Joanna Acevedo
Last August I went on a double date with my friend Abby and her new boyfriend and a guy that she worked with, Graham. While we were making small talk he asked me if I had any siblings.
“Does absorbing a twin in utero count?” I asked.
On the drive home, Abby asked me: “Why are you like this?”
After Jake and I went on our most recent date, I told him that Abby and I weren’t friends anymore. When Jake and I go out on dates, he buys me cheese fries from White Castle, and I give him a hand job in the parking lot. I have to wait to eat the cheese fries, though, because if I eat the fries first, his junk gets all cheesy. We tried that once and he got a rash and it was a whole thing, he had to go to the doctor, and the bill was like, massive. It turns out that Jake doesn’t have health insurance.
My fries are usually soggy by the time I get to eat them, but Jake says this is just motivation.
He buckles up and I wipe my hands on the extra napkins he thoughtfully asked for when the cashier at White Castle handed him the bag with our order in it. This week he was hungry and ordered onion rings for himself. They’ll be soggy, too, but I don’t say anything and I don’t point that out. The White Castle is used to us now and they reserve a parking space in the back of the parking lot with a red flag that says “reserved,” because Jake has told his friends that it’s a good place to hook up—a big tree for coverage, plus the street lamp has been out for months, and no matter how much Mrs. Maple, who lives down the block, calls 311, the city probably won’t send someone to replace the light bulb until the summer. They don’t care about us out here, they really don’t.
“You and Abby have been friends since middle school,” Jake says. “We all have. You and me and Abby and Sara and Mickey.” I can see him flinch. Mickey died last year, overdose. Maybe it was suicide, no one knows. All we know is he liked pills and he died because he took a bunch of them. But everyone likes pills. It could be any of us but it wasn’t. “You and Abby will always be friends.”
“Not like you and I are friends,” I say. “Not like you and Sara and the way Mickey was. We’re all getting different.”
“That’s how it goes,” Jake says. And I don’t want it to be like that even though I know he’s right.
Graham calls. “It’s the perfect crime,” I say. “If I had eaten my twin in utero, there is no body, since I’d have absorbed the evidence.”
Graham laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh. He doesn’t get my humor, which is a strike against him. I really don’t know why Abby thinks I’m going to get along with these guys she sets me up with. She knows me. It’s wishful thinking. As for poor Graham, I can tell he’s only calling because Abby has put him up to it. She’s obsessed with the double date thing. Now that she has a boyfriend, she keeps chattering on about “couples friends.”
“It’s weird when you have one single person and then you have a couple,” she keeps telling me. I am still trying to remember why we were ever friends. “So you need a boyfriend, and then we can all hang out and double date, and it’ll be balanced again.”
“What about Sara? Sara is single.”
“Sara is doing her own thing, I think.”
Recently Sara isn’t hanging with us as much. Actually, she’s not hanging out with us at all. She’s doing something else and it’s kind of wigging me out. She’s been dressing in all white, and she doesn’t talk unless she absolutely has to. She’s been carrying around these old, musty library books, the kind that have titles embossed in gold on the front and you can’t read them from a distance, and she isn’t responding to any texts or emails or DMs. I’m not even sure if she still uses her phone.
“Stevie Nicks vibes,” Abby says. “Or she’s joined a cult.”
“We just need to find you the right guy, and you’ll be out of this funk,” Abby says. She’s still stuck on the double date thing. It’s fall now and she keeps talking about “cuffing season,” as if it’s a real thing.
“Jake is a guy,” I say.
“Jake is not a guy you can date.” She coughs. “And you need to stop texting that guy who stalked you last year.”
“The restraining order was lifted,” I say. “Or it expired. Either way, he’s on lithium now, he’s totally chill.”
I tell Jake about my absorbed twin theory as we hook up in the Applebee’s bathroom—not the one the girl died in, the good one, at the rest stop, with the Starbucks attached to it. They never did release the details of that girl’s death, so obviously it was a suicide. We’re banned from that Applebee’s, anyway. Let’s just say that they do actually put liquor in those $1 drinks, more than you think they do. “There’s no way you were the fitter twin,” Jake says.
“Will you buy me a Diet Coke on the way out?”
“You don’t want an appetizer? I said I’d get you a meal, if you wanted. If you were hungry.”
“I’m trying to lose five pounds.”
“You don’t need to,” Jake says. “You look hot. You’re the most fuckable person in this whole Applebee’s, no cap.”
“Aw, shit, you’re cute,” I say.
“Don’t let Abby tear you down,” Jake says. “You’re better than that.”
Eventually, Abby and I don’t talk much. Passing me in the hall, she points at my Diet Coke. “Those things lower your bone density, you know,” she says.
“And cigarettes give you cancer,” I say. “All the fun stuff is bad for you, yeah, who wants to live a long time, anyway? If you didn’t notice, life kind of sucks.”
I say this kind of loud and some other students nod and I can hear some people saying “yeah,” and even clapping a little bit. For a minute I was important and then the moment passed and I was just regular me again.
If I’ve learned anything, when a guy says, “I’m moving to Massachusetts to finish up my political science degree and then I’m not really sure where life is going to take me, but I can’t make any promises, you know, it wouldn’t be fair to you,” it means he’s breaking up with you. Sometimes, a restraining order is really just like an easier way to tell someone that the sex isn’t good anymore, so move on, pack it up, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Trust me on this, because those legal fees add up, and credit scores matter way more than precalculus ever did. They don’t teach you that in school, and they should.
Joanna Acevedo is the author of three books and two chapbooks. Born and raised in New York City, she received her MFA from New York University in 2021, in addition to holding degrees from Bard College and The New School. Her writing crosses genres, with particular focus in creating accessible resources for emerging writers. She’s worked every job in publishing at one point or another, from the glamorous bulk mailing of ARCs to ghostwriting self-help memoirs for CEOs, and most recently, she did a six-month stint as the Editor in Chief of Frontier Poetry. Currently, she’s exploring new platforms to host and develop revolutionary approaches to literary publishing and the creative arts. Learn more about her and her work by visiting her website: https://www.joannaacevedo.net/.
Photo by Marjan Blan on Unsplash