Looking For Alaska

I WOKE UP EARLY the next morning, my lips dry and my breath visible in the crisp air. Takumi had brought a camp stove in his backpack, and the Colonel was huddled over it, heating instant coffee. The sun shone bright but could not combat the cold, and I sat with the Colonel and sipped the coffee (“The thing about instant coffee is that it smells pretty good but tastes like stomach bile,” the Colonel said), and then one by one, Takumi and Lara and Alaska woke up, and we spent the day hiding out, but loudly. Hiding out loud.

At the barn that afternoon, Takumi decided we needed to have a freestyle contest.

“You start, Pudge,” Takumi said. “Colonel Catastrophe, you’re our beat box.”

“Dude, I can’t rap,” I pled.

“That’s okay. The Colonel can’t drop beats, either. Just try and rhyme a little and then send it over to me.”

With his hand cupped over his mouth, the Colonel started to make absurd noises that sounded more like farting than bass beats, and I, uh, rapped.

“Um, we’re sittin’ in the barn and the sun’s goin’ down / when I was a kid at Burger King I wore a crown / dude, I can’t rhyme for shit / so I’ll let my boy Takumi rip it.”

Takumi took over without pausing. “Damn, Pudge, I’m not sure I’m quite ready / but like Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy / I’ve always got the goods to rip shit up / last night I drank wine it was like hiccup hiccup / the Colonel’s beats are sick like malaria / when I rock the mike the ladies suffer hysteria / I represent Japan as well as Birmingham / when I was a kid they called me yellow man / but I ain’t ashamed a’ my skin color / and neither are the countless bitches that call me lover.”

Alaska jumped in.

“Oh shit did you just diss the feminine gender / I’ll pummel your ass then stick you in a blender / you think I like Tori and Ani so I can’t rhyme / but I got flow like Ghostbusters got slime / objectify women and it’s fuckin’ on / you’ll be dead and gone like ancient Babylon.”

Takumi picked it up again.

“If my eye offends me I will pluck it out / I got props for girls like old men got gout / oh shit now my rhyming got all whack / Lara help me out and pick up the slack.”

Lara rhymed quietly and nervously—and with even more flagrant disregard for the beat than me. “My name’s Lara and I’m from Romania / thees is pretty hard, um, I once visited Albania / I love riding in Alaska’s Geo / My two best vowels in English are EO / I’m not so good weeth the leetle i’s / but they make me sound cosmopoleeteen, right? / Oh, Takumi, I think I’m done / end thees game weeth some fun.”

“I drop bombs like Hiroshima, or better yet Nagasaki / when girls hear me flow they think that I’m Rocky / to represent my homeland I still drink sake / the kids don’t get my rhymin’ so sometimes they mock me / my build ain’t small but I wouldn’t call it stocky / then again, unlike Pudge, I’m not super gawky / I’m the fuckin’ fox and this is my crew / our freestyle’s infused with funk like my gym shoes. And we’re out.”

The Colonel rapped it up with freestyle beat-boxing, and we gave ourselves a round of applause.

“You ripped it up, Alaska,” Takumi says, laughing.

“I do what I can to represent the ladies. Lara had my back.”

“Yeah, I deed.”

And then Alaska decided that although it wasn’t nearly dark yet, it was time for us to get shitfaced.

“Two nights in a row is maybe pushing our luck,” Takumi said as Alaska opened the wine.

“Luck is for suckers.” She smiled and put the bottle to her lips. We had saltines and a hunk of Cheddar cheese provided by the Colonel for dinner, and sipping the warm pink wine out of the bottle with our cheese and saltines made for a fine dinner. And when we ran out of cheese, well, all the more room for Strawberry Hill.

“We have to slow down or I’ll puke,” I remarked after we finished the first bottle.

“I’m sorry, Pudge. I wasn’t aware that someone was holding open your throat and pouring wine down it,” the Colonel responded, tossing me a bottle of Mountain Dew.

“It’s a little charitable to call this shit wine,” Takumi cracked.

And then, as if out of nowhere, Alaska announced, “Best Day/Worst Day!”

“Huh?” I asked.

“We are all going to puke if we just drink. So we’ll slow it down with a drinking game. Best Day/Worst Day.”

“Never heard of it,” the Colonel said.

“ ’Cause I just made it up.” She smiled. She lay on her side across two bales of hay, the afternoon light brightening the green in her eyes, her tan skin the last memory of fall. With her mouth half open, it occurred to me that she must already be drunk as I noticed the far-off look in her eyes. The thousand-yard stare of intoxication, I thought, and as I watched her with an idle fascination, it occurred to me that, yeah, I was a little drunk, too.

“Fun! What are the rules?” Lara asked.

“Everybody tells the story of their best day. The best storyteller doesn’t have to drink. Then everybody tells the story of their worst day, and the best storyteller doesn’t have to drink. Then we keep going, second best day, second worst day, until one of y’all quits.”

“How do you know it’ll be one of us?” Takumi asked.

“ ’Cause I’m the best drinker and the best storyteller,” she answered. Hard to disagree with that logic. “You start, Pudge. Best day of your life.”

“Um. Can I take a minute to think of one?”

“Couldn’ta been that good if you have to think about it,” the Colonel said.

“Fuck you, dude.”

“Touchy.”

“Best day of my life was today,” I said. “And the story is that I woke up next to a very pretty Hungarian girl and it was cold but not too cold and I had a cup of lukewarm instant coffee and ate Cheerios without milk and then walked through the woods with Alaska and Takumi. We skipped stones across the creek, which sounds dumb but it wasn’t. I don’t know. Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows and that kind of bright, soft light you get when the sun isn’t quite setting? That’s the light that makes everything better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light. I mean, I didn’t do anything. But just sitting here, even if I’m watching the Colonel whittle, or whatever. Whatever. Great day. Today. Best day of my life.”

“You think I’m pretty?” Lara said, and laughed, bashful. I thought, It’d be good to make eye contact with her now, but I couldn’t. “And I’m Romaneean!”

“That story ended up being a hell of a lot better than I thought it would be,” Alaska said, “but I’ve still got you beat.”

“Bring it on, baby,” I said. A breeze picked up, the tall grass outside the barn tilting away from it, and I pulled my sleeping bag over my shoulders to stay warm.

“Best day of my life was January 9, 1997. I was eight years old, and my mom and I went to the zoo on a class trip. I liked the bears. She liked the monkeys. Best day ever. End of story.”

“That’s it?!” the Colonel said. “That’s the best day of your whole life?!”

“Yup.”

“I liked eet,” Lara said. “I like the monkeys, too.”

“Lame,” said the Colonel. I didn’t think it was lame so much as more of Alaska’s intentional vagueness, another example of her furthering her own mysteriousness. But still, even though I knew it was intentional, I couldn’t help but wonder: What’s so fucking great about the zoo? But before I could ask, Lara spoke.

“’Kay, my turn,” said Lara. “Eet’s easy. The day I came here. I knew Engleesh and my parents deedn’t, and we came off the airplane and my relatives were here, aunts and uncles I had not ever seen, in the airport, and my parents were so happy. I was twelve, and I had always been the leetle baby, but that was the first day that my parents needed me and treated me like a grown-up. Because they did not know the language, right? They need me to order food and to translate tax and immigration forms and everytheeng else, and that was the day they stopped treating me like a keed. Also, in Romania, we were poor. And here, we’re kinda reech.” She laughed.

“All right.” Takumi smiled, grabbing the bottle of wine. “I lose. Because the best day of my life was the day I lost my virginity. And if you think I’m going to tell you that story, you’re gonna have to get me drunker than this.”

“Not bad,” the Colonel said. “That’s not bad. Want to know my best day?”

“That’s the game, Chip,” Alaska said, clearly annoyed.

“Best day of my life hasn’t happened yet. But I know it. I see it every day. The best day of my life is the day I buy my mom a huge fucking house. And not just like out in the woods, but in the middle of Mountain Brook, with all the Weekday Warriors’ parents. With all y’all’s parents. And I’m not buying it with a mortgage either. I’m buying it with cash money, and I am driving my mom there, and I’m going to open her side of the car door and she’ll get out and look at this house—this house is like picket fence and two stories and everything, you know—and I’m going to hand her the keys to her house and I’ll say, ‘Thanks.’ Man, she helped fill out my application to this place. And she let me come here, and that’s no easy thing when you come from where we do, to let your son go away to school. So that’s the best day of my life.”

Takumi tilted the bottle up and swallowed a few times, then handed it to me. I drank, and so did Lara, and then Alaska put her head back and turned the bottle upside down, quickly downing the last quarter of the bottle.

As she unscrewed the next bottle, Alaska smiled at the Colonel. “You won that round. Now what’s your worst day?”

“Worst day was when my dad left. He’s old—he’s like seventy now—and he was old when he married my mom, and he still cheated on her. And she caught him, and she got pissed, so he hit her. And then she kicked him out, and he left. I was here, and my mom called, and she didn’t tell me the whole story with the cheating and everything and the hitting until later. She just said that he was gone and not coming back. And I haven’t seen him since. All that day, I kept waiting for him to call me and explain it, but he never did. He never called at all. I at least thought he would say good-bye or something. That was the worst day.”

“Shit, you got me beat again,” I said. “My worst day was in seventh grade, when Tommy Hewitt pissed on my gym clothes and then the gym teacher said I had to wear my uniform or I’d fail the class. Seventh-grade gym, right? There are worse things to fail. But it was a big deal then, and I was crying, and trying to explain to the teacher what happened, but it was so embarrassing, and he just yelled and yelled and yelled until I put on these piss-soaked shorts and T-shirt. That was the day I stopped caring what people did. I just never cared anymore, about being a loser or not having friends or any of that. So I guess it was good for me in a way, but that moment was awful. I mean, imagine me playing volleyball or whatever in pee-soaked gym clothes while Tommy Hewitt tells everyone what he did. That was the worst day.”

Lara was laughing. “I’m sorry, Miles.”

“All good,” I said. “Just tell me yours so I can laugh at your pain,” and I smiled, and we laughed together.

“My worst day was probably the same day as my best. Because I left everytheeng. I mean, eet sounds dumb, but my childhood, too, because most twelve-year-olds do not, you know, have to feegure out W-2 forms.”

“What’s a W-2 form?” I asked.

“That’s my point. Eet’s for taxes. So. Same day.”

Lara had always needed to talk for her parents, I thought, and so maybe she never learned how to talk for herself. And I wasn’t great at talking for myself either. We had something important in common, then, a personality quirk I didn’t share with Alaska or anybody else, although almost by definition Lara and I couldn’t express it to each other. So maybe it was just the way the not-yet-setting sun shone against her lazy dark curls, but at that moment, I wanted to kiss her, and we did not need to talk in order to kiss, and the puking on her jeans and the months of mutual avoidance melted away.

“Eet’s your turn, Takumi.”

“Worst day of my life,” Takumi said. “June 9, 2000. My grand-mother died in Japan. She died in a car accident, and I was supposed to leave to go see her two days later. I was going to spend the whole summer with her and my grandfather, but instead I flew over for her funeral, and the only time I really saw what she looked like, I mean other than in pictures, was at her funeral. She had a Buddhist funeral, and they cremated her, but before they did she was on this, like—well, it’s not really Buddhist. I mean, religion is complicated there, so it’s a little Buddhist and a little Shinto, but y’all don’t care—point being that she was on this, like, funeral pyre or whatever. And that’s the only time I ever saw her, was just before they burned her up. That was the worst day.”

The Colonel lit a cigarette, threw it to me, and lit one of his own. It was eerie, that he could tell when I wanted a cigarette. We were like an old married couple. For a moment, I thought, It’s massively unwise to throw lit cigarettes around a barn full of hay, but then the moment of caution passed, and I just made a sincere effort not to flick ash onto any hay.

“No clear winner yet,” the Colonel said. “The field is wide open. Your turn, buddy.”

Alaska lay on her back, her hands locked behind her head. She spoke softly and quickly, but the quiet day was becoming a quieter night—the bugs gone now with the arrival of winter—and we could hear her clearly.

“The day after my mom took me to the zoo where she liked the monkeys and I liked the bears, it was a Friday. I came home from school. She gave me a hug and told me to go do my homework in my room so I could watch TV later. I went into my room, and she sat down at the kitchen table, I guess, and then she screamed, and I ran out, and she had fallen over. She was lying on the floor, holding her head and jerking. And I freaked out. I should have called 911, but I just started screaming and crying until finally she stopped jerking, and I thought she had fallen asleep and that whatever had hurt didn’t hurt anymore. So I just sat there on the floor with her until my dad got home an hour later, and he’s screaming, ‘Why didn’t you call 911?’ and trying to give her CPR, but by then she was plenty dead. Aneurysm. Worst day. I win. You drink.”

And so we did.

No one talked for a minute, and then Takumi asked, “Your dad blamed you?”

“Well, not after that first moment. But yeah. How could he not?”

“Well, you were a little kid,” Takumi argued. I was too surprised and uncomfortable to talk, trying to fit this into what I knew about Alaska’s family. Her mom told her the knock-knock joke—when Alaska was six. Her mom used to smoke—but didn’t anymore, obviously.

“Yeah. I was a little kid. Little kids can dial 911. They do it all the time. Give me the wine,” she said, deadpan and emotionless. She drank without lifting her head from the hay.

“I’m sorry,” Takumi said.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” the Colonel asked, his voice soft.

“It never came up.” And then we stopped asking questions. What the hell do you say?

In the long quiet that followed, as we passed around the wine and slowly became drunker, I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, “I want to go, too! I want to go, too!” And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: “We are all going.”

It was the central moment of Alaska’s life. When she cried and told me that she fucked everything up, I knew what she meant now. And when she said she failed everyone, I knew whom she meant. It was the everything and the everyone of her life, and so I could not help but imagine it: I imagined a scrawny eight-year-old with dirty fingers, looking down at her mother convulsing. So she sat down with her dead-or-maybe-not mother, who I imagine was not breathing by then but wasn’t yet cold either. And in the time between dying and death, a little Alaska sat with her mother in silence. And then through the silence and my drunkenness, I caught a glimpse of her as she might have been. She must have come to feel so powerless, I thought, that the one thing she might have done—pick up the phone and call an ambulance—never even occurred to her. There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow—that, in short, we are all going.

So she became impulsive, scared by her inaction into perpetual action. When the Eagle confronted her with expulsion, maybe she blurted out Marya’s name because it was the first that came to mind, because in that moment she didn’t want to get expelled and couldn’t think past that moment. She was scared, sure. But more importantly, maybe she’d been scared of being paralyzed by fear again.

“We are all going,” McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There’s your labyrinth of suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

None of which I said out loud to her. Not then and not ever. We never said another word about it. Instead, it became just another worst day, albeit the worst of the bunch, and as night fell fast, we continued on, drinking and joking.

Later that night, after Alaska stuck her finger down her throat and made herself puke in front of all of us because she was too drunk to walk into the woods, I lay down in my sleeping bag. Lara was lying beside me, in her bag, which was almost touching mine. I moved my arm to the edge of my bag and pushed it so it slightly overlapped with hers. I pressed my hand against hers. I could feel it, although there were two sleeping bags between us. My plan, which struck me as very slick, was to pull my arm out of my sleeping bag and put it into hers, and then hold her hand. It was a good plan, but when I tried to actually get my arm out of the mummy bag, I flailed around like a fish out of water, and nearly dislocated my shoulder. She was laughing—and not with me, at me—but we still didn’t speak. Having passed the point of no return, I slid my hand into her sleeping bag anyway, and she stifled a giggle as my fingers traced a line from her elbow to her wrist.

“That teekles,” she whispered. So much for me being sexy.

“Sorry,” I whispered.

“No, it’s a nice teekle,” she said, and held my hand. She laced her fingers in mine and squeezed. And then she rolled over and keessed me. I am sure that she tasted like stale booze, but I did not notice, and I’m sure I tasted like stale booze and cigarettes, but she didn’t notice. We were kissing.

I thought: This is good.

I thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all.

I thought: I am clearly the greatest kisser in the history of the universe.

Suddenly she laughed and pulled away from me. She wiggled a hand out of her sleeping bag and wiped her face. “You slobbered on my nose,” she said, and laughed.

I laughed, too, trying to give her the impression that my nose-slobbering kissing style was intended to be funny. “I’m sorry.” To borrow the base system from Alaska, I hadn’t hit more than five singles in my entire life, so I tried to chalk it up to inexperience. “I’m a bit new at this,” I said.

“Eet was a nice slobbering,” she said, laughed, and kissed me again. Soon we were entirely out of our sleeping bags, making out quietly. She lay on top of me, and I held her small waist in my hands. I could feel her breasts against my chest, and she moved slowly on top of me, her legs straddling me. “You feel nice,” she said.

“You’re beautiful,” I said, and smiled at her. In the dark, I could make out the outline of her face and her large, round eyes blinking down at me, her eyelashes almost fluttering against my forehead.

“Could the two people who are making out please be quiet?” the Colonel asked loudly from his sleeping bag. “Those of us who are not making out are drunk and tired.”

“Mostly. Drunk,” Alaska said slowly, as if enunciation required great effort.

We had almost never talked, Lara and I, and we didn’t get a chance to talk anymore because of the Colonel. So we kissed quietly and laughed softly with our mouths and our eyes. After so much kissing that it almost started to get boring, I whispered, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” And she said, “Yes please,” and smiled. We slept together in her sleeping bag, which felt a little crowded, to be honest, but was still nice. I had never felt another person against me as I slept. It was a fine end to the best day of my life.