My Straightedge Prince: Chapter 2
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.
Cleo’s promise didn’t matter because later that week, her workbook arrived. Several months prior, in the early months of fall, Cleo had brought Adriana to her cousin’s wedding in South Carolina as a plus one. Her cousin was marrying a man at a former rice plantation which was now a golf course and venue. When Cleo invited Adriana, she warned that it was going to be gaudy and quite conservative. Plantation golf courses exist? That’s depraved, said Adriana, confirming her attendance.
The two drove seven hours south in Adriana’s brother’s car; for seven hours they played Fuck, Marry, Kill. The triads began concretely but grew experimental as the hours passed: Sylvia Plath but anytime she has sex or thinks about sex she recites “Daddy,” Gerard Way but he has really tiny ankles that could literally snap at any moment, and hypebeast Jonah Hill but there’s a thin layer of sweat on him at all times.
Add in some cheap, watery champagne that tastes like peach body-spray and replace the car with a golf cart, and you had the reception. After trying (and failing) to hunt for Cleo’s cousins on Tinder, the girls—having deemed their legs merely decorative—opted to experience the full horror of a plantation course via golf cart. Simultaneously underestimating the potency of the peachy elixir and overestimating her abilities as a driver, Cleo slid into the driver’s seat.
There was a reason Adriana had driven the seven hours to the Wickham Resort and it was that Cleo absolutely, undeniably sucked shit at driving. Did you know, the resort manager told Cleo, that you can get a DUI from drunk driving a golf cart? To expunge this golf cart DUI, Cleo’s new lawyer explained, she’d have to fill out Lifeskills II: Substance Abuse and Responsibility and do 40 hours of community service or begin going to church: those were the generous terms of the South Carolinian government.
The community service portion of her court mandate didn’t bother her—she’d finished it months ago. In fact, it let Cleo get out of work early a couple times and people always looked impressed when she mentioned she was volunteering with ESL kids. Plus, it could do double duty for her MHA apps. Cleo had exactly one month to finish the workbook and send it back to South Carolina to have it approved in time for her DUI to get expunged before her apps were due.
Cleo opened the 200 page workbook and thumbed through it. There were thirty “daily lessons” to complete: “Moving Through the Fear,” “Being Your Own Best Friend,” things like that. Peppered throughout the workbook was a little anthropomorphic car that offered nonsensical wisdom: “Bad drivers can become good drivers as soon as they want to” and “I don’t have any attitude, values, or behavioral problems. So who’s perfect?” The book espoused a framework called “the 500.” Apparently, people either lived above or below the 500. What divides people on the bottom from the top, the book explained, was “how they see themselves and others.” Are they proud or humble? Do they objectify or feel compassion? Cleo’s first activity was to list historical figures who she felt lived below and above 500. As she scrawled “Dick Cheney, Antonin Scalia, Ted Cruz” in her “Below 500” column, she chuckled. That would make a good Fuck, Marry, Kill, she thought. And then it dawned on her: some cop in South Carolina was going to have to approve all her answers. Her laughter faded as it dawned on her: this workbook was going to blow fields of dick.
From the kitchen, Cleo heard the front door slam and keys hit the console table and the thud of a bag on the floor. It was 6:30, which meant Adriana must have temped today. Adriana flounced into the kitchen, Look, she said. I’m a little lit already, so we should go out sooner.
Before Cleo had the chance to respond, Adriana monologued: OK, so I’m temping at this, like, online retailing startup and what gives–why don’t we all work at startups? All I had to do today was order stuff from a bunch of their sellers and have it delivered to their office and they kept praising me for being so “competent.” Like it’s hard to online shop quickly? But yeah, we went on their roof for drinks promptly at five and I’m a little sunburnt now, anyway, let’s go to Bar Bar. Cleo told Adriana she couldn’t, that she had to start the workbook.
Bullshit! Adriana exclaimed. You don’t have to do it today, it’s a golf cart DUI. As if to emphasize the absurdity of it all, Adriana pronounced DUI as though it were an actual word: dew-eee.
Dew-eee. Dewey. Cleo held the word in her mouth. Which way would she swipe on a Dewey? Probably left. It was one of those unfuckable names, like Carl or Jimmy. Before she could release the question from her mouth Adriana started talking again. You’re probably just trying to hang with Paul instead and pretending to care about music things.
I’ve listened to music. Cleo weakly lobbed her comeback at Adriana before heading to her room, workbook in tow.
An hour later, Cleo emerged and said fuck this, let’s drink but I still have to do the workbook. Alright, so are we doing a DUI workbook drinking game? Adriana asked, the irony of such a game replacing any latent frustration at Cleo.
The rules of the game were as follows:
Take a sip any time there was melodramatic language such as “living in decay” or the word “growth” appeared (if they were to drink whenever the word “goal” appeared, they would surely black-out).
Take a sip whenever a habit listed on one of the checklists applied to them. (Drink at the end of the day? Check. Drink on days you don’t go to work? Check. Drink to sustain intimate relationships? Sure.)
Take a gulp whenever a word inexplicably appeared in bold.
Chug for seven seconds when one of the anthropomorphic cars appeared.
Theatrically reciting the story of 19-year-old Tonya, who—brain “saturated” with cocaine—slammed her convertible into baby Shelley kept the girls satisfied for a few days, almost a full week. “Due to severe disfigurement—drink!—it was a closed-casket funeral.” Rather than a question about drug usage, the workbook asked: “What is the best way—drink!—to raise children?”
But for Adriana, the thrill mocking the discursive stylings of conservative, family-first propaganda quickly waned. Sure, the game was depraved, but she missed creating her own depravity. She wanted to return to her and Cleo’s harem of internet suitors. Weeks prior, Adriana said to Cleo that playing Tinder was the most creative output she’d had since getting fired. She hadn’t been writing anything; as calendar editor she was at least writing blurbs about plays. Now she couldn’t even do that, let alone work on her own scripts. She blamed it on a lack of liveness, without going to the theater she wasn’t invigorated or motivated to create. She surrendered, accepting that messaging boys on the app was as close to writing dialogue as she could currently get.
Cleo was desperate to finish the workbook, to erase the frankly stupid and fake DUI from her record and get on with her life, so much so that Paul had almost fully been replaced by the workbook, despite his frequent invitations to Cleo. It seemed weird, Cleo thought, to be going out with a straight-edge vegan while also turning her DUI workbook into a means of downing shandies. It feels dishonest, like if he finds out he’ll hate me and not want to see me again and I really do like him, Cleo tried to articulate.
Can we just stop talking about this? Adriana said, dismissing Cleo’s anxieties. You’re being a freak.
And so Cleo, slightly put off by Adriana’s lack of attention, texted Paul, who immediately agreed to go to the vegan ice cream shop. Over matcha coconut milk ice cream, Cleo did not disclose her golf cart DUI, instead apologizing and blaming her busy schedule on MHA applications and Adriana—not entirely a lie, right? When Paul asked if they could go to hers this time she lied, No no, we should go to yours, I think Adriana might have a boy over tonight. In reality, she’d just left the workbook in plain sight.
If you missed the first chapter, read it here. <3