The Last September: A Novel

But she called back. “Yeah. He’s alive.”


“Call an ambulance,” I yelled back, my voice so loud and sudden it set off a little pulse behind my eyelids.

The girl brought her hand to her eyes, as if to shade them. “We did,” she said. I crawled backward, over the roof, and climbed back through the window, heading dutifully if numbly to the place where he landed.

BY THE TIME I got to the parking lot, the whole street was engulfed in ambulance lights. Everyone knew that I was the girl who’d been up on the roof. I must have looked that traumatized, disheveled. Somebody, maybe the Delta who’d been standing below when Eli jumped, put a blanket around my shoulders.

I watched Eli rumble by on a stretcher, apparently conscious, his eyes opened and unfocused, staring blankly up at the sky. Without turning his head, he reached his hand out toward me. I grabbed it, relieved that his palm felt warm. The stretcher halted for a moment.

“Do you want to ride with him?” the EMT asked.

Remembering what he’d been like on the roof, I shook my head and let go of Eli’s hand. It fell to his side with a sad flop and I immediately regretted saying no. By this time, the university police had arrived, too. The officers approached me as Eli’s stretcher was loaded. I watched the ambulance pull away, already regretful. I should have gone with him. I should have been right there next to him, holding on to his hand.

“We saw the whole thing,” said the valiant frat boy before they could ask a single question. “He was standing alone at the edge of the building and then he just jumped.”

It hadn’t occurred to me until I heard this defense that someone might think I’d pushed him. One officer scribbled on a notepad while the other looked hard at me.

“Was he drunk?” he said. “Acting strange?”

I nodded. The officer’s pencil halted, expectantly, so I cleared my throat and said, “Yes, he was acting strange. Yes, he was drunk.” That last word gave me a second of hope. Maybe that was all it was.

The officer lifted his eyes and squinted at me in the dimly lit parking lot, then reached out as if to push the hair off my face. I stepped back.

“Did he hit you?” the officer asked.

“No,” I said, shaking the hair back in front of my face. “No, I’m fine.”

His features sharpened as he paused, deciding whether to press the issue. Then he said, “Do you know how we can get in touch with his family?”

My opportunistic heart jumped, just for a moment, hovering like a raptor in the air. Then it landed splat on the pavement, worried and confused.

ON THE CAR RIDE over to Eli’s house, the officers were sensitive and solicitous. Why wouldn’t they be? Here I was, innocent, fragile, and quivering—the embodiment of everything they were assigned to protect. The redheaded officer sat in the back, giving me the front seat so I wouldn’t feel like a criminal. When we arrived, Eli’s house stood dark—his roommates were either asleep or back at Pub Club—but the front door was unlocked. I led the officers up to his room, expecting to find chaos. But when I pushed his door open, the spare order took me by surprise: the bed perfectly made, the floor swept, the walls empty. It looked almost like a military barracks. The one thing not tucked away in a drawer was Eli’s address book, the thin faux-leather kind that banks give away for free. As I picked it up, I caught my reflection in Eli’s mirrored bureau: a dark-haired girl who looked dazed and much younger than nineteen, with a troubling red mark across her forehead.

“Moss,” I said, handing Eli’s address book to the redheaded officer. “His parents are named Moss.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to call?” the officer said. “It might be better if a friend tells them.”