Looking for Alaska

eighty-nine days before

'We found you a girlfriend,' Alaska said to me. Still, no one had explained to me what happened the week before with the Jury. It didn't seem to have affected Alaska, though, who was 1. in our room after dark with the door closed, and 2. smoking a cigarette as she sat on the mostly foam couch. She had stuffed a towel into the bottom of our door and insisted it was safe, but I worried — about the cigarette and the 'girlfriend.'

'All I have to do now,' she said, 'is convince you to like her and convince her to like you.'

'Monumental tasks,' the Colonel pointed out. He lay on the top bunk, reading for his English class. Moby-Dick.

'How can you read and talk at the same time?' I asked.

'Well, I usually can't, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.'

'I like that book,' Alaska said.

'Yes.' The Colonel smiled and leaned over to look at her from his top bunk. 'You would. Big white whale is a metaphor for everything. You live for pretentious metaphors.'

Alaska was unfazed. 'So, Pudge, what's your feeling on the former Soviet bloc?'

'Urn. I'm in favor of it?'

She flicked the ashes of her cigarette into my pencil holder. I almost protested, but why bother. 'You know that girl in our precalc class,' Alaska said, 'soft voice, says thees, not this. Know that girl?'

'Yeah. Lara. She sat on my lap on the way to McDonald's.'

'Right. I know. And she liked you. You thought she was quietly discussing precalc, when she was clearly talking about having hot sex with you. Which is why you need me.'

'She has great breasts,' the Colonel said without looking up from the whale.

'DO NOT OBJECTIFY WOMEN'S BODIES!' Alaska shouted.

Now he looked up. 'Sorry. Perky breasts.'

'That's not any better!'

'Sure it is,' he said. 'Great is a judgment on a woman's body. Perky is merely an observation. They are perky. I mean, Christ.'

'You're hopeless,' she said. 'So she thinks you're cute, Pudge.'

'Nice.'

'Doesn't mean anything. Problem with you is that if you talk to her you'll 'uh um uh' your way to disaster.'

'Don't be so hard on him,' the Colonel interrupted, as if he was my mom. 'God, I understand whale anatomy.

Can we move on now, Herman?'

'So Jake is going to be in Birmingham this weekend, and we're going on a triple date. Well, triple and a half, since Takumi will be there, too. Very low pressure. You won't be able to screw up, because I'll be there the whole time.'

'Okay.'

'Who's my date?' the Colonel asked.

'Your girlfriend is your date.'

'All right,' he said, and then deadpanned, 'but we don't get along very well.'

'So Friday? Do you have plans for Friday?' And then I laughed, because the Colonel and I didn't have plans for this Friday, or for any other Friday for the rest of our lives.

'I didn't think so.' She smiled. 'Now, we gotta go do dishes in the cafeteria, Chipper. God, the sacrifices I make.'

eighty-seven days before

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 and 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. Ill 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.'