The Lie

by Chad Kultgen

  She was like, “He was always kind of a cool guy from what I remember. But he’s still not in a frat or anything, right?”

  I was like, “No. He’s just studying hard and everything. He’s going to be a doctor so he probably wouldn’t have time to do the whole Greek thing anyway.”

  She was like, “Cool, cool.”

  I was like, “Do you come get stuff from this guy by yourself like a lot?”

  She was like, “Not a lot, but since Cam’s brother got arrested it’s been like pretty tough to get anything good and this guy definitely has good stuff. So, you know?”

  I was like, “Yeah.”

  Then the guy pulled up and I was like, “Well, I should probably get back to Cam’s car and everything, so it was like really good seeing you, we should hang out some time. I feel like we never really do anymore.”

  She was like, “Yeah, give me a call.”

  I was like, “I will,” then I got out of her car and I seriously knew that I was like never going to call her. I remember thinking how it’s weird that you can like totally be really good friends with someone and then your lives take like different paths and not even like totally different paths, just like slightly different paths, and your friendship with them is just like not even the same anymore. I mean we were both in sororities. We were even at a lot of the same parties. But we just didn’t hang out anymore.

  So I got back in Cam’s car and Cam was like, “Okay, you guys just want like a gram and how many tabs of E?”

  Gina was like, “Ten or so. Whatever we can get for this,” and Gina handed him the money we had collected from everyone back at the house.

  Then Cam was like, “Okay, you guys stay here and I’ll be right back.” Then he got out of his car and went into the other guy’s car.

  Gina was like, “This is kind of sketchy, right?”

  I was like, “Yeah, totally. I wish Cam would have just like bought a bunch and we could have bought it off him.”

  Gina was like, “I know, right?”

  Then Cam came back and he had like everything we asked for and he drove us home and nothing happened. It was like my first real drug deal and it all went really smooth. In a weird way I was kind of proud.

  chapter twelve

  There were only two days left in the first semester of our junior year and a significant amount of time had passed since Kyle’s request to borrow ten thousand dollars. He had made no further mention of it or of his desire to propose to Heather in the subsequent times we had been in each other’s company. I was certain he hadn’t given up his dream of self-destruction, but I assumed he had put it on hold when he found that he was unable to procure the necessary funds. Like so many times in those four years, I was wrong.

  Kyle and I had just completed the drum and lead guitar sections of Radiohead’s “Creep” on Expert when he put his guitar down and told me that he wanted to show me something. He then proceeded to take a ring box out of his pocket and toss it to me. I didn’t need to open the box to know what was inside, or hear him tell me that he planned to propose to Heather on the day our second semester began, but I was curious to see how much money he wasted on her, so I looked. The ring was clearly out of any price range that Kyle was capable of entertaining. I, of course, asked him where he got the money to pay for the ring, and he explained that the ring was fake. A cubic zirconia facsimile of the actual diamond ring Heather wanted.

  At the outset it would seem that I would approve of something like this—tricking a cunt into thinking the worthless piece of shit on her finger was exactly what she wanted. And, at the outset, this was true, I did approve. But after a few seconds of scrutiny of the specifics of this scenario it became quite clear to me that this was a terrible idea.

  Kyle insisted that Heather would never know, and eventually, when he had enough money to do it right, he would either replace the ring or give her an entirely new one that was even better. I attempted to bring him to his senses by explaining that Heather, by virtue of being a woman and therefore a horrible cunt concerned only with material gain, would be able to tell the ring was fake. I further explained that once Heather gained this awareness there were really only two possible outcomes. The first, and best in my opinion, would be that she would end the relationship. Kyle, of course, discounted this immediately, citing the fact that she loved him and the ring wouldn’t really matter to her. Why, then, I asked, would she have so many demands about the type of ring she wanted? My logic was lost on him.

  The second outcome, and the one I sadly thought was more likely, was that Heather would discover the true nature of the ring’s make and hold this against Kyle for the rest of their relationship, which could be until he died. I reasoned that she would forever force him to buy her gifts and that he would have to display limitless tolerance for her every whim, all in order to apologize for the ring.

  He discounted this immediately as well. When I asked him why he was showing me the ring, why he was involving me in any of this, he told me that when he and Heather actually got married he wanted me to be his best man. I had been in countless wedding parties for cousins throughout the years, so I was no stranger to the role, but this was different. I had never cared about anyone whose wedding I had been a part of in the past. If they wanted to ruin their lives, so be it. In this case, however, I was faced with a certain dilemma. Kyle was my best friend and as such I felt obligated to honor his request, and yet as his best friend I also felt a certain stronger obligation to stop him from making the mistake of marriage in the first place.

  I, of course, told him I would be happy to be in his wedding party while I secretly hoped that the wedding would never happen. It was strange to me how badly Kyle desired a life that was repellent to me. Stranger still was the fact that the exact life Kyle desired—with a wife and children and a stable, uninteresting job—was readily available to me at any time I chose to accept it. And yet it was something Kyle had to work for, had to suffer to achieve. As I looked at his fake ring I thought about how strange life is and how easily things come to people who don’t want them and how the opposite is also true.

  chapter thirteen

  That winter break, Heather ended up spending almost the entire three weeks in Florida with her mom, sister, and grandparents. I got to see her for only a week or so before she left, which actually worked out pretty well because it gave me a chance to figure out how I was going to pop the question. One of the things that pisses me off about how everything turned out is that she’ll never fucking appreciate how much time and effort I put into trying to come up with the perfect way to propose to her. I don’t know if any girl will every really understand that of any guy who asks her to marry him.

  I thought about doing it at a really nice restaurant or something, but we didn’t really have a place we considered “our” restaurant, and I wanted it to at least relate to our relationship in some way. I thought about doing it on the steps of her sorority, but that seemed cheesy as shit and, to be honest, I didn’t really want to involve anyone from her sorority in a moment I felt should be about us and us only. I thought about a bunch of different places around campus where some of the more important moments in our relationship took place, but those all seemed stupid to me. I thought about just finding a nice place she would think was pretty, like the giant garden in Brett’s backyard, but I knew he wouldn’t let me do that. Then one night after I talked to Heather for almost an hour on the phone it came to me.

  She was still going to be in Florida for another week when I decided what I was going to do, and I always thought it was a good sign that I had a little time to sit with it and I never second-guessed myself. She got back from Florida really late on January 4, and classes started up again on the fifth if I remember right.

  That afternoon I called her up and told her I wanted to take her out to a nice dinner because we hadn’t seen each other for a while. Then I told her I had a surprise for her.

  She said something like, “Kyle, I’m so tired from the flight
last night. Can we just do it tomorrow night?”

  I said, “No, I think we should do it tonight.”

  She said, “I love you, babe, but like seriously, I’m so tired.”

  I said, “Well, I promise the surprise after dinner will make you a lot less tired.”

  She said, “Really? What is it?”

  I said, “You’ll see.”

  I could tell she was getting excited. She was just like a little fucking kid with surprises and presents and shit like that.

  So I took her out to eat at Fogo de Chão, which was one of her favorite places to go, and all through dinner she kept asking me what the surprise was. To any person who wasn’t half as retarded as I was with her, it would have become unbearably annoying. At the time, I actually thought her constant begging and inability to just enjoy a fucking surprise was cute. Every time I replay that dinner in my head, though, I want to eat a fucking bullet when I think about what an idiot I was.

  Anyway, we ate and then got in my car and I made her put on a blindfold. I said, “Okay, now for the surprise. I’m going to take you somewhere and you can’t see where it is until we get there.”

  She was so overly excited at the prospect of a surprise, I thought she might piss her pants. There was something in how childlike her reaction was that now disgusts me, but at the time I thought it was sweet and lovable and all the shit douchebags like me think about the horrible bitches they’ve been tricked into believing they’re in love with.

  So I drove from Fogo de Chão to the swing set behind her mom’s house. The sun was going down, so it was getting a little colder. I got a blanket from my trunk and led her by the hand to the swing set. I cannot believe how fucking gay I was. At no point during this entire event did it ever dawn on me that I was being a complete fag.

  I laid the blanket out and sat her down and then took off the blindfold. She looked around and it was clear that she was underwhelmed with the locale I chose to deliver her surprise in.

  She said, “Oh, why are we here?”

  I sat down next to her and prepared to puke out the little speech I had practiced thirty or forty times that morning. I said, “Last summer we spent a lot of time here, and that summer was probably the best one in my life. It just felt so easy and so natural to sit out here and talk with you about nothing all night long. This place is a place that I’ll always remember as one where I felt like our love kind of started again. And I’m hoping it’ll also be a place that I’ll always remember as one where our love became something that would last forever.”

  I remember Heather looking at me like she didn’t know what was going on, even though I thought it was pretty clear at that point. Nonetheless, I finished the rest of my little prepared act, got down on one knee, took the ring out, and said, “Heather, will you marry me?”

  She was crying as soon as I got down on one knee, but she was bawling when the ring came out, and she was sobbing to the point of incoherence when she hugged me and said, “Yes. Yes. Yes. Oh my God. I’m engaged. I’m a junior and I’m engaged.”

  It took me a solid ten minutes of calming her down before she made any sense. The first thing she said that I could understand was, “Oh my God, Kyle, this ring is beautiful.”

  I noticed at that point that she hadn’t looked at me since I put the ring on her finger. She was fucking transfixed by it. She said, “I just, I just like can’t believe how amazing it is. How did you find it?”

  What she actually meant to ask me was how could I afford it and how much did it cost, but she obviously couldn’t cheapen the moment by asking something like that. So she kept the question veiled. So I did the same thing with the answer. I said, “I didn’t want to get you anything other than exactly what you wanted, so I looked every day until I found it.”

  She held it out in front of her and tilted her hand back and forth in the light from a streetlamp that had just turned on. As it sparkled she said, “It’s just incredible, Kyle. Really.”

  I said, “I’m glad you like it,” then I kissed her on the cheek but she never stopped looking at that fucking ring. I honestly probably sat there looking at Heather for ten minutes while she stared at that fucking ring in a semi-catatonic state. She finally said, “Oh my God, I have to like tell all the Kappas. They’re going to be like so jealous, seriously. Oh my God.”

  I said, “Can you wait until tomorrow to tell them? I think we should go back to my place and celebrate on our own.”

  She said, “Oh, for sure. I just kind of wanted to tell everyone, you know?”

  I said, “Yeah, I know, but won’t it be better if you wait until tomorrow morning when everyone’s home? Right now they’re all probably out at parties. You should wait until pretty much everyone’s in the house, don’t you think?”

  She said, “Yeah. I guess you’re right.”

  I knew she wanted to show that ring off to her bitchy sorority sisters worse than anything, and I kind of wanted that, too. It was like I said earlier—there was something about Heather showing the bitchy girls in her house that ring that made me feel good, validated in some way, which is so fucking stupid. I can’t deny it. Despite all of that, what I wanted more than validation from her sorority sisters was to take Heather back to my apartment and fuck her brains out. I said, “It’ll be our first night together as an engaged couple.”

  She smiled, then gave me a big hug and a kiss and said something that I didn’t expect. She said, “I know we started out kind of like rocky and everything our freshman year and part of it was my fault and I’m sorry for everything I did that was mean to you back then.” Then she looked me in the eye for the first time since I proposed to her and said, “Kyle, I really do love you more than anything and tonight has made me realize that more than like I ever did. You know?”

  I said, “I love you, too.”

  We kissed each other, got back in my car, and I drove her back to my apartment where I did indeed fuck her brains out. It was incredible. It was like somehow that ring gave her super fucking powers—and I don’t mean “fucking” in the adjective form, I mean it in the verb form. She was super at fucking that night. We must have fucked for three or four hours straight and everything she did came with a level of genuine, or least what I perceived to be genuine, enthusiasm. She came three or four times. I did, too. It was probably the best single night of sex I had ever experienced in my life.

  When we were too tired to fuck anymore, she curled up next to me and laid her head on my chest. She said, “Where will we live once we’re married?”

  I said, “Wherever you want,” and she went to sleep. I stayed awake for a few more minutes thinking about the whole night, letting it sink in that I was engaged to a girl and every ounce of me was completely in love with her. I haven’t felt that content and whole at any other moment in my life. I know it’s fucking gay to say, but I went to sleep that night really knowing what it meant to be happy for the first time. As it turned out it was also the last time.

  chapter fourteen

  I like don’t even know how to describe what it felt like that next morning after Kyle gave me the ring. I guess I remember waking up and he was already gone because he had an early class or something and there was like this little note on the pillow next to me that said like, To my future wife—I get out of class at 5:30 tonight. Can’t wait to hear all about how the other Kappas reacted. I love you. Love, Kyle.

  Seriously it was pretty sweet that he cared about what my sisters thought about me getting engaged and everything. I just like lay in his bed for half an hour or so looking at the ring. It was really pretty. It had like almost every little thing that I had showed him I wanted in a ring. I was completely impressed that he was able to get such a nice ring.

  I took a shower and then headed over to the Kappa house hoping that pretty much everyone would be there, because it was early enough in the morning that I didn’t think anyone would be at class or anything. When I walked in the living room Gina and Mandy were drinking coffee and checking their e-ma
il, so I put my hand in my pocket so they couldn’t see the ring and I was like, “You guys, I have a seriously big announcement to make to like everyone in the house. Go see who you can get to come down.”

  They went upstairs and I could hear them waking people up and I was getting really excited. I mean the first time you get to tell all of your friends that you’re engaged is like a seriously big deal. So I just kind of waited down at the bottom of the stairs in the main part of the living room and then Gina and Mandy brought down pretty much the entire house, with a few exceptions.

  When I saw Andrea walking down the stairs I felt a little bad because I was like basically going to be rubbing it in her face that she had no hope of getting engaged, but it was my day and I knew she’d be happy for me even if she was like a little sad for herself. I waited until everyone was sitting down on the couches and everything and then I tried to get really serious and I was like, “Everyone, something happened to me last night that was like a life-changing event and I wanted to tell you guys first.”

  I could see a few girls were starting to look like worried. Like I bet they thought it was going to be something seriously bad like an OD or something. Then I pulled out my ring hand and held it up so they could all see and I was like, “I’m engaged!” Everybody seriously went fucking crazy. I was like easily the youngest girl in the house to be engaged and I could tell some of the girls were jealous but most of them were just happy for me. Andrea even came over and gave me a big hug and was like, “I’m so happy for you,” and she was crying and everything. I think she was crying a little bit for herself, though. Whatever. It was still a nice gesture I guess.

  Everyone wanted to know like how he did it and everything and I told them about how he blindfolded me and took me to the swing set behind my house and how sweet he was about it and everything. And then of course everyone was dying to see the ring. They were all really impressed. It wasn’t like huge or anything but it wasn’t small either and it was just so pretty.