Page 30 of Heartbreak Kings
Goddamn it, Carmody, you stupid son of a bitch.
He was acting up again, and this time, he seemed ready to foment a full-fledged rebellion. It didn’t just piss me off. It worried me.The guys are going to have to see this.
Unfortunately, it would have to wait for breakfast. I couldn’t just shake everyone out of bed at six in the morning because I couldn’t sleep.
I read through it again, having to convince myself that it was real. I didn’t know what kind of crazy Carmody was, but whatever his problem was besides just plain hating women, it was becoming our problem too.
I printed out the transcripts and started marking the pertinent bits with a highlighter. It was mostly Carmody’s statements that were the problem, but he was stirring up some other guys too. I did not understand why the same guys who hung out with me in high school would start listening to a spluttering, aging creep who wasn’t even a real member of the frat, but there was a lot about this situation I didn’t understand.
I skimmed through each page, marking a few sentences here, a paragraphs-long rant there. By the end, my back teeth hurt and the corner of my eye kept twitching. I couldn’t understand how this guy could hate Sabine this goddamn much when she was so smart, spirited, hot, and simply amazing. Except maybe that was the problem. She was all that, and Carmody didn’t have a chance with her. And he was one of those pricks who thought the world owed him a hot girlfriend and that any attractive woman who wouldn’t fall into his arms was insulting him. So, in Carmody’s eyes, she had to go down like the professor he wouldn’t leave alone.
I had met guys like that before, though I thought I had left them all behind in high school. Guys unpopular with women, who started hating them and then harassing them and causing them problems. Most of them would have had some success with a bath, a shave, and a few manners, but none of them wanted to make the effort. They just wanted life to be like porn: endless, no-commitment, high-end pussy without their having to do a damn thing to impress a woman or even make her comfortable around them. And when that didn’t manifest, they got salty as hell.
If women weren’t jumping on their dicks on demand, they were the enemy. No middle ground. No way of fixing it. No taking responsibility for their crusty-cumsock level of hygiene or their massive personality flaws. Women were to blame for the lack of sex in their lives, because women were bitches and deserved to be punished. As did men successful with them. Men like us. And that was the biggest problem. I had read the chats, expecting all his flipping out about Sabine. What I hadn’t expected was him being openly against the five of us. He was planning a mutiny.
That fucking turncoat.
I clenched my fists when I read Carmody’s words:
They had her over for dinner, guys. Dinner! Black tie and all!
I don’t know what they think they’re doing. They told us to trust them and not get in the way, but bringing her into our frat house and feeding her steak is not taking care of the problem. They said they wanted the bitch gone too, but this happens!
I think she’s just controlling them with her pussy.
Carmody could have written the book on toxic hate rhetoric, and the shit he was saying as he tried to stir up his fellow pledges against us reflected that. At one point, he used the word “femoid.” I would have laughed if I hadn’t wanted to punch him so fucking bad.
The world had been a better place before bottom-of-the-barrel dudes decided that hating women made up a political movement.Jesus Christ.
Maybe I should have expected this. I spent the most time with the first-years. I hung out with the pledges. The only one who expended anywhere near as much energy on our youngest members and wannabes was Marcus. And yeah, some of that crowd had ideas that the other Gentlemen didn’t totally agree with—like getting rid of Sabine. But we still took their wishes into account.
So why was Carmody doing his best to turn everyone against us?
My eyes narrowed on his words:
The Gentlemen need to be removed. We need new leadership.
“What, like you? You can’t even qualify as a member, no matter how many years you try. And they wrote the rules before we were born, you fuck,” I growled as I kept highlighting the most dangerous-sounding bits of his argument.
It was true. Carmody either couldn’t or wouldn’t adhere to requirements well enough to get in. Whether it was his chronic lateness, his missing pledge meetings, his botching any test we set for him, he came in dead last or close to it every time. Worse than that was his constant, stubborn demand that every pledging requirement be justified to him. He would argue against common-sense rules, like not filling up the common room with vape clouds or trying to take over the entertainment center when a bunch of us were watching something.
Last year, when I had joined, the dumb bastard had almost made it in. All he would have had to do was take his loyalty oath to the fraternity and he would have had his own room here and status as a first-year. But while the rest of us had sworn in, Carmody had disrupted everything by demanding to know why the oath was even necessary. Blake had given him an ultimatum: swear the oath, or don’t get in. Carmody had thrown a fit and stomped out. Another year failed.
Maybe that was why he hated us so much. If it wasn’t Sabine, it would be something else.Goddamn it, I wasn’t this much of a spoiled, contrary fuck even back when I was fifteen.
Fortunately, I had already been forced to deal with one maladjusted man-child a generation older than me. It was why I knew to watch Carmody more closely than the others. And now, James the pledge, who had only been deferred because he had gone out for surgery unexpectedly during rush, had made sure I knew just how bad it had gotten.
Too bad I couldn’t get the others to see it that way.
“This just sounds like Carmody’s usual drivel,” Blake concluded, tossing the sheaf of papers onto the table beside his empty breakfast plate. “I don’t see what’s especially troubling about it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Blake, I know you’re not a morning person, but think. The fucker was up all night reaching out to every pledge on our waiting list, both our deferrals, and every single first-year that got in. Trying to turn them against us. Not just Sabine, us. The guy’s trying to, well, I guess he’s trying for a coup.”
Nathaniel laughed, startling the shit out of me. “That buffoon couldn’t take over even if the charter allowed for it. Besides, I doubt that very many of them listened.”
“Enough are listening that it’s a problem,” I replied. His smirk faded, and he lifted an eyebrow, but I couldn’t tell if he was annoyed with me or genuinely considering the problem. The dude was like a fucking Vulcan.
“The fucker found out about the dinner with Sabine somehow and came up with this paranoid-ass story about her controlling us. And now he’s spitting it out at anyone he thinks will listen.”
