by Green, John
“How have you been?” I asked.
“Uh,” he said, a mouth full of fries, “nah good. You?”
“Not good.” I took a bite of cheeseburger. I’d gotten a plastic stock car with my Happy Meal, and it sat overturned on the table. I spun the wheels.
“I miss her,” Takumi said, pushing away his tray, uninterested in the remaining soggy fries.
“Yeah. I do, too. I’m sorry, Takumi,” and I meant it in the largest possible way. I was sorry we ended up like this, spinning wheels at a McDonald’s. Sorry the person who had brought us together now lay dead between us. I was sorry I let her die. Sorry I haven’t talked to you because you couldn’t know the truth about the Colonel and me, and I hated being around you and having to pretend that my grief is this uncomplicated thing—pretending that she died and I miss her instead of that she died because of me.
“Me too. You’re not dating Lara anymore, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay. She was kind of wondering.”
I had been ignoring her, but by then she had begun to ignore me back, so I figured it was over, but maybe not. “Well,” I told Takumi, “I just can’t—I don’t know, man. That’s pretty complicated.”
“Sure. She’ll understand. Sure. All good.”
“Okay.”
“Listen, Pudge. I—ah, I don’t know. It sucks, huh?”
“Yeah.”
twenty-seven days after
SIX DAYS LATER, four Sundays after the last Sunday, the Colonel and I were trying to shoot each other with paintball guns while turning 900s in a half pipe. “We need booze. And we need to borrow the Eagle’s Breathalyzer.”
“Borrow it? Do you know where it is?”
“Yeah. He’s never made you take one?”
“Um. No. He thinks I’m a nerd.”
“You are a nerd, Pudge. But you’re not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking.” Actually, I hadn’t drunk since that night, and didn’t feel particularly inclined to ever take it up ever again.
Then I nearly elbowed the Colonel in the face, swinging my arms wildly as if contorting my body in the right ways mattered as much as pressing the right buttons at the right moments—the same video-game-playing delusion that had always gripped Alaska. But the Colonel was so focused on the game he didn’t even notice. “Do you have a plan for how, exactly, we’re going to steal the Breathalyzer from inside the Eagle’s house?”
The Colonel looked over at me and said, “Do you suck at this game?” and then, without turning back to the screen, shot my skater in the balls with a blue paint blast. “But first, we gotta get some liquor, because the ambrosia’s sour and my booze connection is—”
“POOF. Gone,” I finished.
When I opened his door, Takumi was sitting at his desk, boxy headphones surrounding his entire head, bouncing his head to the beat. He seemed oblivious to us. “Hey,” I said. Nothing. “Takumi!” Nothing. “TAKUMI!” He turned around and pulled off his headphones. I closed the door behind me and said, “You got any alcohol?”
“Why?” he asked.
“Uh, because we want to get drunk?” the Colonel answered.
“Great. I’ll join you.”
“Takumi,” the Colonel said. “This is—we need to do this alone.”
“No. I’ve had enough of that shit.” Takumi stood up, walked into his bathroom, and came out with a Gatorade bottle filled with clear liquid. “I keep it in the medicine cabinet,” Takumi said. “On account of how it’s medicine.” He pocketed the bottle and then walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. A moment later, he peeked his head back in and, brilliantly mimicking the Colonel’s bossy bass voice, said, “Christ, you comin’ or what?”
“Takumi,” the Colonel said. “Okay. Look, what we’re doing is a little dangerous, and I don’t want you caught up in it. Honestly. But, listen, we’ll tell you everything starting tomorrow.”
“I’m tired of all this secret shit. She was my friend, too.”
“Tomorrow. Honestly.”
He pulled the bottle out of his pocket and tossed it to me. “Tomorrow,” he said.
“I don’t really want him to know,” I said as we walked back to the room, the Gatorade bottle stuffed in the pocket of my sweatshirt. “He’ll hate us.”
“Yeah, well, he’ll hate us more if we keep pretending he doesn’t exist,” the Colonel answered.
Fifteen minutes later, I stood at the Eagle’s doorstep.
He opened the door with a spatula in hand, smiled, and said, “Miles, come in. I was just making an egg sandwich. Want one?”
“No thanks,” I said, following the Eagle into his kitchen.
My job was to keep him out of his living room for thirty seconds so the Colonel could get the Breathalyzer undetected. I coughed loudly to let the Colonel know the coast was clear. The Eagle picked up his egg sandwich and took a bite. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” he asked.
“I just wanted to tell you that the Colonel—I mean, Chip Martin—he’s my roommate, you know, he’s having a tough time in Latin.”
“Well, he’s not attending the class, from what I understand, which can make it very difficult to learn the language.” He walked toward me. I coughed again, and backpedaled, the Eagle and I tangoing our way toward his living room.
“Right, well, he’s up all night every night thinking about Alaska,” I said, standing up straight and tall, trying to block the Eagle’s view of the living room with my none-too-wide shoulders. “They were very close, you know.”
“I know that—” he said, and in the living room, the Colonel’s sneakers squeaked against the hardwood floor. The Eagle looked at me quizzically and sidestepped me. I quickly said, “Is that burner on?” and pointed toward the frying pan.
The Eagle wheeled around, looked at the clearly not-on burner, then dashed into the living room.
Empty. He turned back to me. “Are you up to something, Miles?”
“No, sir. Honestly. I just wanted to talk about Chip.”
He arched his eyebrows, skeptical. “Well, I understand that this is a devastating loss for Alaska’s close friends. It’s just awful. There’s no comfort to this grief, is there?”
“No sir.”
“I’m sympathetic to Chip’s troubles. But school is important. Alaska would have wanted, I’m sure, for Chip’s studies to continue unimpeded.”
I’m sure, I thought. I thanked the Eagle, and he promised me an egg sandwich at some point in the future, which made me nervous that he would just show up at our room one afternoon with an egg sandwich in hand to find us A. illegally smoking while the Colonel B. illegally drank milk and vodka out of a gallon jug.
Halfway across the dorm circle, the Colonel ran up to me. “That was smooth, with the ‘Is that burner on?’ If you hadn’t pulled that, I was toast. Although I guess I’ll have to start going to Latin. Stupid Latin.”
“Did you get it?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. God, I hope he doesn’t go looking for it tonight. Although, really, he could never suspect anything. Why would someone steal a Breathalyzer?”
At two o’clock in the morning, the Colonel took his sixth shot of vodka, grimaced, then frantically motioned with his hand toward the bottle of Mountain Dew I was drinking. I handed it to him, and he took a long pull on it.
“I don’t think I’ll be able to go to Latin tomorrow,” he said. His words were slightly slurred, as if his tongue were swollen.
“One more,” I pleaded.
“Okay. This is it, though.” He poured a sip of vodka into a Dixie cup, swallowed, pursed his lips, and squeezed his hands into tight little fists. “Oh God, this is bad. It’s so much better with milk. This better be point two-four.”
“We have to wait for fifteen minutes after your last drink before we test it,” I said, having downloaded instructions for the Breathalyzer off the Internet. “Do you feel drunk?”
“If drunk were cookies, I�
�d be Famous Amos.”
We laughed. “Chips Ahoy! would have been funnier,” I said.
“Forgive me. Not at my best.”
I held the Breathalyzer in my hand, a sleek, silver gadget about the size of a small remote control. Beneath an LCD screen was a small hole. I blew into it to test it: 0.00, it read. I figured it was working.
After fifteen minutes, I handed it to the Colonel. “Blow really hard onto it for at least two seconds,” I said.
He looked up at me. “Is that what you told Lara in the TV room? Because, see, Pudge, they only call it a blow job.”
“Shut up and blow,” I said.
His cheeks puffed out, the Colonel blew into the hole hard and long, his face turning red.
.16. “Oh no,” the Colonel said. “Oh God.”
“You’re two-thirds of the way there,” I said encouragingly.
“Yeah, but I’m like three-fourths of the way to puking.”
“Well, obviously it’s possible. She did it. C’mon! You can outdrink a girl, can’t you?”
“Give me the Mountain Dew,” he said stoically.
And then I heard footsteps outside. Footsteps. We’d waited till 1:00 to turn on the lights, figuring everyone would be long asleep—it was a school night after all—but footsteps, shit, and as the Colonel looked at me confused, I grabbed the Breathalyzer from him and stuffed it between the foam cushions of the couch and grabbed the Dixie cup and the Gatorade bottle of vodka and stashed them behind the COFFEE TABLE, and in one motion I grabbed a cigarette from a pack and lit it, hoping the smell of smoke would cover up the smell of booze. I puffed the cigarette without inhaling, trying to smoke up the room, and I was almost back to the couch when the three quick knocks came against the door and the Colonel looked at me, his eyes wide, his suddenly unpromising future flashing before his eyes, and I whispered, “Cry,” as the Eagle turned the knob.
The Colonel hunched forward, his head between his knees and his shoulders shaking, and I put my arm around him as the Eagle came in.
“I’m sorry,” I said before the Eagle could say anything. “He’s having a tough night.”
“Are you smoking?” the Eagle asked. “In your room? Four hours after lights-out?”
I dropped the cigarette into a half-empty Coke can. “I’m sorry, sir. I’m just trying to stay awake with him.”
The Eagle walked up toward the couch, and I felt the Colonel start to rise, but I held his shoulders down firmly, because if the Eagle smelled the Colonel’s breath we were done for sure. “Miles,” the Eagle said. “I understand that this is a difficult time for you. But you will respect the rules of this school, or you will matriculate someplace else. I’ll see you in Jury tomorrow. Is there anything I can do for you, Chip?”
Without looking up, the Colonel answered in a quivering, tear-soaked voice, “No, sir. I’m just glad I have Miles.”
“Well, I am, too,” the Eagle said. “Perhaps you should encourage him to live within the confines of our rules, lest he risk his place on this campus.”
“Yessir,” the Colonel said.
“Y’all can leave your lights on until you’re ready to go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow, Miles.”
“Good night, sir,” I said, imagining the Colonel sneaking the Breathalyzer back into the Eagle’s house while I got harangued at Jury. As the Eagle closed the door behind him, the Colonel shot up, smiling at me, and still nervous that the Eagle might be outside, whispered, “That was a thing of beauty.”
“I learned from the best,” I said. “Now drink.”
An hour later, the Gatorade bottle mostly empty, the Colonel hit .24.
“Thank you, Jesus!” he exclaimed, and then added, “This is awful. This is not fun drunk.”
I got up and cleared the COFFEE TABLE out of the way so the Colonel could walk the length of the room without hitting any obstacles, and said, “Okay, can you stand?”
The Colonel pushed his arms into the foam of the couch and began to rise, but then fell backward onto the couch, lying on his back. “Spinning room,” he observed. “Gonna puke.”
“Don’t puke. That will ruin everything.”
I decided to give him a field sobriety test, like the cops do. “Okay. Get over here and try to walk a straight line.” He rolled off the couch and fell to the floor, and I caught him beneath his armpits and held him up. I positioned him in between two tiles of the linoleum floor. “Follow that line of tiles. Walk straight, toe to heel.” He raised one leg and immediately leaned to the left, his arms windmilling. He took a single unsteady step, sort of a waddle, as his feet were seemingly unable to land directly in front of each other. He regained his balance briefly, then took a step backward and landed on the couch. “I fail,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Okay, how’s your depth perception?”
“My what perwhatshun?”
“Look at me. Is there one of me? Are there two of me? Could you accidentally drive into me if I were a cop car?”
“Everything’s very spinny, but I don’t think so. This is bad. Was she really like this?”
“Apparently. Could you drive like this?”
“Oh God no. No. No. She was really drunk, huh.”
“Yeah.”
“We were really stupid.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m spinning. But no. No cop car. I can see.”
“So there’s your evidence.”
“Maybe she fell asleep. I feel awfully sleepy.”
“We’ll find out,” I said, trying to play the role that the Colonel had always played for me.
“Not tonight,” he answered. “Tonight, we’re gonna throw up a little, and then we are going to sleep through our hangover.”
“Don’t forget about Latin.”
“Right. Fucking Latin.”
twenty-eight days after
THE COLONEL MADE IT to Latin the next morning—“I feel awesome right now, because I’m still drunk. But God help me in a couple of hours”—and I took a French test for which I had studied un petit peu. I did all right on the multiple choice (which-verb-tense-makes-sense-here type questions), but the essay question, In Le Petit Prince, what is the significance of the rose? threw me a bit.
Had I read The Little Prince in English or French, I suspect this question might have been quite easy. Unfortunately, I’d spent the evening getting the Colonel drunk. So I answered, Elle symbolise l’amour (“It symbolizes love”). Madame O’Malley had left us with an entire page to answer the question, but I figured I’d covered it nicely in three words.
I’d kept up in my classes well enough to get B-minuses and not worry my parents, but I didn’t really care much anymore. The significance of the rose? I thought. Who gives a shit? What’s the significance of the white tulips? There was a question worth answering.
After I’d gotten a lecture and ten work hours at Jury, I came back to Room 43 to find the Colonel telling Takumi everything—well, everything except the kiss. I walked in to the Colonel saying, “So we helped her go.”
“You set off the fireworks,” he said.
“How’d you know about the fireworks?”
“I’ve been doing a bit of investigating,” Takumi answered. “Well, anyway, that was dumb. You shouldn’t have done it. But we all let her go, really,” he said, and I wondered what the hell he meant by that, but I didn’t have time to ask before he said to me, “So you think it was suicide?”
“Maybe,” I said. “I don’t see how she could have hit the cop by accident unless she was asleep.”
“Maybe she was going to visit her father,” Takumi said. “Vine Station is on the way.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Everything’s a maybe, isn’t it?”
The Colonel reached in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Well, here’s another one: Maybe Jake has the answers,” he said. “We’ve exhausted other strategies, so I’m calling him tomorrow, okay?”
I wanted answers now, too, but not to some questions. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “But
listen—don’t tell me anything that’s not relevant. I don’t want to know anything unless it’s going to help me know where she was going and why.”
“Me neither, actually,” Takumi said. “I feel like maybe some of that shit should stay private.”
The Colonel stuffed a towel under the door, lit a cigarette, and said, “Fair enough, kids. We’ll work on a need-to-know basis.”
twenty-nine days after
AS I WALKED HOME from classes the next day, I saw the Colonel sitting on the bench outside the pay phone, scribbling into a notebook balanced on his knees as he cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder.
I hurried into Room 43, where I found Takumi playing the racing game on mute. “How long has he been on the phone?” I asked.
“Dunno. He was on when I got here twenty minutes ago. He must have skipped Smart Boy Math. Why, are you scared Jake’s gonna drive down here and kick your ass for letting her go?”
“Whatever,” I said, thinking, This is precisely why we shouldn’t have told him. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and lit a cigarette. Takumi came in not long after.
“What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing. I just want to know what happened to her.”
“Like you really want to know the truth? Or like you want to find out that she fought with him and was on her way to break up with him and was going to come back here and fall into your arms and you were going to make hot, sweet love and have genius babies who memorized last words and poetry?”
“If you’re pissed at me, just say so.”
“I’m not pissed at you for letting her go. But I’m tired of you acting like you were the only guy who ever wanted her. Like you had some monopoly on liking her,” Takumi answered. I stood up, lifted the toilet seat, and flushed my unfinished cigarette.
I stared at him for a moment, and then said, “I kissed her that night, and I’ve got a monopoly on that.”
“What?” he stammered.
“I kissed her.”
His mouth opened as if to speak, but he said nothing. We stared at each other for a while, and I felt ashamed of myself for what amounted to bragging, and finally I said, “I—look, you know how she was. She wanted to do something, and she did it. I was probably just the guy who happened to be there.”