John Green: Looking for 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.

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 POOF."

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."

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, Did I help you toward a fate you didn't want, Alaska, or did I just assist in your willful self-destruction?

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 onjust the two of us, like in the first days of the Investigation.

"There's nothing more we can do."

"I want to drive through it," he said. "Like she did."

We couldn't risk leaving campus in the middle of the night like she had, so we left about twelve hours earlier, at 3:00 in the afternoon, with the Colonel behind the wheel of Takumi's SUV. We asked Lara and Takumi to come along, but they were tired of chasing ghosts, and besides, finals were coming.

It was a bright afternoon, and the sun bore down on the asphalt so that the ribbon of road before us quivered with heat. We drove a mile down Highway 119 and then merged onto I-65 northbound, heading toward the accident scene and Vine Station.

The Colonel drove fast, and we were quiet, staring straight ahead. I tried to imagine what she might have been thinking, trying again to see through time and space, to get inside her head just for a moment. An ambulance, lights and sirens blaring, sped past us, going in the opposite direction, toward school, and for an instant, I felt a nervous excitement and thought, It could be someone I know. I almost wished it was someone I knew, to give new form and depth to the sadness I still felt.

The silence broke: "Sometimes I liked it," I said. "Sometimes I liked it that she was dead."

"You mean it felt good?"

"No. I don't know. It felt..pure."

"Yeah," he said, dropping his usual eloquence. "Yeah. I know. Me, too. It's natural. I mean, it must be natural."

It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.

Five miles north of school, the Colonel moved into the left lane of the interstate and began to accelerate. I gritted my teeth, and then before us, broken glass glittered in the blare of the sun like the road was wearing jewelry, and that spot must be the spot. He was still accelerating.

I thought: This would not be a bad way to go.

I thought: Straight and fast Maybe she just decided at the last second.

And POOF we are through the moment of her death. We are driving through the place that she could not drive through, passing onto asphalt she never saw, and we are not dead. We are not dead! We are breathing and we are crying and now slowing down and moving back into the right lane.

We got off at the next exit, quietly, and, switching drivers, we walked in front of the car. We met and I held him, my hands balled into tight fists around his shoulders, and he wrapped his short arms around me and squeezed tight, so that I felt the heaves of his chest as we realized over and over again that we were still alive. I realized it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realized, all the time later, that you are still alive.

The colonel and I threw ourselves into school once we gave up, knowing that we'd both need to ace our finals to achieve our GPA goals (I wanted a 3.0 and the Colonel wouldn't settle for even a 3.98). Our room became Study Central for the four of us, with Takumi and Lara over till all hours of the night talking about The Sound and the Fury and meiosis and the Battle of the Bulge. The Colonel taught us a semester's worth of precalc, although he was too good at math to teach it very well—"Of course it makes sense. Just trust me. Christ, it's not that hard" — and I missed Alaska.