Looking For Alaska

OUR TRIPLE-AND-A-HALF DATE started off well enough. I was in Alaska’s room—for the sake of getting me a girlfriend, she’d agreed to iron a green button-down shirt for me—when Jake showed up. With blond hair to his shoulders, dark stubble on his cheeks, and the kind of faux-ruggedness that gets you a career as a catalog model, Jake was every bit as good-looking as you’d expect Alaska’s boyfriend to be. She jumped onto him and wrapped her legs around him (God forbid anyone ever does that to me, I thought. I’ll fall over). I’d heard Alaska talk about kissing, but I’d never seen her kiss until then: As he held her by her waist, she leaned forward, her pouty lips parted, her head just slightly tilted, and enveloped his mouth with such passion that I felt I should look away but couldn’t. A good while later, she untangled herself from Jake and introduced me.

“This is Pudge,” she said. Jake and I shook hands.

“I’ve heard a lot about ya.” He spoke with a slight Southern accent, one of the few I’d heard outside of McDonald’s. “I hope your date works out tonight, ’cause I wouldn’t want you stealin’ Alaska out from under me.”

“God, you’re so adorable,” Alaska said before I could answer, kissing him again. “I’m sorry.” She laughed. “I just can’t seem to stop kissing my boyfriend.”

I put on my freshly starched green shirt, and the three of us gathered up the Colonel, Sara, Lara, and Takumi and then walked to the gym to watch the Culver Creek Nothings take on Harsden Academy, a private day school in Mountain Brook, Birmingham’s richest suburb. The Colonel’s hatred for Harsden burned with the fire of a thousand suns. “The only thing I hate more than rich people,” he told me as we walked to the gym, “is stupid people. And all the kids at Harsden are rich, and they’re all too stupid to get into the Creek.”

Since we were supposed to be on a date and all, I thought I’d sit next to Lara at the game, but as I tried to walk past a seated Alaska on my way to Lara, Alaska shot me a look and patted the empty spot next to her on the bleachers.

“I’m not allowed to sit next to my date?” I asked.

“Pudge, one of us has been a girl her whole life. The other of us has never gotten to second base. If I were you, I’d sit down, look cute, and be your pleasantly aloof self.”

“Okay. Whatever you say.”

Jake said, “That’s pretty much my strategy for pleasing Alaska.”

“Aww,” she said, “so sweet! Pudge, did I tell you that Jake is recording an album with his band? They’re fantastic. They’re like Radiohead meets the Flaming Lips. Did I tell you that I came up with their name, Hickman Territory?” And then, realizing she was being silly: “Did I tell you that Jake is hung like a horse and a beautiful, sensual lover?”

“Baby, Jesus.” Jake smiled. “Not in front of the kids.”

I wanted to hate Jake, of course, but as I watched them together, smiling and fumbling all over each other, I didn’t hate him. I wanted to be him, sure, but I tried to remember I was ostensibly on a date with someone else.

Harsden Academy’s star player was a six-foot-seven Goliath named Travis Eastman that everyone—even his mother, I suspect—called the Beast. The first time the Beast got to the free-throw line, the Colonel could not keep himself from swearing while he taunted:

“You owe everything to your daddy, you stupid redneck bastard.”

The Beast turned around and glared, and the Colonel almost got kicked out after the first free throw, but he smiled at the ref and said, “Sorry!”

“I want to stay around for a good part of this one,” he said to me.

At the start of the second half, with the Creek down by a surprisingly slim margin of twenty-four points and the Beast at the foul line, the Colonel looked at Takumi and said, “It’s time.” Takumi and the Colonel stood up as the crowd went, “Shhh . . .”

“I don’t know if this is the best time to tell you this,” the Colonel shouted at the Beast, “but Takumi here hooked up with your girlfriend just before the game.”

That made everyone laugh—except the Beast, who turned from the free throw line and walked calmly, with the ball, toward us.

“I think we run now,” Takumi said.

“I haven’t gotten kicked out,” the Colonel answered.

“Later,” Takumi said.

I don’t know whether it was the general anxiety of being on a date (albeit one with my would-be date sitting five people away from me) or the specific anxiety of having the Beast stare in my direction, but for some reason, I took off running after Takumi. I thought we were in the clear as we began to round the corner of the bleachers, but then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a cylindrical orange object getting bigger and bigger, like a fast-approaching sun.

I thought: I think that is going to hit me.

I thought: I should duck.

But in the time between when something gets thought and when it gets done, the ball hit me square across the side of the face. I fell, the back of my head slamming against the gym floor. I then stood up immediately, as if unhurt, and left the gym.

Pride had gotten me off the floor of the gym, but as soon as I was outside, I sat down.

“I am concussed,” I announced, entirely sure of my self-diagnosis.

“You’re fine,” Takumi said as he jogged back toward me. “Let’s get out of here before we’re killed.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But I can’t get up. I have suffered a mild concussion.”

Lara ran out and sat down next to me.

“Are you okay?”

“I am concussed,” I said.

Takumi sat down with me and looked me in the eye. “Do you know what happened to you?”

“The Beast got me.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“I’m on a triple-and-a-half date.”

“You’re fine,” Takumi said. “Let’s go.”

And then I leaned forward and threw up onto Lara’s pants. I can’t say why I didn’t lean backward or to the side. I leaned forward and aimed my mouth toward her jeans—a nice, butt-flattering pair of jeans, the kind of pants a girl wears when she wants to look nice but not look like she is trying to look nice—and I threw up all over them.

Mostly peanut butter, but also clearly some corn.

“Oh!” she said, surprised and slightly horrified.

“Oh God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I think you might have a concussion,” Takumi said, as if the idea had never been suggested.

“I am suffering from the nausea and dizziness typically associated with a mild concussion,” I recited. While Takumi went to get the Eagle and Lara changed pants, I lay on the concrete sidewalk. The Eagle came back with the school nurse, who diagnosed me with—get this—a concussion, and then Takumi drove me to the hospital with Lara riding shotgun. Apparently I lay in the back and slowly repeated the words “The. Symptoms. Generally. Associated. With. Concussion.”

So I spent my date at the hospital with Lara and Takumi. The doctor told me to go home and sleep a lot, but to make sure and have someone wake me up every four hours or so.

I vaguely remember Lara standing in the doorway, the room dark and the outside dark and everything mild and comfortable but sort of spinny, the world pulsing as if from a heavy bass beat. And I vaguely remember Lara smiling at me from the doorway, the glittering ambiguity of a girl’s smile, which seems to promise an answer to the question but never gives it. The question, the one we’ve all been asking since girls stopped being gross, the question that is too simple to be uncomplicated: Does she like me or like me? And then I fell deeply, endlessly asleep and slept until three in the morning, when the Colonel woke me up.

“She dumped me,” he said.

“I am concussed,” I responded.

“So I heard. Hence my waking you up. Video game?”

“Okay. But keep it on mute. My head hurts.”

“Yeah. Heard you puked on Lara. Very suave.”

“Dumped?” I asked, getting up.

“Yeah. Sara told Jake that I had a hard-on for Alaska. Those words. In that order. And I was like, ‘Well, I don’t have a hard-on for anything at this moment. You can check if you’d like,’ and Sara thought I was being too glib, I suppose, because then she said she knew for a fact I’d hooked up with Alaska. Which, incidentally, is ridiculous. I. Don’t. Cheat,” he said, and finally the game finished loading and I half listened as I drove a stock car in circles around a silent track in Talladega. The circles nauseated me, but I kept at it.

“So Alaska went ballistic, basically.” He affected Alaska’s voice then, making it more shrill and headache-inducing than it actually was. “ ‘No woman should ever lie about another woman! You’ve violated the sacred covenant between women! How will stabbing one another in the back help women to rise above patriarchal oppression?! ’ And so on. And then Jake came to Alaska’s defense, saying that she would never cheat because she loved him, and then I was like, ‘Don’t worry about Sara. She just likes bullying people.’ And then Sara asked me why I never stood up for her, and somewhere in there I called her a crazy bitch, which didn’t go over particularly well. And then the waitress asked us to leave, and so we were standing in the parking lot and she said, ‘I’ve had enough,’ and I just stared at her and she said, ‘Our relationship is over.’ ”

He stopped talking then. “ ‘Our relationship is over?’ ” I repeated. I felt very spacey and thought it was just best to repeat the last phrase of whatever the Colonel said so he could keep talking.

“Yeah. So that’s it. You know what’s lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her. I lost my virginity to her.”

“You lost your virginity to her?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I never told you that? She’s the only girl I’ve slept with. I don’t know. Even though we fought, like, ninety-four percent of the time, I’m really sad.”

“You’re really sad?”

“Sadder than I thought I’d be, anyway. I mean, I knew it was inevitable. We haven’t had a pleasant moment this whole year. Ever since I got here, I mean, we were just on each other relentlessly. I should have been nicer to her. I don’t know. It’s sad.”

“It is sad,” I repeated.

“I mean, it’s stupid to miss someone you didn’t even get along with. But, I don’t know, it was nice, you know, having someone you could always fight with.”

“Fighting,” I said, and then, confused, barely able to drive, I added, “is nice.”

“Right. I don’t know what I’ll do now. I mean, it was nice to have her. I’m a mad guy, Pudge. What do I do with that?”

“You can fight with me,” I said. I put my controller down and leaned back on our foam couch and was asleep. As I drifted off, I heard the Colonel say, “I can’t be mad at you, you harmless skinny bastard.”