Chapter Thirty-Three
Jo
My first Adelman family dinner was not at a high-end restaurant, or even in the ornate, rarely used dining room of their Chicago
penthouse. Instead, it was at their large kitchen island, seated on the high leather-cushioned barstools. I had nowhere to
go for winter break my freshman year. The dorms were closing, and in preparation for my temporary eviction, I’d found a cheap
sublet near campus. Back then, my friendship with Ezra was new and intense, his omnipresence in my dorm room causing a visible
tension between me and my roommate, who seemed disturbed that he didn’t seem to remember her, despite being the one to “introduce”
us. I hadn’t yet fully trusted him with the details of my estrangement from my family. When he discovered my plans to be alone
for the holidays, he subverted them immediately.
“Are you kidding me, Jo?” Ezra had said, righteously indignant. “I’m not leaving you here alone. Just come home with me.”
Renata was Jewish, Paul Christian, and so the Adelman residence was decorated in themed rooms to celebrate both religions: an elegant golden menorah in front of the grand stairway, a gargantuan Christmas tree almost scraping the twelve-foot ceiling of the living room. I hadn’t been quite sure what to expect; my interactions with Ezra’s father had been minimal and awkward, and Renata, though she’d never been anything other than doting toward me, still terrified me.
But then we’d arrived in the home to find Renata behind the stove, her usually elegantly coiffed hair tied into a messy ponytail
high on her head, a violently stained apron tied around her waist, and what appeared to be a bloodbath in her kitchen. The
moment we entered, suitcases squealing behind us, Ezra laughed so hard that he nearly choked.
“Are you...” he said in horror, “cooking?”
Renata folded her arms, successfully smearing what I realized was beet juice onto the unshielded sides of her shirt.
“What?” she said. “Why can’t I cook? How do you think I survived before you?”
The oven beeped, and she ran across the room, pulling out a lumpy piece of what was supposed to be challah bread from within
it.
“We needed a home-cooked meal,” Renata explained. “I told Charlotte”—their cook—“that I could do it. I used to make borscht
with my mother, you know. It tastes better when you do it yourself.”
It did not taste better, but the warmth that had traveled from my throat and into my fingertips had been worth the damage
the rock-solid bread did to my teeth. I’d never had a meal like that. The three of us, sitting at an island, giggling in between
oversalted slurps. Not trying to scarf my food down as quickly as possible. Feeling safe. Loved.
Mal’s roast, on the other hand, was delectable. The meat was perfectly melt-in-your-mouth tender, the potatoes well-seasoned and crispy, even the carrots flavorful. In a sharp departure from our many cooking lessons over the last weeks, he had insisted on making everything himself, and once he’d finished up writing for the day, tied an apron around his waist and got to task. Across the table, his gaze was plaintive, eyebrows turned up, brown eyes wide like a child caught in his mess.
I lowered my fork, sighing. “What did you do?” I said.
Mal jolted.
“What do you mean?” he said, and I comforted myself with the knowledge that he would forever be incapable of hiding anything
from me, by virtue of being the worst liar I’d ever met.
“You’re being weird,” I insisted. “Acting guilty. Can you please fess up? Did you talk to media, or—”
As if on cue, Mal’s phone buzzed. I peered at the screen, seeing a name that looked suspiciously like Ezra Adelman flash across the screen.
“Why is Ezra texting you?” I asked, stunned. I knew that they’d run into each other before, but there was no reason for Mal
to have Ezra’s contact.
“Ah,” Mal said, his eyebrows traveling even farther into his hairline, just as the notifications began to roll in.
They came fast, buzzes, dings, and pings, banners in all colors of the rainbow flashing across his screen. I sucked in a breath,
disoriented by the onslaught. My panic crystallized, lodged itself in my throat, and I looked to Mal, searching for an explanation.
“Mal,” I said, my fork falling to my plate with a clatter. “What is going on?” When he didn’t answer, I ran to my bedroom, stepping through my newly organized closet until I reached the phone that I’d tossed into the back weeks ago. My heart leaped in my throat, and I didn’t bother counting out my pulse, didn’t try to counteract my dread as I waited for it to turn on. Miraculously, it did.
“What the hell,” I said, scrolling through my own notifications with my mouth ajar. My phone, despite my many fail-safes,
had blown up similarly. My work email in particular. Denise was passing on interview invitations like her fingers were on
fire, every subject line with a copied and pasted I just think you should see this!
Then there were the news headlines, the social media posts, tags more numerous than I could count. My Instagram ballooning
to nearly nine hundred thousand followers, another two hundred thousand people appearing on my page like they’d materialized
out of thin air.
And finally, there was Mal, sitting at my dining table and looking unsurprised by all of it.
“Are you going to explain what’s going on?” I asked him.
Mal exhaled. Then, silently, he pushed his phone toward me.
It was a video. Ezra Adelman, sitting behind a desk, looking almost angelic in a white linen shirt. He smiled at the camera.
His blue eyes squinted to jewels, the corners of his mouth pointing upward.
“I thought long and hard about making this,” he said, and as if my body already knew what was coming next, tears dripped,
ready-made, onto my plate.
I was the campus paramedic on duty the day that Ezra died.
It had been two weeks since our fight in the Sheridan Student Center, when Ezra had declared himself my friend and I had told him to kick rocks, and in that time, my life had calmed down. Dark-haired heirs no longer plopped themselves next to me in class or overloaded my text thread with links to songs he thought I might like. The rumor mill had died down, and my roommate had stopped giving me dirty looks. I was finally living the college life I had dreamed of; the one in which I could mind my business and no one else’s.
It was quiet. It was lonely.
And then, at my hip, my walkie-talkie went off.
“Jo, do you copy?”
“This is Jo. I copy,” I said into the walkie-talkie. “What’s going on? I didn’t get an alert?”
“This is the alert,” the voice responded—Mike, our dispatcher. “I just got a call from campus police. An anonymous caller
just requested a wellness check on a student. They want to know if either of us is available to accompany them.”
I was already diving into my jacket.
“I got it, Mike,” I said, throwing my med kit onto my back. “Where am I meeting them?”
“On the quad,” Mike said. Then he paused, a little uncomfortable. “But just a heads-up. The student... it’s Adelman.”
My stomach sank. “Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, no pressure, right?”
Our team was composed of two campus police, Dave and Winston, and Patrick, the private security Renata hired to aid the search.
It had been only three hours since he was last seen, a somewhat reasonable time for an eighteen-year-old boy to go wandering off without his phone, but the last person to see him had said he’d seemed not quite in the right state of mind. He’d left his house before the rager he was hosting could really start, but not before sending his mom a text saying, cryptically, “Love you. Forgive me.” No one knew where he’d gone.
Had he been anyone else, emergency services might not have gotten involved. Dave would have probably rolled his eyes and put
off the task until the morning. Patrick wouldn’t be harassing the “guests,” who hadn’t even noticed that their host had disappeared
while they trashed his house. Winston wouldn’t be writing citations that would be thrown away for the juniors caught snorting
lines on Ezra’s glass desk.
I wouldn’t be whisked among them, seeing Ezra’s features in every strobe-lit face.
“You said Josephine Boateng?” his mother had said over the phone, after we’d left his house. I recognized Renata Kovalenko’s
voice from an episode of Project Runway ; it was bizarre to hear it over the phone, addressing me. “I knew that name sounded familiar. I’m so glad that the person
looking today is his friend.”
How could I tell a grieving mother that, actually, she was mistaken? That I wasn’t her son’s friend, that, just two weeks
before, I’d told him as much? What comfort would that bring her?
“Maybe we should file an official report,” Patrick said, when an hour later, we had nothing, no leads, just more concerning
details from the few party guests sober enough to describe Ezra’s behavior before he’d disappeared (“weirdly chill, like,
more than he usually is”).
I tilted my head back, watching my breath form clouds before my eyes. The cold nipped at my nose, the tops of my ears, and I followed the blinking course of a satellite across the cloudless sky. Even in the suburbs, Chicago’s light pollution made it hard to see the stars, but here, in this small, quaint college town, there were more than I could ever have imagined, less the scattering of lights I was used to, more the dense splatter of solar systems far off—
“The observatory,” I said. “He’s in the observatory.”
Dave and Winston blinked at me ghoulishly, but Patrick was quicker on the uptake, and when I set off toward the astronomy
building, he was only steps behind me.
The Adelman family had chosen a home for their only son just a few blocks away from the astronomy building. Whether Ezra had
found his place of solace before or after matriculation was up for speculation. But he’d found it regardless, and I knew he
returned to it often.
“I can take you there someday,” Ezra had said, what felt like a lifetime ago, in our SSC booth.
“No thanks,” I’d responded.
Joke’s on me , I thought, as we waited, huffing, for the night shift custodian to let us in through the building’s enormous carved wooden
doors. Guess you brought me here after all.
There was a single rickety elevator shaft that took us to the tenth floor of the building, the highest it could go without
a special access keycard. I pulled my medical kit to my front, taking out a vial of naloxone, a syringe, a needle. We’d practiced
administration on a dummy before, but never a real human. To think, I’d known what he was doing all this while, and I’d done
nothing to stop him. I’d looked him in the eyes and walked away.
I should have said something then. I should have done something then.
The elevator opened, and I stepped through it, finding the door that marked roof access, pushing through.
The roof was more of a balcony, a thin rim around the tenth floor, with rusting iron railings and concrete flooring that needed sweeping. My heart rate ratcheted up to my throat as I turned the corner, praying to all the gods that I would find him there alive, well. Hoping that my impulse to draw up a vial of naloxone had been out of an abundance of caution, that I would have to explain to the Elion EMS coordinator why I’d prepped one in the first place ahead of time and wasted supplies. That this nightmare of an evening would come to an end, and I would wake up to find it had all been a dream, that everything was okay, that Ezra was still harmlessly annoying and—
“He’s here!” Patrick bellowed.
It was late, dark, but the light from the full moon was just enough to cast Ezra’s sunken silhouette in a soft silvery glow.
He’d always been ethereal, but there was something tragically romantic about how he looked then, his legs splayed, his head
lolled to one side to expose a long, pale neck.
I didn’t remember closing the distance between us. Didn’t remember placing my fingers on that neck to feel his steady pulse
still thrumming, didn’t remember counting his breaths to find them slow and hesitant or screaming for Patrick to help me strip
him of his jacket. Didn’t remember stretching the collar of his shirt until it tore to reach the meat of his shoulder or slipping
the safety off the hub of my needle, pushing it through his skin, pressing the plunger.
What I did remember was the wait. A minute was a long time when you were counting it down. Sixty seconds of praying, of holding
this stupid boy in my arms, of realizing that if he were to die today, I would mourn him. Of wishing that when he’d told me
I was his best friend, I’d admitted that he was mine as well.
And then, at the sixty-seventh second, something incredible happened.
Ezra opened his eyes.
“Jo?” he croaked. He sounded like he’d swallowed glass.
“Yes, you colossal idiot,” I said. Tears trailed down his chin; mine, dropping onto his face.
He smiled, a quirk of his mouth that didn’t hold a candle to his usual smirk.
“I feel like shit,” he said.
I laughed, bowed my head. “Narcan will do that to you,” I said.
Ezra nodded, his head beginning to loll, and I raised my needle, prepared to administer another dose.
“Stay with me, Jo,” he said.
“I will,” I promised.