Now, by the lake, sitting on a mossy, half-rotten log, the Colonel said to me, "Lara was right. We should do something for her. A prank. Something she would have loved."

"Like, a memorial prank?"

"Exactly. The Alaska Young Memorial Prank. We can make it an annual event. Anyway, she came up with this idea last year. But she wanted to save it to be our senior prank. But it's good. It's really good. It's historic."

"Are you going to tell me?" I asked, thinking back to the time when he and Alaska had left me out of prank planning for Barn Night.

"Sure," he said. "The prank is entitled 'Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.'" And he told me, and I have to say, Alaska left us with the crown jewel of pranks, the Mona Lisaof high-school hilarity, the culmination of generations of Culver Creek pranking. And if the Colonel could pull it off, it would be etched in the memory of everyone at the Creek, and Alaska deserved nothing less. Best of all, it did not, technically, involve any expellable offenses.

The Colonel got up and dusted the dirt and moss off his pants. "I think we owe her that."

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.

Two weeks later,the Colonel returned from spring break with two notebooks filled with the minutiae of prank planning, sketches of various locations, and a forty-page, two-column list of problems that might crop up and their solutions. He calculated all times to a tenth of a second, and all distances to the inch, and then he recalculated, as if he could not bear the thought of failing her again. And then on that Sunday, the Colonel woke up late and rolled over. I was reading The Sound and the Fury,which I was supposed to have read in mid-February, and I looked up as I heard the rustling in the bed, and the Colonel said, "Let's get the band back together." And so I ventured out into the overcast spring and woke up Lara and Takumi, then brought them back to Room 43. The Barn Night crew was intact — or as close as it ever would be — for the Alaska Young Memorial Prank.

The three of us sat on the couch while the Colonel stood in front of us, outlining the plan and our parts in it with an excitement I hadn't seen in him since Before. When he finished, he asked, "Any questions?"

"Yeah," Takumi said. "Is that seriously going to work?"

"Well, first we gotta find a stripper. And second Pudge has to work some magic with his dad."

"All right, then," Takumi said. "Let's get to work."

Every spring,Culver Creek took one Friday afternoon off from classes, and all the students, faculty, and staff were required to go to the gym for Speaker Day. Speaker Day featured two speakers — usually small-time celebrities or small-time politicians or small-time academics, the kind of people who would come and speak at a school for the measly three hundred bucks the school budgeted. The junior class picked the first speaker and the seniors the second, and anyone who had ever attended a Speaker Day agreed that they were torturously boring. We planned to shake Speaker Day up a bit.

All we needed to do was convince the Eagle to let "Dr. William Morse," a "friend of my dad's" and a "preeminent scholar of deviant sexuality in adolescents," be the junior class's speaker.

So I called my dad at work, and his secretary, Paul, asked me if everything was all right, and I wondered why everyone, everyone,asked me if everything was all right when I called at any time other than Sunday morning.

"Yeah, I'm fine."

My dad picked up. "Hey, Miles. Is everything all right?"

I laughed and spoke quietly into the phone, since people were milling about. "Yeah, Dad. Everything is fine. Hey, remember when you stole the school bell and buried it in the cemetery?"

"Greatest Culver Creek prank ever," he responded proudly.

"It was, Dad. It was.So listen, I wonder if you'd help out with the new greatest Culver Creek prank ever."

"Oh, I don't know about that, Miles. I don't want you getting in any trouble."

"Well, I won't. The whole junior class is planning it. And it's not like anyone is going to get hurt or anything.

Because, well, remember Speaker Day?"

"God that was boring. That was almost worse than class."

"Yeah, well, I need you to pretend to be our speaker. Dr. William Morse, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida and an expert in adolescent understandings of sexuality."

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, and then he said, "I won't even ask. Hmm."He sighed. "Swear to God you'll never tell your mother."