The Lie Read Online Free Page A

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