library. But you wanna get puked on, you wanna wrestle drunks and crack skulls? Be my guest.”
Their eyes connect through Adam’s glasses when he says the words: crack skulls. But it’s the way he said that other thing — like Rank needed his permission — be my guest. This is what decides it.
Yes! Rank does it, ultimately, out of spite.
08/03/09, 11:13 p.m.
Doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it? Well, it does, a little, when you consider what took place between them only a few nights before. Something both have up until this point pretended not to remember.
It had been sort of a bad day all around. Rank had been in a bit of a state, brooding on the fleshy smack that rang out from Kyle’s bedroom the night before and the soft grunt of female pain he is pretty sure he heard in counterpoint. Kyle had been in there with Janine, the championship highland dancer with zero chest to speak of. And before that, Rank had discovered a poem by T.S. Eliot in the library which for some reason jacked his stress about school and his irritation with Kyle to unreasonable levels. And before that, earlier that afternoon, Rank had met with the registrar to discuss what exactly his status was now that he was no longer the recipient of a hockey scholarship. The registrar — a minty-smelling lady with a Dead Poets Society poster on the wall behind her — gave him to understand that everything would be fine, no worries whatsoever, as long as his tuition was paid in full next semester and he kept his GPA up. Easy! At which point Rank decided not to worry about tuition for the time being and sequester his ass in the library to embark on his new career as an academic achiever.
Whereupon he opened the voluminous anthology of English literature — which all by itself had cost forty fucking dollars — and found himself, once again, a trinket of the gods.
Let us go then, you and I.
Whereupon he closed the voluminous anthology of English literature — which all by itself had cost forty fucking dollars — and decided it was time to get drunk.
If Kyle had been home when Rank arrived, it might have calmed things between them. As it was, however, there was only Adam hanging out by himself, using the empty house to study in, and Rank was grateful. He didn’t want to think about Kyle, he told himself. When in fact, for some reason, all he could think about was Kyle. Kyle had swelled like a Macy’s balloon in his mind, obliterating the minty registrar, the terrifying moment in the library — everything.
Kyle, and the sounds from Kyle’s bedroom. The loud noise Rank knows he heard, followed by the soft noise he is almost sure he heard.
The twisting, seething never-the-same river of his thoughts as he yanked Adam to his feet to accompany him to the liquor store and talked a blue streak in order to distract them both, went something like this: Kyle was such a dick. Kyle thought he was God’s gift. Kyle paraded himself around campus like he owned it. Sometimes, if you hailed Kyle from a distance, he engaged in an elaborate ritual of greeting. He would point to you, then to his own chest, then to his crotch. Nobody knew precisely what it was supposed to mean, but everybody knew approximately. This pantomime all of a sudden struck Rank, who had once laughed at it, as an asshole thing to do. Me, my dick. Me, my dick. You? No. Me. My dick.
Kyle was constantly getting laid. Yearning, sometimes sobbing, women were always showing up at the Temple in the middle of the night. Kyle took a kind of pride in this — you could see it. He’d laugh about it with the boys the following day.
He gave girls shitty nicknames behind their back. A girl they knew named Selina, he’d dubbed Vaselina. He was the one who started calling Tina Tiny once she put on weight. He’d done Tina long ago, way back in first year. He didn’t have to be nice to Tina anymore.
Even though he always was, of course, nice to Tina, to her face. Kyle was nice to everyone to their faces. Inordinately nice. He’d maybe talk to you for five seconds, but in those seconds he’d turn his face to you entirely, let it beam his love and fellowship. Every woman on campus was convinced he found