Looking for Alaska

crew began mowing the grass in the dorm circle again, it seemed to me we had finally lost her.

The Colonel and I walked into the woods down by the lake that afternoon and smoked a cigarette in the precise spot where the Eagle had caught us so many months before. We'd just come from a town meeting, where the Eagle announced the school was going to build a playground by the lake in memory of Alaska. She did like swings, I guess, but a playground? Lara stood up at the meeting — surely a first for her — and said they should do something funnier, something Alaska herself would have done.

Now, by the lake, sitting on a mossy, half-rotten log, the Colonel said to me, 'Lara was right. We should do something for her. A prank. Something she would have loved.'

'Like, a memorial prank?'

'Exactly. The Alaska Young Memorial Prank. We can make it an annual event. Anyway, she came up with this idea last year. But she wanted to save it to be our senior prank. But it's good. It's really good. It's historic.'

'Are you going to tell me?' I asked, thinking back to the time when he and Alaska had left me out of prank planning for Barn Night.

'Sure,' he said. 'The prank is entitled 'Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.'' And he told me, and I have to say, Alaska left us with the crown jewel of pranks, the Mona Lisa of high-school hilarity, the culmination of generations of Culver Creek pranking. And if the Colonel could pull it off, it would be etched in the memory of everyone at the Creek, and Alaska deserved nothing less. Best of all, it did not, technically, involve any expellable offenses.

The Colonel got up and dusted the dirt and moss off his pants. 'I think we owe her that.'

And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh. And maybe — just maybe — she would give us the clue we needed.

eighty-three days after

Two weeks later,the Colonel returned from spring break with two notebooks filled with the minutiae of prank planning, sketches of various locations, and a forty-page, two-column list of problems that might crop up and their solutions. He calculated all times to a tenth of a second, and all distances to the inch, and then he recalculated, as if he could not bear the thought of failing her again. And then on that Sunday, the Colonel woke up late and rolled over. I was reading The Sound and the Fury, which I was supposed to have read in mid- February, and I looked up as I heard the rustling in the bed, and the Colonel said, 'Let's get the band back together.' And so I ventured out into the overcast spring and woke up Lara and Takumi, then brought them back to Room 43. The Barn Night crew was intact — or as close as it ever would be — for the Alaska Young Memorial Prank.

The three of us sat on the couch while the Colonel stood in front of us, outlining the plan and our parts in it with an excitement I hadn't seen in him since Before. When he finished, he asked, 'Any questions?'

'Yeah,' Takumi said. 'Is that seriously going to work?'

'Well, first we gotta find a stripper. And second Pudge has to work some magic with his dad.'

'All right, then,' Takumi said. 'Let's get to work.'

eighty-four days after

Every spring,Culver Creek took one Friday afternoon off from classes, and all the students, faculty, and staff were required to go to the gym for Speaker Day. Speaker Day featured two speakers — usually small-time celebrities or small-time politicians or small-time academics, the kind of people who would come and speak at a school for the measly three hundred bucks the school budgeted. The junior class picked the first speaker and the seniors the second, and anyone who had ever attended a Speaker Day agreed that they were torturously boring. We planned to shake Speaker Day up a bit.

All we needed to do was convince the Eagle to let 'Dr. William Morse,' a 'friend of my dad's' and a 'preeminent scholar of deviant sexuality in adolescents,' be the junior class's speaker.

So I called my dad at work, and his secretary, Paul, asked me if everything was all right, and I wondered why everyone, everyone, asked me if everything was all right when I called at any time other than Sunday morning.

'Yeah, I'm fine.'

My dad picked up. 'Hey, Miles. Is everything all right?'

I laughed and spoke quietly into the phone, since people were milling about. 'Yeah, Dad. Everything is fine. Hey, remember when you stole the school bell and buried it in the cemetery?'

'Greatest Culver Creek prank ever,' he responded proudly.

'It was, Dad. It was. So listen, I wonder if you'd help out with the new greatest Culver Creek prank ever.'

'Oh, I don't know about that, Miles. I don't want you getting in any trouble.'

'Well, I won't. The whole junior class is planning it. And it's not like anyone is going to get hurt or anything.

Because, well, remember Speaker Day?'

'God that was boring. That was almost worse than class.'

'Yeah, well, I need you to pretend to be our speaker. Dr. William Morse, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and an expert in adolescent understandings of sexuality.'

He was quiet for a long time, and I looked down at Alaska's last daisy and waited for him to ask what the prank was, and I would have told him, but I just heard him breathe slowly into the phone, and then he said, 'I won't even ask. Hmm.' He sighed. 'Swear to God you'll never tell your mother.'

'I swear to God.' I paused. It took me a second to remember the Eagle's real name. 'Mr. Starnes is going to call you in about ten minutes.'

'Okay, my name is Dr. William Morse, and I'm a psychology professor, and — adolescent sexuality?'

'Yup. You're the best, Dad.'

'I just want to see if you can top me,' he said, laughing.

Although it killed the Colonel to do it, the prank could not work without the assistance of the Weekday Warriors — specifically junior-class president Longwell Chase, who by now had grown his silly surfer mop back. But the Warriors loved the idea, so I met Longwell in his room and said, 'Let's go.'

Longwell Chase and I had nothing to talk about and no desire to pretend otherwise, so we walked silently to the Eagle's house. The Eagle came to the door before we even knocked. He cocked his head a little when he saw us, looking confused — and, indeed, we made an odd couple, with Long well's pressed and pleated khaki pants and my I-keep-meaning-to-do-laundry blue jeans.

'The speaker we picked is a friend of Miles's dad,' Longwell said. 'Dr. William Morse. He's a professor at a university down in Florida, and he studies adolescent sexuality.'

'Aiming for controversy, are we?'

'Oh no,' I said. 'I've met Dr. Morse. He's interesting, but he's not controversial. He just studies the, uh, the way that adolescents' understanding of sex is still changing and growing. I mean, he's opposed to premarital sex.'

'Well. What's his phone number?' I gave the Eagle a piece of paper, and he walked to a phone on the wall and dialed. 'Yes, hello. I'm calling to speak with Dr. Morse?…Okay, thanks…Hello, Dr. Morse. I have Miles Halter here in my home, and he tells me…great, wonderful…Well, I was wondering' — the Eagle paused, twisting the cord around his finger—'wondering, I guess, whether you — just so long as you understand that these are impressionable young people. We wouldn't want explicit discussions…. Excellent. Excellent. I'm glad you understand…. You, too, sir. See you soon!' The Eagle hung up the phone, smiling, and said, 'Good choice! He seems like a very interesting man.'