The Lie (3 page)

I’ve known Kyle
since third grade. His father has worked for my father since that time as a regional manager at Keller Shipping. Although his family never had the money mine did, his father always made sure he went to the right private schools, associated with the right children of the men he worked for, fostered the right interest in personal and academic achievement, et cetera—all to give his son the best possible chance to ascend to the next rung on the economic ladder, the rung he himself would never see.

I think the reason we became friends so quickly has something to do with the fact that, although he was a member of the same social circles as me, he wasn’t born into them. Even at nine or ten my boredom with the overprivileged kids of my father’s friends had become palpable. Kyle was the only student at St. Mark’s who had humility, an attitude that was so foreign to the rest of my peers that they quickly became disgusting to me. My understanding of the resource my family possessed wasn’t immediate. It took the better part of my prepubescent years to realize I would essentially never have a real concern in my life. Any problematic situation I ever faced would be erased by the unwavering certainty that, whether the problem was solved or not, I could abandon it because my resource to create new situations was virtually unlimited. The rest of my social circle, Kyle excluded, didn’t understand this, or if they did it was long after I had come to realize it. As a result they led what I found to be boring lives consumed with material and superficial concerns about new cars, clothes, who was fucking whom, where they were vacationing, and various other issues of false importance. My disdain for my friends, I quickly came to understand, had to be suppressed in order to calm my father, to make him believe I was just the next generation of Keller man who would socialize with the next generations of the other families that mine had socialized with in years past. I was just the next generation of Keller man who would run the company in exactly the same fashion my father had before me and his father had before him. I would exhibit no deviation, take no step outside the path that would assure my son would mimic all the same actions and have his own son who would do the same, so on and so on until the sun devours our planet. That is why I liked Kyle. He understood. It seems a simple reason for a friendship, but also potentially the only reason to maintain one.

Kyle was, very simply put, my only real friend. All the others existed, it seemed, in order to placate me and thus ensure that their families would remain aligned with mine for one more generation. Had they done anything to lose their connection to my family, they would have been the disgrace of their own. Coming from outside that pitiful world made Kyle immediately interesting to me. His first year at St. Mark’s could have been very difficult were it not for me.

I was not unaware of the fact that, based on my family’s vastly superior wealth, I was the de facto alpha male among the others. Nor was I ignorant or unappreciative of the benefits this afforded me, one being immediate acceptance into the group of whomever I deemed worthy, despite whatever other troubles such a person might have when attempting to enter the group as an outsider on his own. Kyle and I had been friends since early childhood, so his acceptance was never outright questioned, but there were always conversations held in his absence in which his place among us was challenged by the others. Another reason I came to despise my friends.

In the end, however, Kyle never knew that the others questioned him—nor do I think he would have cared had he known. But their outward acceptance, he knew, made his years at St. Mark’s much easier than they otherwise would have been. For that he was grateful to me, I think. At least that’s how our friendship started. As the years passed, I found him to be more intelligent and generally more interesting than almost anyone else. As we ventured into adolescence we shared many similar interests. We found that we both despised athletics, finding them an immense waste of time. While most of the other self-absorbed shits were at football practice, we would generally spend our time playing video games at my house after school. Despite my status I always felt my unwillingness to participate in sports was frowned upon by the others—which made no difference to me, but was worth noting. The hours we spent away from our classmates forged a friendship that I assume will last in some form until we are old men, despite the strain placed upon it by the current situation.

As we progressed in years our interests broadened to include girls. This was an area Kyle very quickly understood would be much easier for him to deal with as a result of being my friend. He would have been correct had he not squandered the resource he had in our friendship.

In high school he had two girlfriends whom I remember. The first was inconsequential other than the fact that she was the first girl he ever kissed. The second was inconsequential other than the fact that she was the first girl he ever fucked, and to my knowledge the only one before college. Neither were what I would consider attractive, but they were passable girls from Hockaday. The second one he actually met through me at a party where I fucked her older sister in their parents’ bedroom, then pulled out and ejaculated on one of her parents’ pillows, which amused me at the time. That is, of course, beside the point, which is that Kyle could have had virtually any girl he wanted because he was my friend. I say virtually because if I had wanted the same girl she would have been mine, but if I had been willing to pass, I would have only had to tell her that I thought they made a cute couple and the girl would have dated him if for no other reason than she was still trying to please me.

But Kyle’s taste in women was simple and he was, for lack of a better term, romantic. I had come to a very early conclusion that being who I was gave me ample opportunity to fuck virtually any girl I chose in our small circle. So I did. College, of course, broadened that circle. I came to a similarly early conclusion that all women are vile whores and my hatred for them as a gender would most likely never be extinguished. My father’s three wives, my biological mother included as the first of those three, sparked this hatred, but my own experiences kept the furnace burning. I also concluded that, although I would marry at some point to appease my family and to produce my successor, I would never love a woman and I would continue to fuck any girl I chose to. Furthermore, my wife, if she discovered my transgressions, would allow them rather than risk being disconnected from my family’s money and local notoriety in Dallas.

All of this leads me to the point that when Kyle told me about Heather I wasn’t that shocked. He had met her I think a week or two into our freshman year and over a lunch at RFoC he divulged to me that there was something about her, some illusory quality he couldn’t stop thinking about. I tried to explain to him that we had just begun our freshman year and he shouldn’t cut his dick off immediately—at least fuck a few girls before locking in on the one he was going to end his life with. He wouldn’t hear it. He kept droning on about some look she gave him the morning she woke up in his bed that he was sure held some deeper meaning—some connection between them that was cemented in that look. The only look a girl has ever given me that has had even the most remote emotional impact is when her asshole is staring back at me just before I ram my dick into it, and this emotion is, of course, complacent satisfaction in knowing that very soon I will remove my dick from her throbbing asshole and put it in her mouth.

I even tried to persuade him by telling him that the night prior I had coaxed two sophomore girls back to my dorm room, where my father insisted I stay for the full freshman year just as he had, for a particularly athletic three-way ending with me forcing both girls to lick my semen out of each other’s cunts. I further explained to Kyle that I didn’t even know these girls’ names, nor did I want to. Women are all evil whores bent on marrying a man and sucking his life away with dwindling sexuality, aging beauty, children, et cetera. This outcome is virtually unavoidable, but in the meantime a man should make use of as many women as he possibly can. I amended by explaining that this behavior is not the woman’s fault. She has been lied to at every turn, told that marriage to a man of resource is valuable, that his resource, in fact, is more valuable than his substance. I don’t fault women for what their gender has come to represent, but neither do I indulge it. And if this promise of resource is what drives them to submit to a man’s will sexually, then I have all the empty promises they could ever want.

Kyle didn’t share my sentiment. He claimed that he wasn’t interested in having sex with as many women as he could. He had never had a one-night stand and he didn’t intend to ever have one. He claimed he wanted to find one girl who made him happy and be with her forever. He didn’t outright claim he thought Heather was this girl, he just said he thought she was intriguing. Intriguing is the actual word he used, which I had to laugh at. The only thing intriguing I had ever noticed in a girl was a slightly overpronounced right nipple on Jennifer Dalton in the tenth grade.

Knowing after many years of friendship with Kyle that I would never change his mind, but never grow tired of the attempt, I told him I would do some investigating into who this girl was. Heather on the second floor of McElvaney. I knew she hadn’t gone to Hockaday or Ursuline, based on her absence from any of the prominent social circles at either of those places and the parties associated with them in our high school years. It was possible she’d gone to some lesser school, or even to public school. In any case I told Kyle I would help him in any way I could. Secretly I also hoped that he would land this girl and one of two things would happen: (1) She would genuinely make him happy for the rest of his life, or (2) she would ruin him and force him to understand women as I do—force him to see that there is no love, there is only the lie we tell ourselves that things are more important than they actually are, that our lives will have meaning beyond all the other lives that have come before us and been forgotten, that there is hope in any of this.

The rest of our conversation that day was about fraternities. I had no real choice in the matter. Although I had little to no interest in Greek life, my father and grandfather were both ATOs and so would I be in the spring. I expected more of the same type of entitled pricks I had gone to high school with, but potentially from different states. I urged Kyle to rush as well so that I might have one person in the whole ordeal who didn’t make me want to swallow razor blades, but he had even less interest in all of it than I did.

I tried to convince him further by suggesting that Heather was most likely interested in joining a sorority, and if they were to be a couple he would surely have to change his mind or their relationship would be doomed from the start. He laughed it off. I couldn’t tell if it was because he found the notion of having a relationship with this girl he barely knew to be absurd, or if he thought the idea that she could care about such things to be absurd. When he told me she had mentioned she was going to rush in the coming semester, I assumed it was the former.

A few weeks had passed.
Class was actually starting to get interesting. In chemistry we were talking about mass relations in chemical reactions and reactions in aqueous solutions, which I wasn’t fascinated by, but college chemistry wasn’t as boring as I thought it would be. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be either. We had one mini-exam in thermochemistry and I got the highest grade in the class.

I started to make a few friends in some of my classes. A guy named Carl Gill was doing pretty much the same thing I was—majoring in biology and then going to med school somewhere. He was a pretty smart guy and we ended up becoming lab partners in a few classes. His older brother had just finished the exact same set of classes two years before and was in his second year of med school at UCLA. Carl said he still had all of his brother’s notes and everything, so that would be a pretty big help.

I also started my work-study job at Mac’s, which was complete shit. My scholarship covered a decent amount of my tuition, and my dad helped me out, too, but I had to do work-study to cover the rest. I worked at a pizza place in high school, so I wasn’t completely foreign to this type of work environment—I mean I was used to being the only person there who spoke English as a first language. I thought there might be one other student working with me who was also forced into work-study, but no, Mac’s Place cafeteria was staffed with nine people per shift. There was some overlap but not much, so with a total of probably about sixteen to twenty employees whose first language was Spanish, I was forced to brush up on mine in a hurry. The lunch shift manager, Raulio, was probably the worst English speaker in the whole bunch. His favorite phrase was, “Now find trays and make them new.” The “make them new” part didn’t really bother me, but I always thought “Now find trays” was funny because it implied that the trays were hidden instead of being on tables or in the tray return bins, both in plain sight.

My job, by the way, was basically to wash the dishes during the lunch and dinner rushes and go get the tray stacks and return them to the front of the line where people first come in. The work itself wasn’t bad, I guess, but being the douchebag in a hairnet that every hot chick in McElvaney would point and laugh at was about as bad an experience as I could have hoped for in a job. But I had no real choice. It was either that or not go to school, so I did it.

Anyway, even though I hadn’t run into her at all, Heather was pretty much all I thought about over those next few weeks. I would go from being pissed at myself for not trying anything when she was in my bed to the more gay emotion of being sad that I would probably never see her again. I think I thought about her so much because all the chicks in my classes were either fat ugly pigs or they were so nerdy that they couldn’t carry on a normal conversation. I remember telling Brett that and he said something like, “I’ve fucked a few nerds in my life and let me tell you this, they might seem unassuming, but in the sack they will peel your dick like a fucking carrot if you’re not careful.” I think I just laughed at him because I didn’t really even know what that meant—if it was a good thing or not, having your dick peeled like a carrot.

The rest of my female interaction was at work, where I got acquainted with the only two coworkers who weren’t men—Isabel and Monica—both of whom were around fifty and strangely missing teeth close enough to the front to notice every time they talked.

So, comparatively speaking, Heather was the single hottest chick I had interacted with the entire time I had been at school. Because of this, and because our next meeting happened by chance, I know I attached way too much meaning to it. Like most people, I think, I saw it as some kind of sign or predestined event—whatever you want to call it—even though I know all of that is a complete load of crap. I was in the laundry room at McElvaney getting my stuff out of the washing machine so I could put it in the dryer, but all the dryers were stopped, full of various assholes’ crap that no one would come down to get for hours, making it impossible for other people to dry their clothes. So I picked the dryer closest to my washing machine and started taking the clothes out of it, piling them up on top.

I assumed the clothes belonged to a chick, based on the amount of thong underwear I was pulling out of the thing. And, as luck would have it, I, of course, was holding just such a pair of thong underwear, and imagining the ass it belonged to, when Heather walked in.

She said, “Oh, hey, Kyle, right?”

“Yeah.” I pretended to vaguely remember her name, “Heather, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Um…are you thinking about like stealing my underwear or…”

I realized I was still holding the underwear and I further realized it was hers. This is how completely retarded I was for this girl. At that exact moment I actually thought to myself that this would be a hilarious story to tell people later when we were married. If I could go back, I think I might just drop my pants and shit in her laundry. Instead, I said, “Oh, sorry, I was just, I was, you know, taking the stuff out of the dryer so I could use it.”

She laughed. God, she was fucking cute. There she was, face-to-face with a guy who was basically a complete stranger holding a pair of her underwear, and she wasn’t pissed or creeped out or anything. She just laughed and took her underwear out of my hand, put it with the rest of her stuff that I had piled up on the dryer, put it all in a little pink laundry basket, and said, “So how have your first few weeks been?”

I wanted to tell her I got the highest grade in my class on our thermochemistry mini-exam, but I held back. I couldn’t let her think I was a nerd. So I said, “Pretty good. Just kind of getting used to all the classes and everything. You know, a little different than high school. How about you?”

“So far so good, I guess. Getting drunk way too much, as usual.” She laughed.

I tried to make a joke, “Smash your skull into any more walls?” She stopped laughing and said, “Nope.”

Then I said, “Cool.” I was pretty sure at that exact moment that I would never fuck this girl in a million years of trying. This would be a conversation she would go back and tell her roommate about to illustrate how utterly retarded guys are when they’re trying to pick up chicks. I was sure I was blowing it. But I wasn’t. I think a lot about that day in the laundry room, wondering if there was anything I could have said to make her never talk to me again.

For some reason, far beyond my understanding at the time, she didn’t leave. For some reason that became clear to me later, but that I was too naive to see at that moment, she kept the conversation going. “So what’s your major? Have you figured it out yet?”

“Yeah, biology. I’m hoping to go to med school and biology seems to be a pretty good way to go. How about you?”

“Elementary education.”

She could have told me she was majoring in shit-eating with a minor in injecting guys with AIDS blood while they slept, and I would have thought it was the greatest, most noble thing in the world.

I said, “That’s really cool. This country needs more good teachers.” Again, for reasons I couldn’t quite place at the time, she stuck around, kept talking to me.

She said, “Yeah, I really think teaching is an important thing and, you’re right, there just aren’t enough teachers who really care about what they do in this country.”

I should have fucking seen through her shit right then and there. She fucking agreed with me. But the vagina has some pretty extraordinary powers. In this case it chose to exercise its powers by performing a nonsurgical lobotomy on me. I didn’t care that she was lying to me—not literally lying to me, but faking that she had any interest in me at all. Not only did I not care, I didn’t even notice. I couldn’t separate what was really going on in that laundry room from the lies I was telling myself, which filled me with the overwhelming hope that this girl would somehow have sex with me, be my girlfriend…love me. She said, “How’s your roommate?”

“Not bad. I found out he’s a born-again Christian, which is kind of weird.” Even as I was saying that, I remember hoping
she
wasn’t a born-again Christian, not because I didn’t want to offend her, but because if she was it would have been a deal-breaker for me. After all that’s happened now, it makes it even worse to know that it all could have been avoided if that cunt would have had the same delusional belief in a god as 95 percent of the backwards assholes in the world. Oh wait—she fucking did, but she hid it from me until she had me wrapped around her finger.

She said, “Yeah, born-again Christians are about as weird as it gets.” I, being a pretty rational guy, took her response to mean that she thought all Christians were off their rockers, that she was at least agnostic if not an outright atheist like myself. I found out later, much later, that neither of these things were true.

She said, “How’d you find out? Was he like praying over you at night and everything?”

“No. It was actually way worse than that. He asked me if I wanted to go to a Rangers game with him and some of his friends last week, and I had nothing better to do so I went. It turned out the friends were his prayer group or something like that and in the middle of the game this one chick who was with us stood up as everyone was trying to watch the game and started singing, ‘God is good, he is the master of all creation’ or some shit. Then all the other people, my roommate included, joined in. It was fucking terrible.”

That was the first time I said fuck in front of her. It just slipped out, but I was kind of interested in seeing her reaction. I always thought it was a good way to tell certain things about a person, to see how they react the first time you say fuck around them. If they don’t throw a shit or a crap or even a fuck of their own into the conversation after a few seconds, it seems like that person is probably a douchebag.

Her next three words were, “That fucking sucks.” She was no douchebag.

She said, “Well, if you ever need some place to chill for a few hours when you’ve had enough born-again bullshit, you can always come down to me and Annie’s room. We’re in two-twelve.”

I didn’t want to sound too desperate or overexcited so I choked out, “Really?”

She said, “Yeah. If we’re not out, we’re usually in our room smoking or drinking some beers. Don’t tell the RA.” She laughed again. “So you should come by.”

Again, not wanting to sound too overexcited I said, “When?”

She said, “What are you doing while your clothes dry?”

“I was just going to go back to my room and read some biology stuff.”

“Screw biology. Put your clothes in the dryer and let’s go smoke a bowl.”

I had never smoked weed before in my life. It wasn’t because I had any moral opposition to it—quite the opposite. I was and still am a big supporter of legalizing all victimless crimes. The only “drug” I had done at all up to that point was booze, though. I had been drunk a few times in high school, probably under ten total, but at that moment I would have injected two metric tons of black tar heroin into my fucking eyeball if it gave me even the most remote chance to have sex with Heather.

I said, “Okay, cool,” tossed my clothes in the dryer, and followed her to her room.