AS I WALKED HOME from classes the next day, I saw the Colonel sitting on
the bench outside the pay phone, scribbling into a notebook balanced on his knees as he cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder.
I hurried into Room 43, where I found Takumi playing the racing game on mute. “How long has he been on the phone?” I asked.
“Dunno. He was on when I got here twenty minutes ago. He must have skipped Smart Boy Math. Why, are you scared Jake’s gonna drive down
here and kick your ass for letting her go?”
“Whatever,” I said, thinking, This is precisely why we shouldn’t have told him. I walked into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and lit a cigarette.
Takumi came in not long after. “What’s up?” he said.
“Nothing. I just want to know what happened to her.”
“Like you really want to know the truth? Or like you want to find out that she fought with him and was on her way to break up with him and was going to come back here and fall into your arms and you were going to
make hot, sweet love and have genius babies who memorized last words
and poetry?”
“If you’re pissed at me, just say so.”
“I’m not pissed at you for letting her go. But I’m tired of you acting like you were the only guy who ever wanted her. Like you had some monopoly on liking her,” Takumi answered. I stood up, lifted the toilet seat, and flushed my unfinished cigarette.
I stared at him for a moment, and then said, “I kissed her that night, and I’ve got a monopoly on that.”
“What?” he stammered. “I kissed her.”
His mouth opened as if to speak, but no words came out. We exchanged glances for a moment, and I felt embarrassed for what seemed like boasting. Finally, I said, “I—look, you know how she was. She wanted something, and she went for it. I was probably just the guy who happened to be there.”
“Yeah. Well, I was never that guy,” he replied. “I—well, Pudge, God knows I can’t blame you.”
“Don’t tell Lara.”
He nodded just as we heard three quick knocks on the front door, signaling the Eagle’s presence. I thought, Great, caught twice in a week, and Takumi pointed toward the shower. We jumped in together, pulling the curtain closed, with the too-low showerhead spraying water from our ribcage down. Forced to stand closer than necessary, we waited silently as the sputtering shower soaked our T-shirts and jeans, hoping the steam would carry the smoke into the vents. But the Eagle never knocked on the bathroom door, and eventually, Takumi turned off the shower. I peeked out to see the Colonel sitting on the foam couch, feet up on the coffee table, finishing Takumi’s NASCAR race. Takumi and I stepped out, fully clothed and dripping wet.
“Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,” the Colonel said casually.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“I knocked like the Eagle to scare you.” He grinned. “But if you need privacy, just leave a note on the door next time.”
Takumi and I laughed, and then Takumi said, “Yeah, Pudge and I were getting a little testy, but ever since we showered together, Pudge, I feel really close to you.”
“So how’d it go?” I asked, sitting on the coffee table. Takumi joined the Colonel on the couch, both of us wet and a bit cold but more interested in the Colonel’s talk with Jake than drying off.
“It was interesting. Here’s what you need to know: He gave her those flowers, just as we thought. They didn’t fight. He called because he promised to call at exactly their eight-month anniversary, which was at 3:02 A.M.—a bit ridiculous, right? Somehow, she heard the phone ringing. They talked about nothing for five minutes, and then out of nowhere, she freaked out.”
“Completely out of nowhere?” Takumi asked.
“Let me check my notes.” The Colonel flipped through his notebook. “Okay. Jake says, ‘Did you have a nice anniversary?’ and Alaska responds, ‘I had a splendid anniversary,’” and I could hear her excitement in the Colonel’s reading, the way she emphasized words like splendid and fantastic. “Then it’s quiet. Jake asks, ‘What are you doing?’ and Alaska says, ‘Nothing, just doodling,’ then suddenly, ‘Oh God.’ She starts sobbing, says she has to go but would talk to him later, but didn’t mention driving to see him. Jake doesn’t think she was. He doesn’t know where she was going, but she always asked to visit him, and she didn’t this time. Hold on, here’s the quote.” He flipped a page. “She said she’d talk to me later, not that she’d see me.”
“She tells me ‘To be continued’ and tells him she’ll talk to him later,” I noted.
“Yes. Noted. Planning for a future. Admittedly inconsistent with suicide.
Then she came back to her room, screaming about forgetting something. And then her headlong race came to its end. So no answers, really.”
“Well, we know where she wasn’t going.”
“Unless she was feeling particularly impulsive,” Takumi said, looking at me. “And from the sound of things, she was feeling rather impulsive that night.”
The Colonel looked at me curiously, and I nodded. “Yeah,” Takumi said. “I know.”
“Okay, then. And you were pissed, but then you showered with Pudge and it’s all good. Excellent. So, that night…” the Colonel continued.
We tried to reconstruct the conversation from that last night as best we could for Takumi, but neither of us remembered it well, partly because the Colonel was drunk and I wasn’t paying attention until she brought up Truth or Dare. And anyway, we didn’t know how much it might mean. Last words are always harder to remember when no one knows someone’s about to die.
“I mean,” the Colonel said, “I think she and I were talking about how much I loved skateboarding on the computer but would never try it in real life, and then she said, ‘Let’s play Truth or Dare’ and then you kissed her.”
“Wait, you kissed her? In front of the Colonel?” Takumi exclaimed. “I didn’t kiss her.”
“Calm down, guys,” the Colonel said, raising his hands. “It’s a euphemism.”
“For what?” Takumi asked. “Kissing.”
“Brilliant euphemism,” Takumi rolled his eyes. “Am I the only one who thinks that might be significant?”
“Yeah, that never occurred to me before,” I said sarcastically. “But now I don’t know. She didn’t tell Jake. It couldn’t have been that important.”
“Maybe she was racked with guilt,” he suggested.
“Jake said she seemed normal on the phone before she freaked out,” the Colonel said. “But it must have been that phone call. Something happened that we aren’t seeing.” The Colonel ran his hands through his thick hair, frustrated. “Christ, something. Something inside of her. And now we just have to figure out what that was.”
“So we just have to read the mind of a dead person,” Takumi said. “Easy enough.”
“Precisely. Want to get drunk?” the Colonel asked. “I don’t feel like drinking,” I said.
The Colonel reached into the couch’s foam recesses and pulled out Takumi’s Gatorade bottle. Takumi didn’t want any either, but the Colonel just smirked and said, “More for me,” and took a swig.
