Looking for Alaska

want to look at them and I didn't want to fall, so I watched my steps, trying to avoid the bigger rocks. I felt the fight-or-fIight reflex swell up in me over and over again, but I knew that neither fight nor flight had ever worked for me before. They took me a roundabout way to the fake beach, andthen I knew what would happen — a good, old- fashioned dunking in the lake — and I calmed down. I could handle that.

When we reached the beach, they told me to put my arms at my sides, and the beefiest guy grabbed two rolls of duct tape from the sand. With my arms flat against my sides like a soldier at attention, they mummified me from my shoulder to my wrists. Then they threw me down on the ground; the sand from the fake beach cushioned the landing, but I still hit my head. Two of them pulled my legs together while the other one — Kevin, I'd figured output his angular, strong-jawed face up so close to mine that the gel-soaked spikes of hair pointing out from his forehead poked at my face, and told me, 'This is for the Colonel. You shouldn't hang out with that asshole.' They taped my legs together, from ankles to thighs. I looked like a silver mummy. I said, 'Please guys, don't,' just before they taped my mouth shut. Then they picked me up and hurled me into the water.

Sinking. Sinking, but instead of feeling panic or anything else, I realized that 'Please guys, don't' were terrible last words. But then the great miracle of the human species — our buoyancy — came through, and as I felt myself floating toward the surface, I twisted and turned as best I could so that the warm night air hit my nose first, and I breathed. I wasn't dead and wasn't going to die.

Well,I thought, that wasn't so bad.

But there was still the small matter of getting to shore before the sun rose. First, to determine my position vis-avis the shoreline. If I tilted my head too much, I felt my whole body start to roll, and on the long list of unpleasant ways to die, 'facedown in soaking-wet white boxers' is pretty high up there. So instead I rolled my eyes and craned my neck back, my eyes almost underwater, until I saw that the shore — not ten feet away — was directly behind my head. I began to swim, an armless silver mermaid, using only my hips to generate motion, until finally my ass scraped against the lake's mucky bottom. I turned then and used my hips and waist to roll three times, until I came ashore near a ratty green towel. They'd left me a towel. How thoughtful.

The water had seeped under the duct tape and loosened the adhesive's grip on my skin, but the tape was wrapped around me three layers deep in places, which necessitated wiggling like a fish out of water. Finally it loosened enough for me to slip my left hand up and out against my chest and rip the tape off.

I wrapped myself in the sandy towel. I didn't want to go back to my room and see Chip, because I had no idea what Kevin had meant — maybe if I went back to the room, they'd be waiting for me and they'd get me for real; maybe I needed to show them, 'Okay. Got your message. He's just my roommate, not my friend.' And anyway, I didn't feel terribly friendly toward the Colonel. Have a good time, he'd said. Yeah, I thought. / had a ball.

So I went to Alaska's room. I didn't know what time it was, but I could see a faint light underneath her door. I knocked softly.

'Yeah,' she said, and I came in, wet and sandy and wearing only a towel and soaking boxers. This was not, obviously, how you want the world's hottest girl to see you, but I figured she could explain to me what had just happened.

She put down a book and got out of bed with a sheet wrapped around her shoulders. For a moment, she looked concerned. She looked like the girl I met yesterday, the girl who said I was cute and bubbled over with energy and silliness and intelligence. And then she laughed.

'Guess you went for a swim, huh?' And she said it with such casual malice that I felt that everyone had known, and I wondered why the whole damn school agreed in advance to possibly drown Miles Halter. But Alaska liked the Colonel, and in the confusion of the moment, I just looked at her blankly, unsure even of what to ask.

'Give me a break,' she said. 'Come on. You know what? There are people with real problems. I've got real problems. Mommy ain't here, so buck up, big guy.'

I left without saying a word to her and went to my room, slamming the door behind me, waking the Colonel, and stomping into the bathroom. I got in the shower to wash the algae and the lake off me, but the ridiculous faucet of a shower head failed spectacularly, and how could Alaska and Kevin and those other guys already dislike me?

After I finished the shower, I dried off and went into the room to find some clothes.

'So,' he said. 'What took you so long? Get lost on your way home?'

'They said it was because of you,' I said, and my voice betrayed a hint of annoyance. 'They said I shouldn't hang out with you.'

'What? No, it happens to everybody,' the Colonel said. 'It happened to me. They throw you in the lake. You swim out. You walk home.'

'I couldn't just swim out,' I said softly, pulling on a pair of jean shorts beneath my towel. 'They duct-taped me. I couldn't even move, really.'

'Wait. Wait,' he said, and hopped out of his bunk, staring at me through the darkness. 'They taped you? How?'

And I showed him: I stood like a mummy, with my feet together and my hands at my sides, and showed him how they'd wrapped me up. And then I plopped down onto the couch.

'Christ! You could have drowned! They're just supposed to throw you in the water in your underwear and run!'

he shouted. 'What the hell were they thinking? Who was it? Kevin Richman and who else? Do you remember their faces?'

'Yeah, I think.'

'Why the hell would they do that?' he wondered.

'Did you do something to them?' I asked.

'No, but I'm sure as shit gonna do something to 'em now. We'll get them.'

'It wasn't a big deal. I got out fine.'

'You could have died.' And I could have, I suppose. But I didn't.

'Well, maybe I should just go to the Eagle tomorrow and tell him,' I said.

'Absolutely not,' he answered. He walked over to his crumpled shorts lying on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He lit two and handed one to me. I smoked the whole goddamned thing.

'You're not,' he continued, 'because that's not how shit gets dealt with here. And besides, you really don't want to get a reputation for ratting. But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends.'

And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well, he was right. 'Alaska was kind of mean to me tonight,' I said. I leaned over, opened an empty desk drawer, and used it as a makeshift ashtray.

'Like I said, she's moody.'

I went to bed wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and socks. No matter how miserably hot it got, I resolved, I would sleep in my clothes every night at the Creek, feeling — probably for the first time in my life — the fear and excitement of living in a place where you never know what's going to happen or when.

one hundred twenty-six days before

'Well,now it's war,'the Colonel shouted the next morning. I rolled over and looked at the clock: 7:52. My first Culver Creek class, French, started in eighteen minutes. I blinked a couple times and looked up at the Colonel, who was standing between the couch and the coffee table, holding his well-worn, once-white tennis shoes by the laces. For a long time, he stared at me, and I stared at him. And then, almost in slow motion, a grin crept across the Colonel's face.

'I've got to hand it to them,' he said finally. 'That was pretty clever.'

'What?' I asked.

'Last night — before they woke you up, I guess — they pissed in my shoes.'