Chapter 1
"Is this why you want to leave, Miles?" Mom asked. I mulled it over for a while, careful not to look at her. "Uh, no," I said. "Well, why then?" she asked. This was not the first time she had posed...
Chapter 2
"Anyway, when you get in trouble, just don't tell on anyone. I mean, I hate the rich snots here with a fervent passion I usually reserve for only dental work and my father. But that doesn't mean I...
Chapter 3
"But we will deal with those bastards, Pudge. I promise you. They will regret messing with one of my friends."And if the Colonel thought that calling me his friend would make me stand by him, well,...
Chapter 4
"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 b...
Chapter 5
"How long have you been dating her?" I asked."Nine months. We never got along. I mean, I didn't even briefly like her…with Sara, there's never a honeymoon period. God, how could she think I was a...
Chapter 6
It was worse than the Duct Tape Incident, because I already knew that the Kevin Richmans of the world didn't like me. But my teachers had always been card-carrying members of the Miles Halter Fan C...
Chapter 11
"I'll see you in Jury tomorrow at five," he announced, and then walked away. Alaska crouched down, picked up the cigarette she had thrown away, and started smoking again. The Eagle wheeled around,...
Chapter 12
"But this is the seventh time I've been caught smoking. I just don't want—whatever. I don't want to upset my dad." (98before.3)
Chapter 16
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 p...
Chapter 17
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...
Chapter 18
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 preferre...
Chapter 19
I opened my mouth again but this time not to speak, and she reached up and put a finger to my lips and said, "Shh. Shh. Don't ruin it." (52before.14)
Chapter 21
"All I remember is that she had a lot of sex.""I know. She's my hero," Alaska said without a trace of irony. (49before.7-8)
Chapter 23
We laughed and drank our wine, and then after the meal, we each listed our gratitudes. My family always did that before the meal, and we all just rushed through it to get to the food. So the four o...
Chapter 24
"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 b****."And there was something to that, trut...
Chapter 26
"Your rote memorization is, like, so impressive," I said."You guys are like an old married couple." Alaska smiled. "In a creepy way." (8before.10-11)
Chapter 27
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...
Chapter 28
The five of us walking confidently in a row, I'd never felt cooler. The Great Perhaps was upon us, and we were invincible. The plan may have had faults, but we did not. (3before.27)
Chapter 29
"Why didn't you ever tell me?" the Colonel asked, his voice soft."It never came up." And then we stopped asking questions. (2before.74-75)
Chapter 31
I spent that afternoon with Lara. We were very cutesy, even though we didn't know the first thing about each other and barely talked. But we made out. She grabbed my butt at one point, and I sort o...
Chapter 32
The Colonel was screaming. He would inhale, and then scream. Inhale. Scream. Inhale. Scream.I thought, at first, that it was only yelling. But after a few breaths, I noticed a rhythm. And after a f...
Chapter 33
Her funeral Sunday. I wondered if the Colonel would get back by then, where he was. He had to come back for the funeral, because I could not go alone, and going with anyone other than the Colonel w...
Chapter 34
"Forty-two," he corrected me. "Well. Forty-two there. Forty-two back. Eighty-two miles. No. Eighty-four. Yes. Eighty-four miles in forty-five hours." (4after.11)
Chapter 35
And I said, "Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you," and the Colonel whispered, "I'm so sorry, Pudge. I know you did," and I said, "No. Not past tense." She wasn't even a person anymore, just fles...
Chapter 36
And I almost said, She buried it in the woods out by the soccer field, but I realized that the Colonel didn't know, that she never took him to the edge of the woods and told him to dig for buried t...
Chapter 37
"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? (8after.8-9)
Chapter 39
Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. (13after.36)
Chapter 40
"I was just thinking—Why do you run head-on into a cop car with its lights on? and then I thought, Well, she hated authority figures."The Colonel laughed. "Hey, look at that. Pudge made a funny!"...
Chapter 41
"You don't even care about her!" he shouted. "All that matters is you and your precious f***ing fantasy that you and Alaska had this goddamned secret love affair and she was going to leave Jake for...
Chapter 42
But even so, the afterlife mattered to me. Heaven and hell and reincarnation. As much as I wanted to know how Alaska had died, I wanted to know where she was now, if anywhere. I liked to imagine he...
Chapter 43
"You are a nerd, Pudge. But you're not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking." Actually, I hadn't drunk since that night, and didn't feel particularly inclined to ever take it up ever...
Chapter 48
"Well, my gut wants to know," Lara said, and only then did I realize […]—I may have kissed her, but I really didn't have a monopoly on Alaska; the Colonel and I weren't the only ones who cared...
Chapter 49
The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop...
Chapter 53
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, a...
Chapter 54
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...
Chapter 56
But we knew what could be found out, and in finding it out, she had made us closer—the Colonel and Takumi and me, anyway. (118after.2)
Chapter 58
"I am interested in how you are able to fit the uncontestable fact of suffering into your understanding of the world, and how you hope to navigate through life in spite of it." (122after.3)
Chapter 59
And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers. And there's no sugarcoating it: She deserved better friends. (136after.12)