John

Green: Looking for Alaska

Different quotes and excerpts from the book.

BEFORE

(136 days before) And his lasts words were, "I go to seek a Great Perhaps." Thats why Im
going. So I dont have to wait until I die to start seeking a Great Perhaps.

(128 days before) That didnt happen, of course. Things never happened like I imagined
them.

I thought of the people I read about - John F kennedy, James Joyce, Humphrey Bogart - who
went to boarding school, and their adventures; Kennedy, for example, loved pranks. I
thought of the Great Perhaps and the things that might happen and the people I might meet
and who my roomate might be.

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.

But look, youre going to get in trouble. Ninety-nine per cent of the time your parents never
have to know though.

Anyway, when you get in trouble, just dont tell on anyone. I mean, I hate the rich snots
here with a fervent passion I usually reserve for dental work and my father. But that doesnt
mean I would rat them out. Pretty much the only important thing is never never never
never rat.

"He - thats Simn Bolvar - 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?
So whats the labyrinth? I asked her. Thats the mystery, isnt it? Is the labyrinth living or
dying? Which is he trying to escape - the world or the end of it?

Every summer since I was little, Ive 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. Ill have more time for reading when
Im old and boring.

They were freshmen together, she said, both scholarship kids with, as she put it, a shared
interest in booze and mischief.

Yeah, dont worry, Pudge. If theres one thing I can get you, its a girlfriend. Lets make a
deal: you figure out what the labyrinth is and how to get out of it, and Ill get you laid.
Deal. We shook on it.

She turned to me as we made our way through the darkness and said, When are you
walking at night, do you ever get creeped out and even though its silly and embarrasing 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.

(127 days before) Come on. You know what? There are people with real problems Ive got
real problems. Mommy aint here, so buck up, big guy."

feeling - probably for the first time in my life - the fear and excitement of living in a place
where you never know whats going to happen or when.

(126 days before) I must talk and you must listen, for we are engaged here in the most
important pursuit in history: the search for meaning. What is the nature of being a person?
What is the best way to go about being a person? How did we come to be, and what will
become of us when we are no longer? In short: what are the rules of this game and how
might we best play it?

(122 days before) Oh, I should mention this earlier. This isnt milk. Its five parts milk and
one part vodka. I call it ambrosia. Drink of the gods. You can barely smell the vodka in the
milk, so the Eagle cant catch me unless he actually takes a sip. The downside is that it tastes
like sour milk and rubbing alcohol, but its Friday night, Pudge, and my girlfriend is a bitch.
Want some?

I guess I stay with her because she stays with me. And thats not an easy thing to do. Im a
bad boyfriend. Shes a bad girlfriend. We deserve one another.

(110 days before) I said nothing - I hadnt known Marya, and anyway, listening quietly was
my general social strategy.

Anyway, Alaska said to me. I thought the way he treated you was just awful. I wanted to
cry. I just wanted to kiss you and make it better. Shame you didnt, I deadpanned, and
they laughed.

Why do you smoke so damn fast? I asked. She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a
wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably
elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said,
Yall smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.

(109 days before) I hated sports. I hated sports, and I hated people who played them, and I
hated people who watched them, and I hated people who didnt hate people who watched
or played them.

He loves weed like Alaska loves sex, the Colonel said. This is a man who once constructed
a bong using only the barrel of an air rifle, a ripe pear and an eight-by-ten glossy photograph
of Anna Kournikova. Not the brightest gem in the jewellery shop, but youve got to admire
his single-minded dedication to drug abuse.

I wanted to be one of those people who have streaks to maintain, who scorch the ground
with their intensity. But for now, at least I knew such people, and they needed me, just like
comets need tails.

(108 days before) Youve got lifetime to mull over the Buddhist understanding of
interconnectedness. But while you were looking out the window, you missed the chance to
explore the equally interesting Buddhist belief in being present for every facet of your daily
life, of being truly present. Be present in this class. And the, when its over, be present out
there.

(101 days before) By happy coincidence, a cute sophomore girl named Lara ended up sitting
on my lap. Larad been born in Russia or someplace, and she spoke with a slight accent.
Since we were only four layers of clothes from doing it, I took the opprotunity to introduce
myself.

Studies show that marijuana is better for your health than those cigarettes, Hank said.
Alaska swallod mouthful of French fries took a drag on her cigarette and blew smoke across
the table at Hank. I may die young, she said, but at least Ill die smart. Now, back to
tangents."

(100 days before) But why Alaska? I asked her. Well, later, I found out what it means. Its
from an Aleut word, Alyeska. It means, That which the sea breaks against and I love that.
But at the time I just saw Alaska up there. And it was big, just like I wanted to be. And it was
damn far away from Vine Station, Alabama, just like i wanted to be. I laughed. And now
your all grown up and fairly far away from home, I said smiling. So congratulations. She
stopped the head bobbing and let go of my (unfortunately sweaty) hand. Getting out isnt
that easy, she said seriously, her eyes on mine like I knew the way out and wouldnt tell
her.

You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how youll escape it one
day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never
do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

Sometimes I dont get you, I said. She didnt even glance at me. She just smiled towards
the television and said, You never get me. Thats the whole point.

(99 days before) Its the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty.
Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.

(98 days before) You dont need to be nervous. But this is the seventh time Ive been
caught smoking"

(89 days before) So Friday? Do you have plans for Friday? and then I laughed because the
Colonel and I didnt have plans for this Friday, or for any other Friday for the rest of our
lives. I didnt think so. She smiled.

(87 days before) Id heard Alaska talk about kissing, but Id never seen her kiss until then: as
he held her by her waist, she leaned forward, her pouty lips parted, her head just slightly
tilted, and enveloped his mouth with such passion that I felt I should look away but
couldnt.

Yeah. So thats it. You know whats lame, Pudge? I really care about her. I mean, we were
hopeless. Badly matched. But still. I mean, I said I loved her. I lost my virginity to her. You
lost yout virginity to her? Yeah. Yeah. I never told you that? Shes the only girl I've slept
with. I dont know. Even though we fought, like, 94 per cent of the time, Im really said."

(84 days before) Day after day, night after night, it rained. It rained so that I couldn't see
across the dorm circle, so that the lake swelled up and lapped against the Adirondack swing,
swallowing half of the fake beach. By the third day, I abandoned my umbrella entirely and
walked around in a perpetual state of wetness.

(76 days before) Sorry. Don't worry, dude, he said. God will punish the wicked. And
before He does, we will.

(66 days before) Pudge, he said. Hmm. Pudge, you need a cigarette. Let's go for a walk.

(58 days before) I woke up half an hour later, when she sat down on my bed, her butt
against my hip. Her underwear, her jeans, the comforter, my corduroys, and my boxers
between us, I thought. Five layers, and yet I felt it, the nervous warmth of touchinga pale
reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in
the almost-ness of the moment, I cared at least enough. I wasn't sure whether I liked her,
and I doubted whether I could trust her, but I cared at least enough to try to find out. Her
on my bed, wide green eyes staring down at me. The enduring mystery of her sly, almost
smirking, smile. Five layers between us.

(1) Because he is a very conscientious student, Pudge has been deprived of many wonderful
Culver Creek experiences, including but not limited to (a) drinking wine with me in the
woods, and (b) getting up early on a Saturday to eat breakfast at Mclnedible and then
driving through the greater Birmingham area smoking cigarettes and talking about how
pathetically boring the greater Birmingham area is, and also (c) going out late at night and
lying in the dewy soccer field and reading a Kurt Vonnegut book by moonlight.

So why don't you go home for vacations? I asked her. I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge.
And home is full of them.

(52 days before) and I dug around the glass until I pulled out a bottle of pink wine
Strawberry Hill, it was called, I suppose because if it had not tasted like vinegar with a dash
of maple syrup, it might have tasted like strawberries.

I worried about it for a moment as I held the bottle by the neck, but I wanted to trust her,
and so I did. I took a minor sip, and as soon as I swallowed, I felt my body rejecting the
stinging syrup of it. It washed back up my esophagus, but I swallowed hard, and there, yes, I
did it. I was drinking on campus.

After a while, she put down the book, and I felt warm but not drunk with the bottle resting
between usmy chest touching the bottle and her chest touching the bottle but us not
touching each other, and then she placed her hand on my leg.

And lying there, amid the tall, still grass and beneath the star-drunk sky, listening to the just-
this-side-of-inaudible sound of her rhythmic breathing and the noisy silence of the bullfrogs,
the grasshoppers, the distant cars rushing endlessly on I-65, I thought it might be a fine time
to say the Three Little Words.

It's not life or death, the labyrinth.
Um, OK. So what is it?
Suffering, she said. Doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. That's the
problem. Bolivar was talking about the pain, not about the living or dying. How do you get
out of the labyrinth of suffering?

(51 days before) Last Thanksgiving, I spent the whole time constructing one massive candle
using the wax from all my little candles.

(49 days before) You shall love your crooked neighbour / With your crooked heart, I read
aloud. Yeah. That's pretty good, I said. Pretty good? Sure, and bufriedos are pretty good.
Sex is pretty fun. The sun is pretty hot. Jesus, it says so much about love and brokenness
it's perfect.

Look me in the eye and tell me this doesn't turn you on, Pudge. I couldn't. She laughed. It
was fine, she said. Healthy.

Shhhh, she said. I'm sleeping.
Just like that. From a hundred miles an hour to asleep in a nanosecond. I wanted so badly to
lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in
those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the
phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was
gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to
my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle
and she was a hurricane.

(46 days before) We spent all morning burning candles - well, and occasionally lighting
cigarettes off the burning candles after we stuffed a towel into the crack at the bottom of
her door.

We had separate blankets, and there were never fewer than three layers between us, but
the possibilities kept me up half the night.

(45 days before) I was thankful for the fine food and the fine company, for having a home
on Thanksgiving.

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.

(43 days before) Coosa liquors' entire business model is built around selling cigarettes to
minors and alcohol to adults.

OK. 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.

Still staring at me, she said, I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I
still fuck up.

OK, I told her. It's OK. 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) 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.

(8 days before) You don't have to care about her, I told myself. Screw her.

(4 days before) 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.

(3 days before) We're just, you know, wreaking a little havoc.

Pudge, my friend, we are indefuckingstructible.

I wanted to like booze more than I actually did (which is more or less the precise opposite of
how I felt about Alaska). But that night, the booze felt great, as the warmth of the wine in
my stomach spread through my body. I didn't like feeling stupid or out of control, but I liked
the way it made everything (laughing, crying, peeing in front of your friends) easier. Why did
we drink? For me, it was just fun, particularly since we were risking expulsion. The nice thing
about the constant threat of expulsion at Culver Creek is that it lends excitement to every
moment of illicit pleasure. The bad thing, of course, is that there is always the possibility of
actual expulsion.

(2 days before) Best day of my life was today, I said. And the story is that I woke up next
to a very pretty Hungarian girl and it was cold but not too cold and I had a cup of lukewarm
instant coffee and ate Cheerios without milk and then walked through the woods with
Alaska and Takumi. We skipped stones across the creek, which sounds dumb but it wasn't. I
don't know. Like the way the sun is right now, with the long shadows and that kind of bright,
soft light you get when the sun isn't quite setting? That's the light that makes everything
better, everything prettier, and today, everything just seemed to be in that light. I mean, I
didn't do anything. But just sitting here, even if I'm watching the Colonel whittle or
whatever. Whatever. Great day. Today. Best day of my life. You think I'm pretty? Lara
said and laughed, bashful. I thought, It'd be good to make eye contact with her now, but I
couldn't. And I'm Romaneean!

I lose. Because the best day of my life was the day I lost my virginity. And if you think I'm
going to tell you that story, you're gonna have to get me drunker than this.

Lara had always needed to talk for her parents, I thought, and so maybe she never learned
how to talk for herself. And I wasn't great at talking for myself either. We had something
important in common, then, a personality quirk I didn't share with Alaska or anybody else,
although almost by definition Lara and I couldn't express it to one another. So maybe it was
just the way the not-yet-setting sun shone against her lazy dark curls, but at that moment, I
wanted to kiss her, and we did not need to talk in order to kiss, and the puking on her jeans
and the months of mutual avoidance melted away.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us,
that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow
- that, in short, we are all going.

We are all going, McKinley said to his wife, and we sure are. There's your labyrinth of
suffering. We are all going. Find your way out of that maze.

and as night fell fast, we continued on, drinking and joking.

She laced her fingers in mine and squeezed. And then she rolled over and keessed me. I am
sure that she tasted like stale booze, but I did not notice, and I'm sure I tasted like stale
booze and cigarettes, but she didn't notice. We were kissing. I thought: This is good. I
thought: I am not bad at this kissing. Not bad at all. I thought: I am clearly the greatest
kisser in the history of the universe.

So we kissed quietly and laughed softly with our mouths and our eyes.

I had never felt another person against me as I slept. It was a fine end to the best day of my
life.

(1 day before) All right. All right. No screaming. Head hurts. And it did. I could feel last
night's wine in my throat and my head throbbed like it had the morning after my
concussion. My mouth tasted like a skunk had crawled into my throat and died.

How ya doin'? the Colonel asked her. I've had better mornings. Hung-over? Like an
alcoholic preacher on Sunday morning. Maybe you shouldn't drink so much, I suggested.
Pudge. She shook her head and sipped the cold coffee and wine. Pudge, what you must
understand about me is that I am a deeply unhappy person.

(The last day) Why do you like last words so much? But a lot of times, people die how
they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the
sort of people biographies get written about. Does that make sense?

It was that quick. I laughed, looked nervous, and she leaned in and tilted her head to the
side, and we were kissing. Zero layers between us. Our tongues dancing back and forth in
each other's mouths until there was no her mouth and my mouth but only our mouths
intertwined. She tasted like cigarettes and Mountain Dew and wine and Chap Stick.

We didn't have sex. We never got naked. I never touched her bare breast, and her hands
never got lower than my hips. It didn't matter. As she slept, I whispered, I love you, Alaska
Young.

AFTER
(The day after) Too much drinking in too short a time. Why did they have to drink last night?
And then I could taste her again, the wine and the cigarette smoke and the Chap Stick and
Alaska, and I wondered if she had kissed me because she was drunk.

Last night, Alaska Young was in a terrible accident. His tears came faster, then. And she
was killed. Alaska has passed away.

I could hear the Colonel still screaming, and I could feel hands on my back as I hunched
forward, but I could only see her lying naked on a metal table, a small trickle of blood falling
out of her half-teardrop nose, her green eyes open, staring off into the distance, her mouth
turned up just enough to suggest the idea of a smile, and she had felt so warm against me,
her mouth soft and warm on mine.

It is so cold today - literally freezing - and I imagine running to the creek and diving in head
first, the creek so shallow that my hands scrape against the rocks, and my body slides into
the cold water, the shock of the cold giving way to numbness, and I would stay there, float
down with that water first to the Cahaba River, then to the Alabama River, then to Mobile
Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

Even car-accident victims sometimes have time for last words. Princess Diana said, Oh God.
What's happened? Movie star James Dean said, They've got to see us, just before
slamming his Porsche into another car. I know so many last words. But I will never know
hers.

(2 days after) She was warm and soft against my skin, my tongue in her mouth, and she was
laughing, trying to teach me, make me better, promising to be continued. And now. And
now she was colder by the hour, more dead with every breath I took. I thought: That is the
fear. I have lost something important, and I cannot find it, and I need it. It is fear like if
someone lost his glasses and went to the glasses store and they told him that the world had
run out of glasses and he would just have to do without.

I'm sorry, he said. I feel so screwed up. I feel like I might die. You might, I said. Yeah.
Yeah. I might. You never know. It's just. It's like. POOF. And you're gone.

I knew he was only trying to help, but he didn't get it. There was pain. A dull endless pain in
my gut that wouldn't go away even when I knelt on the stingingly frozen tile of the
bathroom, dry-heaving. And what is an instant death anyway? How long is an instant? Is it
one second? Ten? The pain of those seconds must have been awful as her heart burst and
her lungs collapsed and there was no air and no blood to her brain and only raw panic. What
the hell is instant? Nothing is instant. Instant rice takes five minutes, instant pudding an
hour. I doubt that an instant of blinding pain feels particularly instantaneous.

The cold wind buffeted against the door, and the trees outside the back window shook with
such force that I could hear it from our room, and I sat in my bed and thought of the Colonel
out there somewhere, his head down, his teeth clenched, walking into the wind.

(4 days after) No! The dreams are terrible. In my dreams, she doesn't even look like herself
any more. I don't even remember what she looked like.

I fell asleep listening to his slow, even breaths, his stubbornness finally melting away in the
face of insurmountable fatigue.

(6 days after) More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of
loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I
leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I cried,
whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a
euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

I felt the Colonel's small hands on my shoulders and a tear dripped on to my head, and for a
few moments, it was just the three of us - the buses of students hadn't arrived, and Takumi
and Lara had faded away, and it was just the three of us - three bodies and two people - the
three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us too much
keeping us from one another.

Is it so hard to die, Mr. Lewis? Is that labyrinth really worse than this one?

(7 days after) I caught the edge of her scent: wet dirt and grass and cigarette smoke, and
beneath that the vestiges of vanilla-scented skin lotion. She flooded into my present and
only tact kept me from burying my face in the dirty laundry overfilling the hamper by her
dresser. It looked as I remembered it: hundreds of books stacked against the walls, her
lavender comforter crumpled at the foot of her bed, a precarious stack of books on her
bedside table, her volcanic candle just peaking out from beneath the bed. It looked as I
knew it would, but the smell, unmistakably her, shocked me. I stood in the center of the
room, my eyes shut, inhaling slowly through my nose, the vanilla and the uncut autumn
grass, but with each slow breath, the smell faded as I became accustomed to it, and soon
she was gone again.

He 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!

(8 days after) The cafeteria clamoured with the sounds of plastic trays against wooden
tables and forks scraping plates, but any conversations were muted. But more than the
noiselessness of everyone else was the silence where she should have been, the bubbling,
bursting, storytelling Alaska, but instead it felt like those times when she had withdrawn
into herself, like she was refusing to answer how or why questions, only this time for good.

You reek of smoke, Pudge. Ask me if I give a shit.

How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? - A Y. Because everybody who has
ever lost their way in life has felt the nagging insistence of that question. At some point we
all look up and realize we are lost in a maze, and I don't want us to forget Alaska,

(9 days after) So she gets off campus, drunk and all pissed off, and she's furious at herself
over whatever it is, and she's driving along and sees the cop car and then in a flash
everything comes together and the end to her labyrinthine mystery is staring her right in the
face and she just does it, straight and fast, just aims at the cop car and never swerves, not
because she's drunk, but because she killed herself.

(13 days after) and I could not get the image of the steering wheel careening into her
chest out of my mind, her chest fairly well crushed while she sucked for a last breath that
would never come, and no, this was not making anything better.

(14 days after) So yeah, she was up and down - from fire and brimstone to smoke and ashes.

She did like being mysterious. Maybe she wanted it like this.

(20 days after) You dont even care about her! he shouted. All that matters is you and
your precious fucking fantasy that you and Alaska had this goddamned secret love affair and
she was going to leave Jake for you and youd live happily ever after. If she loved you so
much, why did she leave you that night? And if you loved her so much, whyd you help her
go? I was drunk. Whats your excuse?

Not screaming, not through clenched teeth, not with the veins pulsing in my forehead, but
calmly. Calmly. I looked down at the Colonel and said, Fuck you.

It was not enough to be the last guy she kissed. I wanted to be the last one she loved. And I
knew I wasn't. I knew it and I hated her for it. I hated her for not caring about me. I hated
her for leaving that night, and I hated myself too, not only because I let her go, but because
if I had been enough for her, she wouldn't have even wanted me to leave. She would have
just lain with me and talked and cried and I would have listened and kissed at her tears as
they pooled in her eyes.

I lit a cigarette and spit into the creek. You can't just make me different and then leave, I
said out loud to her. Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was fine with just me and last
words and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die. For she had
embodied the Great Perhaps - she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my
minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

(21 days after) After class, as Takumi picked through his fries at Mclnedible, eating only the
crunchiest, I felt the total loss of her, still reeling from the idea that she was not only gone
from this world but from all of them.

(27 days after) You got any alcohol? Why? he asked. Uh, because we want to get
drunk? the Colonel answered. Great. Ill join you."

(37 days after) but I only had room for one true want and she was dead, and I wanted to
know the how and why of it, and Lara couldn't tell me, and that was all that mattered.

(45 days after) And we laughed, but the laughs drifted into a thick, pervasive silence and I
knew we were all thinking of her, dead and laughless, cold, no longer Alaska. The idea that
Alaska didn't exist still stunned me every time I thought about it. She's rotting underground
in Vine Station, Alabama, I thought, but even that wasn't quite it. Her body was there, but
she was nowhere, nothing, POOF.

(46 days after) I forgeeve you. Lara smiled and hugged me, her hands tight around the
small of my back. I wrapped my arms around her shoulders and smelled violets in her hair.

I know, but that's why. I loved her, and after she died I couldn't think about anything else. It
felt, like, dishonest. Like cheating.

The smokes bounced and danced in the stream for a few moments and then they floated
out of sight.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with
remembering.

Funny thing, talking to ghosts. he said. You can't tell if you're making up their answers or
if they are really talking to you.

(51 days after) Everything that comes together falls apart, the Old Man said. Everything.
The chair I'm sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I'm gonna fall apart, probably
before this chair. And you're gonna fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make
you you - they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart.

When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a
ghost, but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but
even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone
else's, dying again.

(62 days after) 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.

(69 days after) 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.

(102 days after) It had been Alaska's prank through and through. The hardest part about
pranking, Alaska told me once, is not being able to confess. But I could confess on her behalf
now. And as I slowly made my way out of the gym, I told anyone who would listen, No. It
wasn't us. It was Alaska.

(114 days after) January 10. That date ring a bell? Yeah, it's the day Alaska died.
Technically, she died three hours into January 11, but it was still, to us anyway, Monday
night, January 10.

(118 days after) She didn't leave me enough to discover her, but she left me enough to
rediscover the Great Perhaps.

It always shocked me when I realised that I wasn't the only person in the world who thought
and felt such strange and awful things.

I gritted my teeth, and then before us, broken glass glittered in the glare of the sun like the
road was wearing jewellery, and that spot must be the spot. He was still accelerating. I
thought: This would not be a bad way to go. I thought: Straight and fast. Maybe she just
decided at the last second.

I realised it in waves and we held on to each other crying and I thought, God we must look
so lame, but it doesn't much matter when you have just now realised, all the time later, that
you are still alive.

(119 days after) Our room became Study Central for the four of us, with Takumi and Lara
over till all hours of the night talking about The Sound and the Fury and meiosis and the
Battle of the Bulge.

(122 days after) And so that is the question I leave you with in this final: What is your cause
for hope?

After all this time, it still seems to me like straight and fast is the only way out - but I choose
the labyrinth. The labyrinth blows, but I choose it.

(136 days after)
From the Desk of Takumi Hikohito
Pudge/Colonel:
I am sorry that I have not talked to you before. I am not staying for graduation. I leave for
Japan tomorrow morning. For a long time, I was mad at you. The way you cut me out of
everything hurt me and so I kept what I knew to myself. But then even after I wasn't mad
any more, I still didn't say anything, and I don't even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I
guess. And I had this secret.
You've mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night. I'd stayed up late
with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my
back window. It was like 3.15 that morning, maybe, and I walked out there and saw her
walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me
that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her
mother's grave on the anniversary, but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for
flowers, but it was too early - too wintry. That's how I knew about January 10. I still have no
idea whether it was suicide.
She was so sad, and I didn't know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one
person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn't. I just
thought she was looking for flowers. I didn't know she was going to go. She was drunk, just
trashed drunk, and I really didn't think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just
cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked
away and then I heard a car start. I don't know what I was thinking.
So I let her go too. And I'm sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to.
Takumi

If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest
actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

I would never know her wel enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would
never know if she left us on purpose. But the not-knowing would not keep me from caring,
and I would always love Alaska Young, my crooked neighbor, with all my crooked heart.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend
that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless
maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only led to a lonely life
accompanied only by the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great
Perhaps, for real friends and a more-than-minor life. And then I screwed up and the Colonel
screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no
sugar-coating it: she deserved better friends.
When she fucked up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she
collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where it led for
her. So I still believe in the Great Perhaps, and I can believe in it in spite of having lost her.
Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly,
and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and
the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a
person. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb
and scared thing. I know she forgives me, just as her mother forgives her. And here's how I
know:
I thought at first that she was just dead. Just darkness. Just a body being eaten by bugs. I
thought about her a lot like that, as something's meal. What was her - green eyes, half a
smirk, the soft curves of her legs - would soon be nothing, just the bones I never saw. I
thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in
millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes
with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the
atmosphere. I still think that sometimes, think that maybe the afterlife is just something
we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she
was just matter, and matter gets recycled.
But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled
too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic
code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then
you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else
entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has
to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed.
Although no one will ever accuse me of being much of a science student, one thing I learned
from science classes is that energy is never created and never destroyed. And if Alaska took
her own life, that is the hope I wish I could have given her. Forgetting her mother, failing her
mother and her friends and herself - those are awful things, but she did not need to fold
into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as
indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, Teenagers think they are
invincible, with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are.
We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we
are invincible because we are. We cannot be born and we cannot die. Like all energy, we
can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old.
They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts
cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.
So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her. Thomas Edison's last words were, It's very
beautiful over there. I don't know where there is, but I believe it's somewhere, and I hope
it's beautiful.