Looking for Alaska

you, okay? Okay, I gotta go.\" \"I think I found something!\" I shoutedat the Colonel, invisible beneath hisblanket, but the urgency in my voice andthe promise of something, anything,found, woke the Colonel up instantly,and he jumped from his bunk to thelinoleum. Before I could say anything, hegrabbed yesterday's jeans and sweatshirtfrom the floor, pulled them on, andfollowed me outside. \"Look.\" I pointed, and he squatteddown beside the phone and said, \"Yeah.She drew that. She was always doodlingthose flowers.\" \"And 'just doodling,' remember?Jake asked her what she was doing and

she said 'just doodling,' and then shesaid 'Oh God' and freaked out. Shelooked at the doodle and rememberedsomething.\" \"Good memory, Pudge,\" heacknowledged, and I wondered why theColonel wouldn't just get excited aboutit. \"And then she freaked out,\" Irepeated, \"and went and got the tulipswhile we were getting the fireworks.She saw the doodle, rememberedwhatever she'd forgotten, and thenfreaked out.\" \"Maybe,\" he said, still staring at theflower, trying perhaps to see it as shehad. He stood up finally and said, \"It's asolid theory, Pudge,\" and reached up and

patted my shoulder, like a coachcomplimenting a player. \"But we stilldon't know what she forgot.\" sixty-nine days after A week after the discovery of thedoodled flower, I'd resigned myself toits insignificance — I wasn't Banzan inthe meat market after all — and as themaples around campus began to hint ofresurrection and the maintenance crewbegan mowing the grass in the dormcircle again, it seemed to me we hadfinally lost her. The Colonel and I walked into thewoods down by the lake that afternoonand smoked a cigarette in the precise

spot where the Eagle had caught us somany months before. We'd just comefrom a town meeting, where the Eagleannounced the school was going to builda playground by the lake in memory ofAlaska. She did like swings, I guess, buta playground? Lara stood up at themeeting — surely a first for her — andsaid they should do something funnier,something Alaska herself would havedone. Now, by the lake, sitting on a mossy,half-rotten log, the Colonel said to me,\"Lara was right. We should dosomething for her. A prank. Somethingshe would have loved.\" \"Like, a memorial prank?\" \"Exactly. The Alaska Young

Memorial Prank. We can make it anannual event. Anyway, she came up withthis idea last year. But she wanted tosave it to be our senior prank. But it'sgood. It's really good. It's historic.\" \"Are you going to tell me?\" I asked,thinking back to the time when he andAlaska had left me out of prank planningfor Barn Night. \"Sure,\" he said. \"The prank isentitled 'Subverting the PatriarchalParadigm.'\" And he told me, and I haveto say, Alaska left us with the crownjewel of pranks, the Mona Lisa of high-school hilarity, the culmination ofgenerations of Culver Creek pranking.And if the Colonel could pull it off, itwould be etched in the memory of

everyone at the Creek, and Alaskadeserved nothing less. Best of all, it didnot, technically, involve any expellableoffenses. The Colonel got up and dusted thedirt and moss off his pants. \"I think weowe her that.\" And I agreed, but still, she owed usan explanation. If she was up there,down there, out there, somewhere,maybe she would laugh. And maybe —just maybe — she would give us the cluewe needed. eighty-three days after Two weeks later,the Colonelreturned from spring break with two

notebooks filled with the minutiae ofprank planning, sketches of variouslocations, and a forty-page, two-columnlist of problems that might crop up andtheir solutions. He calculated all timesto a tenth of a second, and all distancesto the inch, and then he recalculated, asif he could not bear the thought of failingher again. And then on that Sunday, theColonel woke up late and rolled over. Iwas reading The Sound and the Fury,which I was supposed to have read inmid-February, and I looked up as I heardthe rustling in the bed, and the Colonelsaid, \"Let's get the band back together.\"And so I ventured out into the overcastspring and woke up Lara and Takumi,then brought them back to Room 43. The

Barn Night crew was intact — or asclose as it ever would be — for theAlaska Young Memorial Prank. The three of us sat on the couchwhile the Colonel stood in front of us,outlining the plan and our parts in it withan excitement I hadn't seen in him sinceBefore. When he finished, he asked,\"Any questions?\" \"Yeah,\" Takumi said. \"Is thatseriously going to work?\" \"Well, first we gotta find a stripper.And second Pudge has to work somemagic with his dad.\" \"All right, then,\" Takumi said. \"Let'sget to work.\" eighty-four days after

Every spring,Culver Creek took oneFriday afternoon off from classes, andall the students, faculty, and staff wererequired to go to the gym for SpeakerDay. Speaker Day featured two speakers— usually small-time celebrities orsmall-time politicians or small-timeacademics, the kind of people whowould come and speak at a school forthe measly three hundred bucks theschool budgeted. The junior class pickedthe first speaker and the seniors thesecond, and anyone who had everattended a Speaker Day agreed that theywere torturously boring. We planned toshake Speaker Day up a bit. All we needed to do was convincethe Eagle to let \"Dr. William Morse,\" a

\"friend of my dad's\" and a \"preeminentscholar of deviant sexuality inadolescents,\" be the junior class'sspeaker. So I called my dad at work, and hissecretary, Paul, asked me if everythingwas all right, and I wondered whye v e r yo ne , e v e r y o n e , asked me ifeverything was all right when I called atany time other than Sunday morning. \"Yeah, I'm fine.\" My dad picked up. \"Hey, Miles. Iseverything all right?\" I laughed and spoke quietly into thephone, since people were milling about.\"Yeah, Dad. Everything is fine. Hey,remember when you stole the school belland buried it in the cemetery?\"

\"Greatest Culver Creek prank ever,\"he responded proudly. \"It was, Dad. It wa s . So listen, Iwonder if you'd help out with the newgreatest Culver Creek prank ever.\" \"Oh, I don't know about that, Miles. Idon't want you getting in any trouble.\" \"Well, I won't. The whole juniorclass is planning it. And it's not likeanyone is going to get hurt or anything. Because, well, remember SpeakerDay?\" \"God that was boring. That wasalmost worse than class.\" \"Yeah, well, I need you to pretend tobe our speaker. Dr. William Morse, aprofessor of psychology at theUniversity of Central Florida and an

expert in adolescent understandings ofsexuality.\" He was quiet for a long time, and Ilooked down at Alaska's last daisy andwaited for him to ask what the prankwas, and I would have told him, but Ijust heard him breathe slowly into thephone, and then he said, \"I won't evenask. Hmm.\" He sighed. \"Swear to Godyou'll never tell your mother.\" \"I swear to God.\" I paused. It tookme a second to remember the Eagle'sreal name. \"Mr. Starnes is going to callyou in about ten minutes.\" \"Okay, my name is Dr. WilliamMorse, and I'm a psychology professor,and — adolescent sexuality?\" \"Yup. You're the best, Dad.\"

\"I just want to see if you can topme,\" he said, laughing. Although it killed the Colonel to doit, the prank could not work without theassistance of the Weekday Warriors —specifically junior-class presidentLongwell Chase, who by now had grownhis silly surfer mop back. But theWarriors loved the idea, so I metLongwell in his room and said, \"Let'sgo.\" Longwell Chase and I had nothing totalk about and no desire to pretendotherwise, so we walked silently to theEagle's house. The Eagle came to thedoor before we even knocked. Hecocked his head a little when he saw us,looking confused — and, indeed, we

made an odd couple, with Long well'spressed and pleated khaki pants and myI-keep-meaning-to-do-laundry bluejeans. \"The speaker we picked is a friendof Miles's dad,\" Longwell said. \"Dr.William Morse. He's a professor at auniversity down in Florida, and hestudies adolescent sexuality.\" \"Aiming for controversy, are we?\" \"Oh no,\" I said. \"I've met Dr. Morse.He's interesting, but he's notcontroversial. He just studies the, uh, theway that adolescents' understanding ofsex is still changing and growing. Imean, he's opposed to premarital sex.\" \"Well. What's his phone number?\" Igave the Eagle a piece of paper, and he