The Lie

by Chad Kultgen

  Everyone was like, “Okay,” but we were all really like, That is so desperate and I hope it doesn’t happen to me. Seriously, I bet we all would have reacted pretty much the same exact way.

  I called Kyle that night and told him what happened. He was like, “Yeah, that sucks, but you have to look at it from—what’s the guy’s name?”

  I was like, “Ron.”

  He was like, “Ron—look at it from Ron’s point of view. If he didn’t really love Andrea like he loved the other chick, then he’s going to be much happier in the long run and ultimately so is Andrea. If the guy didn’t really love her then that relationship would have suffered and eventually ended anyway.”

  I was like, “Yeah, but he could have proposed to her first and maybe even married her. Like he totally ruined the rest of her senior year.”

  Kyle was like, “I see.”

  I knew he wasn’t on my side because he was a guy, but that night I went over to his house and sucked his dick like the best I’ve ever sucked it because I didn’t want him thinking that he could dump me to get back together with that skank he dated when we were broken up instead of proposing to me.

  chapter nine

  After a particularly boring business ethics lecture I returned to my room in the Alpha Tau Omega house and logged into my account on donorsiblingregistry.com to find that I was the proud father of my tenth child—a girl to be named Harriet who would grow up in the household of a single mother of thirty-eight who obviously hadn’t found a man willing to impregnate her or, worse yet and possibly more likely, hadn’t found a man even willing to fuck her at all.

  I decided to celebrate by throwing an impromptu baby shower at my father’s house in Highland Park, knowing that both he and his wife were out of town for the week. I called a girl I had met a few weeks prior at a party I couldn’t remember. Her name was Bethany and she was the sister of a girl named Karlie who was a Pi Phi. Bethany didn’t attend SMU, or any college for that matter, due to a certain level of academic ineptitude. I planned on using whatever insecurities she had about her intellectual inferiority to enhance the sexual degradation I would orchestrate when she arrived at my home.

  I also called Greg’s sister and extended her an invitation. As much as I liked fucking her to somehow accentuate the feeling of dominance I already had over Greg, I found that I actually slightly enjoyed her company. She was a cunt to be sure. This was evidenced by her willingness to fuck me based solely on the fact that I was my father’s son and maybe, I reasoned, partially to fulfill some pedestrian need to act out against her father. But there was something agreeable in her nature that I found far more pleasant to be around than I had expected. Whatever the case, she accepted, as did the moron.

  After their arrival at my home it became apparent to me that, although Greg’s sister had no problem with a three-way, the dunce seemed to have some lingering amount of self-respect that I hadn’t anticipated. I assumed this had something to do with her general lack of knowledge in all categories, including the identities of the most wealthy families in Dallas. I gave one last push by telling her that if she wouldn’t yield to at least sucking my dick while Greg’s sister performed anilingus on her, then she’d have to go. Surprisingly she held fast to her sense of self-worth and walked out. It was mildly amusing only in that it was surprising to a degree and therefore novel.

  I dismissed the event and took Greg’s sister up to my room, hoping to use at least some of the items in my closet on her while photographing many of the night’s events. I was inches away from Greg’s sister’s anus with a rubber fist when my doorbell rang. I wasn’t expecting anyone but I thought it might have been the moron realizing her error. I reasoned that in such a case she would have to be willing to allow a more extreme defiling in order to gain admittance to my home once again. I told Greg’s sister not to move—her ass in the air, dripping with saliva I had lathered it with only seconds before—then donned my robe and went to the front door still holding the rubber fist.

  Standing there in my doorway was not the moron. It was, instead, Kyle, looking very nervous and sweaty. I was concerned as any friend would have been. He told me he had something very important to talk to me about and asked that I put the rubber fist away. I obliged his request.

  I hadn’t forgotten about Greg’s sister. I just became far more interested in discovering the reason Kyle saw fit to show up at my front door unannounced, which was something he had never done at any point in our friendship. For this reason I understood that whatever he wanted to discuss with me had to be a matter of significance. Despite understanding this fact, I was in no way prepared to handle the issue he discussed with me that night.

  After a deep breath, he explained to me that he intended to marry Heather. This was not news to me. I had come to accept that, at some point, Kyle would make the greatest mistake of his life and wed that cunt. This seemed so inevitable to me that I had stopped trying to dissuade him from it. This general feeling of inexorability informed my response to his announcement.

  He went still further down this road of announcements by telling me that he planned to propose to Heather over the winter break. This admission elicited in me a reaction that even I was not prepared for. I had never been struck in the testicles so sharply that it caused me to vomit, but I assumed such a strike would feel similar to receiving the information Kyle had delivered in saying that his proposal to Heather would become concrete in less than two months.

  I made the most coherent argument possible that he should wait at least until their senior year, that there was no harm in waiting, that there was no benefit in an early proposal, et cetera. None of this mattered to Kyle. He insisted that he loved her and he wanted to make her happy. He knew that nothing would make her happier than being proposed to during her junior year. He went on to explain to me that all of the cunts in the sororities at SMU viewed the date of their engagement as some kind of competition. Where I found this to be deplorable information bolstering my argument that Kyle should wait and gain certainty that Heather wouldn’t accept his proposal just as a means to compete with the other cunts of the Kappa house, Kyle somehow found it endearing. He was lost. My best friend was lost and there was nothing I could do to find him again. In many ways that night was possibly the saddest of our friendship, despite the events that were yet to transpire.

  What Kyle said to me next was at once laughable and horrifying. Still nervous and almost shaking as he spoke, he asked me if he could borrow ten thousand dollars to buy Heather an engagement ring. He had asked me to borrow money one other time in our friendship and this request was accompanied by all of the same promises to repay me and all of the same apologies for having to ask for the money and all of the same assurances that if he had any other way to get the money he would have employed it.

  In the first case of my lending money to Kyle, for Heather’s abortion, he had indeed paid me back over the course of the next few months and I’d had no problem whatsoever loaning him the money. It was clear in that instance that Kyle would not have been able to raise the funds necessary to destroy the mistake in Heather’s womb in any kind of timely fashion and furthermore the general purpose of the money in question was one I agreed with—the erasure of a mistake.

  This was something wholly different. The amount Kyle was asking for was immaterial. Had he needed ten thousand or even a hundred thousand in order to pay for an abortion I still would have gladly given it. It was the purpose of the money in question in this instance that I couldn’t bring myself to support. Not only was it a mistake in my opinion for Kyle to propose to and eventually marry Heather, it was a mistake to purchase a ring so soon.

  In general I also despise the idea of engagement rings in that there is no male equivalent. Women seem to want everything to be equal in this world and yet they hope for an expensive engagement ring without ever even thinking of offering something of equal value to the man they marry. The double standard involved specifically with engagement rings repulses me. Beyond
that the very idea of them transcends any logic I can identify with. I understand the symbolism of a ring, but why it has to be a diamond, and why that diamond has to be of a certain size to truly make a woman happy, is beyond me. It only further illustrates, in my mind, how foolish and childlike women are, in that they wait their entire lives for a man to give them a sparkling rock and only this can make them complete.

  This view, of course, has nothing to do with Kyle’s request for ten thousand dollars, which I flatly denied within seconds of his asking, citing many of the reasons I’ve already mentioned and trying again, in vain, to convince him not to propose to Heather.

  He thanked me for listening, apologized for asking for the money, and told me as he left how much he valued our friendship and how much he hated having to ask me for the money. I assured him that it would affect our friendship in no way, and that although I didn’t completely understand his point of view in all of this I could still respect him. I asked him what he thought he was going to do about getting her the ring and he said he didn’t know but he would figure something out. I had no doubt he would.

  As I returned to my bedroom—where Greg’s sister hadn’t moved an inch, with her ass still in the air—I realized I had left the rubber fist downstairs. I thought for one last time about Kyle and the mistake he was about to make. Throughout his and Heather’s relationship there seemed to exist a small group of moments that signified Kyle’s slipping away. I felt that this moment, this realization that he was going to ask her to be his wife was the final moment in the group, the one that ultimately meant he was finally gone. Any hope I had of retrieving my friend from the relationship that had swallowed him whole was gone, or so I thought at that moment.

  I pitied Greg’s sister in that moment, knowing that some of my frustration and some of my hatred for Heather and cunts like her would be channeled into whatever I chose to ram up her asshole. Luckily for her, Kyle’s visit had taken the wind from my sails and I could only find the energy to use my dick. I took no photographs of the event.

  chapter ten

  I had been to probably every jewelry store in Dallas looking at rings, trying to find the best deal I could on a ring that managed to have at least half of the qualities Heather said she wanted. The best price I could come up with was $3,499. So my choices were: don’t eat for the rest of junior year, take out another student loan and move back into the dorms so I could use the rent money I had saved up on her ring, or the most logical choice—don’t get her a fucking ring. That, of course, was one choice I didn’t even entertain.

  I know at the time that I loved her and everything, and I really thought she loved me, too, but what in the fuck was I thinking? I could have waited to get her a ring until our senior year and she wouldn’t have even cared. But I just couldn’t get it out of my head that if I proposed to her during junior year it would make her so happy that she’d never leave me and all of her friends would be envious of her and I knew she wanted that so I wanted to give it to her. Also, as stupid as this is, somewhere deep down I knew that if I proposed to her as a junior it would validate me to her friends. I know it doesn’t seem like that kind of a thing would have mattered to me, but it was kind of like icing on the cake of making Heather happy. It was almost like revenge in a way for me. A lot of the girls in her sorority were nasty bitches to me for the entire time I knew them. I knew that proposing to Heather would shut them up, and in many ways I would immediately rise to the top of their list of most desirable guys because none of their shitbag frat-guy boyfriends would have proposed to them yet. Petty, I know, but I couldn’t help thinking about it.

  So I had to come up with thirty-five hundred dollars and I had about a month to do it, because I wanted to propose to her the first day of our second semester. I was thinking about doing it over winter break, but Heather was talking about maybe going to see her grandparents in Florida with her mom so I didn’t even know if she’d be in town, and besides that I kind of felt like I had to do it when school was in session so her cunty sorority sisters could be the first ones she went and told.

  I thought about getting a second job, but with classes and the one job I already had there was no time during the day for me to do it, especially not if I wanted to see Heather at all. I thought about selling my car, which I probably couldn’t even have gotten two thousand dollars for, let alone thirty-five hundred. I thought about signing up to do some of those medical research programs where they test drugs on people, but that didn’t seem like it would get me enough money by Christmas break. I really had no fucking idea how I was going to get her this ring.

  Then one night I was up late watching TV, waiting for Heather to come back from some party she was throwing with her sorority, and I saw something that made me almost shit my pants. On QVC they were selling a ring that I couldn’t have designed more perfectly myself. It was the literal accumulation of each and every little thing that Heather had circled in the pictures of probably seven or eight different rings. It was exactly the ring she wanted. It was even better than the thirty-five-hundred-dollar ring I was thinking about getting her. And the best part—it was only $89.99. I was only confused for a second and then I realized it was a cubic zirconia—completely fake.

  I remember staring at the TV with the phone in my hand, debating whether or not I should buy it. I didn’t want to lie to Heather, and I knew engagement rings and shit like that were really important to her, but I also knew I wasn’t going to be able to get the real version of the ring she wanted for a long fucking time. So I made the worst decision in the whole list of bad decisions I made where Heather was concerned. Actually, I take that back—it was a good decision, it just turned out bad. And when I say bad I mean it turned out horrible. And it ultimately led us all to where we are now.

  I decided I was going to buy the fake from QVC, propose to her with it, and then eventually replace it without her knowing. I reasoned that, as long as she was happy, it didn’t matter if the ring was real or fake or whatever. And, taking that delusion even further, I thought to myself that the ring was just a symbol anyway. For all intents and purposes it was the exact ring she told me she wanted. So what if it wasn’t a diamond? It fucking looked just like one. Unless she was planning on using it to cut glass or something, she’d never know.

  So I dialed the number, gave them my credit card info, guessed Heather’s ring size, and prepared to wait the five to seven business days for the product of my poor judgment to arrive.

  chapter eleven

  The next kind of big thing that happened that semester was, Cam’s brother got arrested. The cops pulled him over for a DUI and he had like fifteen pounds of weed in his car. So we totally had like no one to get E or pot or anything from, and there were a bunch of parties coming up. So we asked Cam where his brother got his shit from, and Cam was like, “I’m actually going to meet with the guy tomorrow night if you guys want to come, too.”

  So I was like, “Yeah.”

  I tried to get Andrea to come with me but she was still way too fucked up from Ron dumping her and everything so I ended up getting Gina to go. We showed up at Cam’s house at like around seven-thirty or something on whatever night it was. I remember it was a weeknight, but I don’t remember which one, and then Cam drove us to this Valero gas station on Marsh Lane and it was kind of sketchy, but I knew Cam really well and I didn’t think he was going to try anything and I figured if anything weird happened he would look out for us. It was like my first real drug deal, though. I mean I had bought weed and coke and E and whatever, but pretty much always through Cam on campus or through someone else who just happened to have it at a party or something. It was really weird actually doing it for real behind a gas station. I, of course, didn’t tell Kyle what I was doing. He would have seriously flipped out.

  So we got to the Valero and parked and I looked over at this car next to us and Annie was actually there parked in a car next to us. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, so I was like, “Cam, is it cool if I go talk to the
girl in that car over there? I know her.” I didn’t want to like break some kind of drug deal etiquette or whatever by getting out of the car.

  He was like, “Yeah, it’s cool. The dude we’re meeting is driving around the neighborhood and I have to text him, so he won’t be here for a few minutes anyway.”

  I was like, “Cool,” and I got out and went over to Annie’s car, knocked on the window, and got her to let me in. I got in on her passenger’s side and saw that she was doing lines off a credit card.

  I was like, “Did you just get that from a guy at this gas station?”

  She was like, “Yeah, he has some pretty good stuff.”

  I was like, “Yeah, Cam took us over here to get some for this party at the end of the week. How have you been?”

  She was like, “Really good. You know I started dating Jeff Gurddey.”

  I was like, “That senior Pike guy?”

  She was like, “Yeah. I dated Brian for a while at the beginning of the year. I hope you’re not mad.”

  I was like, “Not at all.”

  She was like, “I don’t know if he was weird when you guys were dating, but he totally creeped me out, or I guess it was more like his friend Josh creeped me out. So I like broke up with him and then started dating Jeff.”

  Jeff Gurddey was actually a pretty good catch. He got arrested for public indecency after a crazy party that Pike threw our sophomore year, his junior year, but other than that he was supposedly like in a pretty rich family and everything. I was like, “That’s great. How long have you guys been going out?”

  She was like, “Just a couple of months. So I don’t think he’s going to propose or anything, but maybe by the end of the year or something. I don’t know. How are you doing? I heard you and Kyle got back together.”

  I was like, “Yeah. At the end of last year we got back together and things have actually been like really, really good.”