by Green, John
Rather than, like, I don’t know, “hello” or something, the Colonel began, “I have been instructed to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner at Chez Martín.”
Alaska whispered into my ear, and then I laughed and said, “I have been instructed to accept your invitation.” So we walked over to the Eagle’s house, told him we were going to eat turkey trailer-park style, and sped away in the hatchback.
The Colonel explained it to us on the two-hour car ride south. I was crammed into the backseat because Alaska had called shotgun. She usually drove, but when she didn’t, she was shotgun-calling queen of the world. The Colonel’s mother heard that we were on campus and couldn’t bear the thought of leaving us familyless for Thanksgiving. The Colonel didn’t seem too keen on the whole idea—“I’m going to have to sleep in a tent,” he said, and I laughed.
Except it turns out he did have to sleep in a tent, a nice four-person green outfit shaped like half an egg, but still a tent. The Colonel’s mom lived in a trailer, as in the kind of thing you might see attached to a large pickup truck, except this particular one was old and falling apart on its cinder blocks, and probably couldn’t have been hooked up to a truck without disintegrating. It wasn’t even a particularly big trailer. I could just barely stand up to my full height without scraping the ceiling. Now I understood why the Colonel was short—he couldn’t afford to be any taller. The place was really one long room, with a full-size bed in the front, a kitchenette, and a living area in the back with a TV and a small bathroom—so small that in order to take a shower, you pretty much had to sit on the toilet.
“It ain’t much,” the Colonel’s mom (“That’s Dolores, not Miss Martin”) told us. “But y’alls a-gonna have a turkey the size o’ the kitchen.” She laughed. The Colonel ushered us out of the trailer immediately after our brief tour, and we walked through the neighborhood, a series of trailers and mobile homes on dirt roads.
“Well, now you get why I hate rich people.” And I did. I couldn’t fathom how the Colonel grew up in such a small place. The entire trailer was smaller than our dorm room. I didn’t know what to say to him, how to make him feel less embarrassed.
“I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable,” he said. “I know it’s probably foreign.”
“Not to me,” Alaska piped up.
“Well, you don’t live in a trailer,” he told her.
“Poor is poor.”
“I suppose,” the Colonel said.
Alaska decided to go help Dolores with dinner. She said that it was sexist to leave the cooking to the women, but better to have good sexist food than crappy boy-prepared food. So the Colonel and I sat on the pull-out couch in the living room, playing video games and talking about school.
“I finished my religion paper. But I have to type it up on your computer when we get back. I think I’m ready for finals, which is good, since we have an ank-pray to an-play.”
“Your mom doesn’t know pig Latin?” I smirked.
“Not if I talk fast. Christ, be quiet.”
The food—fried okra, steamed corn on the cob, and pot roast that was so tender it fell right off the plastic fork—convinced me that Dolores was an even better cook than Maureen. Culver Creek’s okra had less grease, more crunch. Dolores was also the funniest mom I’d ever met. When Alaska asked her what she did for work, she smiled and said, “I’m a culnary engineeyer. That’s a short-order cook at the Waffle House to y’all.”
“Best Waffle House in Alabama.” The Colonel smiled, and then I realized, he wasn’t embarrassed of his mom at all. He was just scared that we would act like condescending boarding-school snobs. I’d always found the Colonel’s I-hate-the-rich routine a little overwrought until I saw him with his mom. He was the same Colonel, but in a totally different context. It made me hope that one day, I could meet Alaska’s family, too.
Dolores insisted that Alaska and I share the bed, and she slept on the pull-out while the Colonel was out in his tent. I worried he would get cold, but frankly I wasn’t about to give up my bed with Alaska. We had separate blankets, and there were never fewer than three layers between us, but the possibilities kept me up half the night.
forty-six days before
BEST THANKSGIVING FOOD I’d ever had. No crappy cranberry sauce. Just huge slabs of moist white meat, corn, green beans cooked in enough bacon fat to make them taste like they weren’t good for you, biscuits with gravy, pumpkin pie for dessert, and a glass of red wine for each of us. “I believe,” Dolores said, “that yer s’posed to drink white with turkey, but—now I don’t know ’bout y’all—but I don’t s’pose I give a shit.”
We laughed and drank our wine, and then after the meal, we each listed our gratitudes. My family always did that before the meal, and we all just rushed through it to get to the food. So the four of us sat around the table and shared our blessings. I was thankful for the fine food and the fine company, for having a home on Thanksgiving. “A trailer, at least,” Dolores joked.
“Okay, my turn,” Alaska said. “I’m grateful for having just had my best Thanksgiving in a decade.”
Then the Colonel said, “I’m just grateful for you, Mom,” and Dolores laughed and said, “That dog won’t hunt, boy.”
I didn’t exactly know what that phrase meant, but apparently it meant, “That was inadequate,” because then the Colonel expanded his list to acknowledge that he was grateful to be “the smartest human being in this trailer park,” and Dolores laughed and said, “Good enough.”
And Dolores? She was grateful that her phone was back on, that her boy was home, that Alaska helped her cook and that I had kept the Colonel out of her hair, that her job was steady and her coworkers were nice, that she had a place to sleep and a boy who loved her.
I sat in the back of the hatchback on the drive home—and that is how I thought of it: home—and fell asleep to the highway’s monotonous lullaby.
forty-four days before
“COOSA LIQUORS’ entire business model is built around selling cigarettes to minors and alcohol to adults.” Alaska looked at me with disconcerting frequency when she drove, particularly since we were winding through a narrow, hilly highway south of school, headed to the aforementioned Coosa Liquors. It was Saturday, our last day of real vacation. “Which is great, if all you need is cigarettes. But we need booze. And they card for booze. And my ID blows. But I’ll flirt my way through.” She made a sudden and unsignaled left turn, pulling onto a road that dropped precipitously down a hill with fields on either side, and she gripped the steering wheel tight as we accelerated, and she waited until the last possible moment to brake, just before we reached the bottom of the hill. There stood a plywood gas station that no longer sold gas with a faded sign bolted to the roof: COOSA LIQUORS: WE CATER TO YOUR SPIRITUAL NEEDS.
Alaska went in alone and walked out the door five minutes later weighed down by two paper bags filled with contraband: three cartons of cigarettes, five bottles of wine, and a fifth of vodka for the Colonel. On the way home, Alaska said, “You like knock-knock jokes?”
“Knock-knock jokes?” I asked. “You mean like, ‘Knock knock . . .”
“Who’s there?” replied Alaska.
“Who.”
“Who Who?”
“What are you, an owl?” I finished. Lame.
“That was brilliant,” said Alaska. “I have one. You start.”
“Okay. Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?” said Alaska.
I looked at her blankly. About a minute later, I got it, and laughed.
“My mom told me that joke when I was six. It’s still funny.”
So I could not have been more surprised when she showed up sobbing at Room 43 just as I was putting the finishing touches on my final paper for English. She sat down on the couch, her every exhalation a mix of whimper and scream.
“I’m sorry,” she said, heaving. Snot was dribbling down her chin.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. She picked up a Kleenex from the COFFEE TABLE and wiped a
t her face.
“I don’t . . .” she started, and then a sob came like a tsunami, her cry so loud and childlike that it scared me, and I got up, sat down next her, and put my arm around her. She turned away, pushing her head into the foam of the couch. “I don’t understand why I screw everything up,” she said.
“What, like with Marya? Maybe you were just scared.”
“Scared isn’t a good excuse!” she shouted into the couch. “Scared is the excuse everyone has always used!” I didn’t know who “everyone” was, or when “always” was, and as much as I wanted to understand her ambiguities, the slyness was growing annoying.
“Why are you upset about this now?”
“It’s not just that. It’s everything. But I told the Colonel in the car.” She sniffled but seemed done with the sobs. “While you were sleeping in the back. And he said he’d never let me out of his sight during pranks. That he couldn’t trust me on my own. And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.”
“It took guts to tell him,” I said.
“I have guts, just not when it counts. Will you—um,” and she sat up straight and then moved toward me, and I raised my arm as she collapsed into my skinny chest and cried. I felt bad for her, but she’d done it to herself. She didn’t have to rat.
“I don’t want to upset you, but maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of going home or something?”
She pulled away from me and gave me a Look of Doom that would have made the Eagle proud, and I felt like she hated me or hated my question or both, and then she looked away, out the window, toward the soccer field, and said, “There’s no home.”
“Well, you have a family,” I backpedaled. She’d talked to me about her mom just that morning. How could the girl who told that joke three hours before become a sobbing mess?
Still staring at me, she said, “I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.”
“Okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.” I didn’t even know what she was talking about anymore. One vague notion after another.
“Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.”
And there was something to that, truth be told.
christmas
WE ALL WENT HOME for Christmas break—even purportedly homeless Alaska.
I got a nice watch and a new wallet—“grown-up gifts,” my dad called them. But mostly I just studied for those two weeks. Christmas vacation wasn’t really a vacation, on account of how it was our last chance to study for exams, which started the day after we got back. I focused on precalc and biology, the two classes that most deeply threatened my goal of a 3.4 GPA. I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college.
So, yeah, I spent a lot of my time at home studying math and memorizing French vocab, just like I had before Culver Creek. Really, being at home for two weeks was just like my entire life before Culver Creek, except my parents were more emotional. They talked very little about their trip to London. I think they felt guilty. That’s a funny thing about parents. Even though I pretty much stayed at the Creek over Thanksgiving because I wanted to, my parents still felt guilty. It’s nice to have people who will feel guilty for you, although I could have lived without my mom crying during every single family dinner. She would say, “I’m a bad mother,” and my dad and I would immediately reply, “No, you’re not.”
Even my dad, who is affectionate but not, like, sentimental, randomly, while we were watching The Simpsons, said he missed me. I said I missed him, too, and I did. Sort of. They’re such nice people. We went to movies and played card games, and I told them the stories I could tell without horrifying them, and they listened. My dad, who sold real estate for a living but read more books than anyone I knew, talked with me about the books I was reading for English class, and my mom insisted that I sit with her in the kitchen and learn how to make simple dishes—macaroni, scrambled eggs—now that I was “living on my own.” Never mind that I didn’t have, or want, a kitchen. Never mind that I didn’t like eggs or macaroni and cheese. By New Year’s Day, I could make them anyway.
When I left, they both cried, my mom explaining that it was just empty-nest syndrome, that they were just so proud of me, that they loved me so much. That put a lump in my throat, and I didn’t care about Thanksgiving anymore. I had a family.
eight days before
ALASKA WALKED IN on the first day back from Christmas break and sat beside the Colonel on the couch. The Colonel was hard at work, breaking a land-speed record on the PlayStation.
She didn’t say she missed us, or that she was glad to see us. She just looked at the couch and said, “You really need a new couch.”
“Please don’t address me when I’m racing,” the Colonel said. “God. Does Jeff Gordon have to put up with this shit?”
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “It’s great. What we need is a pre-prank that coincides with an attack on Kevin and his minions,” she said.
I was sitting on the bed, reading the textbook in preparation for my American history exam the next day.
“A pre-prank?” I asked.
“A prank designed to lull the administration into a false sense of security,” the Colonel answered, annoyed by the distraction. “After the pre-prank, the Eagle will think the junior class has done its prank and won’t be waiting for it when it actually comes.” Every year, the junior and senior classes pulled off a prank at some point in the year—usually something lame, like Roman candles in the dorm circle at five in the morning on a Sunday.
“Is there always a pre-prank?” I asked.
“No, you idiot,” the Colonel said. “If there was always a pre-prank, then the Eagle would expect two pranks. The last time a pre-prank was used—hmm. Oh, right: 1987. When the pre-prank was cutting off electricity to campus, and then the actual prank was putting five hundred live crickets in the heating ducts of the classrooms. Sometimes you can still hear the chirping.”
“Your rote memorization is, like, so impressive,” I said.
“You guys are like an old married couple.” Alaska smiled. “In a creepy way.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” the Colonel said. “You should see this kid try to crawl into bed with me at night.”
“Hey!”
“Let’s get on subject!” Alaska said. “Pre-prank. This weekend, since there’s a new moon. We’re staying at the barn. You, me, the Colonel, Takumi, and, as a special gift to you, Pudge, Lara Buterskaya.”
“The Lara Buterskaya I puked on?”
“She’s just shy. She still likes you.” Alaska laughed. “Puking made you look—vulnerable.”
“Very perky boobs,” the Colonel said. “Are you bringing Takumi for me?”
“You need to be single for a while.”
“True enough,” the Colonel said.
“Just spend a few more months playing video games,” she said. “That hand-eye coordination will come in handy when you get to third base.”
“Gosh, I haven’t heard the base system in so long, I think I’ve forgotten third base,” the Colonel responded. “I would roll my eyes at you, but I can’t afford to look away from the screen.”
“French, Feel, Finger, Fuck. It’s like you skipped third grade,” Alaska said.
“I did skip third grade,” the Colonel answered.
“So,” I said, “what’s our pre-prank?”
“The Colonel and I will work that out. No need to get you into trouble—yet.”
“Oh. Okay. Um, I’m gonna go for a cigarette, then.”
I left. It wasn’t the first time Alaska had left me out of the loop, certainly, but after we’d been together so much over Thanksgiving, it seemed ridiculous to plan the prank with the Colonel but without me. Whose T-shirts were wet with her tears? Mine. Who’d listened to her
read Vonnegut? Me. Who’d been the butt of the world’s worst knock-knock joke? Me. I walked to the Sunny Konvenience Kiosk across from school and smoked. This never happened to me in Florida, this oh-so-high-school angst about who likes whom more, and I hated myself for letting it happen now. You don’t have to care about her, I told myself. Screw her.
four days before
THE COLONEL WOULDN’T TELL ME a word about the pre-prank, except that it was to be called Barn Night, and that when I packed, I should pack for two days.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were torture. The Colonel was always with Alaska, and I was never invited. So I spent an inordinate amount of time studying for finals, which helped my GPA considerably. And I finally finished my religion paper.
My answer to the question was straightforward enough, really. Most Christians and Muslims believe in a heaven and a hell, though there’s a lot of disagreement within both religions over what, exactly, will get you into one afterlife or the other. Buddhists are more complicated—because of the Buddha’s doctrine of anatta, which basically says that people don’t have eternal souls. Instead, they have a bundle of energy, and that bundle of energy is transitory, migrating from one body to another, reincarnating endlessly until it eventually reaches enlightenment.
I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers—where you just repeat what you’ve already said with phrases like In summation, and To conclude. I didn’t do that—instead I talked about why I thought it was an important question. People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn’t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn’t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing, and couldn’t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn’t bear not to.