Looking for Alaska

head. I just stared, looking at his thick and bushy hair. For a moment, it was so quiet that you could hear the sound of not-breathing, the vacuum created by 190 students shocked out of air.

I thought: It's all my fault I thought: I don't feel very good.

I thought: I'm going to throw up.

I stood up and ran outside. I made it to a trash can outside the gym, five feet from the double doors, and heaved toward Gatorade bottles and half-eaten McDonald's. But nothing much came out. I just heaved, my stomach muscles tightening and my throat opening and a gasping, guttural blech, going through the motions of vomiting over and over again. In between gags and coughs, I sucked air in hard. Her mouth. Her dead, cold mouth. To not be continued. I knew she was drunk. Upset. Obviously you don't let someone drive drunk and pissed off.

Obviously. And Christ, Miles, what the hell is wrong with you? And then comes the puke, finally, splashing onto the trash. And here is whatever of her I had left in my mouth, here in this trash can. And then it comes again, more — and then okay, calm down, okay, seriously, she's not dead.

She's not dead. She's alive. She's alive somewhere. She's in the woods. Alaska is hiding in the woods and she's not dead, she's just hiding. She's just playing a trick on us. This is just an Alaska Young Prank Extraordinaire. It's Alaska being Alaska, funny and playful and not knowing when or how to put on the brakes.

And then I felt much better, because she had not died at all.

I walked back into the gym, and everyone seemed to be in various stages of disintegration. It was like something you see on TV, like a National Geographic special on funeral rituals. I saw Takumi standing over Lara, his hands on her shoulders. I saw Kevin with his crew cut, his head buried between his knees. A girl named Molly Tan, who'd studied with us for precalc, wailed, beating balled fists against her thighs. All these people I sort of knew and sort of didn't, and all of them disintegrating, and then I saw the Colonel, his knees tucked into his chest, lying on his side on the bleachers, Madame O'Malley sitting next to him, reaching toward his shoulder but not actually touching it. The Colonel was screaming. He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream.

I thought, at first, that it was only yelling. But after a few breaths, I noticed a rhythm. And after a few more, I realized that the Colonel was saying words. He was screaming, 'I'm so sorry.'

Madame O'Malley grabbed his hand. 'You've got nothing to be sorry for, Chip. There was nothing you could have done.' But if only she knew.

And I just stood there, looking at the scene, thinking about her not dead, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around to see the Eagle, and I said, 'I think she's playing a dumb prank,' and he said, 'No, Miles, no, I'm sorry,' and I felt the heat in my cheeks and said, 'She's really good. She could pull this off,' and he said, 'I saw her. I'm sorry.'

'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 can breathe, 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