by Green, John
And maybe that was the only answer we’d ever have. She fell apart because that’s what happens. The Colonel seemed resigned to that, but if the Investigation had once been his idea, it was now the thing that held me together, and I still hoped for enlightenment.
sixty-two days after
THE NEXT SUNDAY, I slept in until the late-morning sunlight slivered through the blinds and found its way to my face. I pulled the comforter over my head, but the air got hot and stale, so I got up to call my parents.
“Miles!” my mom said before I even said hello. “We just got caller identification.”
“Does it magically know it’s me calling from the pay phone?” She laughed. “No, it just says ‘pay phone’ and the area code. So I deduced. How are you?” she asked, a warm concern in her voice.
“I’m doing okay. I kinda screwed up some of my classes for a while, but I’m back to studying now, so it should be fine,” I said, and that was mostly true.
“I know it’s been hard on you, buddy,” she said. “Oh! Guess who your dad and I saw at a party last night? Mrs. Forrester. Your fourth-grade teacher! Remember? She remembered you perfectly, and spoke very highly of you, and we just talked”—and while I was pleased to know that Mrs. Forrester held my fourth-grade self in high regard, I only half listened as I read the scribbled notes on the white-painted pine wall on either side of the phone, looking for any new ones I might be able to decode (Lacy’s—Friday, 10 were the when and where of a Weekday Warrior party, I figured)—“and we had dinner with the Johnstons last night and I’m afraid that Dad had too much wine. We played charades and he was just awful.” She laughed, and I felt so tired, but someone had dragged the bench away from the pay phone, so I sat my bony butt down on the hard concrete, pulling the silver cord of the phone taut and preparing for a serious soliloquy from my mom, and then down below all the other notes and scribbles, I saw a drawing of a flower. Twelve oblong petals around a filled-in circle against the daisy-white paint, and daisies, white daisies, and I could hear her saying, What do you see, Pudge? Look, and I could see her sitting drunk on the phone with Jake talking about nothing and What are you doing? and she says, Nothing, just doodling, just doodling. And then, Oh God.
“Miles?”
“Yeah, sorry, Mom. Sorry. Chip’s here. We gotta go study. I gotta go.”
“Will you call us later, then? I’m sure Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Yeah, Mom; yeah, of course. I love you, okay? Okay, I gotta go.”
“I think I found something!” I shouted at the Colonel, invisible beneath his blanket, but the urgency in my voice and the promise of something, anything, found, woke the Colonel up instantly, and he jumped from his bunk to the linoleum. Before I could say anything, he grabbed yesterday’s jeans and sweatshirt from the floor, pulled them on, and followed me outside.
“Look.” I pointed, and he squatted down beside the phone and said, “Yeah. She drew that. She was always doodling those flowers.”
“And ‘just doodling,’ remember? Jake asked her what she was doing and she said ‘just doodling,’ and then she said ‘Oh God’ and freaked out. She looked at the doodle and remembered something.”
“Good memory, Pudge,” he acknowledged, and I wondered why the Colonel wouldn’t just get excited about it.
“And then she freaked out,” I repeated, “and went and got the tulips while we were getting the fireworks. She saw the doodle, remembered whatever she’d forgotten, and then freaked out.”
“Maybe,” he said, still staring at the flower, trying perhaps to see it as she had. He stood up finally and said, “It’s a solid theory, Pudge,” and reached up and patted my shoulder, like a coach complimenting a player. “But we still don’t know what she forgot.”
sixty-nine days after
A WEEK AFTER THE DISCOVERY of the doodled flower, I’d resigned myself to its insignificance—I wasn’t Banzan in the meat market after all—and as the maples around campus began to hint of resurrection and the maintenance crew began mowing the grass in the dorm circle again, it seemed to me we had finally lost her.
The Colonel and I walked into the woods down by the lake that afternoon and smoked a cigarette in the precise spot where the Eagle had caught us so many months before. We’d just come from a town meeting, where the Eagle announced the school was going to build a playground by the lake in memory of Alaska. She did like swings, I guess, but a playground? Lara stood up at the meeting—surely a first for her—and said they should do something funnier, something Alaska herself would have done.
Now, by the lake, sitting on a mossy, half-rotten log, the Colonel said to me, “Lara was right. We should do something for her. A prank. Something she would have loved.”
“Like, a memorial prank?”
“Exactly. The Alaska Young Memorial Prank. We can make it an annual event. Anyway, she came up with this idea last year. But she wanted to save it to be our senior prank. But it’s good. It’s really good. It’s historic.”
“Are you going to tell me?” I asked, thinking back to the time when he and Alaska had left me out of prank planning for Barn Night.
“Sure,” he said. “The prank is entitled ‘Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.’ ” And he told me, and I have to say, Alaska left us with the crown jewel of pranks, the Mona Lisa of high-school hilarity, the culmination of generations of Culver Creek pranking. And if the Colonel could pull it off, it would be etched in the memory of everyone at the Creek, and Alaska deserved nothing less. Best of all, it did not, technically, involve any expellable offenses.
The Colonel got up and dusted the dirt and moss off his pants. “I think we owe her that.”
And I agreed, but still, she owed us an explanation. If she was up there, down there, out there, somewhere, maybe she would laugh. And maybe—just maybe—she would give us the clue we needed.
eighty-three days after
TWO WEEKS LATER, the Colonel returned from spring break with two notebooks filled with the minutiae of prank planning, sketches of various locations, and a forty-page, two-column list of problems that might crop up and their solutions. He calculated all times to a tenth of a second, and all distances to the inch, and then he recalculated, as if he could not bear the thought of failing her again. And then on that Sunday, the Colonel woke up late and rolled over. I was reading The Sound and the Fury, which I was supposed to have read in mid-February, and I looked up as I heard the rustling in the bed, and the Colonel said, “Let’s get the band back together.” And so I ventured out into the overcast spring and woke up Lara and Takumi, then brought them back to Room 43. The Barn Night crew was intact—or as close as it ever would be—for the Alaska Young Memorial Prank.
The three of us sat on the couch while the Colonel stood in front of us, outlining the plan and our parts in it with an excitement I hadn’t seen in him since Before. When he finished, he asked, “Any questions?”
“Yeah,” Takumi said. “Is that seriously going to work?”
“Well, first we gotta find a stripper. And second Pudge has to work some magic with his dad.”
“All right, then,” Takumi said. “Let’s get to work.”
eighty-four days after
EVERY SPRING, Culver Creek took one Friday afternoon off from classes, and all the students, faculty, and staff were required to go to the gym for Speaker Day. Speaker Day featured two speakers—usually small-time celebrities or small-time politicians or small-time academics, the kind of people who would come and speak at a school for the measly three hundred bucks the school budgeted. The junior class picked the first speaker and the seniors the second, and anyone who had ever attended a Speaker Day agreed that they were torturously boring. We planned to shake Speaker Day up a bit.
All we needed to do was convince the Eagle to let “Dr. William Morse,” a “friend of my dad’s” and a “preeminent scholar of deviant sexuality in adolescents,” be the junior class’s speaker.
So I called my dad at work, and his secretary, Paul, ask
ed me if everything was all right, and I wondered why everyone, everyone, asked me if everything was all right when I called at any time other than Sunday morning.
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
My dad picked up. “Hey, Miles. Is everything all right?”
I laughed and spoke quietly into the phone, since people were milling about. “Yeah, Dad. Everything is fine. Hey, remember when you stole the school bell and buried it in the cemetery?”
“Greatest Culver Creek prank ever,” he responded proudly.
“It was, Dad. It was. So listen, I wonder if you’d help out with the new greatest Culver Creek prank ever.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that, Miles. I don’t want you getting in any trouble.”
“Well, I won’t. The whole junior class is planning it. And it’s not like anyone is going to get hurt or anything. Because, well, remember Speaker Day?”
“God that was boring. That was almost worse than class.”
“Yeah, well, I need you to pretend to be our speaker. Dr. William Morse, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and an expert in adolescent understandings of sexuality.”
He was quiet for a long time, and I looked down at Alaska’s last daisy and waited for him to ask what the prank was, and I would have told him, but I just heard him breathe slowly into the phone, and then he said, “I won’t even ask. Hmm.” He sighed. “Swear to God you’ll never tell your mother.”
“I swear to God.” I paused. It took me a second to remember the Eagle’s real name. “Mr. Starnes is going to call you in about ten minutes.”
“Okay, my name is Dr. William Morse, and I’m a psychology professor, and—adolescent sexuality?”
“Yup. You’re the best, Dad.”
“I just want to see if you can top me,” he said, laughing.
Although it killed the Colonel to do it, the prank could not work without the assistance of the Weekday Warriors—specifically junior-class president Longwell Chase, who by now had grown his silly surfer mop back. But the Warriors loved the idea, so I met Longwell in his room and said, “Let’s go.”
Longwell Chase and I had nothing to talk about and no desire to pretend otherwise, so we walked silently to the Eagle’s house. The Eagle came to the door before we even knocked. He cocked his head a little when he saw us, looking confused—and, indeed, we made an odd couple, with Longwell’s pressed and pleated khaki pants and my I-keep-meaning-to-do-laundry blue jeans.
“The speaker we picked is a friend of Miles’s dad,” Longwell said. “Dr. William Morse. He’s a professor at a university down in Florida, and he studies adolescent sexuality.”
“Aiming for controversy, are we?”
“Oh no,” I said. “I’ve met Dr. Morse. He’s interesting, but he’s not controversial. He just studies the, uh, the way that adolescents’ understanding of sex is still changing and growing. I mean, he’s opposed to premarital sex.”
“Well. What’s his phone number?” I gave the Eagle a piece of paper, and he walked to a phone on the wall and dialed. “Yes, hello. I’m calling to speak with Dr. Morse? . . . Okay, thanks . . . Hello, Dr. Morse. I have Miles Halter here in my home, and he tells me . . . great, wonderful . . . Well, I was wondering”—the Eagle paused, twisting the cord around his finger—“wondering, I guess, whether you—just so long as you understand that these are impressionable young people. We wouldn’t want explicit discussions. . . . Excellent. Excellent. I’m glad you understand. . . . You, too, sir. See you soon!” The Eagle hung up the phone, smiling, and said, “Good choice! He seems like a very interesting man.”
“Oh yeah,” Longwell said very seriously. “I think he will be extraordinarily interesting.”
one hundred two days after
MY FATHER PLAYED Dr. William Morse on the phone, but the man playing him in real life went by the name of Maxx with two x’s, except that his name was actually Stan, except on Speaker Day his name was, obviously, Dr. William Morse. He was a veritable existential identity crisis, a male stripper with more aliases than a covert CIA agent.
The first four “agencies” the Colonel called turned us down. It wasn’t until we got to the B’s in the “Entertainment” section of the Yellow Pages that we found Bachelorette Parties R Us. The owner of the aforementioned establishment liked the idea a great deal, but, he said, “Maxx is gonna love that. But no nudity. Not in front of the kids.” We agreed—with some reluctance.
To ensure that none of us would get expelled, Takumi and I collected five dollars from every junior at Culver Creek to cover “Dr. William Morse’s” appearance fee, since we doubted the Eagle would be keen on paying him after witnessing the, uh, speech. I paid the Colonel’s five bucks. “I feel that I have earned your charity,” he said, gesturing to the spiral notebooks he’d filled with plans.
As I sat through my classes that morning, I could think of nothing else. Every junior in the school had known for two weeks, and so far not even the faintest rumor had leaked out. But the Creek was rife with gossips—particularly the Weekday Warriors, and if just one person told one friend who told one friend who told one friend who told the Eagle, everything would fall apart.
The Creek’s don’t-rat ethos withstood the test nicely, but when Maxx/Stan/Dr. Morse didn’t shown up by 11:50 that morning, I thought the Colonel would lose his shit. He sat on the bumper of a car in the student parking lot, his head bowed, his hands running through his thick mop of dark hair over and over again, as if he were trying to find something in there. Maxx had promised to arrive by 11:40, twenty minutes before the official start of Speaker Day, giving him time to learn the speech and everything. I stood next to the Colonel, worried but quiet, waiting. We’d sent Takumi to call “the agency” and learn the whereabouts of “the performer.”
“Of all the things I thought could go wrong, this was not one of them. We have no solution for this.”
Takumi ran up, careful not to speak to us until he was near. Kids were starting to file into the gym. Late late late late. We asked so little of our performer, really. We had written his speech. We had planned everything for him. All Maxx had to do was show up with his outfit on. And yet . . .
“The agency,” said Takumi, “says the performer is on his way.”
“On his way?” the Colonel said, clawing at his hair with a new vigor. “On his way? He’s already late.”
“They said he should be—” and then suddenly our worries disappeared as a blue minivan rounded the corner toward the parking lot, and I saw a man inside wearing a suit.
“That’d better be Maxx,” the Colonel said as the car parked. He jogged up to the front door.
“I’m Maxx,” the guy said upon opening the door.
“I am a nameless and faceless representative of the junior class,” the Colonel answered, shaking Maxx’s hand. He was thirtyish, tan and wide-shouldered, with a strong jaw and a dark, close-cropped goatee.
We gave Maxx a copy of his speech, and he read through it quickly.
“Any questions?” I asked.
“Uh, yeah. Given the nature of this event, I think y’all should pay me in advance.”
He struck me as very articulate, even professorial, and I felt a supreme confidence, as if Alaska had found the best male stripper in central Alabama and led us right to him.
Takumi popped the trunk of his SUV and grabbed a paper grocery bag with $320 in it. “Here you go, Maxx,” he said. “Okay, Pudge here is going to sit down there with you, because you are friends with Pudge’s dad. That’s in the speech. But, uh, we’re hoping that if you get interrogated when this is all over, you can find it in your heart to say that the whole junior class called on a conference call to hire you, because we wouldn’t want Pudge here to get in any trouble.”
He laughed. “Sounds good to me. I took this gig because I thought it was hilarious. Wish I’d thought of this in high school.”
As I walked into the gym, Maxx/Dr. William Morse at my side, Takumi and the Colonel trailing a good bit beh
ind me, I knew I was more likely to get busted than anyone else. But I’d been reading the Culver Creek Handbook pretty closely the last couple weeks, and I reminded myself of my two-pronged defense, in the event I got in trouble: 1. There is not, technically, a rule against paying a stripper to dance in front of the school. 2. It cannot be proven that I was responsible for the incident. It can only be proven that I brought a person onto campus who I presumed to be an expert on sexual deviancy in adolescence and who turned out to be an actual sexual deviant.
I sat down with Dr. William Morse in the middle of the front row of bleachers. Some ninth graders sat behind me, but when the Colonel walked up with Lara a moment later, he politely told them, “Thanks for holding our seats,” and ushered them away. As per the plan, Takumi was in the supply room on the second floor, connecting his stereo equipment to the gym’s loudspeakers. I turned to Dr. Morse and said, “We should look at each other with great interest and talk like you’re friends with my parents.”
He smiled and nodded his head. “He is a great man, your father. And your mother—so beautiful.” I rolled my eyes, a bit disgusted. Still, I liked this stripper fellow. The Eagle came in at noon on the nose, greeted the senior-class speaker—a former Alabama state attorney general—and then came over to Dr. Morse, who stood with great aplomb and half bowed as he shook the Eagle’s hand—maybe too formal—and the Eagle said, “We’re certainly very glad to have you here,” and Maxx replied, “Thank you. I hope I don’t disappoint.”