Final Truth

In college, RAs don't care if you fail classes, skip lectures, or party all night. They only care if you die on campus. Lots of seemingly peaceful colleges have dark secrets. Something like that happened at a media school somewhere in the Northeast. I can't say exactly which one – the school paid us off and threatened our graduation to keep us quiet. Now, years later, I want to tell the story. I'll try to stick to the facts, just what I saw and heard. I was pretty good friends with the guy who died. We did a lot together. I'm telling this to set the record straight, because there are two versions of this story. The one still going around campus is incomplete. All the names here are changed. Don’t bother trying to figure out who they are.

Freshman year, everyone takes a psych survey. The last question is always, “Do you/does your family have a history of mental illness?” Most people are honest. Later, we asked a professor, and the guy who killed himself, let’s call him “Quiet Joe,” answered truthfully. He had moderate depression.

We noticed Quiet Joe always took pills. Later, we learned they were Paxil, for depression. They come in packs of ten, each pill scored down the middle so you can break it in half. We usually saw him take one and a half. The night it happened, we got back from a late study session and didn't see him. We just saw an empty Paxil blister pack on his desk. Looking back, my roommates and I think he took them all that night, or maybe he’d already taken most and just finished the pack. You’ve probably guessed by now. Quiet Joe, the one who killed himself, was my roommate.

There were four of us in the room. Three of us were in the same program; Quiet Joe was in a different one, so we didn't know much about his life outside the dorm. We knew he had good grades, was already up for honors, and was always picked for awards. He was good-looking too, not in a sunshine-and-smiles way, but he had nice skin and regular features. Years later, I’d realize that's what people mean by "handsome." Except for being quiet, he was perfect. But he didn't have many friends. Besides us, he was always alone. On weekends, he'd be out early and back late, sometimes not at all. We asked where he went, but he just gave a tight smile and said, "Working." We knew his family wasn’t rich, and with the meds, he was always short on cash. So he took odd jobs, worked in the cafeteria last semester, and was tutoring this semester. We tried to look out for him.

That Friday, it was past eleven, and he wasn't back. Dorms usually lock up at ten, no one in or out after eleven. We figured he was at his job. Since it was Friday, and no classes Saturday, we wanted to sleep in. We left the door unlocked so he could get in without waking us. We crashed. Athletic guys, we sleep hard. The next morning, one of my roommates woke up needing to pee. Half-asleep, eyes closed, he just felt his way out of bed, into his slippers, towards the bathroom. Bumped into something, too ti...