off. 'You're so hot! I weesh you'd shut up and take off your clothes.'
The students laughed, but all of the teachers turned around and looked at her, stunned silent. She sat down.
'What's your name, dear?'
'Lara,' she said.
'Now, Lara,' Maxx said, looking down at his paper to remember the line, 'what we have here is a very interesting case study — a female objectifying me, a male. It's so unusual that I can only assume you're making an attempt at humor.'
Lara stood up again and shouted, 'I'm not keeding! Take off your clothes.'
He nervously looked down at the paper, and then looked up at all of us, smiling. 'Well, it is certainly important to subvert the patriarchal paradigm, and I suppose this is a way. All right, then,' he said, stepping to the left of the podium. And then he shouted, loud enough that Takumi could hear him upstairs, 'This one's for Alaska Young.'
As the fast, pumping bass of Prince's 'Get Off' started from the loudspeakers, Dr. William Morse grabbed the leg of his pants with one hand and the lapel of his coat with the other, and the Velcro parted and his stage costume came apart, revealing Maxx with two x's, a stunningly muscular man with an eight- pack in his stomach and bulging pec muscles, and Maxx stood before us, smiling, wearing only briefs that were surely tighty, but not whitey — black leather.
His feet in place, Maxx swayed his arms to the music, and the crowd erupted with laughter and deafening, sustained applause — the largest ovation by a good measure in Speaker Day history. The Eagle was up in a flash, and as soon as he stood, Maxx stopped dancing, but he flexed his pec muscles so that they jumped up and down quickly in time to the music before the Eagle, not smiling but sucking his lips in as if not smiling required effort, indicated with a thumb that Maxx should go on home, and Maxx did.
My eyes followed Maxx out the door, and I saw Takumi standing in the doorway, fists raised in the air in triumph, before he ran back upstairs to cut the music. I was glad he'd gotten to see at least a bit of the show.
Takumi had plenty of time to get his equipment out, because the laughing and talking went on for several minutes while the Eagle kept repeating, 'Okay. Okay. Let's settle down now. Settle down, y'all. Let's settle down.'
The senior-class speaker spoke next. He blew. And as we left the gym, nonjuniors crowded around us, asking, 'Was it you?' and I just smiled and said no, for it had not been me, or the Colonel or Takumi or Lara or Longwell Chase or anyone else in that gym. It had been Alaska's prank through and through. The hardest part about pranking, Alaska told me once, is not being able to confess. But I could confess on her behalf now. And as I slowly made my way out of the gym, I told anyone who would listen, 'No. It wasn't us. It was Alaska.'
The four of us returned to Room 43, aglow in the success of it, convinced that the Creek would never again see such a prank, and it didn't even occur to me that I might get in trouble until the Eagle opened the door to our room and stood above us, and shook his head disdainfully.
'I know it was y'all,' said the Eagle.
We look at him silently. He often bluffed. Maybe he was bluffing.
'Don't ever do anything like that again,' he said. 'But, Lord, 'subverting the patriarchal paradigm'—it's like she wrote the speech.' He smiled and closed the door.
one hundred fourteen days after
A week and Ahalf later,I walked back from my afternoon classes, the sun bearing down on my skin in a constant reminder that spring in Alabama had come and gone in a matter of hours, and now, early May, summer had returned for a six-month visit, and I felt the sweat dribble down my back and longed for the bitter winds of January. When I got to my room, I found Takumi sitting on the couch, reading my biography of Tolstoy.
'Uh, hi,' I said.
He closed the book and placed it beside him and said, 'January10.'
'What?' I asked.
'January 10. That date ring a bell?'
'Yeah, it's the day Alaska died.' Technically, she died three hours into January 11, but it was still, to us anyway, Monday night, January 10.
'Yeah, but something else, Pudge. January 9. Alaska's mom took her to the zoo.'
'Wait. No. How do you know that?'
'She told us at Barn Night. Remember?'
Of course I didn't remember. If I could remember numbers, I wouldn't be struggling toward a C-plus in precalc.
'Holy shit,' I said as the Colonel walked in.
'What?' the Colonel asked.
'January 9, 1997,' I told him. 'Alaska liked the bears. Her mom liked the monkeys.' The Colonel looked at me blankly for a moment and then took his backpack off and slung it across the room in a single motion.
'Holy shit,' he said. 'WHY THE HELL DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT!'
Within a minute, the Colonel had the best solution either of us would ever come up with. 'Okay. She's sleeping.
Jake calls, and she talks to him, and she's doodling, and she looks at her white flower, and 'Oh God my mom liked white flowers and put them in my hair when I was little,' and then she flips out. She comes back into her room and starts screaming at us that she forgot — forgot about her mom, of course — so she takes the flowers, drives off campus, on her way to — what?' He looked at me. 'What? Her mom's grave?'
And I said, 'Yeah, probably. Yeah. So she gets into the car, and she just wants to get to her mom's grave, but there's this jackknifed truck and the cops there, and she's drunk and pissed off and she's in a hurry, so she thinks she can squeeze past the cop car, and she's not even thinking straight, but she has to get to her mom, and she thinks she can get past it somehow and
Takumi nods slowly, thinking, and then says, 'Or, she gets into the car with the flowers. But she's already missed the anniversary. She's probably thinking that she screwed things up with her mom again — first she doesn't call 911, and now she can't even remember the freaking anniversary. And she's furious and she hates herself, and she decides, 'That's it, I'm doing it,' and she sees the cop car and there's her chance and she just floors it.'
The Colonel reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapping it upside down against thecoffee table. 'Well,' he said. 'That clears things up nicely.'
one hundred eighteen days after
So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be discovered. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved. I still did not know her as I wanted to, but I never could.
She made it impossible for me. And the accicide, the suident, would never be anything else, and I was left to ask,
Because they are different crimes, and I didn't know whether to feel angry at her for making me part of her suicide or just to feel angry at myself for letting her go.
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it out, she had made us closer — the Colonel and Takumi and me, anyway. And that was it. She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to rediscover the Great Perhaps.
'There's one more thing we should do,' the Colonel said as we played a video game together with the sound
