It’s the screams that get me running. Primal and full of terror, these aren’t the kind of shrieks that dissolve into giddy laughter, but the kind that set your teeth on edge, the kind you might hear in the woods or down a dark alley, the kind that send adrenaline coursing through your limbs in an instinctive motion of fight or flight.

Before my mother can flinch, I am out of the chair and in the carpeted hallway, through the side door, and throwing myself down the concrete steps. I think she calls after me, but her voice is miles away. And as I dodge students with their backpacks, heads down, lost in their phones, I remember I’ve always been good at this. And that whatever Truman says, this, the instinct that drives me toward the center of the action, not away from it, is what makes me good at my job.

Students are congregating at the Lumpkin Street crosswalk. They’re rigid, suspended in motion. Hands raised to mouths, feet still outstretched, forward momentum thwarted like they’ve hit an invisible wall. I skid to a stop, and there’s a swell silent and still, all sounds of traffic, the gasps and murmurs of the crowd obliterated for one long moment, cresting at the precipice, before the wave crashes down. And everything else rushes in, the endless scream, students clutching each other, voices—Call 911, is he breathing? What happened? The other guy—he just drove off. Didn’t stop. And then my own voice, yelling for them to get out of the way, holding my badge in the air. They scatter the way young people always do when they hear “police.” And there’s a clear path from me to the street.

He’s on his side, a bloody arm stretched out above his head, one leg bent under the other, and his hip twisting at an impossible angle. Medium height, dressed in khaki shorts and a blue polo shirt, a pair of Ray-Bans askew on his face, so I can see one eye open, unblinking at the asphalt. With his mouth agape and brown curls falling over his flushed cheek, he looks young; but based on the tuft of hair curling out from the top button of his shirt, the way the fabric stretches across his shoulders, the bruise-colored shadows under his eyes, and slight pouch of a beer belly, I guess he’s around twenty, likes to party, and should be sitting in the back of a lecture hall instead of lying dead on the street.

I squat in front of him, phone at my ear.