My second year on the force, I pulled his file late one night after everyone else had gone home. The coroner wrote that he fell backward out the window—there was no chance of him landing on his feet. His spine fractured near the top, his aorta transected. There was profuse internal bleeding. Before he died, he might have felt a tearing inside his chest, experienced a shortness of breath, a coldness in his legs. He, who had always been stronger and faster than me, would have experienced weakness in his limbs, which is why he wasn’t able to stumble back into the party or call for help. But the coroner also noted traumatic brain injury—like Jay—and the assertion that he died within minutes, meaning that even if his friends managed to call an ambulance, get him into a car, he would have died on the way to the hospital. He didn’t suffer, I remember everyone saying later, but we can’t know that for certain—and it’s those minutes I can’t forget. Him—lying on his back, staring at a starless sky, a building ablaze with light and voices coming from all sides, but he’s all alone in the dark. I feel his body go cold, the drops of rain on his forehead, and my own heart dying in my chest. When they found him, he was lying in the grass, covered in morning dew. He had been there all night.

So yeah, I hate fraternities. I hate their party, live-for-the-moment lifestyle as if nothing they do will ever have consequences. As if they don’t die as easy as the rest of us. I hate anybody who could watch someone fall out a window and not check to make sure they were okay. I hate that Craig died alone. And I hate myself—for refusing to pick up the phone, for letting his apologies go to voicemail, and for not being there for him in the end.

By the time I arrived, his body was gone and blue lights flashed off the edges of his brothers’ faces. But I was the one sobbing, while they huddled somberly out front. I was the one screaming for them to take responsibility, when they collectively refused to admit fault.