Kyle || Applebee's Beatdown

Friday night. Applebee's. Kyle's table is a graveyard of empty Triple Dipper baskets, Bud Light bottles, and margarita glasses, the sticky salt-rimmed kind with little paper umbrellas that Chip keeps stabbing into Rex's mozzarella sticks for no reason anyone's asked about.

"—and I'm TELLING you," Chip is saying, in that prep-school whine that could curdle milk at twenty paces, "my yacht guy said the hull was fine. The Coast Guard guy was being a total drama queen about it."

"You SANK it, dude," Rex crows, slapping the table hard enough to rattle the ketchup. "You sank a whole-ass boat. That's like—that's the Titanic, bro. You're the Titanic."

"The Titanic was an accident. I was sailing."

Kyle isn't listening. Kyle is four margaritas and two Bud Lights deep, one arm slung along the back of the booth, watching the Celtics game on the mounted TV with the focused squint of a man whose brain is buffering. His Hawaiian shirt—pink flamingos on a background of pinker flamingos—is unbuttoned one button too far, and every time he shifts, the smell of Polo Red and cheap beer radiates off him like heat off asphalt.

At the end of the table, Toby stirs the ice in a Coke he's been nursing for two hours, making himself as flat against the vinyl as a person can physically be.

"DANA," Kyle bellows, catching their waitress by the drinks station. "Dana. Hey. Dana." He pounds the table in a slow rhythm, like directing a flight crew. "Round of margarite-itas. And the—the little egg roll guys. The crispy ones."

"Kyle, that's your third warning," Dana says, not stopping. "One more noise complaint and I'm cutting you off."

"You're doing amazing, Dana. Everybody loves you." He gives her two thumbs up. She's already gone.

Best Applebee's in the state. No contest.

It's somewhere between Rex screaming about a twelve-year-old named xX_Sn1perDaddy420 ruining his Fortnite match and Chip attempting a toast to "winners, bros, and the troops" that Kyle slides out of the booth and stands on it, arms wide, commanding the room like a general.

"APPLEBEE'S! Who wants to see a guy chug a—"

And that's when Kyle notices someone sitting alone two tables over, past the dessert case glow and the crush of Friday-night families. Someone quietly enjoying an appetizer, minding their own business.

And Kyle would swear—he would swear on his Jeep—the person just looked over here. Just smirked. Right at him. At the exact moment Kyle was standing on a booth.

Rex leans across the table, eyes going wide with drunk delight. "Ohhh no. Bro. Bro. That person's been eyeballing you since margarita number two. I've been counting."

"They're laughing at your shirt," Chip adds helpfully, umbrella spear still in hand.

"This is a TWO HUNDRED DOLLAR shirt, Chip." Kyle's face is going red in blotches, ears first. The room tilts a little and he corrects against the booth back. Everybody's looking. The whole restaurant is looking at them laughing at me. Somewhere in the fog, a distant sensible thought points out that the person might be laughing at their phone, at literally anything, at a text from anyone on planet Earth. The sensible thought gets shoved in a locker.

"Bro. Bro. Rex. Hold my beer." Rex takes the bottle he wasn't holding. Rex already has his phone out, filming, grinning like a Texas jack-o'-lantern.

Kyle pushes off the booth and crosses the dining room in a beeline that's only mostly straight, sneakers squeaking and sticking on the syrup-tile, past a family of four, past the dessert case, until he's planted at the end of the person's table, chest out, shoulders squared, looming with all five-foot-eleven of Friday night confidence. Beer and Polo Red roll off him in waves.

He plants one palm flat on the table with a dull thunk that rattles the person's plate and drink.

"'Sup," Kyle slurs, chin dipped, eyes narrowed to slits. "You got a problem, bro? Huh? You been lookin' over at my table all night, laughin' and—smirkin' and stuff. So like. Say it to my face, dude. You think somethin's funny? I will end you, no problemo. Ninguno. Problemo. That's Spanish. For 'I'll wreck you.'"

The final point hit the floor with a slap that echoed through the gym, and the scoreboard glowed its verdict: 25-21. Kyle didn't even wait for the ref's hand to go up. He was already airborne, fist punching at nothing, jersey flapping around his torso as he came down and immediately ripped the hem of it up to wipe his entire face like a towel.

"LET'S GO! LET'S GO!" He spun in a circle, arms out like he was conducting an orchestra of his own greatness. "Did you SEE that, bro?! Back row! BACK ROW DIG! I was like—" he dropped into a low crouch, palms out, then popped back up and spiked the air, "—BOOM. Off the ceiling. Nasty. NASTY."

Chip jogged over, still catching his breath, ponytail-swept hair stuck to his forehead. "You got lucky on that touch, mate, it was going out."

"Lucky? LUCKY?!" Kyle grabbed the front of Chip's jersey and shook him. "Bro, I don't do lucky. I'm the whole reason we won. Eighteen kills. EIGHTEEN. I'm basically carrying this entire program on my back. The school should pay me. Like, actual money. Scholarships are free money, right? Somebody should look into that for me."

Rex came sprinting in from the bench area, nearly tripping over the ball cart, and chest-bumped Kyle hard enough to knock him back a step. "AYYYY! That's my boy! That's my boy right there!"

Kyle threw both arms up and turned toward the stands, cupping his hands around his mouth. "YEAHHH! Who's got the camera?! This is going on the 'Tok! Rex! PHONE!" He struck a pose at the edge of the court — biceps flexed, jersey pulled taut across his chest, tongue out — while Rex fumbled his phone out and started filming.

"We just SMOKED State, baby!" Kyle yelled at the lens, walking backward toward the bleachers. "Post game rager at the house tonight, everybody's invited, bring your own beer, Toby's bringing the snacks 'cause he's our little— our little homework goblin. Love you, goblin!"

Man, I'm so sick at volleyball. Like genuinely. Somebody should study me.

He hopped up onto the first row of bleachers, sweat dripping off his jaw, scanning the crowd with that wide, self-satisfied grin, like the entire gym existed purely as his audience.

The frat house was at full throttle by eleven. Somebody had flipped the big living room TV on for the UFC fight, but nobody was really watching it — the sound was drowned out anyway by a speaker blasting something with too much bass, and the floor was already sticky in the way that suggested it would still be sticky next Tuesday. Rex was on the back balcony screaming at a Fortnite match on his phone. Toby stood near the snack table nursing the same solo cup he'd filled an hour ago. And Kyle was the life of everything, as usual — he'd shotgunned four beers in the kitchen, won beer pong with Chip, and taken his shirt off at one point for no reason anyone could determine.

"Yo, bro, watch this, watch this—" Kyle tried to bounce a ping pong ball off his own forehead into a cup, missed, and celebrated anyway. His cheeks were flushed red and his words had started sliding into each other somewhere around beer seven.

Then, over the crowd, the TV caught his eye.

The fight had gone to a commercial break. Instead of the usual beer ads, the screen filled with slow-motion footage of shivering dogs behind chain-link fences. A three-legged puppy. A golden retriever pressing its face against a cage. Piano music. In the arms of an angel...

Kyle stopped mid-sentence. His mouth was still open from whatever dumb thing he'd been saying.

"...bro."

He stared. The golden retriever looked directly into the camera. The voiceover said something about just nineteen dollars a month.

Kyle's eyes went glassy. He blinked hard, twice, and swiped the back of his hand across his face with the smooth subtlety of a man wiping sweat. "Yo, someone's — someone's vaping over here or some shit, my eyes—" His voice cracked on the word 'eyes.' He cleared his throat loudly, looked around to check if anyone had noticed, and no one had, which was somehow worse because it meant nobody could see him heroically NOT crying.

That dog's got no family, man. No family and three legs.

"I gotta — yo, I gotta take a piss," he announced to nobody in particular, and shoved through the crowd like a icebreaker ship, shoulders first, up the stairs.

His bedroom was dark and smelled like Polo Red and old beer. He didn't turn on the light. Instead he knelt down, fumbled under his bed with clumsy hands, and dragged out a worn, one-eared teddy bear with a faded ribbon neck — Sir Stuffington, veteran of twenty-two years of classified operations.

Kyle sat on the floor with his back against the bed frame, cracked open one of the beers he'd pocketed from the kitchen, and pulled the bear into his chest.

"They didn't— " he hiccupped, wiping his nose on his own forearm. "They didn't even show what happened to the golden retriever, Sir Stuffington. They just left him there. In the fence."

He took a long pull of beer, sniffling, the bass from the party thudding dully through the floor. His door, in his current state, had not been fully closed — it sat ajar, a strip of hallway light and muffled party noise leaking into the dark room.

"An' the three-legged one..." Kyle's voice wobbled dangerously. He buried his face into the bear's matted fur. "Don't look at me, bro. I'm fine. This is — I'm FINE."

.