Mal exhaled. Then, silently, he pushed his phone toward me.
It was a video. Ezra Adelman, sitting behind a desk, looking almost angelic in a white linen shirt. He smiled at the camera. His blue eyes squinted to jewels, the corners of his mouth pointing upward.
“I thought long and hard about making this,” he said, and as if my body already knew what was coming next, tears dripped, ready-made, onto my plate.
I was the campus paramedic on duty the day that Ezra died.
It had been two weeks since our fight in the Sheridan Student Center, when Ezra had declared himself my friend and I had told him to kick rocks, and in that time, my life had calmed down. Dark-haired heirs no longer plopped themselves next to me inclass or overloaded my text thread with links to songs he thought I might like. The rumor mill had died down, and my roommate had stopped giving me dirty looks. I was finally living the college life I had dreamed of; the one in which I could mind my business and no one else’s.
It was quiet. It was lonely.
And then, at my hip, my walkie-talkie went off.
“Jo, do you copy?”
“This is Jo. I copy,” I said into the walkie-talkie. “What’s going on? I didn’t get an alert?”
“This is the alert,” the voice responded—Mike, our dispatcher. “I just got a call from campus police. An anonymous caller just requested a wellness check on a student. They want to know if either of us is available to accompany them.”
I was already diving into my jacket.
“I got it, Mike,” I said, throwing my med kit onto my back. “Where am I meeting them?”
“On the quad,” Mike said. Then he paused, a little uncomfortable. “But just a heads-up. The student... it’s Adelman.”
My stomach sank. “Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, no pressure, right?”
Our team was composed of two campus police, Dave and Winston, and Patrick, the private security Renata hired to aid the search.
It had been only three hours since he was last seen, a somewhat reasonable time for an eighteen-year-old boy to go wandering off without his phone, but the last person to see him had said he’d seemed not quite in the right state of mind. He’d left his house before the rager he was hosting could really start, but not beforesending his mom a text saying, cryptically, “Love you. Forgive me.” No one knew where he’d gone.
Had he been anyone else, emergency services might not have gotten involved. Dave would have probably rolled his eyes and put off the task until the morning. Patrick wouldn’t be harassing the “guests,” who hadn’t even noticed that their host had disappeared while they trashed his house. Winston wouldn’t be writing citations that would be thrown away for the juniors caught snorting lines on Ezra’s glass desk.
I wouldn’t be whisked among them, seeing Ezra’s features in every strobe-lit face.
“You said Josephine Boateng?” his mother had said over the phone, after we’d left his house. I recognized Renata Kovalenko’s voice from an episode ofProject Runway; it was bizarre to hear it over the phone, addressing me. “I knew that name sounded familiar. I’m so glad that the person looking today is his friend.”
How could I tell a grieving mother that, actually, she was mistaken? That I wasn’t her son’s friend, that, just two weeks before, I’d told him as much? What comfort would that bring her?
“Maybe we should file an official report,” Patrick said, when an hour later, we had nothing, no leads, just more concerning details from the few party guests sober enough to describe Ezra’s behavior before he’d disappeared (“weirdly chill, like, more than he usually is”).
I tilted my head back, watching my breath form clouds before my eyes. The cold nipped at my nose, the tops of my ears, and I followed the blinking course of a satellite across the cloudless sky. Even in the suburbs, Chicago’s light pollution made it hard to see the stars, but here, in this small, quaint college town, there weremore than I could ever have imagined, less the scattering of lights I was used to, more the dense splatter of solar systems far off—
“The observatory,” I said. “He’s in the observatory.”
Dave and Winston blinked at me ghoulishly, but Patrick was quicker on the uptake, and when I set off toward the astronomy building, he was only steps behind me.
The Adelman family had chosen a home for their only son just a few blocks away from the astronomy building. Whether Ezra had found his place of solace before or after matriculation was up for speculation. But he’d found it regardless, and I knew he returned to it often.
“I can take you there someday,” Ezra had said, what felt like a lifetime ago, in our SSC booth.
“No thanks,” I’d responded.
Joke’s on me, I thought, as we waited, huffing, for the night shift custodian to let us in through the building’s enormous carved wooden doors.Guess you brought me here after all.
There was a single rickety elevator shaft that took us to the tenth floor of the building, the highest it could go without a special access keycard. I pulled my medical kit to my front, taking out a vial of naloxone, a syringe, a needle. We’d practiced administration on a dummy before, but never a real human. To think, I’d known what he was doing all this while, and I’d done nothing to stop him. I’d looked him in the eyes and walked away.
