The Lie

by Chad Kultgen

  We made mojitos and anyone who didn’t have class stuck around for brunch and I started to feel a little better about the whole thing. You know, like my life wasn’t completely over. Then Kyle called me. I shouldn’t have taken the call, but I was curious to hear what he had to say. At that point I hadn’t necessarily ruled out the possibility of getting back together with him if he could make things right. But he’d have to really make them right, like when that one basketball player anally raped that girl and then bought his wife a four-million-dollar ring—that kind of right.

  So I went up to my room and took his call.

  He was like, “Heather, I don’t believe you really don’t want to see me ever again. How can you go from loving someone to never wanting to see them again in twenty-four hours?”

  I was like, “Twenty-four hours—it was more like twenty-four seconds as soon as I found out you lied to me about my ring.”

  He was like, “I never lied to you. I never said it was a real diamond.”

  I was like, “When you put it on my finger you implied it was real, you fucking asshole.”

  He was like, “Heather, I love you more than anything. I don’t know how else to say it and I’m sorry and I know you still love me, too. This is all just ridiculous.”

  When he said that, I remember thinking to myself that he was wrong. I didn’t love him anymore. I mean on that actual phone call I remember thinking about why I ever started dating him in the first place and it was like seriously easy for me to get back to that emotional state, you know like just completely not caring about him. And that was actually easier to deal with than the anger and like the hatred I felt for him when I thought about the fake ring and everything.

  So I was like, “No, you know what’s ridiculous is that you think this is ridiculous. Kyle, that ring might have been like a symbol or whatever to you and not that big of a deal, but it was really important to me, like the most important thing in our relationship, and if something that important to me doesn’t even fucking matter to you, then there’s no reason we should like stay together.”

  He was like, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  I was like, “Yeah, it does.”

  Then he didn’t say anything for a while and then he was like, “I love you.”

  And I was like, “Bye,” then I hung up on him. I thought he would try to call back, but he never did. I went downstairs and finished brunch with the girls who were there and as we were eating it started to sink in. I would probably never see Kyle again. He was a part of my life for like three years off and on and I really thought I would end up with him. Once I realized that I just started freaking out and crying.

  Gina was like, “It’s okay, you’re going to find some other guy who’s like a million times better for you and you’ll be fine.”

  She didn’t get it. I knew I was kind of under the gun a little bit to find a new guy and everything, but I was crying because I felt like I’d wasted all of that time with Kyle. I mean seriously, I only really dated two guys in college and they both turned out to be dicks. I mean they were dicks for different reasons, but they were both dicks. I gave some blowjobs here and there to other guys, but I should have been out there playing the field, finding like the best guy at SMU to marry, and instead I pretty much wasted my entire time there. That’s why I was crying.

  And then, also, like every guy at school pretty much was going to find out about why I was single if they didn’t already know and none of them were going to want to like date me or anything. I mean, I really thought Kyle might have totally fucked me in terms of being able to find a new guy before graduation. I guess I was crying a little bit because of that, too. I just remember thinking that the first day of my freshman year there was no doubt in my mind that by the time I graduated I would have found a really great guy who was going to have a really great job who would propose to me with a real fucking ring, and it looked like none of that was even close to happening with like less than three semesters left in the whole thing.

  I calmed down enough to drink like twenty more mojitos and pass out in the middle of the day. That’s really the only choice I had.

  chapter eighteen

  My wounds weren’t significant enough to require any type of medical attention—no stitches, no salves, et cetera, but I was left with a black eye, which was a first for me. I enjoyed its novelty. It seemed to attract even more attention from the whores and cunts around campus.

  I wasn’t sure how any of the events of that night would affect Greg socially. I, of course, hoped for a social version of the same outcome he received from my father’s company—a complete erasure of all connection and of any future prospect for any kind of involvement. My hopes were well met with the reality that followed. Greg had intermittently dated a girl named Michelle Rowanson for the majority of his four years at SMU. He had taken their brief times apart to fuck as many whores as he could until Michelle would ultimately come to the conclusion that she should forgive him for whatever transgression he may have been responsible for. In their time together Greg had been caught fucking one of Michelle’s sorority sisters in a back room at Michelle’s own birthday party, he had hidden her car keys in her vagina while she was nearly comatose from alcohol poisoning, and he had placed his own feces in the microwave at Michelle’s sorority house and set the microwave to five hours before leaving, among other similar depraved acts. She forgave him for all of these things, but in the matter of his attack on me it seemed she wouldn’t return a single phone call.

  This type of treatment wasn’t delivered to Greg by Michelle only. It seemed that within forty-eight hours of the event virtually every whore on campus had labeled him a pariah and so too had every guy. In his final semester as the president of Alpha Tau Omega and as a student at SMU Greg was crippled. I was pleased with the outcome.

  I was sitting in my room at the Alpha Tau Omega house thinking about how masterfully I had destroyed him when our doorbell rang and I heard Alan Raggermore answer the door, followed by what I thought was Kyle’s voice asking if I was present. I went downstairs to find that I was correct. Kyle stood in the doorway looking like he had just seen his mother and father murdered and had then been forced to fuck their corpses. Aside from the look on his face, I knew the situation to be dire based on his presence at the Alpha Tau Omega house. Kyle despised everything that had to do with the Greek system at SMU and would stop at nothing to be completely untainted by it. Appearing at the door of an actual fraternity house unannounced just to talk to a friend meant the world’s end must have been close at hand for Kyle. Indeed it was.

  I took him up to my room, where he proceeded to divulge to me all the details of the past forty-eight hours between him and Heather. I learned of the proposal and acceptance and I learned of the following day’s events that led Heather to have the ring appraised—this, by the way, made me hate that cunt with more venom than I’ve ever conjured for anyone—and I learned of her subsequent decision to dissolve their relationship based on the pretense that she viewed their relationship to be too intertwined with falsehood to continue. If my father had ever employed a contract killer of whom I was aware, I would have given him a job opportunity then and there.

  To see my best friend in shambles again, much worse than the first time, was almost too much to bear. I did feel genuine empathy for him. I had gone through the cheering-up phase once before—the waiting for him to have a certain amount of time to grieve, the conversations assuring him that all would turn out just fine, the setting him up with a whore into whom he could spill his seed in order to ease his mind, et cetera. I knew that I would be able to tolerate all of that again.

  As Kyle recounted the final moments of his and Heather’s final conversation, I was fully prepared to not talk to Kyle for a month or so until he had worked through whatever horrible emotional bullshit he needed to. I was very pleasantly surprised, however, when at the conclusion of his description of their relationship’s end he looked me in the eye, with no trace o
f tears or sorrow—with quite a chilling stare, actually—and proceeded to explain that he was done with it all. He claimed he was through with love and he wanted to fuck as many whores as me, never the same one twice. He refused to allow himself to go through this same terrible emotional experience that one girl had put him through twice. He reasoned that any relationship he might get into in the future would only yield the same outcome. To illustrate his point, he even used a line that I’ve always been fond of: “All things end.”

  I promised Kyle that I would fill his cup until it overflowed with cunts and whores of all shapes and sizes. I assured him that no matter how savage his thirst for nameless fucking I would eventually slake it. And if it could not be slaked then I would have a brother in arms until our dying days. I wanted to tell him that I knew this was a phase, a visceral reaction to the pain Heather made him feel. I wanted to tell him that after he fucked three or four whores, his old desire for love and stability would come back to him. I wanted to tell him these things, but I couldn’t because I didn’t believe they were true.

  I remembered when he first asked me to set him up with a cunt to fuck without emotion a few semesters prior. Despite the fact that he went through with the act, there was still a spark in his eye, some glimmer of his true self both before and after he fucked the whore in my guest room. That glimmer was gone this time and in its place was something very familiar to me—a complete lack of caring for any being with a vagina. He didn’t yet have the contempt, but he had no concern for them, no sense of equality or respect. It seemed as though he viewed them only as holes to put his dick in, which was, to my mind, the first step to true social enlightenment for any man.

  I regretted not being able to help him on that night, as I had previously agreed to meet my father for dinner and talk to him about the events that had transpired with Greg. I ended up using that conversation to make certain Greg was blacklisted at a minimum of a dozen other Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas.

  Instead, I assured Kyle, the following night I would help him celebrate his birth into true manhood by rounding up some willing whores. He seemed happy, as was I. Throughout the entirety of our friendship I had made countless attempts at changing Kyle’s mind about whores. I had tried every technique I could think of to make him understand, as I did, the disposable nature of their entire gender. The irony was that, where I had failed in doing this, a cunt succeeded more supremely than I ever possibly could have.

  chapter nineteen

  I guess I had never felt that empty before. Nothing mattered to me after Heather dumped me. I still went to my classes, but it was all robotic to me. I didn’t retain much of what I was supposed to be learning. I just memorized, spit it out for a test, and then forgot it. I was used to making the best grade in every class I had taken up to that point, but I started to slip a little. I still made good enough grades to get by, but I wasn’t the best in any of my classes by the end of that second semester.

  I took the MCAT in April, which was the norm for everyone who intended to go to med school, and actually did really well. I should have also been volunteering at a hospital or something at some point in my junior year, but I just couldn’t bring myself to give a shit. I applied to all the med schools in Texas through the AMCAS and even though I didn’t have the extracurricular shit on my resume, my MCAT score was high enough to get into UT at Houston, which kind of surprised me. I knew I did well on the verbal reasoning and the essay and the biological science, but in the physical science specifically there were some inorganic chemistry questions that I really thought I fucked up. But I ended up pulling out a thirty-nine on the multiple choice parts—fourteen on verbal reasoning, twelve in physical science, and thirteen in organic science. And I got an R on the essay. So I didn’t really have to worry that much about med school as long as I didn’t flunk out my senior year. It seemed like that part of my life was all taken care of, which left me with a lot more time to hang out with Brett.

  Brett was probably the worst friend I could have had around that time. He was there for me and everything and always hung out with me whenever I asked him to, so he was a great friend in that respect. But it was like I was a guy who said to his best friend, “Hey, my life really sucks, all I want to do is smoke crack,” and the best friend was the biggest crack dealer on the face of the planet, with every kind of crack you can imagine and some kinds you can’t, and that best friend said, “Lucky for you, I’ll give you anything you want for free.”

  In the months after the breakup there were maybe three or four nights I didn’t spend at Brett’s house fucking some stupid girl who thought that by fucking me she could fuck Brett. The story of my fake diamond ring proposal had spread around campus, and almost every girl, at least every girl who was in a sorority, knew exactly who I was and what I had done. I almost became something of a strange pseudo-celebrity on campus. The more I hung out with Brett and adopted his lifestyle, the more this became the case, and the more I embraced it. I still wasn’t matching Brett’s numbers, but I do remember a girl who I had just fucked in Brett’s downstairs kitchen saying, “I can’t believe I just like had sex with you.”

  I said, “Why?”

  She said, “You’re like the guy who proposed with a fake ring. You’re kind of like the ultimate bad boy or something, you know?”

  I always thought that was funny. The worst thing these girls could think of a guy doing wasn’t dealing drugs or raping somebody or even killing somebody—it was proposing to a girl with a fucking cubic zirconia.

  I know it didn’t really address all of the shit I was dealing with, but having sex with those girls just made it easy to coast and not feel and not think and that’s really all I wanted to do. I purposely stayed away from any places where I knew I would have a higher probability of accidentally seeing Heather, and I got drunk with Brett a lot, and I had sex with the nameless girls he would set up for me. That’s really all I did until the end of that semester. And I know it probably sounds like it was really fun, but it wasn’t. And I know that by admitting that, I’m a fucking pussy.

  I remember there was one moment toward the end of that semester when I almost pulled myself out of it all—just another one of those moments in this whole shitty story where everything could have turned around and the end could have been avoided, but that’s not how it worked out. It was late, I was drunk, I had just had anal sex with some girl in Brett’s hot tub because he said to her, “If you don’t let my friend put his dick in your ass you have to hit the fucking road and I’m not paying for a cab.” This poor girl clearly didn’t want to do it. Don’t get the wrong idea, it wasn’t rape or anything—she just obviously didn’t want to have anal sex. But she let me do it because of Brett and I did it because I just fucking hated everything and thought I could be Brett, at least in terms of how I looked at girls and relationships and everything, if I did the shit he did.

  So anyway I had just had anal sex with that girl, and then she and probably three or four other girls stayed downstairs with Brett, and I think that night he made them eat slices of Velveeta out of each other’s vaginas or something. That might not have been it, but it was something really disgusting like that. I went upstairs because I had gotten drunk enough to pass out and I just wanted to sleep. I did a lot of that, too—drinking myself to sleep, I mean.

  I was in bed, the room was spinning, and I took out my cell phone and started looking through the contacts, not because I was thinking of calling anyone, but because for some reason staring at ordered text helps calm down the spins when I’m that drunk. So I was scrolling up and down through the contacts and I came to Erin. As soon as I saw her name I just hit the call button. It must have been three in the morning.

  I had no idea what I was going to say, and even if I would have had an idea I was way too drunk for it to have mattered. Her phone went straight to voice mail, which meant she was probably asleep and had it turned off, but in my drunken state all I could think was that she was probably fucking some gu
y, which kind of made me mad, but then I rethought it. Erin wasn’t the type of girl to just fuck random guys. I remember thinking she was probably asleep in bed with a guy she really loved, a guy who could have been me if I hadn’t fucked everything up. It wasn’t like I still loved her or anything; I didn’t and I recognized that. But I felt like I could have if I’d given it a chance, or if I’d known what the outcome with Heather would have been. I felt like she was the girl I was supposed to end up with, but it was too far beyond repair to even entertain talking to her about it.

  Again, I was drunk, so keep that in mind when I say that, as the beep went off and her voice mail started recording my message, all I could do was cry again. I know, I know. Even recounting that night now makes me feel like a pussy and I guess I was. Everything just seemed so hopeless and I guess Erin kind of represented the last bit of that hope fading away into nothing for me.

  The next morning I woke up with a massive hangover, and as Brett and I were eating breakfast in his backyard Erin sent me a text message saying, “Got your message last night. Were you drunk?” I never responded and she never contacted me again. Again, I was a massive pussy.

  I finished out that semester with okay grades in all my classes, and the overall number of girls I had had sex with was probably multiplied by twenty-five. I had achieved a level of numbness and apathy about virtually everything in my life that made it much easier to forget about how happy I was with Heather and how I would probably never be that happy again.

  chapter twenty

  I know it was like seriously one of the most stupid things I could have done, but I was like seriously desperate once it got to the point of there being like only a month or so left in the semester. I mean, I had tried to hook up with like every single guy at every party I went to, but it was like they had all heard about the fake ring and they all like thought I was just looking for a guy to propose to me with a real diamond. So like pretty much every guy I hooked up with that semester just hooked up with me once and then never called me again. It was fucking miserable and it made me hate Kyle even more for forcing me to be in that situation.