The story I was told after the party was that I had beaten up my friend and then thrown him out of a window. Glass showered the parking lot below as Lyle tumbled from the second floor. He survived because—as I was told—he landed upright in the passenger seat of a convertible. But I would not have seen any of that take place, even if it had really happened, because I stormed out of the party right after the real fight, if that’s what it was. Lyle was about three times my size, so there wasn’t much of a fight. Afterwards, I stumbled along the sidewalk pissed off, trying to piece it all together in my intoxicated mind as I worried about seeing Lyle in class the next day.
We were already drunk when we went into Barbara’s room to get cross-faded. The three of us sat on her bed in the dark, just a sliver of light spilling in from under her door. Whenever someone passed the bong Lyle would say something stupid about Nikolina, the girl from Intro to Mass Comm who I had a crush on. Barbara was her roommate at the Baytowne Apartment Complex. I hadn’t talked to Nikolina all night and I don’t think she knew I was there.
“Billy likes Niki’s trumpet tits,” said Lyle in a goofy voice, which made Barbara laugh.
“Oh my God,” Barbara said, “She does.” But Barbara couldn’t finish her sentence. “Oh, poor Niki,” she finally said. Lyle wanted to fuck Barbara, so he was making me look stupid. Trumpet tits? What the fuck was that? I hoped Niki didn’t walk in and hear anything. I didn’t want her to know I had a crush on her.
I heard our professor use her full name once when taking attendance. Nikolina. She was Romanian, I found out. Sometimes I would whisper her name when I thought no one could hear me, or I would keep my lips closed and shape the syllables with my mouth. It was hopeless because I knew she thought I was boring. I was just a dumbass from not-Chicago, Illinois. I took a second pull and then it was Barbara’s turn, so I handed her the bong. The water bubbled as she took a big rip.
“Billy likes Niki’s nipple rings,” said Lyle, and then he let out this stupid laugh. “Hah-haaaa!”
Barbara burst out laughing right into the bong which caused the glass bowl to pop out and land on the carpet. She was laughing so hard we couldn’t hear her laughing. I hated thinking Lyle might have seen Niki’s actual nipple rings, if they were real, and was joking about it like she was some kind of throwaway. And he knew I hated when people called me Billy. Everyone called me Bill now.
“Oh my God,” Barbara managed. “Poor Niki.” She scooped up the scattered bits of weed in her hands while Lyle and I stood up from the bed to pretend to help. I reached down to pick up the bowl but I touched a part that was too hot still and I dropped it again.
“Billy wants those silver trombones,” Lyle said. “Hah-haaaa!” He sounded stupid and he was doing it on purpose. He made these shrill noises with his mouth like a brass instrument and there was just enough light for me to see that he was pushing his lips together in order to make a fish face like a fucking asshole.
“Dude,” I said.
“Billy wants to twist those nipple rings like car keys, Hah-haaaa!”
“Dude, come on. Shut the fuck up.”
But Lyle repeated his trumpet noises over and over as if he were heralding the arrival of nobility into some kind of shitty kingdom structured solely around playing beer pong in cheap, dirty apartments. The harder Barbara laughed while she picked at the carpet, the longer he kept up his bullshit.
“Dude. I’m gonna fucking push you if you don’t shut up,” I said, squaring my shoulders at him.
“Do it,” said Lyle.
“I will,” I said, then I looked ahead ten years. We would each have our own established lives, that was clear to me. But was it me with the good job and the big house, or was that Lyle? Was it me or Lyle with a wife and kids? Which of us would be happy? Did it matter? Barbara and Niki would move to either Chicago or St. Louis, but I would never keep that straight. I would lose track of most people over time. I would be somewhere else soon, doing something different.
“Do it, bitch,” said Lyle, so I shoved him in the dark and then a flurry of drumming fists pummeled down against my body. I was too stoned. He was the right amount of stoned. I doubled over and reached out to swat his arms away without looking up. I had never been in a fight before.
“Fucking stop it,” Barbara shouted as we bumped into her. “Get the fuck out!”
We grabbed a handful of each other’s shirts and we danced around in circles like hockey players. We knocked over a small shelf and the jagged pieces of something sharp cracked under the arches of our feet. Then Lyle bumped into a closet mirror and a loud shatter brought everything to a silent halt except the muffled sounds of Kanye West’s Graduation sneaking in from the party outside the bedroom. The entire mirror had cascaded to the floor in a heap of shards.
“You’re gonna fucking pay for that,” Barbara yelled.
“Man, I ain’t payin’ for shit,” I said, which would turn out to be false in the long run. I threw open the bedroom door and stormed down the hall to the living room where Nikolina was playing beer pong with one of her other roommates against two guys from the baseball team who wore sweatpants and backwards fitteds. They had no table, just a white door laid across folding chairs. I put on my shoes and left and I don’t think anyone noticed that anything had happened.
We were townies at a community college, so word of the fight spread fast the next day. Now I was famous for the wrong reasons. A fellow townie, someone I knew from high school, met me before our Western Civ lecture and told me the rumor about Lyle and the window. I was told people believed the story. But only one other person brought the rumor up to me after that, so maybe it wasn’t even a rumor. Lyle was in that Western Civ lecture too. When I walked in, I searched the lecture hall and found him across the room. He didn’t look up, even though I had known him my whole life. I sat in class staring straight ahead, my feet sore from the previous night’s walk home, three drunk miles in flip flops, but I remembered thinking as I walked, even in my drunken state, that at some point we would be older, sitting at a table with pints of beer in front of us, laughing about something stupid. For now, I was worried that Nikolina’s impression of me stemmed from the destruction of her roommate’s closet mirror, but I secretly hoped she believed I could pick up a two-hundred-pound guy and casually throw him out of a window.
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John Milas is a writer from Illinois. Find him on twitter @johnmilaslit.
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image: “Alley:” Amanda Rabaduex is a poet and writer based out of Knoxville, TN. When she has writer’s block, she plays with watercolors and a Canon EOS 90D. Find her on Twitter @ARabaduex or on her website amandarabaduex.com.
Rejection Letters 