He Doesn’t Even Play Water Polo

by

Nick Kunze

I’M SLIDING THE SCALE INTO MY BACKPACK and Kelly is looking at the bag of coke in her hand like it’s a crystal ball when I say, I guess there’s a snowstorm on the forecast, which isn’t remotely funny. I don’t even know why I said it. Kelly peeks at me over the baggie and laughs. Cackles, actually. Head back, shoulders bouncing. I’m thinking No way she thought that was funny when she stops mid-cackle, goes stone-faced and looks me right in the eyes. Good one, she says, voice flat, then bounces her eyebrows just once, like they’re testing out a trampoline.

I think I’m in love with this girl. The thought reveals itself like it’s been hiding behind a lamp in my brain’s living room. I think I’m in love with Kelly.

That’s me, I say. Mr. Funny Guy. I stand and stumble toward the door, cheeks hot, desperate to get out before I do anything else weird.

Wait, she says. I turn. Four twenties sit between her index and middle finger. This wasn’t a gift, was it?

I grab the cash, give her a weird little head nod and dip out.

The whole walk home I think about all the times I’ve sold to Kelly, how I always get excited when she texts me to pick up and how I feel jittery when I leave her apartment. I realize I’ve got, like, a middle school infatuation, but have been pretending I don’t because she’s a client.

I say it out loud to make it real. I think I’m in love with Kelly. It feels good, a little secret burning my insides like a gulp of whisky.

Maybe this could be a good thing. Maybe, if I play it right, she could think she loves me too.

WHEN YOU’RE A COLLEGE COKE DEALER, most of your clients are friends, or friends of friends, or friends of friends of friends. That’s one way to avoid trouble: referrals only. A new customer needs to text me the name of the person who referred them, then I need to get a confirmation text from that person. I only take cash, too, even though people bitch and say Can’t I just Venmo you? I’ll make it private. But I always say no. I’d rather miss out on a sale if it means avoiding a Venmo feed full of snowman emojis.

When you only deal to your friends or your friends of friends, everyone thinks they deserve a discount, which means nobody gets a discount. Otherwise, you constantly hear So-and-so told me he only paid $60 for a gram, and you don’t even like that dude and I’m practically your best friend, so why the fuck are you charging me $80? My roommates are the worst about it. Every Friday night they complain, saying Don’t be so stingy, and You literally have a mountain of the stuff, and We let you sell this shit out of our house, which makes us, like, liable, so you kind of owe us, to which I always have to say This is my livelihood, fellas. The only person who gets special treatment is Kelly. I’ll knock off $20 or add an extra quarter gram to her bag, not turning it into a big gesture or anything, just doing it like it’s the most natural thing in the world. She never acknowledges when I do stuff like that, but I’m sure she appreciates it.

When I started selling, I wasn’t scared of getting arrested. I only worried about what people would say. When my friends and friends of friends found out, I was sure they’d ask me shit like Why are you doing this? and What would your parents think? and Aren’t you scared of getting caught? and I’d have to reply Money, and My dad does not give a single shit what I do, trust me, and I probably should be, but no. But none of that happened. Most people only double-checked if they had my number saved. I’m not sure if this is because I have drug dealer energy that’s hidden from everyone but me or because nobody cares what I do.

One benefit of dealing is it lets you cross social circles. I’ll be at a water polo party, then some fraternity party, then some senior’s casual kickback thing, and I’m welcome at each. I can grab a beer and sit on the couch, and no one is like, What the fuck is this guy doing here, he doesn’t even play water polo. Plus, every now and then some drunk dude will buy an absurd amount of coke, like a whole quarter ounce, and just plop it on the table in his room and let everyone get after it, people jostling around the table with rolled-up bills like puppies fighting for nipples. And the dude, who barely does any himself, will give me a little head nod like Go for it. And his money not even three minutes in my wallet, I’m doing lines of the coke I just sold him. Some people are funny like that.

The coke helps me with girls too, I think. Not that I trade lines for sex or anything skeezy like that. But people know I deal, and a lot of nights some chick will start flirting with me and we’ll go back to my apartment, where we end up doing lines after the fact, them bending over the bedside table in just a thong or maybe nothing at all. Sometimes they let me do a line off their tits or ass, them giggling the whole time, which makes me feel like some billionaire movie villain. The girls are usually the ones to suggest we get high, not even being subtle, cuddling me for like thirty seconds before they whisper Want to do some blow?

The random hook-up thing doesn’t leave me satisfied, though. The girls are always strangers, and coke sex either takes too long or maybe doesn’t happen at all. The morning after, I usually wake up alone, the girl having vanished around 4 AM mumbling I’m way too wired to sleep. Those mornings I’m always in a bad mood, like I accidentally killed a dog the night before.

What I want, really want, is a girlfriend. Something substantial. Real. My parents met in college, and they were happy right up until the end. At least that’s how I remember them, back when they were still my parents and not something I needed to explain. My uncle John, who used to be a hotshot but is now middle-aged and funny-looking, tells me I need to get Wifed up, and that college is the best time to find my Special person, becauseafter graduation the odds of finding love were low and the effort it would take to find it would be next-level depressing. He’s said this to me almost verbatim four or five times, late at night at a family gathering, the neck of a beer gripped too loose in his hand, his other arm around my shoulder.

It’s the end of junior year. I’m ready for it. A girlfriend. Kelly. In my mind, it can only be Kelly.

That’s another benefit of dealing, actually – it lets you spend time with people you’d normally never meet. Example: Kelly. We have almost zero life overlap, but she likes drugs and got my number from some dude I sell drugs to, so now we get one-on-one time every few weeks. That wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t dealing. She wouldn’t be the girl who’s infiltrated my brain, commandeering all mental space while I’m sitting in class or watching TV or selling coke. She’d be just another face on campus.

HERE’S WHY I THINK I’M IN LOVE WITH KELLY.

First off, she’s blonde and full skinny, like go spelunking with no problem skinny – a flat-chested, no-butt, toned-stomach girl with this grumbly, flat voice. But the physical aspect is, like, the least of it. She says at least one thing that makes me laugh every time I go to her apartment, to the point where I imagine her brainstorming something funny to say beforehand. She also acts totally normal when I’m selling to her. Most customers act one of three ways: 1) They’re so nervous it makes me nervous, like they think a cop with big biceps and a German Shepherd is going to pop out of my backpack when I unzip it; 2) They’re over-the-top friendly, laughing at everything I say while ogling my bag, like sucking up to me is going to convince me to give them a freebie; 3) They’re transactional to the point where they won’t look at me or speak to me, holding out cash while staring at their shoes like I’m a drug vending machine and not the guy who used to sit next to them in that easy-ass elective about dinosaurs. Kelly doesn’t do any of that. She treats me like a friend who’s come to visit. She offers me a glass of water or a beer, which I always accept – any excuse to stay longer. Sometimes we’ll chat for twenty minutes before I even bring out the coke.

She was also in my English class freshman year and was the only person who didn’t just agree with the professor. She spoke up constantly, saying some borderline rude shit while arguing with this tenured bald guy who has won, like, awards for how well he understands other people’s books. But the points she made were always backed by the text and eloquent, so Professor Conrad could only clench his ass and say That’s a very interesting interpretation, Kelly.

Once I have cash in hand, I zip up my bag, give her a little wave and say Until next time, and she says Until then, and then I’m out the door. Once I leave, all I can do is hope she’s got a real bender planned or is in a generous mood so she runs out of coke faster and I can come back sooner.

THE FIRST TIME I PICKED UP, right before the start of junior year, I was terrified. I got connected with the supplier by the old campus coke dealer, who graduated last spring and got a job in tech sales. I wasn’t like his protégé or anything, but I asked him questions about dealing whenever he sold to my roommates, and once we ran into each other in the financial aid office and made eye contact like You too? Then, a few days before the end of my sophomore year, at some house party, he walked up to me and said I can give you the keys to the fucking castle, the whole phrase leaving his mouth in one long, slurred syllable. If you want them. He looked so serious, like a TV dad letting his teenage son drive the family car for the first time. I said I want them.

The supplier’s house was a ten minute drive from campus, and that first time I assumed I was about to pull up to some rundown house with broken windows, and I’d knock on the door and some skinny-but-strong dude with a bunch of weird tattoos would answer, and he’d lead me inside, and we’d walk past a bunch of burned-out, high-as-fuck girls laying all over the place like torn-up furniture, and he’d keep calling me a racial slur for a race neither of us were a part of, and the whole time I’d be jumping at every sound until I could pay him and leave. But it wasn’t like that. My supplier is a chubby white guy a few years older than me with a bad beard and a new but not-so-nice townhouse. That first time, he opened the door wearing gym shorts and a logoed polo shirt for the cell phone store he worked at. His nametag was still dangling from the polo. Eric. He dapped me up, we made some small talk, then I was on my way.

Now when I pick up, I usually kick it for a bit, play a game of FIFA or something. But Eric is too good at FIFA for it to ever be fun. He’ll beat me like six-zero, talking shit the whole time, and at the end of the game I’ll be making excuses, saying If Neymar hadn’t missed that wide open goal I could have won, with Eric just laughing and waving his hand in front of his nose like Pee-yew.

I KNOW IF I EVER GET FED UP WITH SELLING COKE, I can work at the campus store again. Earn my money folding shirts in the backroom and ringing up condoms for freshmen. The issue is, I’d need to work like fifty hours a week at their bullshit rates to match how much I’m making right now.

I’m not ungrateful or anything. I know I’m not poor-poor – the fact that I’m in college selling expensive drugs to spoiled kids is proof of that. Plus, I chose this, picked the liberal arts school that, even with my scholarship, wasn’t affordable considering I was getting zero help from my dad and had no savings. I decided to attend this not-even-that-impressive private university over going to community college or working for my dad at his construction firm. I’m not sure if this decision was ego or a fucked-up kind of self-preservation, but it made it so that for the first two years of school, even working all the time at the fucking campus store, I could barely afford all the shit I needed, let alone any of the shit I wanted. I’m not obsessed with status or anything, but when everyone else goes to Mexico for spring break and you go chill for the week at your dad’s house and ignore him and be ignored by him while you play video games in your childhood bedroom, you notice.

The two jobs feel the same in my head, though: selling coke and working at the campus store. A way to make money, nothing more. Today, I’m the Coke Guy. Tomorrow, or soon enough that in the grand scheme it’ll seem like tomorrow, I’ll just be Me again.

Which reminds me of another reason I like Kelly. She makes me feel closer to the Me I know I am. The Me that’s in my head.

I’m normally quiet. Even with my friends I don’t say much. I sit and watch and laugh when I’m supposed to laugh – to the point where my friends say things like It’s a good thing you deal, because otherwise what the fuck would we keep you around for? which makes everyone crack up. Then the attention will turn to Sam for being fat or Andrew for having a retarded but kind of hot sister, which leads to more laughs. I’m not even sure I find this shit funny, but if I’m not laughing the jokes spin back to me. It’s better than it used to be, I guess, when they made fun of me for being on scholarship. The guys would take a dollar out of their wallet and flap it around, saying I’ll give you this if you grab me a beer. I know you need the money. Then they’d cackle while I walked to the fridge. I’d still take the dollar though – if they want to be stupid with their money, that’s their problem.

Sometimes I think I hate my roommates. Sometimes I’m sure they hate me, or they would if they bothered to think about it. They seem so comfortable just existing, coasting on their middling looks and bad jokes, treating our school like a playground while they wait to move back to their hometowns, where they’ll make stupid money doing whatever the fuck their dad does.

It does scare me that in high school all I could think about was how much I wanted to get out, to escape my druggie friends and dad and shitty life, and now that I’m in college I feel the same way – that this is something to endure until I reach the next, better part of the story. What if there is no better part, though? What if all I’m ever trying to do is escape?

With Kelly, I don’t feel like that. With Kelly, I never run out of things to say. I tell jokes and say all the shit that’s in my head but never leaves my mouth. Not that I’m a chatterer, but I’m engaged. Part of it. When she finally checks her phone and says Oh shit, I got class in 20 minutes, I know she isn’t just trying to get me out the door. Only then do I unzip my backpack and say The usual?

I’M GOING TO ASK OUT KELLY. I decide in bed, not able to sleep, thinking about fucking her and laying on the couch with her and introducing her to all my stupid friends as my girlfriend, feeling trapped by this image of my fingers sitting gently on her wrist. I’m not going to be an asshole about it, though. None of that bullshit where I invite her to a party and try to hook up with her at like 2 AM when we’re both hammered and coked out. I’m going to ask her on a date. Dinner.

I’ve got a vision of how it’ll play out. I’ll ask her to dinner, real casual, and she’ll say yes with a Why the fuck not? grin, thinking it’ll be a free meal and a good story. I’ll meet her at her place wearing a button-up, and we’ll walk into town and I’ll buy her sushi. Maybe we’ll get beer or ice cream after. I’ll say a bunch of funny shit and I’ll give her compliments, but not stupid ones like You’re so hot. Unique, thoughtful shit, like how I like her earrings or something. Then, when we’re walking back, she’ll be surprised by how much fun we had and how much she likes me, but she doesn’t fuck on the first date, so she’ll start to feel apprehensive as we approach the part of the night where I inevitably try to fuck her and she has to politely but firmly turn me down. Except I’m not even going to make a move. I’m just going to walk her to her door and give her one kiss on the lips, the kind of kiss that lingers for just a second and feels like a warm-up for other, wetter kisses, but that’ll be the only one, and then I’ll take her hand and give it one quick squeeze before walking away, and I’ll wave behind me without looking back, and she’ll watch me go with the kiss still on her lips and the pressure of my hand fading from her palm and she’ll be thinking about all the charming shit I said at dinner and how nice I cleaned up and she’ll think, Wait what the fuck.

I don’t know how to ask her, though. I won’t do it over text. Our entire text history is her saying You free? and me giving her a time frame and saying That okay? and her saying That’s okay, and then me texting her like an hour later saying I’m outside, because her place has a gate she needs to buzz me through. I can’t ask her out when I’m selling to her either, for obvious reasons. The problem is that’s the only time I see her. So where does that leave me?

AFTER ANOTHER WEEK OF THINKING ABOUT KELLY so often it starts to piss me off – her sitting crisscross-applesauce with her long, skinny legs right in the centre of my brain – I decide that the next time I see her, as long as I’m not selling to her and she’s not with a bunch of other girls, I’ll ask her out. I can’t wait any longer.

I make this decision and then, boom, the next day at lunchtime Kelly is sitting alone on the far side of the student lounge with a smoothie. I came in to get some Panda Express, but the second I see her it feels like my stomach has been crumpled up like a piece of paper. Plus, I know if I dawdle I’m going to pussy out, so I walk right up to her table and say Hi, Kelly. She looks up. Smiles. Hi.

I try to smile normal, which definitely means I’m smiling weird, like I’m saying Cheese for a canned family photo. My brain freezes. I’ve practiced this moment five thousand fucking times in my head and even a few times in the mirror when I was positive my roommates weren’t home, but now that I’m here and she’s looking at me, waiting patiently to hear whatever the fuck her drug dealer needs to tell her on a Tuesday at noon, I’m stuck.

This is taking too long. She’s starting to look uneasy, like I’m about to say something she doesn’t want to hear.

Speak. Talk. Now.

I’m finally able to push the words out, ejecting them like a too-big chunk of food that was lodged in my throat. Do you think I could take you out? Like, on a date. Can I take you on a date?

Kelly frowns. Not a big frown of judgement or the fake frown of a kid’s movie witch. A tiny flicker of a frown, the kind that looks involuntary. A frown not aimed at me, but at herself. A frown that says What did I do to encourage this?

Then her face goes flat before switching to a forced smile. No, thank you, she says. That’s very sweet though. Then she adds, I’m not really dating right now.

Hey, no worries, I say. I get it. I get it. You can still hit me up to pick up, though. You can definitely still hit me up to pick up. Then I turn and walk away before either of us can say anything else.

WALKING AWAY FROM KELLY’S TABLE, fighting the urge to look back, I was certain that would be our final interaction, like, ever. That I’d see her on campus from time-to-time, but she’d avert her eyes when she noticed me, only peeking up at the last moment to see if I was looking at her. That she’d tell her friends I asked her out and they’d tell their friends and, since my whole client list is friends or friends of friends, soon everyone would know and would either razz me or give me pitying looks like, Dude, what? That with an indecisive thumb and half-closed eyes Kelly would delete my number and start buying coke from Carl, whose shit sucks and who is a creep.

Five days later, her name appears on my phone. One new text message from Kelly. I’m in class and I jump a little when I see her name, like a spider crawled across my desk. The person sitting next to me looks over, confused and a little pissed-off.

Moving too quick, brain exploding, I try and fail to input my passcode twice before I finally get it right. My phone opens with a click.

Kelly, who I’d already mourned for, who I was certain had become past tense. Kelly, who made me feel like more than just my base descriptors – shy, poor, drug dealer – and then, with her rejection, made me feel exactly like that. Kelly.

I open my messenger app, ready for anger or confessions of love or a whole bundle of confused emotions and maybe an invitation to meet up and just talk it over.

I click her name. The text appears.

You free?