Looking for Alaska

"I could wear a tuxedo and your parents would still hate me!" he shouted.

"That's not my fault! You antagonize them!" She held up the car keys in front of him. "Look, we're going now or we're not going."

"Fuck it. I'm not going anywhere with you," the Colonel said.

"Fine. Have a great night." Sara slammed the door so hard that a sizable biography of Leo Tolstoy (last words: "The truth is…I care a great deal…what they…") fell off my bookshelf and landed with a thud on our checkered floor like an echo of the slamming door.

"AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!"he screamed.

"So that's Sara," I said.

"Yes."

"She seems nice."

The Colonel laughed, knelt down next to the mini fridge, and pulled out a gallon of milk. He opened it, took a swig, winced, half coughed, and sat down on the couch with the milk between his legs.

"Is it sour or something?"

"Oh, I should have mentioned that earlier. 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, but it's Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch. Want some?"

"I think I'll pass." Aside from a few sips of champagne on New Year's under the watchful eye of my parents, I'd never really drunk any alcohol, and "ambrosia" didn't seem like the drink with which to start. Outside, I heard the pay phone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders shared five pay phones, I was amazed at how infrequently it rang. We weren't supposed to have cell phones, but I'd noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot.

"Are you going to get that?" the Colonel asked me. I didn't feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn't feel like fighting.

Through a buggy twilight, I walked to the pay phone, which was drilled into the wall between Rooms 44 and 45.

On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20;773.573.6521; JG — Kuffs?).Calling the pay phone required a great deal of patience. I picked up on about the ninth ring.

"Can you get Chip for me?" Sara asked. It sounded like she was on a cell phone.

"Yeah, hold on."

I turned, and he was already behind me, as if he knew it would be her. I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room.

A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night.

"Screw you too!" the Colonel shouted.

Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, "She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That's what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out. Me. That's why the piss in the shoes. That's why the nearly killing you. 'Cause you live with me, and they say I'm a rat."

I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I had heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn't match "Paul" and "Marya" with faces. And then I remembered why: I'd never seen them.

They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta.

"How long have you been dating her?" I asked.

"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 like 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?" He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, "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."

"But-" "I can't believe they think that," he said as he walked to the bookshelf and pulled down the almanac. He took a long pull off his ambrosia. "Goddamn Weekday Warriors. It was probably one of them that ratted out Paul and Marya and then blamed me to cover their tracks. Anyway, it's a good night for staying in. Staying in with Pudge and ambrosia."

"I still—" I said, wanting to say that I didn't understand how you could kiss someone who believed you were a rat if being a rat was the worst thing in the world, but the Colonel cut me off.

"Not another word about it. You know what the capital of Sierra Leone is?"

"No."

"Me neither," he said, "but I intend to find out." And with that, he stuck his nose in the almanac, and the conversation was over.

one hundred ten days before

Keeping up with my classes proved easier than I'd expected. My general predisposition to spending a lot of time inside reading gave me a distinct advantage over the average Culver Creek student. By the third week of classes, plenty of kids had been sunburned to a bufriedo-like golden brown from days spent chatting outside in the shadeless dorm circle during free periods. But I was barely pink: I studied.

And I listened in class, too, but on that Wednesday morning, when Dr. Hyde started talking about how Buddhists believe that all things are interconnected, I found myself staring out the window. I was looking at the wooded, slow-sloping hill beyond the lake. And from Hyde's classroom, things did seem connected: The trees seemed to clothe the hill, and just as I would never think to notice a particular cotton thread in the magnificently tight orange tank top Alaska wore that day, I couldn't see the trees for the forest — everything so intricately woven together that it made no sense to think of one tree as independent from that hill. And then I heard my name, and I knew I was in trouble.

"Mr. Halter," the Old Man said. "Here I am, straining my lungs for your edification. And yet somethingout there seems to have caught your fancy in a way that I've been unable to do. Pray tell: What have you discovered out there?"

Now I felt my own breath shorten, the whole class watching me, thanking God they weren'tme. Dr. Hyde had already done this three times, kicking kids out of class for not paying attention or writing notes to one another.

"Urn, I was just looking outside at the, uh, at the hill and thinking about, um, the trees and the forest, like you were saying earlier, about the way—" The Old Man, who obviously did not tolerate vocalized rambling, cut me off. "I'm going to ask you to leave class, Mr. Halter, so that you can go out there and discover the relationship between the um-trees and the uh-forest.

And tomorrow, when you're ready to take this class seriously, I will welcome you back."

I sat still, my pen resting in my hand, my notebook open, my face flushed and my jaw jutting out into an underbite, an old trick I had to keep from looking sad or scared. Two rows behind me, I heard a chair move and turned around to see Alaska standing up, slinging her backpack over one arm.