My Straightedge Prince: Chapter 1
Illustrations by Jana Surkova
Cleo and Adriana are co-dependent roommates who spend their days drinking enough to enjoy swiping on Tinder for hours on end. Their friendship begins to waver when Cleo begins to date Adriana’s former co-worker Paul—a straight-edge vegan—whilst simultaneously trying to expunge a DUI from her record before applying to graduate school.
Disclaimer: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
On this summer morning, Cleo, an out-patient consultant at a gerontology clinic, spent 45 minutes explaining to a patient with a hiatal hernia that she had to eat fewer crackers in order to lose 30 pounds in the next six weeks because she was too fat to have a safe transthoracic repair. Leading a sedentary lifestyle on two and a half boxes of crackers a day creates excess abdominal fat. If a body has too much abdominal fat enveloping its organs, the surgeon cannot slice into the back, which allows the surgeon necessary access to the esophagus, stomach, and diaphragm, Cleo explained.
We would like you to lose 33.4 pounds in preparation for your surgery; you will have a follow up visit in 45 days to reassess your surgical candidacy, said Cleo, well-rehearsed. The cracker lady heard the young, gaunt woman saying, You need to lose 1/6 of your body weight in six weeks in order to have surgery without complications; get fucked, ma’am.
Perhaps take a daily walk, Cleo gently suggested. Perhaps eat more vegetables and cut simple carbs. Put three crackers in a tupperware and fill another with a salad. Try celery, it’s also crunchy. The cracker lady, obesely sniffling, shoulders rippling, explained that if she went on a walk, she’d just double her cracker sleeve intake. Cleo took a deep breath and imagined Mrs. Crackers’ carceral walk-in pantry; three walls of green Keebler Club boxes neatly arranged side by side. The Keebler elf shrine pantry was the only orderly part of the kitchen; the rest was overflowing green cardboard, glossed with the baseline crumb residue more commonly associated with the communal housing of twenty-something men.
But Mrs. Crackers insisted that she couldn’t cut the crackers, they were all consuming. I understand, said Cleo to the patient. I love ice cream so much, all I want to do when I get home is sit down and eat a pint. But I know I can’t do that, so I have just one spoonful after dinner to sate the craving. The patient looked at Cleo, her lip quivering. You think I can eat just one cracker? she sobbed. Big and fat drippy tears unsmoothly moved down the wrinkly slip-n-slide of the patient’s face.
A better example would’ve been Cleo’s shandy habit, or her Tinder habit better yet. Ice cream wasn’t a problem for Cleo, not even a little. Working in healthcare, especially healthcare with olds, had taught Cleo to be careful with what she put in her body in a food kind of way: edamame beans, Omega-3s, kefir. Her roommate, Adriana, had once commented that if it weren’t for all the shandies and skeezy dick she put into her body, Cleo would be a certified body fascist.
Like when Cleo after-hours dicked her orgo TA in one of the negative pressure labs before her final. Or the morning she felt a sting on her tit after a blacked-out tryst with a dental student, looked down and found part of her right nipple was missing. The absent-minded swiping had replaced the skeezy dick, which Cleo wanted to understand as an uptick in standards. In any case, professionalism mattered—especially if she wanted rec letters from her superiors for her Masters in Health Administration apps—so ice cream it was.
Cleo spent every moment she wasn’t at work in Adriana’s air-conditioned room. The two girls sat for hours, backs against a propped up mound of pillows, phones plugged into outlets on either side of the bed. In sync, they swiped left, they swiped right, they swiped left again, and again, and again, sharing a near-lukewarm shandy. Every couple minutes, one of them would giggle and the other would cackle in response, turning their screen to the other for review.
Here’s one, Cleo offered. Cody, she read, age 27; brimmed straw hat, sausage-casing-skinny black skinny jeans, ‘09 handlebar mustache in ‘19 (yikes). “Comedy guy slash food dude slash cheese boy. Mainly looking for casual kisses and lil snugaroos. Might cook for u if u r nice [smiling purple devil emoji].” Ew, what a chotch.
Zach lists his job as “Zach of all trades,” Adriana said, tipping her phone towards Cleo. Eater of fancy cheese. Rider of bikes. Runner of runs. Reader of books. Taster of whiskeys, Adriana recited. But is he actually kinda hot? Maybe; swipe right.
On nights cool enough to go outside without their feet sliding out of their tart-smelling summer mules, the girls walked down the street to Bar Bar. Cleo ordered a gin and tonic while Adriana laid claim to the corner patio table with the wooden benches. Adriana invariably pointed out that they had many potential suitors; why did neither of them ever pull the trigger and go on a date? On this night, Cleo responded: Well, what are the chances we’ll both find normal dates on the same night?Clicking the lighter for a cigarette she didn’t have, Adriana sat, pensively. This was the most complex question she’d considered in days. Adriana didn’t work consistently. She’d been temping a few days a week after being fired from her job as a calendar editor at an alt-weekly months before. The editor-in-chief told her it wasn’t “the right environment” for her. Not wrong, thought the playwright Adriana, who worked at the increasingly irrelevant paper for the comp tickets. When Adriana got fired she told Cleo it was probably because the EIC was in the midst of divorcing his wife, an actress. Now, despite—or maybe because—she didn’t have a full-time job, Adriana kept her AC unit on at all times. The cool air was running up their electricity bill. Be reasonable, Cleo wanted to say to Adriana, only turn it on during the day if it’s mind-numbingly hot or just get an office job for the sole purpose of funding the air-conditioning.
Rarely did Cleo have stimulus such as Mrs. Crackers at work. Usually, her sole entertainment came from Adriana sending her missives, mostly screenshots of the men Cleo wasn’t there to see. At the end of the day, the app boys morphed into the business men on the streetcar. Cleo would stare at their slacks, imagining the men stepping off the streetcar one by one, the stale and oppressive summer air violently smacking the flaccid, dangling penises through their slacks. She texted Adriana,
wyd tonite u want to get dinner?
no i cant
im sussing out a potential nite-boy.
maybe u should, too
What would Cleo actually do? Maybe update her MHA application spreadsheet. Maybe get sweaty while cleaning her room. Maybe feel bad for herself because somehow Adriana was managing to have more of a life than her.
idk everyone a loser
just go w/ the first person u match
When Cleo got home to an Adriana-less house, she dropped her bag and used her right foot to press down the ankle of her left shoe and slide them off. Maybe Adriana was right, maybe she should go out with the first match of the night. Paul popped up. Paul, 31, looked familiar. She swiped through his images: he was cute, though he sported a different style of facial hair in every picture. In one selfie, a beanie rolled up a bit too much, his ears exposed. Another showed him standing up, lanky and wearing black, floral-patterned Crocs. The third a picture of him in a library, wearing a crewneck that said “LOANS” and a baseball cap with some university’s red and blue “M” on it. His “work history” line on the app cited the same alt-weekly Adriana had worked at, and following that, his bio read, “washed-up sXe vegan lookin’ 4 luv [hotdog emoji].” Cleo swiped right. It’s a match! her phone dinged.
This was it then, this was her first match of the night, her evening suitor, as per Adriana’s suggestion. Cleo messaged. He messaged back, they did know each other and did she want to go to a cafe-cum-bar? They settled to meet up in an hour and a half. Cleo splashed water on her sweaty face and then opted to use actual face wash and re-apply deodorant. As she redid her make-up, Cleo finished an already-opened shandy from the fridge.
The next day, Cleo laid in Adriana’s air-conditioning and told her of the date. I guess we just, like, really clicked, Cleo explained. Not like all the other abject losers on Tinder. Paul told Cleo about his days in a semi-successful hardcore band and told Cleo about some tape he wanted to buy where the frontman of an experimental noise-pop band drunkenly recorded an album “making of.” Such were things Cleo knew nothing about, but he didn’t talk about them in the way college radio boys might and he laughed at her imagined description of the cracker lady’s kitchen. Plus he didn’t ask why I wanted to do an MHA instead of “just going to med school” so maybe I should be in love with him, she concluded.
I mean, it sounds kind of like a normal date with a boy who has baseline social competency, Adriana said before adding, but yeah, Paul is chill, one of my favorite co-workers, so as to not sound so patronizing. Adriana had never seriously considered hooking up with him because the vegan thing and the not drinking thing were too much for her. Her own date last night had been a bust. Zach of all trades besides eating pussy, am I right? Anyway, don’t go ditching me for Paul every night this summer. I’ll be lonely without you, Adriana said. She wouldn’t be one of those girls, Cleo assured Adriana.
Note: There is a typo in the printed excerpt of this piece that shows up in our 2nd Issue, as the name of Cleo’s boyfriend Paul was originally Jason. This error has since been amended in the online publication. Sorry, Paul! <3