She leaned just an inch closer. “If you’re found guilty, you could lose your scholarship or, more likely, be expelled. Ruthie as well. And obviously your parents would be notified of...everything.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. I pictured my father, intercepting the letter from the school, then slapping my mother across the face with it until she was cowering on the floor, her nose bleeding down her apron. How dare you encourage this? he’d repeat over and over. How dare you encourage her?

I looked at Dr. Bregg, the way her eyebrows scrunched in the middle, as if she was genuinely concerned. As if she’d heard my every word.

When she finally leaned back and I could see the contents of her notebook, the only thing in it was a write-up of accrued violations, like an algebra problem showing all her work.

Two days later, I tried to convince Dean Gerwig. I ran to his office Wednesday morning, waiting outside the speckled glass doors for him to stroll in without a worry in the world at 10:15 a.m., a giant iced coffee in hand, telling someone via Bluetooth headphones that his assistant will send the papers over this afternoon, thank you for your donation, Doug.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

He towered over me, swishing his iced coffee around like it was part of a fucking symphony. “My roommate is missing,” I said. It had been seventy-two hours. She’d missed three days of classes, three days of homework, three days of curfews. She missed a convocation. She missed breakfasts and dinners. She was gone.

After waving off his assistant, and two other concerned office workers—he invited me to take a seat in his office, in one of the tall leather chairs opposite his gargantuan mahogany desk. The room was covered in floor-to-ceiling amber bookshelves, filled with leather-bound classics and an entire shelf dedicated to all three hundred translations of the Bible. As if this stupid man could speak anything other than English.

I explained to him exactly what I told Dr. Bregg. We snuck out. We went to a party. It was on a mountain. I don’t remember the address, but I’d memorized everything about it that night and on the drive home. I could take him there by memory. The windy street, the wooden sign hanging over the entrance to it, near where we parked our car. It was a big house with glass walls and a firepit. There was a lake, I think, I could hear water moving when I was deep in the woods, her name echoing off each tree as I said it over and over again. Behind the house was a big red barn. It was the only thing on the entire mountain.

He put his coffee down and leaned back into his chair, resting his hands behind his head like he was getting comfortable to watch a movie.