TUESDAY—WE HAD SCHOOL for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling.
“Awful,” a girl said.
“En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.”
Everything looked the same, but more still: the Weekday Warriors still sat on the benches outside the library, but their gossip was quiet, understated.
The cafeteria buzzed with the clatter of plastic trays hitting wooden tables and the sound of forks scraping against plates, yet conversations were strangely subdued. More noticeable than the general hush was the absence of her vibrant presence—Alaska, who was usually bursting with stories. It felt like those moments when she withdrew into herself, refusing to answer questions about the hows and whys, but this time, it seemed permanent.
In religion class, the Colonel sat next to me, sighed, and remarked, “You smell like smoke, Pudge.”
“Ask me if I care.”
Dr. Hyde then entered the room, carrying our final exams under one arm. After settling in and taking a few deep breaths, he began, “It is an unwritten law that parents should not have to bury their children. Someone ought to enforce it. This semester, we will continue exploring the religious traditions introduced last fall. But now, the questions we pose have taken on a new urgency. For instance, what happens to us after death is no longer a mere philosophical query; it’s a question we must consider about our classmate. Living in the shadow of grief is not just an abstract concept for Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims to ponder. The questions of religious thought have become, I suspect, deeply personal.”
He sorted through our exams, selecting one from the stack. “Here is Alaska’s final. You’ll recall the assignment was to identify the most significant question facing humanity and how the three traditions we study address it. This was Alaska’s question.”
With a sigh, he grabbed hold of his chair and lifted himself out of it, then wrote on the blackboard: How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? —A. Y.
“I’m going to leave that up for the rest of the semester,” he said.
“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, and I don’t want to forget that even when the material we study seems boring, we’re trying to understand how people have answered that question and the questions each of you posed in your papers—how different traditions have come to terms with what Chip, in his final, called ‘people’s rotten lots in life.’”
Hyde sat down. “So, how are you guys doing?”
The Colonel and I said nothing, while a bunch of people who didn’t know Alaska extolled her virtues and professed to be devastated, and at first, it bothered me. I didn’t want the people she didn’t know—and the
people she didn’t like—to be sad. They’d never cared about her, and now they were carrying on as if she were a sister. But I guess I didn’t know her completely, either. If I had, I’d have known what she’d meant by “To be
continued?” And if I had cared about her as I should have, as I thought I did, how could I have let her go?
So they didn’t bother me, really. But next to me, the Colonel breathed slowly and deeply through his nose like a bull about to charge.
He actually rolled his eyes when Weekday Warrior Brooke Blakely,
whose parents had received a progress report courtesy of Alaska, said, “I’m
just sad I never told her I loved her. I just don’t understand why.”
“That’s such bullshit,” the Colonel said as we walked to lunch. “As if Brooke Blakely gives two shits about Alaska.”
“If Brooke Blakely died, wouldn’t you be sad?” I asked.
“I guess, but I wouldn’t bemoan the fact I never told her I loved her. I
don’t love her. She’s an idiot.”
I thought everyone else had a better excuse to grieve than we did—after all, they hadn’t killed her—but I knew better than to try to talk to the Colonel when he was mad.
