Текст книги "Looking for Alaska"

Автор книги: John Green

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 15 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 6 страниц]

one hundred twenty-two days before

After my last class of my first week at Culver Creek, I entered Room 43 to an unlikely sight: the diminutive and shirtless Colonel, hunched over an ironing board, attacking a pink button-down shirt. Sweat trickled down his forehead and chest as he ironed with great enthusiasm, his right arm pushing the iron across the length of the shirt with such vigor that his breathing nearly duplicated Dr. Hyde's.

"I have a date," he explained. "This is an emergency." He paused to catch his breath. "Do you know" – breath—"how to iron?"

I walked over to the pink shirt. It was wrinkled like an old woman who'd spent her youth sunbathing. If only the Colonel didn't ball up his every belonging and stuff it into random dresser drawers. "I think you just turn it on and press it against the shirt, right?" I said. "I don't know. I didn't even know we hadan iron."

"We don't. It's Takumi's. But Takumi doesn't know how to iron, either. And when I asked Alaska, she started yelling, `You're not going to impose the patriarchal paradigm on me.'Oh, God, I need to smoke. I need to smoke, but I can't reek when I see Sara's parents. Okay, screw it. We're going to smoke in the bathroom with the shower on. The shower has steam. Steam gets rid of wrinkles, right?

"By the way," he said as I followed him into the bathroom, "if you want to smoke inside during the day, just turn on the shower. The smoke follows the steam up the vents."

Though this made no scientific sense, it seemed to work. The shower's shortage of water pressure and low showerhead made it all but useless for showering, but it worked great as a smoke screen.

Sadly, it made a poor iron. The Colonel tried ironing the shirt once more ("I'm just gonna push really hard and see if that helps") and finally put it on wrinkled. He matched the shirt with a blue tie decorated with horizontal lines of little pink flamingos.

"The one thing my lousy father taught me," the Colonel said as his hands nimbly threaded the tie into a perfect knot, "was how to tie a tie. Which is odd, since I can't imagine when he ever had to wear one."

Just then, Sara knocked on the door. I'd seen her once or twice before, but the Colonel never introduced me to her and didn't have a chance to that night.

«Oh. My God. Can't you at least press your shirt?» she asked, even though the Colonel was standing in front of the ironing board.

"We're going out with my parents."Sara looked awfully nice in her blue summer dress. Her long, pale blond hair was pulled up into a twist, with a strand of hair falling down each side of her face. She looked like a movie star – a bitchy one.

"Look, I did my best. We don't all have maids to do our ironing."

"Chip, that chip on your shoulder makes you look even shorter."

"Christ, can't we get out the door without fighting?"

"I'm just saying. It's the opera.It's a big deal to my parents. Whatever. Let's go." I felt like leaving, but it seemed stupid to hide in the bathroom, and Sara was standing in the doorway, one hand cocked on her hip and the other fiddling with her car keys as if to say, Let's go.

"I could wear a tuxedo and your parents would still hate me!" he shouted.

"That's not my fault! You antagonize them!" She held up the car keys in front of him. "Look, we're going now or we're not going."

"Fuck it. I'm not going anywhere with you," the Colonel said.

"Fine. Have a great night." Sara slammed the door so hard that a sizable biography of Leo Tolstoy (last words: "The truth is…I care a great deal…what they…") fell off my bookshelf and landed with a thud on our checkered floor like an echo of the slamming door.

"AHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!"he screamed.

"So that's Sara," I said.

"Yes."

"She seems nice."

The Colonel laughed, knelt down next to the mini fridge, and pulled out a gallon of milk. He opened it, took a swig, winced, half coughed, and sat down on the couch with the milk between his legs.

"Is it sour or something?"

"Oh, I should have mentioned that earlier. This isn't milk. It's five parts milk and one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the milk, so the Eagle can't catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes like sour milk and rubbing alcohol, but it's Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch. Want some?"

"I think I'll pass." Aside from a few sips of champagne on New Year's under the watchful eye of my parents, I'd never really drunk any alcohol, and "ambrosia" didn't seem like the drink with which to start. Outside, I heard the pay phone ring. Given the fact that 190 boarders shared five pay phones, I was amazed at how infrequently it rang. We weren't supposed to have cell phones, but I'd noticed that some of the Weekday Warriors carried them surreptitiously. And most non-Warriors called their parents, as I did, on a regular basis, so parents only called when their kids forgot.

"Are you going to get that?" the Colonel asked me. I didn't feel like being bossed around by him, but I also didn't feel like fighting.

Through a buggy twilight, I walked to the pay phone, which was drilled into the wall between Rooms 44 and 45.

On both sides of the phone, dozens of phone numbers and esoteric notes were written in pen and marker (205.555.1584; Tommy to airport 4:20;773.573.6521; JG – Kuffs?).Calling the pay phone required a great deal of patience. I picked up on about the ninth ring.

"Can you get Chip for me?" Sara asked. It sounded like she was on a cell phone.

"Yeah, hold on."

I turned, and he was already behind me, as if he knew it would be her. I handed him the receiver and walked back to the room.

A minute later, three words made their way to our room through the thick, still air of Alabama at almost-night.

"Screw you too!" the Colonel shouted.

Back in the room, he sat down with his ambrosia and told me, "She says I ratted out Paul and Marya. That's what the Warriors are saying. That I ratted them out. Me. That's why the piss in the shoes. That's why the nearly killing you. 'Cause you live with me, and they say I'm a rat."

I tried to remember who Paul and Marya were. The names were familiar, but I had heard so many names in the last week, and I couldn't match "Paul" and "Marya" with faces. And then I remembered why: I'd never seen them.

They got kicked out the year before, having committed the Trifecta.

"How long have you been dating her?" I asked.

"Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn't even briefly like her. Like, my mom and my dad – my dad would get pissed, and then he would beat the shit out of my mom. And then my dad would be all nice, and they'd have like a honeymoon period. But with Sara, there's never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a rat? I know, I know: Why don't we break up?" He ran a hand through his hair, clutching a fistful of it atop his head, and said, "I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And that's not an easy thing to do. I'm a bad boyfriend. She's a bad girlfriend. We deserve each other."

"But-" "I can't believe they think that," he said as he walked to the bookshelf and pulled down the almanac. He took a long pull off his ambrosia. "Goddamn Weekday Warriors. It was probably one of them that ratted out Paul and Marya and then blamed me to cover their tracks. Anyway, it's a good night for staying in. Staying in with Pudge and ambrosia."

"I still—" I said, wanting to say that I didn't understand how you could kiss someone who believed you were a rat if being a rat was the worst thing in the world, but the Colonel cut me off.

"Not another word about it. You know what the capital of Sierra Leone is?"

"No."

"Me neither," he said, "but I intend to find out." And with that, he stuck his nose in the almanac, and the conversation was over.

one hundred ten days before

Keeping up with my classes proved easier than I'd expected. My general predisposition to spending a lot of time inside reading gave me a distinct advantage over the average Culver Creek student. By the third week of classes, plenty of kids had been sunburned to a bufriedo-like golden brown from days spent chatting outside in the shadeless dorm circle during free periods. But I was barely pink: I studied.

And I listened in class, too, but on that Wednesday morning, when Dr. Hyde started talking about how Buddhists believe that all things are interconnected, I found myself staring out the window. I was looking at the wooded, slow-sloping hill beyond the lake. And from Hyde's classroom, things did seem connected: The trees seemed to clothe the hill, and just as I would never think to notice a particular cotton thread in the magnificently tight orange tank top Alaska wore that day, I couldn't see the trees for the forest – everything so intricately woven together that it made no sense to think of one tree as independent from that hill. And then I heard my name, and I knew I was in trouble.

"Mr. Halter," the Old Man said. "Here I am, straining my lungs for your edification. And yet somethingout there seems to have caught your fancy in a way that I've been unable to do. Pray tell: What have you discovered out there?"

Now I felt my own breath shorten, the whole class watching me, thanking God they weren'tme. Dr. Hyde had already done this three times, kicking kids out of class for not paying attention or writing notes to one another.

"Urn, I was just looking outside at the, uh, at the hill and thinking about, um, the trees and the forest, like you were saying earlier, about the way—" The Old Man, who obviously did not tolerate vocalized rambling, cut me off. "I'm going to ask you to leave class, Mr. Halter, so that you can go out there and discover the relationship between the um-trees and the uh-forest.

And tomorrow, when you're ready to take this class seriously, I will welcome you back."

I sat still, my pen resting in my hand, my notebook open, my face flushed and my jaw jutting out into an underbite, an old trick I had to keep from looking sad or scared. Two rows behind me, I heard a chair move and turned around to see Alaska standing up, slinging her backpack over one arm.

"I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. You can't just throw him out of class. You drone on and on for an hour every day, and we're not allowed to glance out the window?"

The Old Man stared back at Alaska like a bull at a matador, then raised a hand to his sagging face and slowly rubbed the white stubble on his cheek. "For fifty minutes a day, five days a week, you abide by my rules. Or you fail. The choice is yours. Both of you leave."

I stuffed my notebook into my backpack and walked out, humiliated. As the door shut behind me, I felt a tap on my left shoulder. I turned, but there was no one there. Then I turned the other way, and Alaska was smiling at me, the skin between her eyes and temple crinkled into a starburst. "The oldest trick in the book," she said, "but everybody falls for it."

I tried a smile, but I couldn't stop thinking about Dr. Hyde. It was worse than the Duct Tape Incident, because I always knew that the Kevin Richmans of the world didn't like me. But my teachers had always been card-carrying members of the Miles Halter Fan Club.

"I told you he was an asshole," she said.

"I still think he's a genius. He's right. I wasn't listening."

"Right, but he didn't need to be a jerk about it. Like he needs to prove his power by humiliating you?! Anyway," she said, "the only real geniuses are artists: Yeats, Picasso, Garcia Marquez: geniuses.Dr. Hyde: bitter old man."

And then she announced we were going to look for four-leaf clovers until class ended and we could go smoke with the Colonel and Takumi, "both of whom," she added, "are big-time assholes for not marching out of class right behind us."

When Alaska Young is sitting with her legs crossed in a brittle, periodically green clover patch leaning forward in search of four-leaf clovers, the pale skin of her sizable cleavage clearly visible, it is a plain fact of human physiology that it becomes impossible to join in her clover search. I'd gotten in enough trouble already for looking where I wasn't supposed to, but still…

After perhaps two minutes of combing through a clover patch with her long, dirty fingernails, Alaska grabbed a clover with three full-size petals and an undersize, runt of a fourth, then looked up at me, barely giving me time to avert my eyes.

"Even though you were dearlynot doing your part in the clover search, perv," she said wryly, «I really would give you this clover. Except luck is for suckers.» She pinched the runt petal between the nails of her thumb and finger and plucked it. «There,» she said to the clover as she dropped it onto the ground. «Now you're not a genetic freak anymore.»

"Uh, thanks," I said. The bell rang, and Takumi and the Colonel were first out the door. Alaska stared at them.

"What?" asked the Colonel. But she just rolled her eyes and started walking. We followed in silence through the dorm circle and then across the soccer field. We ducked into the woods, following the faint path around the lake until we came to a dirt road. The Colonel ran up to Alaska, and they started fighting about something quietly enough that I couldn't hear the words so much as the mutual annoyance, and I finally asked Takumi where we were headed.

"This road dead-ends into the barn," he said. "So maybe there. But probably the smoking hole. You'll see."

From here, the woods were a totally different creature than from Dr. Hyde's classroom. The ground was thick with fallen branches, decaying pine needles, and brambly green bushes; the path wound past pine trees sprouting tall and thin, their stubbly needles providing a lace of shade from another sunburned day. And the smaller oak and maple trees, which from Dr. Hyde's classroom had been invisible beneath the more majestic pines, showed hints of an as-yet-thermally-unforeseeable fall: Their still-green leaves were beginning to droop.

We came to a rickety wooden bridge – just thick plywood laid over a concrete foundation – over Culver Creek, the winding rivulet that doubled back over and over again through the outskirts of campus. On the far side of the bridge, there was a tiny path leading down a steep slope. Not even a path so much as a series of hints – a broken branch here, a patch of stomped-down grass there – that people had come this way before. As we walked down single file, Alaska, the Colonel, and Takumi each held back a thick maple branch for one another, passing it along until I, last in line, let it snap back into place behind me. And there, beneath the bridge, an oasis. A slab of concrete, three feet wide and ten feet long, with blue plastic chairs stolen long ago from some classroom. Cooled by the creek and the shade of the bridge, I felt unhot for the first time in weeks.

The Colonel dispensed the cigarettes. Takumi passed; the rest of us lit up.

"He has no right to condescend to us is all I'm saying," Alaska said, continuing her conversation with the Colonel.

"Pudge is done with staring out the window, and I'm done with going on tirades about it, but he's a terrible teacher, and you won't convince me otherwise."

"Fine," the Colonel said. "Just don't make another scene. Christ, you nearly killed the poor old bastard."

"Seriously, you'll never win by crossing Hyde," Takumi said.

"He'll eat you alive, shit you out, and then piss on his dump. Which by the way is what we should be doing to whoever ratted on Marya. Has anyone heard anything?"

"It must have been some Weekday Warrior," Alaska said. "But apparently they think it was the Colonel. So who knows. Maybe the Eagle just got lucky. She was stupid; she got caught; she got expelled; it's over. That's what happens when you're stupid and you get caught." Alaska made an O with her lips, moving her mouth like a goldfish eating, trying unsuccessfully to blow smoke rings.

"Wow," Takumi said, "if I ever get kicked out, remind me to even the score myself, since I sure can't count on you."

"Don't be ridiculous," she responded, not angry so much as dismissive. "I don't understand why you're so obsessed with figuring out everything that happens here, like we have to unravel every mystery. God, it's over.

Takumi, you gotta stop stealing other people's problems and get some of your own." Takumi started up again, but Alaska raised her hand as if to swat the conversation away.

I said nothing – I hadn't known Marya, and anyway, "listening quietly" was my general social strategy.

"Anyway," Alaska said to me. "I thought the way he treated you was just awful. I wanted to cry. I just wanted to kiss you and make it better."

"Shame you didn't," I deadpanned, and they laughed.

"You're adorable," she said, and I felt the intensity of her eyes on me and looked away nervously. "Too bad I love my boyfriend." I stared at the knotted roots of the trees on the creek bank, trying hard not to look like I'd just been called adorable.

Takumi couldn't believe it either, and he walked over to me, tussling my hair with his hand, and started rapping to Alaska. "Yeah, Pudge is adorable / but you want incorrigible / so Jake is more endurable / 'cause he's sodamn. Damn. I almost had four rhymes on adorable.But all I could think of was unfloorable,which isn't even a word."

Alaska laughed. "That made me not be mad at you anymore. God, rapping is sexy. Pudge, did you even know that you're in the presence of the sickest emcee in Alabama?"

"Urn, no."

"Drop a beat, Colonel Catastrophe," Takumi said, and I laughed at the idea that a guy as short and dorky as the Colonel could have a rap name. The Colonel cupped his hands around his mouth and started making some absurd noises that I suppose were intended to be beats. Puh-chi. Puh-puhpuh-chi.Takumi laughed.

"Right here, by the river, you want me to kick it? / If your smoke was a Popsicle, I'd surely lick it / My rhymin' is old school, sort of like the ancient Romans / The Colonel's beats is sad like Arthur Miller's Willy Loman / Sometimes I'm accused of being a showman / ICanRhymeFast and I can rhyme slow, man."

He paused, took a breath, and then finished.

"Like Emily Dickinson, I ain't afraid of slant rhyme / And that's the end of this verse; emcee's out on a high."

I didn't know slant rhyme from regular rhyme, but I was suitably impressed. We gave Takumi a soft round of applause. Alaska finished her cigarette and flicked it into the river.

"Why do you smoke so damn fast?" I asked.

She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, "Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die."

one hundred nine days before

Dinner in the cafeteria the next night was meat loaf, one of the rare dishes that didn't arrive deep-fried, and, perhaps as a result, meat loaf was Maureen's greatest failure – a stringy, gravy-soaked concoction that did not much resemble a loaf and did not much taste like meat. Although I'd never ridden in it, Alaska apparently had a car, and she offered to drive the Colonel and me to McDonald's, but the Colonel didn't have any money, and I didn't have much either, what with constantly paying for his extravagant cigarette habit.

So instead the Colonel and I reheated two-day-old bufriedos – unlike, say, french fries, a microwaved bufriedo lost nothing of its taste or its satisfying crunch – after which the Colonel insisted on attending the Creek's first basketball game of the season.

«Basketball in the fall?» I asked the Colonel. «I don't know much about sports, but isn't that when you play football?»

"The schools in our league are too small to have football teams, so we play basketball in the fall. Although, man, the Culver Creek football team would be a thing of beauty. Your scrawny ass could probably start at lineman.

Anyway, the basketball games are great."

I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didn't hate people who watched or played them. In third grade – the very last year that one could play T-ball – my mother wanted me to make friends, so she forced me onto the Orlando Pirates. I made friends all right – with a bunch of kindergartners, which didn't really bolster my social standing with my peers.

Primarily because I towered over the rest of the players, I nearly made it onto the T-ball all-star team that year.

The kid who beat me, Clay Wurtzel, had one arm. I was an unusually tall third grader with two arms, and I got beat out by kindergartner Clay Wurtzel. And it wasn't some pity-the-one-armed-kid thing, either. Clay Wurtzel could flat-out hit,whereas I sometimes struck out even with the ball sitting on the tee. One of the things that appealed to me most about Culver Creek was that my dad assured me there was no PE requirement.

"There is only one time when I put aside my passionate hatred for the Weekday Warriors and their country-club bullshit," the Colonel told me. "And that's when they pump up the air-conditioning in the gym for a little old-fashioned Culver Creek basketball. You can't miss the first game of the year."

As we walked toward the airplane hangar of a gym, which I had seen but never even thought to approach, the Colonel explained to me the most important thing about our basketball team: They were not very good. The "star" of the team, the Colonel said, was a senior named Hank Walsten, who played power forward despite being five-foot-eight. Hank's primary claim to campus fame, I already knew, was that he always had weed, and the Colonel told me that for four years, Hank started every game without ever once playing sober.

"He loves weed like Alaska loves sex," the Colonel said. "This is a man who once constructed a bong using only the barrel of an air rifle, a ripe pear, and an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of Anna Kournikova. Not the brightest gem in the jewelry shop, but you've got to admire his single-minded dedication to drug abuse."

From Hank, the Colonel told me, it went downhill until you reached Wilson Carbod, the starting center, who was almost six feet tall. "We're so bad," the Colonel said, "we don't even have a mascot. I call us the Culver Creek Nothings."

"So they just suck?" I asked. I didn't quite understand the point of watching your terrible team get walloped, though the air-conditioning was reason enough for me.

"Oh, they suck," the Colonel replied. "But we always beat the shit out of the deaf-and-blind school." Apparently, basketball wasn't a big priority at the Alabama School for the Deaf and Blind, and so we usually came out of the season with a single victory.

When we arrived, the gym was packed with most every Culver Creek student – I noticed, for instance, the Creek's three goth girls reapplying their eyeliner as they sat on the top row of the gym's bleachers. I'd never attended a school basketball game back home, but I doubted the crowds there were quite so inclusive. Even so, I was surprised when none other than Kevin Richman sat down on the bleacher directly in front of me while the opposing school's cheerleading team (their unfortunate school colors were mud-brown and dehydrated-piss-yellow) tried to fire up the small visitors' section in the crowd. Kevin turned around and stared at the Colonel.

Like most of the other guy Warriors, Kevin dressed preppy, looking like a lawyer-who-enjoys-golfing waiting to happen. And his hair, a blond mop, short on the sides and spiky on top, was always soaked through with so much gel that it looked perennially wet. I didn't hate him like the Colonel did, of course, because the Colonel hated him on principle, and principled hate is a hell of a lot stronger than "Boy, I wish you hadn't mummified me and thrown me into the lake" hate. Still, I tried to stare at him intimidatingly as he looked at the Colonel, but it was hard to forget that this guy had seen my skinny ass in nothing but boxers a couple weeks ago.

«You ratted out Paul and Marya. We got you back. Truce?» Kevin asked.

"I didn't rat them out. Pudge here certainlydidn't rat them out, but you brought him in on your fun. Truce?

Hmm, let me take a poll real quick." The cheerleaders sat down, holding their pompoms close to their chest as if praying. "Hey, Pudge," the Colonel said. "What do you think of a truce?"

"It reminds me of when the Germans demanded that the U.S. surrender at the Battle of the Bulge," I said. "I guess I'd say to this truce offer what General McAuliffe said to that one: Nuts."

"Why would you try to kill this guy, Kevin? He's a genius. Nuts to your truce."

"Come on, dude. I know you ratted them out, and we had to defend our friend, and now it's over. Let's end it." He seemed very sincere, perhaps due to the Colonel's reputation for pranking.

"I'll make you a deal. You pick one dead American president. If Pudge doesn't know that guy's last words, truce.

If he does, you spend the rest of your life lamenting the day you pissed in my shoes."

"That's retarded."

"All right, no truce," the Colonel shot back.

"Fine. Millard Fillmore," Kevin said. The Colonel looked at me hurriedly, his eyes saying, Was that guy a president?I just smiled.

"When Fillmore was dying, he was super hungry. But his doctor was trying to starve his fever or whatever.

Fillmore wouldn't shut up about wanting to eat, though, so finally the doctor gave him a tiny teaspoon of soup.

And all sarcastic, Fillmore said, 'The nourishment is palatable,' and then died. No truce."

Kevin rolled his eyes and walked away, and it occurred to me that I could have made up any last words for Millard Fillmore and Kevin probably would have believed me if I'd used that same tone of voice, the Colonel's confidence rubbing off on me.

"That was your first badass moment!" The Colonel laughed.

"Now, it's true that I gave you an easy target. But still. Well done."

Unfortunately for the Culver Creek Nothings, we weren't playing the deaf-and-blind school. We were playing some Christian school from downtown Birmingham, a team stocked with huge, gargantuan apemen with thick beards and a strong distaste for turning the othercheek.

At the end of the first quarter: 20-4.

And that's when the fun started. The Colonel led all of the cheers.

"Cornbread!" he screamed.

"CHICKEN!" the crowd responded.

"Rice!"

"PEAS!"

And then, all together: "WE GOT HIGHER SATs."

"Hip Hip Hip Hooray!" the Colonel cried.

"YOU'LL BE WORKIN' FOR US SOMEDAY!"

The opposing team's cheerleaders tried to answer our cheers with «The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire! Hell is in your future if you give in to desire,» but we could always do them one better.

"Buy!"

"SELL!"

"Trade!"

"BARTER!"

"YOU'RE MUCH BIGGER, BUT WE ARE SMARTER!"

When the visitors shoot a free throw on most every court in the country, the fans make a lot of noise, screaming and stomping their feet. It doesn't work, because players learn to tune out white noise. At Culver Creek, we had a much better strategy. At first, everyone yelled and screamed like in a normal game. But then everyone said, "Shh!" and there was absolute silence. Just as our hated opponent stopped dribbling and prepared for his shot, the Colonel stood up and screamed something. Like: "For the love of God, please shave your back hair!" Or: "I need to be saved. Can you minister to me after your shot?!"

Toward the end of the third quarter, the Christian-school coach called a time-out and complained to the ref about the Colonel, pointing at him angrily. We were down 56–13. The Colonel stood up. "What?! You have a problem with me!?"

The coach screamed, "You're bothering my players!"

"THAT'S THE POINT, SHERLOCK!" the Colonel screamed back. The ref came over and kicked him out of the gym. I followed him.

"I've gotten thrown out of thirty-seven straight games," he said.

"Damn."

"Yeah. Once or twice, I've had to go really crazy. I ran onto the court with eleven seconds left once and stole the ball from the other team. It wasn't pretty. But, you know. I have a streak to maintain."

The Colonel ran ahead of me, gleeful at his ejection, and I jogged after him, trailing in his wake. I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like comets need tails.