The Lie (22 page)

Going into my third year at SMU,
I couldn’t have been happier. My grandma, who I loved but really barely knew when I stopped to think about it, died of old age toward the end of the summer and left me seven thousand dollars, so I was finally able to get the fuck out of McElvaney Hall. I got myself a little one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from campus, which I was more than excited to have shitloads of sex with Heather in. I signed up for all my classes, most of which looked interesting and none of which looked too difficult except for this applied physics class. For some reason physics always seemed daunting to me, but I wasn’t too concerned. I assumed I’d just have to study a little harder.

But besides having my own place and a class load that seemed pretty easy, I had Heather. I moved into my apartment a week before our first classes and a few days before she had to do anything with her sorority. She and my parents helped me get settled. My mom and dad I don’t think ever really liked Heather, and they liked her even less the second time around, but they didn’t say anything about it to me, which I always appreciated.

That first night, after everything was moved in, my mom and dad took us out to eat at Big Al’s Pizza and they made a pretty decent effort to warm up to Heather. I guess they must have thought that if we were back together after all the shit we had been through, it was going to be for a while.

We got our food and sat down and my dad said, “So, Heather, you looking forward to some of your classes this year? You probably start some kind of student-teaching or something your junior year, right?”

Heather said, “Um, yeah, I guess. I don’t like really know. I mean I know the first semester I don’t think I have to student-teach yet. Maybe second semester.”

My mom said, “Have you given any thought to what kind of a teacher you want to be yet?”

What she said next can just be thrown on the pile of statements that proved I had my head too far up her ass to hear clearly. She said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. I mean I want to focus on marriage and family and everything first and career second, so if I need to teach for like a year or something at an elementary school before I start my own family, then I guess I could be like an art teacher or something, you know?”

I love my mom. She said, “Oh, that sounds very fulfilling,” in about as sarcastic a tone as she could muster, which wasn’t very sarcastic at all. My dad and I got it, but Heather didn’t.

The rest of the night was spent talking about nothing important. Back at my apartment just before my parents were about to leave, my dad peeled me off a hundred bucks and said, “Don’t spend this on her. Use it to buy something for yourself,” which I appreciated. I gave my mom and dad a hug good-bye and then it was just me and Heather alone for the first night in my very first apartment.

She said, “So we’re all alone. What do you want to do now?”

I said, “I guess we should christen the place.”

She said, “You mean we should both take dumps in the toilet?” And I remembered that occasionally Heather could actually be pretty funny. I hugged her and I kissed her and I said, “What I actually meant was that we could both take dumps in the shower,” which got a laugh out of her and then we started kissing and didn’t stop until we were fucking.

That night we fucked in almost every place you could possibly imagine in that apartment. The couch, the shower, the bed—and I guess that pretty much covers the entire place. It was pretty fucking small, but that made it better to me. It was like a little nest just for me and Heather, and it could have been even smaller, to be honest, and I would have been perfectly happy.

I remember that the next morning the whole place smelled like her. I can only assume that was because it was so small. After she left to go meet up with some of her sorority sisters I tried to clean some more stuff up, get some more stuff out of boxes, all the usual moving-in crap that no one likes to do, but I couldn’t. Every time I would move in that place it would stir some little jet stream of air that would deliver a shot of her smell right to my nose and then I’d start thinking about us fucking the night before.

My shit stayed in boxes for a few weeks after moving in.

That first night back
was like seriously the best. Kyle having his own place made it really seem like things were going to be different, you know, like they were going to be real or like more adult I guess. I mean when we first started dating and we lived at McElvaney it was like he was still a kid, kind of, but once he had his place it made everything just seem more legit, like we were getting further away from being high school kids and closer to being college graduates or something.

The next morning I went to the Kappa house to move some of my stuff back in and say hi to some of the other girls. We also had a meeting that afternoon that was like mandatory and everything. It was basically just to talk about like all of the new stuff we were going to be doing that year. They made the announcement that Andrea was going to be our new president, which was seriously exciting for her. I mean we all knew because the vote happened at the end of the year before, but we still had to have like the official ceremony and everything. I was really happy for her. I knew that meant that my chances might be a little better to be president when I was a senior, but I didn’t really think I had a chance because of how I kind of didn’t go to as many parties and everything right after the thing with Brian and Josh. That was cool with me. I never really wanted to be the Kappa president or anything, and honestly I was looking forward to spending time with Kyle that year more than I was even really thinking about doing anything for Kappa.

After the meeting we were all sitting around drinking wine and this senior named Harlow Gallerston came in and was like, “Sorry I was late for the meeting, guys, but I have a really good excuse.”

We were all like, “Okay…what is it?”

And she whipped out her left hand and was like, “Garret proposed. I’m engaged.”

We were all like going crazy. We gave her a huge hug and everything and she showed us her ring and it was really, really nice. It was like a three-and-a-half-carat princess cut in this really pretty platinum setting with two one-carat diamonds on either side of the middle one. All of the other seniors were seriously jealous. Kendra Thomas was like, “That’s really pretty. Did you tell Garret what kind of ring to get you?”

Harlow was like, “Kind of, but he picked it out mainly by himself.”

Kendra was like, “You should have been more specific. When Louis proposes to me this Christmas I told him he better not show up with anything less than four carats or he can find himself another fiancée.” Then she laughed, but we all knew it wasn’t even like close to being a joke for her.

Pretty much all the seniors had boyfriends and pretty much all of them knew they were going to get proposed to. The only girl who didn’t know what was going to happen was this girl Casey Riddle. She had been dating the same guy since high school and all of the guys in his family had served in the military so he did, too. And he was in Iraq like right during her senior year so she had no idea if he was going to propose to her or even be able to make it back at all or anything. I felt so bad for her.

For the rest of the night we all just sat around and talked to the seniors about what they were going to do once they got engaged and then married and everything. Most of them were going to move back to wherever their future husbands were from originally. Some of their future husbands were from Dallas so they were going to start looking for houses and everything as soon as they got engaged. Most of them were pretty sure they were going to get proposed to over the Christmas break. Andrea had been dating this guy in Kappa Sig named Ron Thuron, who was like a really cool guy, but he was in Kappa Sig and he didn’t really know what he wanted to do or anything and I kind of felt sorry for her, like she was settling. But it was like her senior year had already started. If she didn’t end up with Ron, she was pretty much fucked. Like I don’t even know how you would even try to find a husband if you don’t have one pretty much locked in by the middle of your senior year.

I guess I hadn’t really given it much serious thought, me and Kyle getting married, until that night, but I did think that Kyle would probably propose to me my senior year and I hoped he’d do it early so I could be like the first one, you know like Harlow, to show off my ring and everything. Like I wondered if I could get him to propose to me over the next summer break. I thought I could if I started laying in hints here and there. I just thought the ring might be a problem. I knew he had saved up some money from his summer job but he was spending it all on his apartment. I guess in the end I figured his parents would help him or he could get a loan or something. If he really loved me he’d figure it out and I knew he did really love me so I wasn’t worried.

Year three
of my mandatory and pointless four-year stay at SMU started much like any other—a trip to the South Texas Fertility and Family Medical Center to deposit my semen in a plastic cup, signing up for classes I had no interest in, and ending my first day back at school by ass-fucking someone—in this case Greg Simmons’s younger sister, an eighteen-year-old freshman named Kennedy with a slight amount of hair around her asshole—in my bedroom at the Alpha Tau Omega house.

Alpha Tau Omega sponsored a family barbecue on the first day back to school. My father was to be a guest of honor of sorts but he was away on business. So his wife filled in, much to the dismay of virtually every member of Alpha Tau Omega and many of their fathers, all much too eager to kiss my father’s ass and all much too aware that my father’s wife presented far less than an adequate proxy.

It was at this barbecue that I met Greg’s sister. She knew who I was immediately, which led me to the conclusion that my family was a constant topic of conversation for Greg’s family—a fact I found amusing and personally satisfying. I leveraged the fact that I was known to her to lure her into my bedroom while the barbecue was still in full swing in the backyard of the house. Once in my bedroom, there was no real need to maintain the pleasantries. I told her simply that I wanted to ram my dick in her ass as hard as I could and I wanted to press her tits up against my window so the guests of the family barbecue, her parents included, could see what a nasty little slut she was. She agreed to the former but not the latter. And she was not given the chance to agree or disagree with my request to photograph us in the act because the request never existed. I simply took the photo and she never demanded it be erased so it wasn’t.

She was attractive, aside from the sparse anal hairs I mentioned earlier. Had I not filled a plastic cup with semen shortly prior to the event, I’m sure she would have left my room and leaked semen out of her asshole for the next hour at least.

I fucked her in the ass for the obvious reason of merely enjoying firing a load into the anus of an eighteen-year-old, but I fucked her for more than that. My hatred for her older brother had become something different, more acute than the normal hatred I had for the rest of my peers. I think perhaps it was because, more than them, he was the most extreme and well-defined example of everything I thought was wrong with my peers, of everything I despised. For that reason, fucking his little sister in the ass calmed me in a way that was similar to a skilled masseuse massaging the one muscle that aches most in your body and hinders all movement of any other muscle. So, too, the knowledge that I possessed a photo of the act to publicly expose at will in a scenario that most called for it further put me at ease for the remainder of the barbecue.

After wiping my dick off with the bottom of Greg’s sister’s Marc Jacobs sundress and pulling my pants back up, I was able to mingle with the parents and siblings of each and every false piece of shit that I called my brother in Alpha Tau Omega without ever breaking my smile. I took particular pleasure in chatting with Greg’s father, who couldn’t have been more complimentary of my own father and of my clear potential as the future president of Keller Shipping. I agreed with all of his comments and listened intently to everything he had to say for the better part of fifteen minutes, each second of which was an exercise in self-control for me. My hand was gripped so tight around my phone in my left front pants pocket, ready to whip it out and force his father to gaze upon the image of my cock buried in his daughter’s pliable teenage asshole, that I thought I might have been drawing blood.

As great a moment as it would have been, I thankfully had the wherewithal to realize that the photo was best used against Greg, not his father. For some reason there was in me a general feeling about my father’s generation that made me pity them. I almost forgave their blind allegiance to the prior generation’s will, or at least I certainly didn’t have the venomous disdain for them that I did for my own generation, which did nothing more to garner that disdain than follow the exact same path. It seemed to me somehow that we had seen our fathers become their fathers and that experience should have given us some insight. Our fathers had no model to show them the pitfalls of becoming their fathers, but we were different. We saw exactly the slow transition that took place, the creeping loss of self that occurred in each of our own fathers once they started down the paths of our grandfathers. Our fathers saw it only after their lives had run their courses. We still had everything ahead of us. We should have known better. And yet for most of my peers the comfort of a life that had been lived twice or more already was all too inviting, and so they were eager to fall in line. I suppose that’s what I despised most about them. Even after being granted the knowledge necessary to change, to strike out and accomplish something unique, my peers chose the same things as their fathers and their fathers’ fathers before them.

I wasn’t sure how a photo of my dick in Greg’s sister’s ass, with her smiling back over her shoulder at the camera, would play into liberating my peers from this psychological prison they all seemed so eager to lock themselves into, but I was glad I had it.

The barbecue lasted for a few more hours, and at its conclusion Greg’s sister asked me for my phone number, which I gave her, calculating that I might be able to fuck her again and orchestrate a scenario in which Greg would walk in on us. Or at the very least I could take some photos of her with my semen all over her face.