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“Never been.”
“That’s pretty amazing, the countries thing,” I said.
“Yeah, everybody’s got a talent. I can memorise things. And you can …?”
“Um, I know a lot of people’s last words.” It was an indulgence, learning last words. Other people had chocolate; I had dying declarations.
“Example?”
“I like Henrik Ibsen’s. He was a playwright.” I knew a lot about Ibsen, but I’d never read any of his plays. I didn’t like reading plays. I liked reading biographies.
“Yeah, I know who he was,” said Chip.
“Right, well, he’d been sick for a while and his nurse said to him, ‘You seem to be feeling better this morning,’ and Ibsen looked at her and said, ‘On the contrary,’ and then he died.”
Chip laughed. “That’s morbid. But I like it.”
He told me he was in his third year at Culver Creek. He had started in ninth grade, the first year at the school, and was now a junior like me. A scholarship kid, he said. Got a full ride. He’d heard it was the best school in Alabama, so he wrote his application essay about how he wanted to go to a school where he could read long books. The problem, he said in the essay, was that his dad would always hit him with the books in his house, so Chip kept his books short and paperback for his own safety. His parents got divorced his sophomore year. He liked “the Creek”, as he called it, but, “You have to be careful here, with students and with teachers. And I do hate being careful,” he smirked. I hated being careful too – or wanted to, at least.
He told me this while ripping through his duffel bag, throwing clothes into drawers with reckless abandon. Chip did not believe in having a sock drawer or a T-shirt drawer. He believed that all drawers were created equal and filled each with whatever fit. My mother would have died.
As soon as he finished “unpacking”, Chip hit me roughly on the shoulder, said, “I hope you’re stronger than you look,” and walked out the door, leaving it open behind him. He peeked his head back in a few seconds later and saw me standing still. “Well, come on, Miles To Go Halter. We got shit to do.”
We made our way to the TV room, which according to Chip contained the only cable TV on campus. Over the summer, it served as a storage unit. Packed nearly to the ceiling with couches, fridges and rolled-up carpets, the TV room undulated with kids trying to find and haul away their stuff. Chip said hello to a few people, but didn’t introduce me. As he wandered through the couch-stocked maze, I stood near the door, trying my best not to block pairs of roommates as they manoeuvred furniture through the narrow front door.
It took ten minutes for Chip to find his stuff, and an hour more for us to make four trips back and forth across the dorm circle between the TV room and Room 43. By the end, I wanted to crawl into Chip’s minifridge and sleep for a thousand years, but Chip seemed immune to both fatigue and heatstroke. I sat down on his couch.
“I found it lying on a curb in my neighbourhood a couple of years ago,” he said of the couch as he worked on setting up my PlayStation 2 on top of his footlocker. “I know the leather’s got some cracks, but come on. That’s a damn nice couch.” The leather had more than a few cracks – it was about 30 per cent baby-blue faux leather and 70 per cent foam – but it felt damn good to me anyway.
“All right,” he said. “We’re about done.” He walked over to his desk and pulled a roll of duct tape from a drawer. “We just need your trunk.”
I got up, pulled the trunk out from under the bed, and Chip situated it between the couch and the PlayStation 2 and started tearing off thin strips of duct tape. He applied them to the trunk so that they spelled out COFFEE TABLE.
“There,” he said. He sat down and put his feet up on the, uh, coffee table. “Done.”
I sat down next to him, and he looked over at me and suddenly said, “Listen. I’m not going to be your entrée to Culver Creek social life.”
“Uh, OK,” I said, but I could hear the words catch in my throat. I’d just carried this guy’s couch beneath a white-hot sun and now he doesn’t like me?
“Basically, you’ve got two groups here,” he explained, speaking with increasing urgency. “You’ve got the regular boarders, like me, and then you’ve got the Weekday Warriors; they board here, but they’re all rich kids who live in Birmingham and go home to their parents’ air-conditioned mansions every weekend. Those are the cool kids. I don’t like them and they don’t like me, and so if you came here thinking that you were hot shit at public school so you’ll be hot shit here, you’d best not be seen with me. You did go to public school didn’t you?”
“Uh…” I said. Absentmindedly, I began picking at the cracks in the couch’s leather, digging my fingers into the foamy whiteness.
“Right, you did probably, because if you had gone to a private school your freakin’ shorts would fit.” He laughed.
I wore my shorts just below my hips, which I thought was cool. Finally, I said, “Yeah, I went to public school. But I wasn’t hot shit there, Chip. I was regular shit.”
“Ha! That’s good. And don’t call me Chip. Call me the Colonel.”
I stifled a laugh. “The Colonel?”
“Yeah. The Colonel. And we’ll call you …hmm. Pudge.”
“Huh?”
“Pudge,” the Colonel said. “Because you’re skinny. It’s called irony, Pudge. Heard of it? Now, let’s go get some cigarettes and start this year off right.”
He walked out of the room, again just assuming I’d follow, and this time I did. Mercifully, the sun was descending towards the horizon. We walked five doors down to Room 48. A dry-erase board was taped to the door using duct tape. In blue marker, it read, Alaska has a single!
The Colonel explained to me that (1) this was Alaska’s room, and that (2) she had a single room because the girl who was supposed to be her roommate got kicked out at the end of the last year, and that (3) Alaska had cigarettes, although the Colonel neglected to ask whether (4) I smoked, which (5) I didn’t.
He knocked once, loudly. Through the door, a voice screamed, “Oh my God, come in you short little man because I have the best story.”
And we walked in. I turned to close the door behind me, and the Colonel shook his head and said, “After seven, you have to leave the door open if you’re in a girl’s room,” but I barely heard him because the hottest girl in all of human history was standing before me in cut-off jeans and a peach tank top. And she was talking over the Colonel, talking loud and fast.
“So first day of summer, I’m in grand old Vine Station with this boy named Justin and we’re at his house watching TV on the couch – and mind you, I’m already dating Jake – actually I’m still dating him, miraculously enough, but Justin is a friend of mine from when I was a kid and so we’re watching TV and literally chatting about the SATs or something, and Justin puts his arm around me and I think, Oh, that’s nice, we’ve been friends for so long and this is totally comfortable, and we’re just chatting and then I’m in the middle of a sentence about analogies or something and like a hawk he reaches down and he honks my boob. HONK. A much-too-firm, two- to three-second HONK. And the first thing I thought was, OK, how do I extricate this claw from my boob before it leaves permanent marks? and the second thing I thought was God, I can’t wait to tell Takumi and the Colonel.”
The Colonel laughed. I stared, stunned partly by the force of the voice emanating from the petite (but, God, curvy) girl and partly by the gigantic stacks of books that lined her walls. Her library filled her bookshelves and then overflowed into waist-high stacks of books everywhere, piled haphazardly against the walls. If just one of them moved, I thought, the domino effect could engulf the three of us in an asphyxiating mass of literature.
“Who’s the guy that’s not laughing at my very funny story?” she asked.
“Oh, right. Alaska, this is Pudge. Pudge memorises people’s last words. Pudge, this is Alaska. She got her boob honked over the summer.” She walked over to me with her hand extended, then made a quick move downwards at the last moment and pulled down my shorts.
“Those are the biggest shorts in the state of Alabama!”
“I like them baggy,” I said, embarrassed, and pulled them up. They had been cool back home in Florida.
“So far in our relationship, Pudge, I’ve seen your chicken legs entirely too often,” the Colonel deadpanned. “So, Alaska. Sell us some cigarettes.” And then somehow, the Colonel talked me into paying five dollars for a pack of Marlboro Lights I had no intention of ever smoking.
He asked Alaska to join us, but she said, “I have to find Takumi and tell him about The Honk.” She turned to me and asked, “Have you seen him?” I had no idea whether I’d seen Takumi, since I had no idea who he was. I just shook my head.
“All right. Meet ya at the lake in a few minutes then.” The Colonel nodded.
At the edge of the lake, just before the sandy (and, the Colonel told me, fake) beach, we sat down in an Adirondack swing. I made the obligatory joke: “Don’t grab my boob.”
The Colonel gave an obligatory laugh, then asked, “Want a smoke?” I had never smoked a cigarette, but when in Rome …
“Is it safe here?”
“Not really,” he said, then lit a cigarette and handed it to me. I inhaled. Coughed. Wheezed. Gasped for breath. Coughed again. Considered vomiting. Grabbed the swinging bench, head spinning, and threw the cigarette to the ground and stomped on it, convinced my Great Perhaps did not involve cigarettes.
“Smoke much?” He laughed, then pointed to a white speck across the lake and said, “See that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What is that? A bird?”
“It’s the swan,” he said.
“Wow. A school with a swan. Wow.”
“That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.”
“Why?”
“It has some issues with people. It was abused or something. It’ll rip you to pieces. The Eagle put it there to keep us from walking around the lake to smoke.”
“The Eagle?”
“Mr Starnes. Code name: the Eagle. The Dean of Students. Most of the teachers live on campus and they’ll all bust you. But only the Eagle lives in the dorm circle and he sees all. He can smell a cigarette from like five miles.”
“Isn’t his house back there?” I asked, pointing to it. I could see the house quite clearly despite the darkness, so it followed he could probably see us.
“Yeah, but he doesn’t really go into blitzkrieg mode until classes start,” Chip said nonchalantly.
“God, if I get in trouble my parents will kill me,” I said.
“I suspect you’re exaggerating. But look, you’re going to get in trouble. Ninety-nine per cent of the time your parents never have to know though. The school doesn’t want your parents to think you became a fuck-up here any more than you want your parents to think you’re a fuck-up.” He blew a thin stream of smoke forcefully towards the lake. I had to admit: he looked cool doing it. Taller, somehow. “Anyway, when you get in trouble, just don’t tell on anyone. I mean, I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve only for dental work and my father. But that doesn’t mean I would rat them out. Pretty much the only important thing is never never never never rat.”
“OK,” I said, although I wondered: if someone punches me in the face, I’m supposed to insist that I ran into a door? It seemed a little stupid. How do you deal with bullies and assholes if you can’t get them into trouble? I didn’t ask Chip though.
“All right, Pudge. We have reached the point in the evening when I’m obliged to go and find my girlfriend. So give me a few of those cigarettes you’ll never smoke anyway and I’ll see you later.”
I decided to hang out on the swing for a while, half because the heat had finally dissipated into a pleasant, if muggy, eighty-something, and half because I thought Alaska might show up. But almost as soon as the Colonel left, the bugs encroached: no-see-ums (which, for the record, you can see) and mosquitoes hovered around me in such numbers that the tiny noise of their rubbing wings sounded cacophonous. And then I decided to smoke.
Now, I did think, The smoke will drive the bugs away. And, to some degree, it did. I’d be lying though if I claimed I became a smoker to ward off insects. I became a smoker because (1) I was on an Adirondack swing by myself, and (2) I had cigarettes, and (3) I figured that if everyone else could smoke a cigarette without coughing, I could damn well too. In short, I didn’t have a very good reason. So yeah, let’s just say that (4) it was the bugs.
I made it through three entire drags before I felt nauseous and dizzy and only semi-pleasantly buzzed. I got up to leave. As I stood, a voice behind me said:
“So, do you really memorise last words?”
She ran up beside me and grabbed my shoulder and pushed me back on to the porch swing.
“Yeah,” I said. And then hesitantly, I added, “You want to quiz me?”
“JFK,” she said.
“That’s obvious,” I answered.
“Oh, is it now?” she asked.
“No. Those were his last words. Someone said, ‘Mr President, you sure can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,’ and then he said, ‘That’s obvious,’ and then he got shot.”
She laughed. “God, that’s awful. I shouldn’t laugh. But I will,” and then she laughed again. “OK, Mr Famous Last Words Boy. I have one for you.” She reached into her overstuffed backpack and pulled out a book. “Gabriel García Márquez. The General in His Labyrinth. Absolutely one of my favourites. It’s about Simón Bolívar.” I didn’t know who Simón Bolívar was, but she didn’t give me time to ask. “It’s a historical novel, so I don’t know if this is true, but in the book, do you know what his last words are? No, you don’t. But I am about to tell you, Señor Parting Remarks.”
And then she lit a cigarette and sucked on it so hard for so long that I thought the entire thing might burn off in one drag. She exhaled and read to me:
“He – that’s Simón Bolívar – was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness. ‘Damn it,’ he sighed. ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?’”
I knew great last words when I heard them, and I made a mental note to get ahold of a biography of this Simón Bolívar fellow. Beautiful last words, but I didn’t quite understand. “So what’s the labyrinth?” I asked her.
And now is as good a time as any to say that she was beautiful. In the dark beside me, she smelled of sweat and sunshine and vanilla, and on that thin-mooned night I could see little more than her silhouette except for when she smoked, when the burning cherry of the cigarette washed her face in pale red light. But even in the dark, I could see her eyes – fierce emeralds. She had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavour. And not just beautiful, but hot too, with her breasts straining against her tight tank top, her curved legs swinging back and forth beneath the swing, flip-flops dangling from her electric-blue-painted toes. It was right then, between when I asked about the labyrinth and when she answered me, that I realised the importance of curves, of the thousand times where girls’ bodies ease from one place to another, from arc of the foot to ankle to calf, from calf to hip to waist to breast to neck to ski-slope nose to forehead to shoulder to the concave arch of the back to the butt to the etc. I’d noticed curves before, of course, but I had never quite apprehended their significance.
Her mouth close enough to me that I could feel her breath warmer than the air, she said, “That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape – the world or the end of it?” I waited for her to keep talking, but after a while it became obvious she wanted an answer.
“Uh, I don’t know,” I said finally. “Have you really read all those books in your room?”
She laughed. “Oh God, no. I’ve maybe read a third of ’em. But I’m going to read them all. I call it my Life’s Library. Every summer since I was little, I’ve gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. But there is so much to do: cigarettes to smoke, sex to have, swings to swing on. I’ll have more time for reading when I’m old and boring.”
She told me that I reminded her of the Colonel when he came to Culver Creek. They were freshmen together, she said, both scholarship kids with, as she put it, “a shared interest in booze and mischief”. The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I’d stumbled into what my mother referred to as “the wrong crowd”, but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart. As she lit a new cigarette off the butt of her previous one, she told me that the Colonel was smart but hadn’t done much living when he got to the Creek.
“I got rid of that problem quickly.” She smiled. “By November, I’d gotten him his first girlfriend, a perfectly nice non-Weekday Warrior named Janice. He dumped her after a month because she was too rich for his poverty-soaked blood, but whatever. We pulled our first prank that year – we filled Classroom 4 with a thin layer of marbles. We’ve progressed some since then, of course.” She laughed. So Chip became the Colonel – the military-style planner of their pranks – and Alaska was ever Alaska, the larger-than-life creative force behind them.
“You’re smart like him,” she said. “Quieter, though. And cuter, but I didn’t even just say that, because I love my boyfriend.”
“Yeah, you’re not bad either,” I said, overwhelmed by her compliment, “But I didn’t just say that, because I love my girlfriend. Oh, wait. Right. I don’t have one.”
She laughed. “Yeah, don’t worry, Pudge. If there’s one thing I can get you, it’s a girlfriend. Let’s make a deal: you figure out what the labyrinth is and how to get out of it, and I’ll get you laid.”
“Deal.” We shook on it.
Later, I walked towards the dorm circle beside Alaska. The cicadas hummed their one-note song, just as they had at home in Florida. She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said, “When you’re walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though it’s silly and embarrassing you just want to run home?”
It seemed too secret and personal to admit to a virtual stranger, but I told her, “Yeah, totally.”
For a moment, she was quiet. Then she grabbed my hand, whispered, “Run run run run run,” and took off, pulling me behind her.
One Hundred and Twenty-seven Days Before
Early the next afternoon, I blinked sweat from my eyes as I taped a Van Gogh poster to the back of the door. The Colonel sat on the couch judging whether the poster was level and fielding my endless questions about Alaska. What’s her story? “She’s from Vine Station. You could drive past it without noticing – and from what I understand, you ought to. Her boyfriend’s at Vanderbilt on scholarship. Plays bass in some band. Don’t know much about her family.” So she really likes him? “I guess. She hasn’t cheated on him, which is a first.” And so on. All morning, I’d been unable to care about anything else, not the Van Gogh poster and not video games and not even my class schedule, which the Eagle had brought by that morning. He introduced himself too:
“Welcome to Culver Creek, Mr Halter. You’re given a large measure of freedom here. If you abuse it, you’ll regret it. You seem like a nice young man. I’d hate to have to bid you farewell.”
And then he stared at me in a manner that was either serious or seriously malicious. “Alaska calls that the Look of Doom,” the Colonel told me after the Eagle left. “The next time you see that, you’re busted.”
“OK, Pudge,” the Colonel said as I stepped away from the poster. Not entirely level, but close enough. “Enough with the Alaska already. By my count, there are ninety-two girls at this school and every last one of them is less crazy than Alaska, who, I might add, already has a boyfriend. I’m going to lunch. It’s bufriedo day.” He walked out, leaving the door open. Feeling like an over-infatuated idiot, I got up to close the door. The Colonel, already halfway across the dorm circle, turned around. “Christ. Are you coming or what?”
You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can’t say that Alabamans as a people are unduly afraid of deep fryers. In that first week at the Creek, the cafeteria served fried chicken, chicken-fried steak and fried okra, which marked my first foray into the delicacy that is the fried vegetable. I half expected them to fry the iceberg lettuce. But nothing matched the bufriedo, a dish created by Maureen, the amazingly (and understandably) obese Culver Creek cook. A deep-fried bean burrito, the bufriedo proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that frying always improves a food. Sitting with the Colonel and five guys I didn’t know at a circular table in the cafeteria that afternoon, I sank my teeth into the crunchy shell of my first bufriedo and experienced a culinary orgasm. My mom cooked OK, but I immediately wanted to bring Maureen home with me over Thanksgiving.
The Colonel introduced me (as “Pudge”) to the guys at the wobbly wooden table, but I only registered the name Takumi, whom Alaska had mentioned yesterday. A thin Japanese guy only a few inches taller than the Colonel, Takumi talked with his mouth full as I chewed slowly, savouring the beany crunch.
“God,” Takumi said to me, “there’s nothing like watching a man eat his first bufriedo.”
I didn’t say much – partly because no one asked me any questions and partly because I just wanted to eat as much as I could. But Takumi felt no such modesty – he could, and did, eat and chew and swallow while talking.
The lunch discussion centred on the girl who was supposed to have been Alaska’s roommate, Marya, and her boyfriend, Paul, who had been a Weekday Warrior. They’d gotten kicked out in the last week of the previous school year, I learned, for what the Colonel called “the Trifecta” – they were caught committing three of Culver Creek’s expellable offences at once. Lying naked in bed together (“genital contact” being offence number one), already drunk (number two), they were smoking a joint (number three) when the Eagle burst in on them. Rumours had it that someone had ratted them out, and Takumi seemed intent on finding out who – intent enough, anyway, to shout about it with his mouth jampacked with bufriedo.
“Paul was an asshole,” the Colonel said. “I wouldn’t have ratted on them, but anyone who shacks up with a Jaguar-driving Weekday Warrior like Paul deserves what she gets.”
“Dude,” Takumi responded, “yaw guhfwend,” and then he swallowed a bite of food, “is a Weekday Warrior.”
