The John Green Collection (12 page)

“Although it isn’t due for more than two months, you’ll be receiving your paper topic for this semester today. Now, I’m quite sure that you’ve all read the syllabus for this class with such frequency and seriousness that by now you’ve committed it to memory.” He smirked. “But a reminder: This paper is fifty percent of your grade. I encourage you to take it seriously. Now, about this Jesus fellow.”

Hyde talked about the Gospel of Mark, which I hadn’t read until the day before, although I was a Christian. I guess. I’d been to church, uh, like four times. Which is more frequently than I’d been to a mosque or a synagogue.

He told us that in the first century, around the time of Jesus, some of the Roman coins had a picture of the Emperor Augustus on them, and that beneath his picture were inscribed the words
Filius Dei.
The Son of God.

“We are speaking,” he said, “of a time in which gods had sons. It was not so unusual to be a son of God. The miracle, at least in that time and in that place, was that
Jesus
—a peasant, a Jew, a nobody in an empire ruled exclusively by somebodies—was the son of
that
God, the all-powerful God of Abraham and Moses. That God’s son was not an emperor. Not even a trained rabbi. A peasant and a Jew. A nobody like you. While the Buddha was special because he abandoned his wealth and noble birth to seek enlightenment, Jesus was special because he lacked wealth and noble birth, but inherited the ultimate nobility: King of Kings. Class over. You can pick up a copy of your final exam on the way out. Stay dry.” It wasn’t until I stood up to leave that I noticed Alaska had skipped class—how could she skip the only class worth attending? I grabbed a copy of the final for her.

The final exam:
What is the most important question human beings must answer? Choose your question wisely, and then examine how Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity attempt to answer it.

“I hope that poor bastard lives the rest of the school year,” the Colonel said as we jogged home through the rain, “because I’m sure starting to enjoy that class. What’s your most important question?”

After thirty seconds of running, I was already winded. “What happens…to us…when we die?”

“Christ, Pudge, if you don’t stop running, you’re going to find out.” He slowed to a walk. “My question is: Why do good people get rotten lots in life? Holy shit, is that Alaska?”

She was running at us at full speed, and she was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her over the pounding rain until she was so close to us that I could see her spit flying.

“The fuckers flooded my room. They ruined like a hundred of my books! Goddamned pissant Weekday Warrior shit. Colonel, they poked a hole in the gutter and connected a plastic tube from the gutter down through my back window into my room! The whole
place is soaking wet. My copy of
The General in His Labyrinth
is absolutely
ruined
.”

“That’s pretty good,” the Colonel said, like an artist admiring another’s work.

“Hey!” she shouted.

“Sorry. Don’t worry, dude,” he said. “God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.”

sixty-seven days before

SO THIS IS HOW NOAH FELT.
You wake up one morning and God has forgiven you and you walk around squinting all day because you’ve forgotten how sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad, and the whole world is brighter and cleaner than ever before, like central Alabama has been put in the washing machine for two weeks and cleaned with extra-superstrength detergent with color brightener, and now the grass is greener and the bufriedos are crunchier.

I stayed by the classrooms that afternoon, lying on my stomach in the newly dry grass and reading for American history—the Civil War, or as it was known around these parts, the War Between the States. To me, it was the war that spawned a thousand good last words. Like General Albert Sidney Johnston, who, when asked if he was injured, answered, “Yes, and I fear seriously.” Or Robert E. Lee, who, many years after the war, in a dying delirium, announced, “Strike the tent!”

I was mulling over why the Confederate generals had better last words than the Union ones (Ulysses S. Grant’s last word, “Water,” was pretty lame) when I noticed a shadow blocking me from the sun. It had been some time since I’d seen a shadow, and it startled me a bit. I looked up.

“I brought you a snack,” Takumi said, dropping an oatmeal cream pie onto my book.

“Very nutritious.” I smiled.

“You’ve got your oats. You’ve got your meal. You’ve got your cream. It’s a fuckin’ food pyramid.”

“Hell yeah it is.”

And then I didn’t know what to say. Takumi knew a lot about hip-hop; I knew a lot about last words and video games. Finally, I said, “I can’t believe those guys flooded Alaska’s room.”

“Yeah,” Takumi said, not looking at me. “Well, they had their reasons. You have to understand that with like everybody, even the Weekday Warriors, Alaska is famous for pranking. I mean, last year, we put a Volkswagen Beetle in the library. So if they have a reason to try and one-up her, they’ll try. And that’s pretty ingenious, to divert water from the gutter to her room. I mean, I don’t
want
to admire it…”

I laughed. “Yeah. That will be tough to top.” I unwrapped the cream pie and bit into it. Mmm…hundreds of delicious calories per bite.

“She’ll think of something,” he said. “Pudge,” he said. “Hmm. Pudge, you need a cigarette. Let’s go for a walk.”

I felt nervous, as I invariably do when someone says my name twice with a
hmm
in between. But I got up, leaving my books behind, and walked toward the Smoking Hole. But as soon as we got to the edge of the woods, Takumi turned away from the dirt road. “Not sure the Hole is safe,” he said.
Not safe?
I thought.
It’s the safest place to smoke a cigarette in the known universe.
But I just followed him through the thick brush, weaving through pine trees and threatening, chest-high brambly bushes. After a while, he just sat down. I cupped my hand around my lighter to protect the flame from the slight breeze and lit up.

“Alaska ratted out Marya,” he said. “So the Eagle might know about the Smoking Hole, too. I don’t know. I’ve never seen him down that way, but who knows what she told him.”

“Wait, how do you know?” I asked, dubious.

“Well, for one thing, I figured it out. And for another, Alaska admitted it. She told me at least part of the truth, that right at the end of school last year, she tried to sneak off campus one night after lights-out to go visit Jake and then got busted. She said she was careful—no headlights or anything—but the Eagle caught her, and she had a bottle of wine in her car, so she was fucked. And the Eagle took her into his house and gave her the same offer he gives to everyone when they get fatally busted. ‘Either tell me everything you know or go to your room and pack up your stuff.’ So Alaska broke and told him that Marya and Paul were drunk and in her room right then. And then she told him God knows what else. And so the Eagle let her go, because he needs rats to do his job. She was smart, really, to rat on one of her friends, because no one ever thinks to blame the friends. That’s why the Colonel is so sure it was Kevin and his boys. I didn’t believe it could be Alaska, either, until I figured out that she was the only person on campus who could’ve known what Marya was doing. I suspected Paul’s roommate, Longwell—one of the guys who pulled the armless-mermaid bit on you. Turns out he was at home that night. His aunt had died. I checked the obit in the paper. Hollis Burnis Chase—hell of a name for a woman.”

“So the Colonel doesn’t know?” I asked, stunned. I put out my cigarette, even though I wasn’t quite finished, because I felt spooked. I’d never suspected Alaska could be disloyal. Moody, yes. But not a rat.

“No, and he can’t know, because he’ll go crazy and get her expelled. The Colonel takes all this honor and loyalty shit pretty seriously, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Takumi shook his head, his hands pushing aside leaves to dig into the still-wet dirt beneath. “I just don’t get why she’d be
so afraid of getting expelled. I’d hate to get expelled, but you have to take your lumps. I don’t get it.”

“Well, she obviously doesn’t like home.”

“True. She only goes home over Christmas and the summer, when Jake is there. But whatever. I don’t like home, either. But I’d never give the Eagle the satisfaction.” Takumi picked up a twig and dug it into the soft red dirt. “Listen, Pudge. I don’t know what kind of prank Alaska and the Colonel are going to come up with to end this, but I’m sure we’ll both be involved. I’m telling you all this so you can know what you’re getting into, because if you get caught, you had better take it.”

I thought of Florida, of my “school friends,” and realized for the first time how much I would miss the Creek if I ever had to leave it. I stared down at Takumi’s twig sticking erect out of the mud and said, “I swear to God I won’t rat.”

I finally understood that day at the Jury: Alaska wanted to show us that we could trust her. Survival at Culver Creek meant loyalty, and she had ignored that. But then she’d shown me the way. She and the Colonel had taken the fall for me to show me how it was done, so I would know what to do when the time came.

fifty-eight days before

ABOUT A WEEK LATER
I woke up at 6:30—6:30 on a Saturday!—to the sweet melody of Decapitation: automatic gunfire blasted out above the menacing, bass-heavy background music of the video game. I rolled over and saw Alaska pulling the controller up and to the right, as if that would help her escape certain death. I had the same bad habit.

“Can you at least mute it?”

“Pudge,”
she said, faux-condescending, “the sound is an integral part of the artistic experience of this video game. Muting Decapitation
would be like reading only every other word of
Jane Eyre
. The Colonel woke up about half an hour ago. He seemed a little annoyed, so I told him to go sleep in my room.”

“Maybe I’ll join him,” I said groggily.

Rather than answering my question, she remarked, “So I heard Takumi told you. Yeah, I ratted out Marya, and I’m sorry, and I’ll never do it again. In other news, are you staying here for Thanksgiving? Because I am.”

I rolled back toward the wall and pulled the comforter over my head. I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability—cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a
reason
.

In a testament to the power of fatigue, I managed to fall asleep quickly, convinced that the shrieking of dying monsters and Alaska’s delighted squeals upon killing them were nothing more than a pleasant sound track by which to dream. 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 touching—a pale reflection of the fireworks of one mouth on another, but a reflection nonetheless. And in the almostness 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.

She continued as if I hadn’t been asleep. “Jake has to study. So he doesn’t want me in Nashville. Says he can’t pay attention to musicology while staring at me. I said I would wear a burka, but he wasn’t convinced, so I’m staying here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, don’t be. I’ll have loads to do. There’s a prank to plan. But I was thinking you should stay here, too. In fact, I have composed a list.”

“A list?”

She reached into her pocket and pulled out a heavily folded piece of notebook paper and began to read.

“Why Pudge Should Stay at the Creek for Thanksgiving: A List,
by Alaska Young.

“
One.
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 McInedible 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.

“
Two.
Although she certainly does not excel at endeavors such as teaching the French language, Madame O’Malley makes a mean stuffing, and she invites all the students who stay on campus to Thanksgiving dinner. Which is usually just me and the South Korean exchange student, but whatever. Pudge would be welcome.

“
Three.
I don’t really have a
Three,
but
One
and
Two
were awfully good.”

One
and
Two
appealed to me, certainly, but mostly I liked the idea of just her and just me on campus. “I’ll talk to my parents. Once they wake up,” I said. She coaxed me onto the couch, and we played Decapitation together until she abruptly dropped the controller.

“I’m not flirting. I’m just tired,” she said, kicking off her flip-flops. She pulled her feet onto the foam couch, tucking them behind a cushion, and scooted up to put her head in my lap. My
corduroys. My boxers. Two layers. I could feel the warmth of her cheek on my thigh.

There are times when it is appropriate, even preferable, to get an erection when someone’s face is in close proximity to your penis.

This was not one of those times.

So I stopped thinking about the layers and the warmth, muted the TV, and focused on Decapitation.