The Lie

by Chad Kultgen

  I had no idea what I was going to do about finding a guy before the end of that year so I called up Brian and was like, “Hey, we haven’t talked in a long time and I thought you might want to go get some lunch or something.”

  He was like, “For real?”

  And I was like, “Yeah, for real.”

  I never really ate at Mac’s Place, but I was still like seriously fucking furious at Kyle for giving me a fake ring, so I thought it would be a nice fuck-you to him if I showed up with Brian while he was working so he could see us together. But when we got there Kyle wasn’t even working. Whatever.

  So we sat down and Brian was like, “So what’s up? How have you been and everything?”

  I was like, “Fine. How about you?”

  He was like, “Pretty good. You know, just getting geared up for finals.”

  I was like, “Yeah, me too,” even though two out of my five classes didn’t even have finals and one of the other three that did was my second field experience class, and the final was just getting the teacher whose class we sat in on for the whole semester to write an evaluation of how well we observed their class.

  He was like, “Look, you know I’m really sorry for everything that went down between us, right?”

  I was like, “I don’t even care. It was no big deal.”

  He was like, “Oh, cool. For real, that’s how I felt about it, but it seemed like you were kind of agro or something.”

  I was like, “Oh, weird. I wasn’t.”

  He was like, “Then why did you never call me back?”

  I was like, “I was just busy and everything and I thought it was better if we just kind of like cooled off for a little while and everything. I guess I just like didn’t really want to be dating anybody at that point, you know?”

  He was like, “But you got back together with your old ex-boyfriend.”

  I was like, “Yeah, it just happened that way I guess.”

  He was like, “Okay, but didn’t he propose to you with a fake ring or something not that long ago?”

  I was like, “It was like two and a half months ago. How did you hear about that?”

  He was like, “Everybody heard about. It was like legendary. For real.”

  Then we just sat there for a few minutes like not even saying anything and finally he was like, “So, why’d you ask me out to lunch?”

  I was like, “You know, I just haven’t like seen you in a long time and I was just wondering how things were going. Really, I just like kind of wanted to catch up.”

  He was like, “For real? There’s no other reason?”

  I was like, “Well, are you like seeing anybody or anything?”

  He was like, “Why are you asking me that?”

  I was like, “I don’t know. I just remember we had some pretty good times and everything and I was thinking maybe we could like give it another shot or something, you know?”

  He was like, “You want to just jump back into it and be a couple and everything again, for real?”

  It had been a while since the whole thing with him and Josh happened, and if I thought about it too much it seriously made me ill, but the way I saw it I really had no other choice. If I didn’t have a boyfriend, like a serious boyfriend, by the time senior year started, I’d end up like Andrea and be completely fucked by the time I graduated. Brian wasn’t that bad of a guy except for that one night. I figured I could just get over it. But when he was like, “You want to just jump back into it and be a couple and everything again, for real?” I guess it was the first time I really thought about what that meant, you know, that I was basically putting all my eggs in that basket and hoping he would ask me to marry him at some point in our senior year.

  I knew he’d wind up with a good job and he’d probably be a good husband and everything, but then I was like what if he still hangs out with Josh and one night they’re drunk and they try to do that again and it was just beyond gross. Still, there were no other guys that would even entertain the idea of doing anything with me at that point except hooking up once and then never talking to me again, so he was a step up from that. And I figured worst-case scenario if something happened with Josh again or if Brian was just being a serious dick or whatever I could dump him and be no worse off than I already was.

  So I was like, “Yeah, like we just pick up where we left off.”

  He was like, “Heather, I have a girlfriend.”

  I was like, “Who?”

  He was like, “Annie.”

  I was like, “I just saw her not that long ago. She said you guys just dated for a little while and that was it.”

  He was like, “Yeah, but then a few months ago we started getting pretty serious.”

  I was like, “Like seriously?”

  He was like, “For real.”

  I could not fucking believe it—even fucking Annie had someone. I’m not saying Annie was like a bad person or anything, but of all the girls who I thought might be okay with not having a guy going into their senior year I thought Annie would be that girl. She was always like so independent and never really cared too much about marriage, or at least never talked about it that much our freshman year, but I guess I didn’t either. Whatever. As I sat there across from Brian in fucking Mac’s Place, where Kyle wasn’t even working, I started to think there was like no way I was going to find a guy who would propose to me, like with a real ring, by graduation the next year. It totally fucking sucked.

  And then to make shit even like worse than I could have imagined, with about a month and a half left in the semester Andrea’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend died in this really shitty car crash with three Chi-Os. She was driving and was supposedly drunk and everything and it sucked but I didn’t really know them that well so what sucked more for me was that Ron like immediately called up Andrea crying and everything and she helped him through it and within like two weeks he supposedly like realized how much he loved her and how important she was to him and everything and he fucking proposed to her on graduation day.

  So I went from being the only junior in the house with an engagement ring to being like the only girl on campus who no guy would even consider marrying and Andrea went from having no chance at finding a guy to getting proposed to. It just didn’t seem all that fair, you know? Needless to say I wasn’t named the Kappa president.

  chapter twenty-one

  The months that followed the demise of Kyle and Heather’s relationship were strange for me. Kyle had been my friend for most of my life, and for the portion of that life in which we had taken an interest in cunts he had always been the one of the two of us to insist that there was meaning to be found in a relationship with a cunt beyond sexual gratification. He was always the one of the two of us to believe in the lie of love. Although I enjoyed the version of Kyle who was more in keeping with my own outlook on whores and their purpose in this world, it was slightly unsettling to witness the core identity of my best friend become so drastically altered.

  I embraced it, though, and made it my goal to give to Kyle everything he had not allowed me to in the previous years of our friendship. Any and every kind of cunt he could imagine was his for the taking in the last half of that semester. The strange thing is that he didn’t seem to enjoy it. Don’t mistake that: He clearly enjoyed all of these cunts enough to maintain an erection and use it to its intended purpose on each of the cunts that I delivered to him. When I say that he didn’t enjoy it, I mean that there was something missing from his interactions with these whores that I was used to in myself I suppose. Where I found amusement in these activities he seemed to find none.

  His drinking escalated as well in those months. I had no real problem with this other than the previously stated drastic and slightly unsettling change that I was witnessing in my best friend. I did my fair share of drinking, but again where I found amusement he seemed to find none, which led me to question why he was doing any of these things at all. But I never questioned Kyle’s new approach to life very thoroughly or
for any extended period of time. I was, instead, thankful that he had finally come to accept the truest notion of what women were—meaningless whores, each one no different than any other, best used as tools for amusement and nothing more.

  Other than my escapades with Kyle, the only other thing that happened to me of note during that semester, aside from the incident with Greg, of course, was my election into the seat of Alpha Tau Omega president. It was never really questioned by anyone in the fraternity that I would ultimately be named its president in my senior year, including myself I suppose. It was strange to me that the year before I had come to the decision to detach myself from the life my father had set out for me, to tell him how I felt about it and try to create something for myself in this life that was my own—and yet there I stood in the living room of the Alpha Tau Omega house being named the organization’s new president just as my father had and just as his father had.

  As Greg passed the torch begrudgingly on to me it seemed less difficult than it should have been for me to accept it all. Again, I felt comfortable in the fact that I had made the decision to end my participation in it all at some point—so comfortable that I was able to remain a willing participant. In retrospect, I don’t know that I’ll ever understand that reasoning again. It seems so foreign to me now.

  As I was named the president, I made one final vow to myself—that by next year’s end, sometime before I graduated, I would tell my father I could not work for his company.

  summer

  I didn’t have the money to stay in my apartment over the summer, so I cut a deal with my landlord to sublet it until the next semester started up and then I’d come back. I got the same job at the same movie theater and I went out with Brett every night. My parents seemed to be worried about me. I guess they hadn’t really seen me on a day-to-day basis since Heather dumped me and I probably didn’t seem like myself to them. They cut me some slack, though, because of my MCAT score and my acceptance into UT Houston’s med school. I ended up having sex that summer in one of the projection rooms with a girl who worked at the movie theater who was only seventeen. I didn’t know it at the time, but when I found out I didn’t really care. It was a fucking crime, a literal fucking crime, and I didn’t care. That should have tipped me off to the fact that I was fucking losing it, but like I said, I just didn’t care about that or about anything. I had one more year left. I thought if I could just get through that, graduate, and then start med school in Houston, I’d snap out of it and everything would be fine. That’s what I thought.

  My summer was seriously like the worst one I ever had in my entire life. I had like no one to do anything with. I hung out with my mom like almost every day and she was always like, “It’s not the end of the world if you don’t have a boyfriend.” And I was always like, “If I graduate without one, how am I ever going to find a guy to marry?” And she was always like, “I think you’ll be okay.” She just like didn’t get it at all. Andrea had like this huge engagement party that I went to and it was seriously hard to sit through. I was pretty much like the only girl there who wasn’t engaged or already married and since most of the guests were Kappas or girls from other sororities they like all knew my story and everything. A couple of them who were like graduates from a few years before even knew about it. It was seriously horrible. I had like no idea what I was going to do going into senior year.

  That summer for me included a discovery that would change my life forever. One night, while Kyle and I were relaxing at my house with some sluts from Brookhaven Community College, I happened across a website called cat69.com. It was run by a company called Viking’s Resort, which sold packaged vacations to a private island in the Caribbean. This vacation, however, was unlike any other I was aware of. Their island was populated only by “escorts,” or so the website touted. The island had a golf course and a five-star hotel and only a handful of men were ever allowed on the island at any given time. Different packages included the ability to be entertained by various numbers of “escorts” through your stay. That night I booked the first available opening for myself. I assumed Kyle would want to go, given his new outlook on whores, but when I extended the offer to him he refused, citing that he didn’t know if he could bring himself to fuck an actual whore. This was proof to me that somewhere within him was a kernel of his old self.

  part four

  senior year

  chapter one

  I’d made it through so much shit with Heather and all I would have had to do was make it through one more fucking year and I would have been in the clear. I never would have had to see her or talk to her or think about her. I would have gone to med school, become a doctor, found a wife somewhere, had some kids, and lived the life I always wanted. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that on my first day back at SMU.

  I moved all of my shit back into my old apartment. The people my landlord sublet the place to over the summer must have had a dog, because there was dog hair everywhere and a spot in the kitchen by the microwave that smelled like dog piss for the rest of the year no matter what I did to get rid of it.

  Classes hadn’t started and I was restless. Brett was out of town on a vacation to some place he called Whore Island. He tried to get me to go, but even after I had pretty much become an emotional robot when it came to dealing with girls I still wasn’t prepared to cross the line and have sex with an actual prostitute. I knew I’d probably had sex with a dozen girls over that previous semester who had banged more guys than any prostitute on Whore Island, but there was still something really dirty to me about having sex with a real prostitute.

  Anyway, Brett was out of town for another few days and, like I said, I was restless. I drank about half a bottle of vodka and started thinking about Heather and thought about calling her, but I didn’t. Instead I called Erin. The last time I called her I was also drunk, but this time I knew I wasn’t going to cry.

  She actually answered. She said, “Kyle?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  She said, “Hi.”

  I said, “Hi.”

  She said, “Did you call me back before the summer drunk or something and leave a really weird message?”

  I said, “I don’t think so.”

  She said, “Oh, so what’s up? Why are you calling me?”

  I didn’t even know why I was calling her. I was bored. I was drunk. I was lonely. I had no one else to call or talk to. I guess I could have told her all of that. Instead I said, “I miss you.”

  She said, “You miss me?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  She said, “Kyle, what are you doing?”

  I said, “Calling you because I miss you, I guess.”

  She said, “Are you fucking with me or something? I felt like after we had that conversation last year I didn’t really mean all that much to you.”

  I was too drunk to even know what conversation she was talking about. I was such a fucking asshole, and I got even worse. I said, “You did, I just didn’t know how to tell you that because…”

  She said, “Because you were in a relationship with Heather?”

  I said, “Exactly.”

  She said, “Why are you waiting to tell me this now? I thought you guys broke up right after winter break last year.”

  I said, “We did. I guess I just needed to work through some stuff. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  I had no idea what I was doing in that conversation. I just wanted to keep talking to her because I knew that at one point she loved me. I thought she still might, and it wasn’t that it felt particularly good to talk to her or anything, but it felt like something, and from the time Heather dumped me until that phone call I had done a very good job of feeling nothing.

  It was probably around nine-thirty at night. She said, “Well, do you want to come over and talk about this face-to-face? I have a new apartment now, a little bigger.”

  I said, “Sure.”

  After she gave me the directions to her new place I realized she lived about
two blocks from me and I stumbled to Erin’s apartment.

  When I showed up, she could tell I was drunk but I don’t think she cared. She looked genuinely happy to see me. She gave me a big hug and then sat down next to me on her couch. Her new apartment was much nicer than her old one.

  She said, “So you miss me.”

  I didn’t really but it felt good to make her happy again so I said, “Yeah.”

  She leaned in and kissed me and it was a kiss that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was Erin, so specifically it was a kiss I hadn’t felt in a long time, but I mean that all the girls I had sex with after Heather never kissed like that. It wasn’t that they were cold or unfeeling or anything, but there was something in the way they kissed that was only carnal, there was no thought behind it, no real emotion, no real connection. With Erin there was. I wondered if she could tell that I wasn’t returning the same thing in my kiss.

  She said, “You want to see the rest of the place?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  Even though it was nicer than her last place, it was still just a one-bedroom apartment that a college student could afford. The grand tour ended at the bedroom, where she gave me another kiss and said, “I think you should stay over.”