DeCenz and I spent New Year’s Eve at the Hilltop. Shorty the bartender gave us each a free shot at the stroke. Whoopee. We ended up on the watertower with a bottle of Boone’s Farm apple wine. I lay on my stomach and put my ear to the icy metal. DeCenz stood at the edge, the toes of his boots protruding into side-sui-land. He gazed down, fearless. It was pointless to ask him to be careful.

“I was up here with Mousy the night he bit it,” DeCenz said. “I was yelling at him, telling him to get his shit together. You should’ve seen him, he looked nervous. Never joked about his suicide no more, neither.”

I rolled onto my back. The sky was cloudy and black.

“It’s like he felt it coming,” DeCenz said. He turned but stayed at the edge. “You think he felt it coming?”

“Probably, in a way.”

DeCenz walked across the tower, stepping over me. “Do you think Mousy’s better off dead than totally paralyzed, Dunph. I mean like the guy in the iron lung?”

“I guess.”

He came back and stood over me. “You know what I been thinking? I been thinking that Mousy’s probably better off dead than working for that company.”

I tried to picture a nuclear power plant.

“Know what I mean, Dunph? He changed so much those last few months, it was like he died back in August. He just died. I tell you, sometimes I think he’s better off this way. You think he’s better off this way?”

The first thing I noticed at school in January was the heater in my room; it was on. Everywhere I went there was heat. The second thing I noticed was the food; it was good. Major improvement since the fall. The meat was identifiable, and there was plenty of it. I found out what the deal was when I was in Billy-Fu Sodani’s room about to get high. I was jamming a wet towel under the door to lock in the smoke when Billy-Fu said, “Relax, friend, you don’t got to bother weeth it.”

This guy is really burnt, I thought. He’d already been accepted early admission at Princeton and had more to lose than almost anyone on campus. Yet here he was, still dealing, still getting high in his own room, practically running a clinic on how to get booted. I continued to line the door with towels.

Billy-Fu lit a bowl of hash. “Dunphy, would you blease cool down and pring you ass over here. No need to woory, nobody going to bust us.”

His recklessness was annoying. Especially since I was only taking the mildest precautions. “How can you be so sure?”

Billy-Fu smiled. “Trust me, friend. There is no way ad-meenistration going to step feet in this room. That you can make sure of.”