only true thing. "I'm sorry, too."

two days after

I didn't sleep that night. Dawn was slow in coming, and even when it did, the sun shining bright through the blinds, the rickety radiator couldn't keep us warm, so the Colonel and I sat wordlessly on the couch. He read the almanac.

The night before, I'd braved the cold to call my parents, and this time when I said, "Hey, it's Miles," and my mom answered with, "What's wrong? Is everything okay?" I could safely tell her no, everything was not okay. My dad picked up the line then.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Don't yell," my mother said.

"I'm not yelling; it's just the phone."

"Well, talk quieter," she said, and so it took some time before I could say anything, and then once I could, it took some time to say the words in order — my friend Alaska died in a car crash. I stared at the numbers and messages scrawled on the wall by the phone.

"Oh, Miles," Mom said. "I'm so sorry, Miles. Do you want to come home?"

"No," I said. "I want to be here…I can't believe it," which was still partly true.

"That's just awful," my dad said. "Her poor parents." Poor parent,I thought, and wondered about her dad. I couldn't even imagine what my parents would do if I died. Driving drunk. God, if her father ever found out, he would disembowel the Colonel and me.

"What can we do for you right now?" my mom asked.

"I just needed you to pick up. I just needed you to answer the phone, and you did." I heard a sniffle behind me — from cold or grief, I didn't know — and told my parents, "Someone's waiting for the phone. I gotta go."

All night, I felt paralyzed into silence, terrorized. What was I so afraid of, anyway? The thing had happened. She was dead. She was warm and soft against my skin, my tongue in her mouth, and she was laughing, trying to teach me, make me better, promising to be continued. And now.

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 that the world had run out of glasses and he would just have to do withoutJust before eight in the morning, the Colonel announced to no one in particular, "I think there are bufriedos at lunch today."

"Yeah," I said. "Are you hungry?"