When the weekend came, we walked silently to the only brunch place in town, where his parents were waiting. They were just as serious-looking as the first time I’d met them, on move-in day nearly a year ago. Stern and intellectual. Both doctors.

The entire meal, Troy barely spoke more than a few sentences, lifting his eyes from his plate only to stick his knife in the cup of butter or to take a sip of orange juice. It felt like we’d all just gone to the same funeral.

“So, I’m gonna have to be the one who turns this meal around,” I thought. “Just like I fix everything in this relationship.”

For the rest of the meal, I spoke to Troy’s parents as if they were my own, regaling them with stories of our inseparable friendship, the nights we spent keeping one another awake, watching movies, and comforting ourselves to sleep.

What can I say? I know how to work for a free meal.

•  •  •

A month later, as the school year was coming to an end, and my time with Troy was finally almost over, I had my own moment of drunken weakness.

By then, I’d been selected as the dorm historian, a meaningless role that had only one responsibility: writing the dorm newsletter. Except the newsletter wasn’t actually a newsletter, but an Onion-like page of satire taped to the back of the dorm’s bathroom stalls. A dumb piece of potty-time entertainment that fell to me.

For the last issue, I drank perhaps a few too many sips of cheap boxed wine while I was writing, and concocted a list, cleverly titled, “Things Not to Do While Your Roommate Is Sleeping.” In my defense, for the most part, the list was entirely innocent. At least 90 percent of it had absolutely nothing to do with Troy. Things like “Don’t eat a bag full of cured salamis and cheeses” and “Don’t perform maintenance on your personal pubic hedges, no matter how aggressively your freakishly pubescent body parts have begun to shed their fur.” And of course, being the drunk asshole that I can be, I added as a final touch, and in caps for unmistakable emphasis: “And most important, DON’T MASTURBATE WHILE YOU THINK YOUR ROOMMATE IS SLEEPING. TROY, I’M TALKING TO YOU. I KNOW WHAT YOU DID.”

Save. Print forty copies. Tape to the back of forty bathroom stalls. Wait to be murdered.

Now, before you write me off as a terrible asshole who broke some kind of deep, unspoken code about never tattling on your midnight-masturbating roommate, it was ostensibly a newsletter full of satire! At the very worst, everybody should’ve assumed I was making a horrible joke, except for all of the people I’d told the truth, which included basically everybody.