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Looking For Alaska
John Green
The authors definitive edition of this unmissable first novel from bestselling and award-winning author of THE FAULT IN OUR STARS and TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN.Contains:• a brand-new introduction from John Green• never-before-seen passages from original manuscript• a Q&A with the author, responding to fans’ favourite questions“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, but even in the dark, I could see her eyes – fierce emeralds. And not just beautiful, but hot too.”BEFORE. Miles Halter’s whole life has been one big non-event until he starts at anything-but-boring Culver Creek Boarding School and meets Alaska Young. Gorgeous, clever, funny, sexy, screwed up and utterly fascinating she pulls Miles into her world, launches him into a new life, and steals his heart. But when tragedy strikes, and Miles comes face-to-face with death he discovers the value of living and loving unconditionally.AFTER: Nothing will ever be the same.Poignant, funny, heartbreaking and compelling, this novel will stay with you forever.
Copyright (#ucd271982-ed0a-5fd4-9bf5-fea8ee6f94f1)
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is coincidental.
HarperCollins Children's Books
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in the USA by Dutton Books, 2005
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
This edition published in 2015
www.johngreenbooks.com (http://www.johngreenbooks.com)
Looking for Alaska
Text copyright © John Green 2005
Additional content for this edition © John Green, 2015
Here (#ulink_78564489-b9e3-5f61-b191-e813bdd83879) and here (#litres_trial_promo) Excerpt from The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
Poetry quote (#litres_trial_promo) from “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W. H. Auden
Poetry quote (#litres_trial_promo) from “Not So Far as the Forest” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
John Green asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780008120924
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2015 ISBN: 9780008129453
Version: 2016-12-02
Dedication (#ucd271982-ed0a-5fd4-9bf5-fea8ee6f94f1)
To my family, Sydney Green, Mike Green and Hank Green.
“I have tried so hard to do right.”
(last words of President Grover Cleveland)
Contents
Cover (#ud88e88f9-eccf-5fd9-a62d-a2baa8308250)
Title Page (#u784251fe-f206-5422-a923-761a58c7878c)
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Before
One Hundred Thirty-Six Days Before
After
The Day After
Some Last Words on Last Words
Deleted Scenes
Opening Scenes
Original Draft Opening, August 2003
Original First Meeting, August 2003
The Funeral
Original Funeral, August 2003
Funeral, Revision Delivered January 2004
Funeral, Revision Delivered March 2004
“Before & After” Counting Alaska’s Days
Q & A with John Green
Alaska, Ten Years Later: A Literary Retrospective by Michael Cart
Acknowledgments
Also by John Green
About the Publisher
introduction (#ucd271982-ed0a-5fd4-9bf5-fea8ee6f94f1)
It is a funny business, to introduce a book you published ten years ago. In some ways, I am the least qualified person to write this—for one thing, authors are notoriously poor when it comes to assessing their own work (nothing makes me shudder more than hearing an author friend tell me, “I’ve just written my best book yet”). For another, I last read Looking for Alaska in January, 2005, so among almost everyone who has ever read the book, my memories are the most distant.
Looking for Alaska began for me in September of 2001. I was working at Booklist magazine as an editorial assistant and occasional book reviewer, and one of my editors, the children’s book author Ilene Cooper, was encouraging me to actually write the semi-autobiographical boarding school story I’d been pitching to her for years. She even gave me a deadline: March 1, 2002.
Then on September 11, the World Trade Center was attacked. A few days later, my girlfriend, with whom I’d been living for a couple years, broke up with me. I descended into an intense period of depression, eventually taking a leave of absence from my job at Booklist to focus on getting my mental health straightened out. On my last day at the magazine, the publisher Bill Ott wrote me a brief note: “Expect to see you back here in a couple weeks. Eat, get healthy, and—now more than ever—watch Harvey.” Bill had been bugging me to see this old movie, Harvey, for years.
My dad drove me home to Orlando, where I hadn’t really lived since leaving for boarding school when I was fifteen. I spent a couple weeks in daily therapy sessions, figuring out a medication regimen that worked, and watching a lot of TV, where the news people kept talking about 9/11, the day that changed history. Soon, they were talking about the pre-9/11 world and the post-9/11 world. One night watching cable news, I heard a psychologist say that Americans would organize their memories around that terrible day: before and after. It occurred to me that we almost always measure time in relation to what matters most to us: In the Christian calendar, we measure distance from the birth of Jesus. In the Islamic calendar, they measure distance from the hijrah, the Muslim community’s journey from Mecca to Medina.
The story I wanted to tell—based very loosely on high school memories—was about young people whose lives are so transformed by an experience that they can only respond by reimagining time itself. I’d stumbled onto a structure that could work for the book, but I had no energy to actually write it.
And then I watched Harvey. Now, I don’t believe in epiphanies, but all I can say is this: I woke up the next morning feeling a little better, and in the years since, I have never felt quite as bad as I did before watching Harvey. Within a week, I was back in Chicago, back at work, back to being pestered by Ilene about my story. At night and on the weekends, I wrote.
On March 1, 2002, I handed Ilene forty single-spaced pages. It was a confusing jumble and only a few paragraphs of those pages made it to the final book. But Ilene saw potential in it and worked with me through many drafts over the next year, and then submitted it to publishers on my behalf. Dutton bought it, and after a few months in limbo, Julie Strauss-Gabel eventually became my editor.
The story still had a long way to go: There was no labyrinth of suffering in the manuscript that Julie first read, and no Great Perhaps. I wanted to write a novel about love and suffering and forgiveness, a novel of what in the study of religion is called “radical hope,” the idea that hope is available to all of us at all times, even unto—and after—death. I hope I pulled it off. If I did, it wasn’t because of me. It was because my parents welcomed me home, because Harvey portrayed mental illness as more than merely tragic, because Ilene and Julie believed in my work and devoted years to this novel, and because readers have looked upon it with generosity and forgiven its many flaws.
So that’s the story of my Great Perhaps. Thanks for being part of it.
(#ucd271982-ed0a-5fd4-9bf5-fea8ee6f94f1)
one hundred thirty-six days before (#ucd271982-ed0a-5fd4-9bf5-fea8ee6f94f1)
THE WEEK BEFORE I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going-away party. To say that I had low expectations would be to underestimate the matter dramatically. Although I was more or less forced to invite all my “school friends,” i.e., the ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks I sat with by social necessity in the cavernous cafeteria of my public school, I knew they wouldn’t come. Still, my mother persevered, awash in the delusion that I had kept my popularity secret from her all these years. She cooked a small mountain of artichoke dip. She festooned our living room in green and yellow streamers, the colors of my new school. She bought two dozen champagne poppers and placed them around the edge of our coffee table.
And when that final Friday came, when my packing was mostly done, she sat with my dad and me on the living-room couch at 4:56 P.M. and patiently awaited the arrival of the Good-bye to Miles Cavalry. Said cavalry consisted of exactly two people: Marie Lawson, a tiny blonde with rectangular glasses, and her chunky (to put it charitably) boyfriend, Will.
“Hey, Miles,” Marie said as she sat down.
“Hey,” I said.
“How was your summer?” Will asked.
“Okay. Yours?”
“Good. We did Jesus Christ Superstar. I helped with the sets. Marie did lights,” said Will.
“That’s cool.” I nodded knowingly, and that about exhausted our conversational topics. I might have asked a question about Jesus Christ Superstar, except that 1. I didn’t know what it was, and 2. I didn’t care to learn, and 3. I never really excelled at small talk. My mom, however, can talk small for hours, and so she extended the awkwardness by asking them about their rehearsal schedule, and how the show had gone, and whether it was a success.
“I guess it was,” Marie said. “A lot of people came, I guess.” Marie was the sort of person to guess a lot.
Finally, Will said, “Well, we just dropped by to say good-bye. I’ve got to get Marie home by six. Have fun at boarding school, Miles.”
“Thanks,” I answered, relieved. The only thing worse than having a party that no one attends is having a party attended only by two vastly, deeply uninteresting people.
They left, and so I sat with my parents and stared at the blank TV and wanted to turn it on but knew I shouldn’t. I could feel them both looking at me, waiting for me to burst into tears or something, as if I hadn’t known all along that it would go precisely like this. But I had known. I could feel their pity as they scooped artichoke dip with chips intended for my imaginary friends, but they needed pity more than I did: I wasn’t disappointed. My expectations had been met.
“Is this why you want to leave, Miles?” Mom asked.
I mulled it over for a moment, careful not to look at her. “Uh, no,” I said.
“Well, why then?” she asked. This was not the first time she had posed the question. Mom was not particularly keen on letting me go to boarding school and had made no secret of it.
“Because of me?” my dad asked. He had attended Culver Creek, the same boarding school to which I was headed, as had both of his brothers and all of their kids. I think he liked the idea of me following in his footsteps. My uncles had told me stories about how famous my dad had been on campus for having simultaneously raised hell and aced all his classes. That sounded like a better life than the one I had in Florida. But no, it wasn’t because of Dad. Not exactly.
“Hold on,” I said. I went into Dad’s study and found his biography of François Rabelais. I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais), I’d never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote (“NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,” my dad had told me a thousand times. But how else are you supposed to find what you’re looking for?).
“So this guy,” I said, standing in the doorway of the living room. “François Rabelais. He was this poet. And his last words were ‘I go to seek a Great Perhaps.’ That’s why I’m going. So I don’t have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.”
And that quieted them. I was after a Great Perhaps, and they knew as well as I did that I wasn’t going to find it with the likes of Will and Marie. I sat back down on the couch, between my mom and my dad, and my dad put his arm around me, and we stayed there like that, quiet on the couch together, for a long time, until it seemed okay to turn on the TV, and then we ate artichoke dip for dinner and watched the History Channel, and as going-away parties go, it certainly could have been worse.
one hundred twenty-eight days before
FLORIDA WAS PLENTY HOT, certainly, and humid, too. Hot enough that your clothes stuck to you like Scotch tape, and sweat dripped like tears from your forehead into your eyes. But it was only hot outside, and generally I only went outside to walk from one air-conditioned location to another.
This did not prepare me for the unique sort of heat that one encounters fifteen miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, at Culver Creek Preparatory School. My parents’ SUV was parked in the grass just a few feet outside my dorm room, Room 43. But each time I took those few steps to and from the car to unload what now seemed like far too much stuff, the sun burned through my clothes and into my skin with a vicious ferocity that made me genuinely fear hellfire.
Between Mom and Dad and me, it only took a few minutes to unload the car, but my unair-conditioned dorm room, although blessedly out of the sunshine, was only modestly cooler. The room surprised me: I’d pictured plush carpet, wood-paneled walls, Victorian furniture. Aside from one luxury—a private bathroom—I got a box. With cinder-block walls coated thick with layers of white paint and a green-and-white-checkered linoleum floor, the place looked more like a hospital than the dorm room of my fantasies. A bunk bed of unfinished wood with vinyl mattresses was pushed against the room’s back window. The desks and dressers and bookshelves were all attached to the walls in order to prevent creative floor planning. And no air-conditioning.
I sat on the lower bunk while Mom opened the trunk, grabbed a stack of the biographies my dad had agreed to part with, and placed them on the bookshelves.
“I can unpack, Mom,” I said. My dad stood. He was ready to go.
“Let me at least make your bed,” Mom said.
“No, really. I can do it. It’s okay.” Because you simply cannot draw these things out forever. At some point, you just pull off the Band-Aid and it hurts, but then it’s over and you’re relieved.
“God, we’ll miss you,” Mom said suddenly, stepping through the minefield of suitcases to get to the bed. I stood and hugged her. My dad walked over, too, and we formed a sort of huddle. It was too hot, and we were too sweaty, for the hug to last terribly long. I knew I ought to cry, but I’d lived with my parents for sixteen years, and a trial separation seemed overdue.
“Don’t worry.” I smiled. “I’s a-gonna learn how t’talk right Southern.” Mom laughed.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” my dad said.
“Okay.”
“No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.” As an alumnus of Culver Creek, he had done the things I had only heard about: the secret parties, streaking through hay fields (he always whined about how it was all boys back then), drugs, drinking, and cigarettes. It had taken him a while to kick smoking, but his badass days were now well behind him.
“I love you,” they both blurted out simultaneously. It needed to be said, but the words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss.
