Chapter 1
IF YOU ASKED MY EX GIRLFRIENDS, they would probably tell you that I’m a sociopath. It’s not exactly a title I’m proud of, or plan to brag about. To be a sociopath, you have to have a lack of emotions and remorse. Going on that definition, I’m basically the opposite of a sociopath.
I feel. I feel a lot, actually. Something that my ex girlfriends don’t know is that I loved all of them once. The love was not faked, the happiness not either. I’m unable to fake that kind of love. I know they get confused on how I can turn off those emotions so quickly, how I’m able to claim that the last few months were a complete lie. How I’m able to break their hearts without a look back.
The truth is: I don’t like when they feel pain. In fact, that’s the entire reason I do what I do. Sometimes, when I’m falling in love, I don’t pay attention to what I could be doing to them. Sometimes I hope that they are immune to me, to my charms. I fool myself into believing that they will feel nothing for me. But the truth is, they always do.
That’s not me sucking my own dick or anything. It’s just a complete, undeniable fact. Undeniable fact is that I—Elliot Adonis Andersson—am a lady’s man. Is it better if I admit it? Or would it be better if I just pretend that I’m a good guy?
Clearly, I’m not a good guy. If I was a good guy, I wouldn’t go after these girls in the first place. I would leave them alone, because subconsciously I know they will always fall for me. And if I do really feel as much as I just claimed to have, I would make sure to limit the amount of pain I give out.
But really, it’s easier to give it out than to take it.
If I kept track of how many people hated me, I would probably have enough material for a novel. Nothing huge—not like a Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix equivalent. More like a Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A sweet, simple 223 pages. Complete with tension building and a climax and then the end, where the characters find peace. They know it’s not the end, but there’s that moment of bliss where they know they are happy.
I try not to relate my entire life to the Harry Potter series. Especially because I’m a 23 year old man, and those books are aimed towards younger crowds. I know there are those people who grow up to get sleeves full of tattoos dedicated to the saga. It changes people. I get that shit. It changed me, too, when I was a child. But at some point, we have to grow up.
Anyway, as I was saying, people hate me. The first person who hated me was probably Maggie Thurster in fourth grade. She had a mousy face, wore glasses and had a bit of a limp. She had a crush on me, I guess, and for some reason her friends convinced her that I could have had something in return. So at recess, she came up to me with a daffodil she picked from the ground and held it out to me with a hopeful look. It would have been easy for me to grab it and say thanks, but I was a child. And influenced by the legend, Draco Malfoy himself, I grabbed the daffodil and flicked it to the floor. Her brown eyes fell, as she looked at me with devastation in her eyes. Maggie’s heart was held out for me to do my bidding—and I loved the feeling. I then stepped on the daffodil and snickered as she ran away. After that, I went around and called her “Maggie Fister”. My older brother, Collin, had told me the term. Informing the other dudes of the term and the new nickname caused a tight knit group of assholes that would follow throughout all of high school.
Yeah, sure, it’s fucked up. I know that now, alright? A lot more than I did then. But regardless of how messed up it was, that’s where it started. Where I discovered the game, where I finally understood what Collin had explained to me all those years. He lost his virginity at fourteen years old, solely to be more effective in what he believed would put him ahead. It might be fucked up that he told an seven year old about this breaking of females, but that’s when our father taught him. Before he left, of course.
I don’t like Collin. Not by any means. But he is my brother, and I have to admit our similarities. We have the same ruffled brown hair that came from our father, the same hazel eyes that came from our mother. We both stand tall at around six feet, and every day the both of us spend at the gym. Standing next to each other, no one would doubt our familial relation, regardless of the six year difference.
He’s an asshole. Not that I’m not, I’ll admit that, but somehow he’s worse. I mean, the dude is twenty nine years old and still in the game. He had a girlfriend, once, had her for about two years. I believe he cheated on her the entire time, but I was never able to prove it. But try I did. The man’s an expert deceiver, though, and he’s been doing it six years longer than I have.
But sometimes we come together. We are brothers, after all. Usually once a month we co-plan a party, hosting it at our mother’s apartment when she’s on a business trip. The Andersson parties are a decently big deal, enough that people come up to us when the month doesn’t work for us. The set up is always the same—a keg in the backyard, vodka and juice and whatever else in the kitchen. We also keep a idiotic cup system, where each cup signifies a different relationship status. Red is single, purple is taken, orange is complicated, green is married. It’s really for Collin and I to know who we would have the most luck with. Along with the drinks, we move the furniture to the edges of the room and take the living room TV into mom’s room and lock the door. Since we don’t stay at our house, we don’t care about people fucking on our beds. Mom doesn’t deserve that shit.
The early people usually come around ten, but the party really starts around eleven. There are usually around three hundred people that come, give or take fifty. There are people littered on the couches, the upstairs, the yard. Everywhere you turn there’s someone to see, sometimes familiar and other times not. I glance at my watch to see the time: 12:15. The night is less than half way over, I know that much. The last person usually leaves around three, and that’s not counting the people who fall asleep on our floors. At nine in the morning we kick them all out and Collin and I clean up the mess, finishing at eleven. Just in time for mom to come home at twelve.
Another undeniable fact: Collin is always trying to be better than me. I couldn’t explain why, or what childhood trauma caused him to do this, but I know that it began when we were young. I learned to never tell him when I liked a girl, because he would go after her just to prove he could. Once we both became adults and were able to go after the same people, it got a lot worse. He would specifically become friends with the girls who he knew I was once with, just to hear what they had to say about me. He would then use them against me, bringing them up at family dinners or using them to keep his reputation as the good brother. He’s an asshole.
So far, much to my own surprise, he has not went after the girl I’m currently messing around with. Katie Bradley is a girl with caramel colored skin, washed out pink hair, a pretty face, and a pessimistic view on love. She seemed like the kind of effortless fling that I was looking for, something that I wasn’t worried would eventually turn into her looking at me for love. To be fair, I’ve been hiding it pretty well. We only hook up after most people have gone to sleep, so no one sees her come or go. It’s been about two months since we began, and no emotions have become a problem yet. I guess I’m hopeful they never will.
But, God, is she sexy. She wears tight clothing most of the time because she knows her figure is worth flaunting. Coming into our apartment, she wears a tight grey dress that makes me want to take her back to my childhood bedroom and see how it looks on the floor. She catches my eye from across the lawn and gives me a soft smile. I look away. I’m not up for that bullshit tonight.
My eyes search the crowd for someone of interest, but find Collin. His eyes catch mine, a small smirk on his lips. He’s talking to Naomi Warner, which is funny — I never really took Collin as a rebound type of guy, especially not for someone who’s as mediocre as Naomi. She’s hot, don’t get me wrong, but I already had her three months ago. Either Collin has no idea that he’s speaking with my sloppy seconds, he doesn’t care, or he’s just there to prove that he can do it better than I can. Regardless of the reasoning, I can’t bring myself to care.
I look away from them, also, trying to find someone in the crowd of people that I don’t have history with. The first person I find is Macy Acosta, dancing wildly in the crowd. She moved in the same apartment complex that Collin and I live in, with no correlation at all. In fact, Macy is probably the most severely different person compared to my family. She moved in with a close friend of hers, a cool dude named Harry Miller. He never comes to these kinds of things, though, so she usually comes alone. She’s one of the only woman I’ve ever met that doesn’t shave her legs, and she also hasn’t worn a bra once in the year that I’ve known her. Her entire existence is basically the opposite of what my own parents taught me. While hers probably taught her happiness and loving thyself, my parents taught me to get rid of any qualities that I didn’t like about myself. Which was, unfortunately, too much.
Macy is dancing with two people that I don’t recognize. I’m not one of those people who give a shit if I don’t know someone in my house, especially if they’re women. The first one, who is dancing awkwardly in the trio, is average height with curly blonde hair. She is skinny, and looks young in the way that she could be a model and I wouldn’t know. Her bleach blonde hair and large blue eyes make her look more doll-like than human. She seems awkward and out of place between the two girls dancing wildly, which brings my eyes to the last girl in the circle.
She is dancing similarly to how Macy is—free, wild—but much more. While Macy is not paying attention to the movements she makes, the new girl has rhythm to her bones. She dances as if the song was made for her, moving her abundance of brown hair out of her face when too much gets into her line of vision. She wears hardly any makeup, and she wears a pair of jeans and an extremely hideous reindeer sweater. I’m talking one of those, press the nose and it’ll light up kind of sweaters. Besides the out of place sweater at a party, she’s beautiful in a way that isn’t normally conditional. She wouldn’t stop rooms, like the blonde girl would, but the way she presents herself is fascinating.
“Already looking after new victims?” My brother’s voice appears, diminishing the dense thoughts that were clouding my mind. I glance over at him, rolling my eyes.
“So what if I was?” The best way to react to Collin is to play along with him. Since he’s older, he will think he has the control in the relationship. It’s vital for me to show that he doesn’t affect me. It’s vital to show that nothing affects me. Something our father taught both of us was to never let someone have power over you.
“The blonde is Ellie,” he explains to me. “She’s mine.”
He probably isn’t even that interested in her, he probably just thinks that I would be. Given my track record, I see why he would think that. Women are beautiful. I—like most males—am drawn to the most attractive of the lot. And sure, Ellie is beautiful. But I don’t have the time, nor the energy for a competition with him.
Collin is still looking at me, awaiting my reaction. The good thing about him being a shit brother is that he doesn’t know the difference from when I am faking a reaction and when I am being insincere. He spent his whole life trying to be the alpha that he didn’t even notice my emotions beginning to harden and my act beginning to surface.
I pat him on the shoulder. “All yours, man.” He raises his eyebrows at me, trying to search my face for tells of lying. But he’ll never know, just as I’ll never tell him. I turn from him, and push my way through the crowd. I’m not surprised that he doesn’t try to follow, there would be no reason for him to. I make my way to the kitchen, miraculously mostly empty. I haven’t drank for about six months, slowing down after my fifth hospital visit of the year, and I’m not planning on restarting tonight. But as an Andersson brother, I have a reputation to uphold. I can’t be seen as the less than. Instinctively my hand reaches for the orange cup—complicated—but ultimately settle with the single red cup. My life would be so much easier if I just didn’t use the red cup. If I just lied about my relationship status to keep drunk party girls away from me, it would keep both me and them in check.
At the next table, I begin to fill up my cup with coke. I put a few drops of rum just to make it smell like alcohol, because I wouldn’t ever put it past Collin to smell my drink.
Just as I’m about to leave, someone comes up to the table next to me. I glance up and find that it’s the girl from before, the dancer. She holds a green cup—engaged, which is odd, because hardly anyone ever uses the green cups—and proceeds to fill up half of her cup with vodka. Her sweater is even uglier up close. I am unable to stop myself from smiling and asking, “Rough night?”
The girl looks up for a beat and then back down to her drink. “Rough life.”
I don’t know why, but I want to talk to her. More out of curiosity than anything else. “Fight with your husband?”
She quickly turns to me, confusion etched on her features. Her cheeks are as pink as her lips. “What?” The girl looks behind me to find the table full of plastic cups, the system that we set up. Realization settles on her face. “Oh, right. I’m not married. I just picked the cup that would keep sweaty boys away from me most effectively.”
I laugh. I wonder if that means she’s in a relationship, or just unwilling to talk to men at parties. I wouldn’t mind her being the girl for tonight, if she was up to it. “I’m Eli, by the way.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I light up, raising my eyebrows at her and trying to press her for more. “Oh?”
She hums, pouring fruit punch into the rest of the cup. I drank like that once, but it never came from anywhere good. It came from my depression, my hatred for my family life and my hatred of myself. Once I stopped drinking, I was able to keep those feelings down a lot easier. The girl finally continues, “Quarterback douchebag who treats all women like objects and gave Kerry Lochlan an STD.”
My smile fades. “Oh.”
She winks, raises her green cup in a toast and then walks back into the crowd. At first, I’m unsure how to react. Usually girls know about the way I treat women, but it’s never really a deal breaker. I’m able to give someone enough attention to make them believe that I treat them differently, that I’m really just misunderstood, and they accept that truth. I shake my head, taking myself out of my head, and run after her. She’s already a good push through the crowd, but people move for me. When she finds that I followed her, she rolls her eyes. “First off, I’m twenty three now. It’s been five years since I’ve been the high school quarterback, so I don’t really think I should be judged by that.” She doesn’t look back and acknowledge me, but her chuckle proves that she is listening. “Second, I didn’t give Kerry Lochlan a STD. She was just pissed that I had sex with her mom.”
She snorts, continuing to look ahead. “You’re really helping your case there, quarterback.” There’s a beat where neither of us say a thing, until she abruptly stops and turns to face me. I stop in my path, surprised that she turned so soon. “It’s really not my business. Give whoever you want an STD.”
Not the take-away I planned from this conversation, but it seems like the only one I’ll get. Before I can say anything else, she puts the cup to her lips and chugs around half of the liquid that’s in her cup. Without a wince, without a second look. She wipes the excess liquid on the sleeve of her sweater. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
She continues her walk out, and this time I don’t follow her. I know when a girl’s not into me, and I’m not the kind of dude to lick my wounds. She’s probably in a relationship or fucking some other dude, and it’s not my business to intrude on that. I did wish I got her name, though.
Shaking my head with a slight smile on my lips, I retreat back to the wall to search for someone else. Within seconds, I catch Katie’s glance, her turning from the group of people she was with to look into my eyes. Her red lips turn to a smirk, giving me a signal to something I’ve waited for the whole night. She turns away, wishes her friends a good night, and leaves out the front door. She knows just as much as anyone else that I don’t like anyone seeing my childhood room—a small amount of vulnerability that I don’t like to share with anyone. She’ll meet me outside, and we’ll walk to her apartment complex a few blocks over. We’d have sex—simple, easy. Repetitive. At some point, probably soon, I’ll get bored with doing this. Then I’ll move on to the next chick and do the same shit. That’s the cycle. That’s what it’s been since I was fourteen. To change it now would be idiotic.
I look around to find Collin, drunkenly making out with a girl (not Naomi Warner), and figure he won’t miss my absence. I’ll be back in the morning to help clean up, that’s all he cares about. I won’t get any texts tonight to make sure I’m fine, or ask where I am at all. Not that I would do so for him. Turning away from him, I follow the path Katie laid out for me. A sneaky smile lingers on my lips.
