Hoping to hear her mother’s upbeat voice, I called Kathleen’s home phone. A detective answered. I don’t even remember breathing as this stranger quickly told me the story that would break my heart forever: Kathleen had been killed by her boyfriend, Tom, at her Columbia University dorm.

 The following afternoon, Tom’s body was found in pieces after he jumped in front of an uptown subway train. Kathleen’s picture ID was in his pocket. “Fear” was spelled out in graffiti on the subway station wall.

This couldn’t be happening.

The voices on the news that night had never seemed so strange, as they murmured simple tidbits of a person and a life they knew nothing about: “Kathleen Roskot, 19, was found covered in blood, beaten and stabbed on her dorm room floor…a magazine featuring Jack Kerouac covered her face…Kathleen Roskot was allegedly killed by her boyfriend…Kathleen Roskot, an Ivy League student, mourned here today by family and friends.”

Did they know that Jack Kerouac was one of her favorite writers?

Kathleen’s name and yearbook photo were everywhere. It was a journalist who first notified Kathleen’s parents that something had happened to their daughter. Eager to get a story, a reporter rang their phone to ask how the Roskots felt about the murder of their daughter. Another journalist knocked on their door. To them, it was a story. To the Roskots, it was the beginning of the rest of their lives.

That night, I was in so much disbelief that I called her dorm room.

I got the Rolling Stones: “Pleased to meet you, won’t you guess my name?” Her answering machine sang “Sympathy For The Devil,” as usual.

“Hey this is Kathleen, I’m not here right now. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you, thanks. Bye.” I left one. Looking back, I don’t know what I was thinking.

I cried the rest of the night in a way that purged the youthful innocence we’d all still held onto from high school. I was unable to comprehend, in the moment, that everything happening around me implied something that was forever. The phone calls. The TV announcing her death, over and over again, like it was the first time every time. I didn’t understand the story she was being reduced to, and I certainly didn’t understand journalism. I just sat in the dark with the TV light in my eyes, barely seeing, as I watched the video of her covered body being carried away.

I searched through my box of old journals to find the one that Kathleen and I had shared in our senior year of high school. We would write entries together, or read to each other what we had written. Our journals were mostly jumbles of quotes scribbled on post-its, detailed stories of everything that we did that weekend and our latest philosophies on life itself. We loved to read, we loved to write and we loved to tell stories—the same stories—again and again, like they had never lost their original zing. Kathleen told a story like it was the most enthralling thing you’d ever hear. At her funeral, many of her close friends reminisced about her unique, joyful voice, as well as her hysterically contagious laugh.

 In the journal, I came across a letter Kathleen had written to me before we began college. The letter began with a Jack Kerouac quote:

“It made me think that everything was about to arrive—the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.”

I stopped reading.

Suddenly these words had a new and heartbreaking meaning.

“We may go far,” she wrote, “but we’ll never forget.” The letter overflowed with her words of remembrance and inspiration. She recounted the memories of the Bay Shore childhoods we were about to leave behind, and projected her wishes for the lives that were before us as young adults. She had always had a handful of best girlfriends, to whom she brought unyielding loyalty and esteem. She was the girl who could always entertain herself and all others at any place, any time. She was the girl who could talk lacrosse with the boys, while each of them secretly wondered if they just might be in love with her. She was the spirit that you could feel enter the party before her flip-flops could flip-flap through the door.

That was Kathleen..

As the news continued its attempt to answer the unanswerable question of “Why?,” Cosmopolitan magazine prepared to cover Kathleen’s story in its June 2000 issue.

There is nothing that Cosmopolitan magazine reminds me of more than picking up Kathleen for the beach. Picking up Kathleen for the beach went the same way every time. I’d drive up to the front of her house knowing she’d ready and waiting on her front lawn, in the sun. My backseat would be littered with every imaginable beach essential, while Kathleen’s preparation consisted of a few things: a water bottle, sometimes a towel, a Cosmopolitan magazine and a big, old book.

In June 2000, I stood in the grocery line and picked up Cosmopolitan. Her photo and story filled pages inside.   

For a while after her death, conversations would run through my mind from when Tom, the California wrestler and former Columbia student, returned to New York . Kathleen knew Tom only from her circle of college friends. I remember her telling me about this mysterious, intelligent person whom she had met through her friends. Tom told her within days of meeting her that he thought he could love her. A stranger to Kathleen, Tom immediately connected to her profound feelings about life itself and her love for Kerouac.

Many times, when I would call Kathleen at her dorm, she would put him on the phone so we could get to know each other better. He would often speak to me about California , since I dreamed of living there one day. He would describe it as beautiful, peaceful and wonderfully laid back. When I finally met Tom, he seemed pensive and obviously enamored with Kathleen.

In the days after her death, I fantasized about Kathleen coming to me one day when I was much older. We’d both be married, with small children. She would tell me that she had a very important reason to disappear for some time. She would say she was so sorry she had to leave everyone. Other times, I would just dream about everything I wanted to say to her when we could finally be together again. If there is a heaven, I’ve prayed enough times to know that she will be the one waiting at the gate to meet me, with her long brown hair and flip-flops. And we will be 19 again.

I’ve found that when you speak of someone who has passed in such a violent way, you often get a reaction as though you’ve just spoken about a ghost. This reaction makes my heart sink every time, because it’s a reminder that her name is sometimes associated more with fear and the way that she died, than with the life she lived. To me, she is the same unequivocal girl. I can still hear her laughing, with life exuding from the tips of her red painted toes and silver toe rings, to her bright and knowing eyes.