The Lie (34 page)

It was with great pride
that I found myself knocking on the front door of Kyle’s apartment on the afternoon following the first night I fucked Heather. Several knocks were required until a disheveled and clearly hungover Kyle answered his door. I had seen countless fraternity drunks on the morning that followed an all-night bender. Kyle was far beyond that. He more closely resembled a sixty-year-old career alcoholic—dead eyes, without even an inkling of joy derived from the night that had produced such a hangover, just pain and annoyance at the world that wouldn’t let him sleep—than did he a binge-drinking undergraduate student. I hoped my news of our plan’s success would change his mood.

I informed Kyle that after much posturing I had been able to engage in unprotected sex with Heather during a visible outbreak at least half a dozen times, with some added attempts to rub my open sores on and around her cunt. I further informed him that I never came inside her in any orifice that could produce an offspring, opting instead to spread my seed over as much of her body as I possibly could, also taking these opportunities to rub my exposed blisters on her flesh wherever possible. I wasn’t positive that she had contracted my virus, but it seemed highly likely.

Kyle’s reaction was a smile and an invitation to go get lunch, which I accepted. It was good to see him excited about anything, and he was excited. He insisted that we go to Chick-fil-A, his favorite. I took this as a sign that perhaps my old friend was returning—perhaps the completion of his revenge on Heather had ended the horrible cycle he had begun almost a year ago.

At lunch he begged for every detail, which I found strange. It wasn’t that I had any respect for whores or for the sexual act as anything more than an opportunity to express dominance over a whore and to expel semen, but it was somehow strange to me that he would want the images in his mind of me debasing the whore he used to claim to love. Nonetheless I obliged. His favorite moment in the recounting of the prior night’s events seemed to be when I made Heather use the tip of my dick like she would a tube of ChapStick and apply my semen to her lips. It was good to see him smile again.

After the initial retelling of the story Kyle was curious to know when I would next see Heather. I explained that I would likely never see her again. Kyle entreated me to see and fuck her as many times as I possibly could in order to maximize the chances that she would contract my virus. I observed that if the prior night’s activities were not enough for her to contract the virus, then she must have the world’s most resilient immunity to it. I was in the middle of a visible outbreak and my unsheathed cock had swabbed virtually every inch of her body including her genitals and mouth. He seemed content with this, but required a promise from me to inform him when and if I ever became aware of Heather’s positive herpes status. This went without saying in my mind.

The conversation then turned to an outcome neither of us had previously anticipated. What if Heather contracted the virus but kept this information hidden from everyone? We might never know if our plan had worked. And it was on the basis of this possibility that Kyle insisted I continue to date her. Even if she wouldn’t divulge the information, surely I could bear witness to an outbreak when it occurred once she had contracted the virus. Despite the fact that I had become overwhelmingly tired of dealing with Heather and pretending to be interested in her at all, I could do nothing but agree with Kyle. To see our plan to its end required obtaining conclusive evidence of our success.

Winter break was fast approaching, and I had scheduled another trip to Viking’s Resort, among other trips that would have me out of the country for virtually the entire month. Kyle and I both reasoned that this would do little to dampen Heather’s interest in me so long as I explained to her that I was interested in having an exclusive relationship with her. We agreed that this was the best plan of action and that I would fuck her once a week during this false relationship and then dump her as soon as the evidence we required was produced.

Happy with our plan, we finished lunch and I returned to the Alpha Tau Omega house, where I encountered Gordon Hallern, a sophomore who was so similar to Greg in virtually every respect that I wished him dead. He served as an undeniable reminder to me that, despite any attempt I could possibly make to change the unfaltering path upon which we were all set, the path would right itself. I might have been able to stop Greg from becoming the cog in the wheel he was destined to become, but the machine itself would create another Greg to take his place. It was disheartening.

It seemed Gordon had just returned from Deep Ellum, where he’d gotten his first tattoo, and he felt the need to display it for anyone who would view it. When I saw what it was, the futility of everything became so crystal clear it was painful.

Across his stomach, in a style and lettering similar to Tupac Shakur’s “Thug Life” tattoo, Gordon had the words “Bitches Ain’t Shit…” It was clearly a reference to Dr. Dre’s seminal masterpiece “Bitches Ain’t Shit” from 1992’s
The Chronic
, but it was in the style of Tupac. I wondered if this was done on purpose, done by mistake, or, more likely, done with only a minor knowledge of the origin of the phrase and a misplaced respect for its overuse in the suburban white culture Gordon had no doubt grown up in. I wondered what my father would think if he knew that Gordon had this tattoo when he hired him for his first job, which I was certain was inevitable. I was one step closer to having the conversation with my father about rejecting the life he would have me lead. I wondered if exposing the fact that I had herpes would make that conversation easier, possibly giving my father something else to place his disappointment in rather than just my own decision to reject what was essentially his own life.

After getting the good news
from Brett about Heather, something changed for me. I started actually being able to think about other things. I still didn’t know if the whole plan had worked, but I felt like there was already some closure on the whole situation and I guess that’s what I really wanted the whole time, just to know that someone as horrible as her couldn’t just get away with completely fucking somebody over like she did me.

The first thing I did was to e-mail my genomics professor and tell him that I was interested in retaking my midterm if the offer was still open. The semester was really close to being over and our finals were happening the next week, but he was nice enough to cut me some slack. The only shitty thing was that I would have to take the midterm retest on the same day I would take the final. It wasn’t fun but I did it.

I got the highest grade in the class on both of the exams. The retest, of course, was on a 75-point scale, so even though I got a 99 percent on it I was only given a 74. And I got a 98 percent on the final. So I ended up pulling out a high B overall that semester in genomics and bioinformatics, which wasn’t bad. It was my first B, but I could live with it. It wasn’t anything that would really raise any eyebrows on the admissions board at UT Houston and that’s all that actually mattered.

I went home to visit my parents on the weekend before our winter break started and apologized to them for the party I ruined. The morning after that party I had just kind of left without telling them and I hadn’t really said much to them since. I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to. But after my conversation with Brett I felt good enough about everything that it wasn’t that big of a deal to talk to them about it because I really felt like that was in the past.

I told them that breaking up with Heather had really screwed me up but that I was over it and I was glad to have them as parents and I thanked them for putting up with me while I was such an asshole. They were happy to have me apologize and told me that they loved me no matter what but that they were a little scared for me there a few times, the party being the most scared they’d ever been. I felt bad about that, really bad, but like I said, it really felt like all of that shit was behind me.

I didn’t get to see
Brett like at all over the winter break. He was off on a bunch of trips out of the country with his parents and everything, which was like not that big of a deal I guess. But before he left he took me out to dinner and he was like, “Heather, I think we should be an exclusive couple. What do you think?”

I seriously like literally almost crapped in my pants. I mean like at the beginning of the year I was totally fucked, and then by winter break I had Brett fucking Keller asking me to be his girlfriend.

I was like, “I think that sounds seriously awesome.”

He was like, “Me too.”

I was like, “Oh my God, this is so exciting. What should we do to celebrate?”

He was like, “We should finish eating dinner and then we should go back to my house and fuck.”

We did a lot of fucking. Not like every day or anything—I mean we actually only saw each other like once a week because Brett was always busy doing stuff—but when we would get together it was like he would fuck me like five or six times in a night and rub his dick all over me. I thought it was kind of weird, but it wasn’t any weirder than like Brian forcing me into a three-way with Josh. I just thought like every guy had his thing and Brett’s thing was rubbing his dick on me. I guess I should have thought about that a little more.

So I wasn’t having sex with any other guys and like probably a month after our second semester started I was in the shower shaving my pubes and I noticed a little red spot right on the outside of my left lip. And then I noticed one on the inside of the right lip. I was like, “What the fuck?”

I went to the health center to get it checked out and the guy looked in my vag and everything and he was like, “Are you sexually active?”

I was like, “Yeah.”

He was like, “Do you engage in unprotected sexual activity with multiple partners?”

I was like, “I just have one partner at the moment.”

He was like, “Well, you’re going to want to tell your partner that you have herpes simplex 2.”

I was like, “What? Is that like the cold sore one?”

He was like, “It’s genital herpes.” Then he handed me a pamphlet that was all about dealing with getting herpes. I was so fucking pissed and panicked I had no idea what to do.

The guy was like, “One in four people have herpes simplex 2, so it’s not the end of the world. There are many medications available now that can suppress outbreaks so you get them as infrequently as once every few years. That pamphlet covers most of it and directs you to a few websites that should answer any questions you might have. If you feel you still have questions please don’t hesitate to contact us here at the health center.”

Then the guy took off his rubber gloves and was like, “You can get dressed now,” and left.

I just sat there with no pants on and my vag hanging out for like five minutes. I felt so fucking gross, like I was basically ruined for the rest of my life. I had fucking herpes—like how in the hell did I get herpes? I started going through the whole list of guys I had fucked without a condom and I didn’t think anyone had herpes. But from the end of our junior year and kind of into the first part of our senior year there were like a lot of guys that I fucked because I thought they were into me, and any one of them could have had herpes.

I never thought it was Brett. I mean we had just started dating like exclusively and everything was going so well and he really seemed to like me. I just never thought it was him. And on top of that I actually felt bad that I might have given him herpes. We never used condoms and we had had a lot of sex. I felt like such shit. More than feeling bad for him, though, I felt bad for myself. I had basically landed the best guy in school and now I was going to have to tell him I had herpes.

Then I started thinking about if I was going to have to tell my mom about it and that was fucking gross to me. Like what was I going to say? “Hey, mom, nice to see you. Your skanky daughter fucked some guy without a rubber and now she has herpes. I love you.”?

Then I started thinking about who I was going to date. I almost thought I wouldn’t tell Brett, would just keep it a secret and hope he never got herpes from me. If I did tell him, I hoped he’d be understanding enough to stay with me. I knew that was pretty unlikely, though. I started thinking that there were probably like dating sites dedicated to people who had herpes. That’s where I was probably going to have to find my husband—on fucking eHarmony.com but for herpes.

Seriously, my life was fucking over.

I was perusing
the personal ads at a website called prescription4love.com, which I came to after searching “herpes dating site.” I had assumed two things: (1) A herpes dating website must exist, and (2) any whore desperate enough to list her profile on such a site would be willing to engage in sexual acts so degrading they might put a normal whore to shame. What I found on prescription4love.com was nothing less than mind-blowing.

Not only was there an entire member’s section devoted solely to helping people with herpes meet one another, there were sections of the site devoted to people with AIDS, cancer, obesity, deafness, diabetes, IBS, impotence, allergies, hepatitis, alcoholism, epilepsy, arthritis, dwarfism, MS, para- and quadriplegia, Parkinson’s, burns, lupus, HPV, ADD, Asperger’s, autism, breathing disorders, psychiatric disorders, blindness, heart disease, cerebral palsy, dyslexia, Tourette’s, chronic fatigue syndrome, anxiety disorders, skin problems, et cetera. In short, I learned that the Internet was a treasure trove of horribly desperate whores who already had such amazing doubt about their own self-worth that they could easily be exploited into any act I chose.

I was midway through writing my descriptive paragraph for a profile to appear in the burn victim section of the site when my doorbell rang. I let the maid answer the door and heard Heather’s voice. An unannounced visit was strange. I assumed she had discovered a herpes lesion on her cunt and was standing in my doorway to confront me and unleash her anger on me for having given her the virus. I was only partially correct.

She sat down with me in one of two living rooms near the front of the house, put her hand on my hand, adopted a wistful gaze, and blathered on for several minutes about how important I was to her and how much our relationship meant and how in the time we had spent together she had come to realize that she had found someone with whom she thought she could spend much of her life, et cetera. It was difficult to keep from laughing, but I wanted her to go through her entire process. I wanted her to speak every word that I knew she had rehearsed in her bedroom multiple times before finally delivering her performance. I wanted her to put all of her effort into this last attempt to keep me and then I wanted to destroy her.

So I waited. I waited through several more minutes of her listing some of the moments in our short relationship that she had come to value as precious memories. I listened to her recount the first time we met when she was still dating Kyle. I listened to her explain that she had told her mother about me and her mother was apparently very excited to meet me.

And when the first half of her performance was over, she turned somber and claimed that there was something she had to tell me. As I was a person she had the utmost respect and admiration for, she felt it wasn’t right to keep such a thing a secret from me. She went on to say that she didn’t know from whom she had contracted the virus, but she had conclusive proof that she was a carrier of herpes simplex 2, genital herpes.

She had become conscious of her herpes infection during a recent trip to the student health center, shortly after discovering some red blisters in and around her cunt in the shower. She had not, however, even contemplated finding fault with me for her new status as an STD carrier. This was something I had hoped would happen but was less than certain of.

As soon as the final word, “herpes,” fell from her lips, I jerked my hand out from under hers, conjured the finest fake attitude of outrage I had ever mustered, and began a tirade so excessively angry that I thought Heather must have assumed I meant to do her physical harm.

I hit every insulting point I could in my monologue, whether I knew the insults to be true or not. I called her a whore and told her that only the most irresponsible and intellectually stunted people on earth allowed themselves to contract herpes. I accused her of cheating on me while we were an official couple over the winter break. I accused her of being aware of her status before we ever started fucking and keeping it from me so I wouldn’t dismiss her. I accused her of only being interested in my money, which, of all the insults, was probably the most accurate. I ended by telling her that if she gave me herpes I would tell not only the entire student body of SMU but the entire city of Dallas, Texas. She, of course, broke down sobbing, her herpes-laden tears falling into the ten-thousand-dollar fabric of my stepmother’s favorite couch. I momentarily thought of my stepmother sitting on the couch naked and contracting herpes from Heather’s tears, no matter how unlikely it seemed.

After I had my fill of watching her cry, I commanded Heather to get out of my house and told her never to call me again. She tried to give me a hug and I refused. She cried some more, and the maids were watching, so I finally gave her one in the hopes that she would be appeased and leave peacefully. As we embraced, I whispered into her ear that if she just would have stuck with Kyle none of this would have happened. I thought this final twisting of the blade would keep her awake at night, and I knew it would be a welcome addition and punctuation to the story I would be telling Kyle the following day.

As I watched Heather drive away from my home that day, sobbing so violently it appeared that she was convulsing, I could only feel pride for Kyle and myself. We had created a plan and carried it through to fruition. In some way I’m sure my father would have been proud of me. This thought led me to realize the time was fast approaching to have what would be his most disappointing conversation with me. I set the date in my mind for this conversation to take place on my graduation day. It seemed a good time to make the break from both my academic life and my father simultaneously.