A light in the corner flashed, sending everyone flying in the opposite direction, the whiteness stinging my eyes even when I closed them. Then, impossibly loud music came on, the kind that seemed to thump inside my ears. Purple, blue, and green lights started flashing around the room like an out-of-control disco ball. Boys and girls—student actors—crowded into the scene in front of us, dancing, shaking their hips and butts, touching each other, moving in tandem. A few of them took sips from red plastic cups. A few pretended to smoke unlit cigarettes. On a table meant to be the bar was a line of white powder and some credit cards. A boy, tall and chubby, leaned over the bar and, with a rolled-up dollar bill, sniffed some powder into his nose. Then, as he walked back toward the dance floor, he collapsed and started shaking, the white powder bubbling from his mouth now. Everyone else was too drunk to notice him dying.

Darkness as we followed the crowd into the next room.

A scream, a flash, another scream. When the light turned back on, so bright and fluorescent I had to turn away, a girl, younger than me, was lying limp on a hospital bed, her legs up in stirrups, blood everywhere. On everything. On the bed between her legs, on her hospital gown, on the walls. It dropped onto the floor in thick red clots. A man in a white coat sat at the end of the bed, holding a long metal piece of equipment, a speculum, also covered in blood.

Then, again, darkness.

We were led, next, into a dorm room, identical to any of ours—the same yellow wood furniture, the same plastic-covered mattress. A girl stood on her desk chair in the center of the room, staring at us, unmoving. Behind her, the bedsheets were disoriented and there were dozens of used condoms and wrappers on the floor. The lights turned off and a gunshot and the feeling of water spraying on my face and then in the light, she was on the floor, blood and brain goop that kind of looked like guacamole all over the room.

Darkness.

Then, a voice came over the loudspeaker, crackly and distant, sending goose bumps up my arm. I squeezed Ruthie’s hand so hard she had to ask me to stop.

“If you died today...” a voice said slowly, echoey, like a heartbeat in your ears. “Do you know where you’d go?”