Queditor Piper S. McKeever Assassinated at the Brittle Old Age of 21
Dear Student Body,
We are devastated to announce that Quest editor Piper S. McKeever was assassinated on the night of Thursday, April 24, 2025. In order to speak to the late editor and uncover the details of that fateful evening, one very brave Quest writer took it upon themself to locate a portal to, and subsequently enter, the pocket universe of Three Portlands in order to collaborate with Deer College’s Necromancy Department.
After spending some quality study time at not-technically-her thesis desk on Thursday evening, McKeever decided that she wanted to hit the Lutz to shoot doubles pool with randoms, drink two gin and tonics, and bother the other bar patrons by replaying the same Rob Zombie remixes via TouchTunes multiple times throughout the evening, which, surprisingly, was not noticed by the bartender. McKeever, being the independent and pedestrian (in both senses!) young woman she was, traveled alone and by foot. She had only her pocket knife, which is embossed with “Sweet” in reference to her second favorite song, in the cigarette pocket of her signature Von Dutch jacket to protect her. McKeever wanted us to note that if she did ever have to stab someone in the heart, she would’ve said, “not such a sweetheart now, huh?,” although the writer would like to clarify that that joke is really not all that clever, or even funny, which is kind of the baseline for entry on something being a joke.
After a few hours of boisterously clowning around in the bar and being very obviously 21 in the irritating and socially unaware way, McKeever decided that it was time to turn in for the evening. She planned to go home, take off her shoes, do something to annoy her roommate, and rewatch the David Foster Wallace movie for what would’ve been the sixth time now. While taking the walk back, she decided that instead of circumventing campus on the way home because she always runs into people who are itching to talk to her for an awkward and over-extended conversation at exactly two drinks deep (no more no less), to just say “what the hell!” and drop by the swing set for what she calls “swing set ponder time.” What she could possibly have to ponder about at midnight on a Thursday is really a mystery, to both the writer and to herself, but nonetheless, she was ready to listen to selections from the Original Broadway Cast Recording of Les Mis and not cry about something minute and ultimately inconsequential for twenty-ish minutes.
Just as “A Little Fall Of Rain” came on, McKeever decided that it was time to pack it up and complete the journey back home. As she stood up from the swing set and cinematically wiped a single tear from her eye, she heard someone approaching from behind. The attacker was masked and completely covered from head to toe in spandex, which McKeever noted was, “admittedly, kind of a hot look.” Like all good assassins do, they handed McKeever a small pamphlet containing a manifesto regarding their reason to assassinate her before they proceeded.
The pamphlet read:
To the CSOs, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our college. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn't working with anyone. This was fairly trivial: some elementary social engineering, basic CAD, a lot of patience. The spiral notebook, if present, has some straggling notes and To Do lists that illuminate the gist of it. My tech is pretty locked down because I work in engineering so probably not much info there. I do apologize for any strife of traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, the Quest simply had it coming. A reminder: Reed College has the #7 best college paper in the United States, yet we rank roughly #63 in US News for National Liberal Arts Colleges. Quest gets the [indecipherable] most of their requested funding every semester, behind Senate. It has grown and grown, but as our ranking? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our student body fee for their weekly contributor’s meeting pizza budget because the Reed public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed, and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play. Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.
After taking a speed read of the annoyingly not-copy-edited pamphlet, McKeever stated, “Come on, man, I write the horoscope! Plus, we abstain as a college from the U.S. News Ranking stuff, and besides, it’s, like, not even the Quest’s fault anyway.” After realizing she was beginning to try to reason her way out of an irrational argument, she knew it wasn’t going to work. The assassin shrugged their shoulders before shooting McKeever in the chest and running back into the darkness. As she laid out bleeding in the small grassy patch of daisies under the night sky, she realized this wasn’t such a bad way to go after all, dressed in starlight during the balmy, early hours of morning. As Éponine died alongside her through the power of lyrical storytelling, she could confirm that she didn’t feel any pain either, but McKeever couldn’t feel any pain because the shock set in quickly, and unfortunately not because she was being held in her final moments by the love of her life. So it goes.
McKeever was found in the early morning by a group of no-good pot-smoking freshmen, all of whom were paranoid high instead of funny high, and who initially thought she fell asleep outside after a night of debauchery, which isn’t an unusual find at Reed. After trying to wake her, the no-good pot-smoking freshmen realized that they would need years of psychotherapy and antidepressants to cope with the disturbing experience of finding someone in their peer group dead. Had they heard the news from their favorite professor the day after, it would only take about six sessions of complimentary college grief therapy and listening to “The Ghost Of You” by My Chemical Romance every day for a year and a half before the post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms would subside to subclinical and interpersonally functional levels. Although the no-good pot-smoking freshmen were rightfully shocked and horrified, they managed to phone the CSOs and get Granger Danger on the case. However, Granger Danger did not make an attempt to track the assassin, instead choosing to go after the more pressing matter of giving out AODs to the no-good pot-smoking freshmen. And, as we all can acknowledge, the streets are safer for it. McKeever confirmed that the Lord smiles upon 28 West, which, as an institution, is a direct agent for His good (see Romans 8:28 for more details).
When asked about whether she had any sort of premonition about her death, or an unsettled feeling of some sort, McKeever stated, “I should have known this was going to happen, honestly, because the Red Sox lost yesterday. Something bad always happens to me soon after the Red Sox lose, and the Red Sox lose a lot, so this correlation is pretty bad news for me. Nothing bad happened yet that day or the day before, so I knew something bad would eventually happen, but the bad thing has never before been being murdered, obviously. Usually, the bad thing is just spilling coffee on myself or an all-consuming and acute awareness of the essential, existential isolation all conscious creatures suffer because of our ipseity. So, it’s fair to say I didn’t see this coming. I really wish the Red Sox would’ve won, because I wouldn’t have been murdered, and something awesome would’ve happened in my life. Like, I’d be sent a meme via Twitter DM, or I’d eat something other than canned soup that day. Wait, that makes it sound like my life sucked. Did it suck? Can you cut this from the article? I want to think of something different.”
Although she didn’t really want to die, McKeever believes that “Dying, or death itself, isn’t the bad part. The bad part is that I haven't finished reading Works of Love yet, and it was just getting good. The unfinished business stuff is real, because if you take a look at my Goodreads currently reading section, I’m not exactly batting a thousand on finishing books. However, I’ll have you know that, in Heaven, not finishing the book doesn’t matter content-wise because I now have a higher understanding of everything inside the natural universe. On principle, though, I would have liked the opportunity to finish the book.”
When asked about what we have to look forward to in the afterlife, McKeever stated, “Heaven is a great place to be, way more awesome than they make it out to be, but it’s not this pearly gated cloud conclave for the perfectly pure-souled like you’d come to believe if you exclusively receive your ideas about the afterlife from kitschy condolence cards and the Goodwill photo frame section. It’s actually an entirely different state of consciousness and the limits of language to convey ideas are so devastatingly apparent to me now that I’ve experienced their transcendence. The closest metaphor I could use to describe it is that being in Heaven is like being a wine stain on the carpet of creation. You’re completely enmeshed, and yet you still retain your distinct identity in a way. Does that make sense?” The writer had no idea what this chick was rambling about, but nodded yes anyway.
In McKeever’s final comment, she stated that to unite with her favorite writers and philosophers, as well as her deceased friends and family, is a bonus part of being in Heaven. She requested that we don’t use the term “meet” because she wanted to emphasize, “it doesn’t work like that.” She tried to explain it to us, but we couldn’t grasp the concept due to our more restricted frame of existence. McKeever stated, “There’s this Tolstoy quote I’ve always really loved from when a character is contemplating death shortly before he dies in War and Peace. It goes like this: ‘Love is life… Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.’ I enjoy thinking of myself as being a particle of love returned to the general and eternal source. I’m getting a headache from having to use language again, so it’s probably time for me to go. But, don’t fret, you’ll see me when you get to the other side, and, since time isn’t linear in Heaven, you’re sort of already there to me. Anyway, later, losers!”