#//with a grand total of [counting on fingers] 4 sentences of respondable dialogue

[troublcmakcrs]

▸   @mysqueerion   ⟶   ❛  (( @ craig )): “Pizza will never cheat on you.”  ❜   ╱   (  about pizza , accepting .  )

Craig did not know if he had ever been cheated on before, and if he had, he didn’t care about it.  The most serious relationship he’d ever had had been with Tweek, and he thought it would have been a mercy to have Tweek cheat on him.  It would have meant that he was not completely alone in dealing with the other’s bullshit, that somebody else was taking care of him, just more quietly and behind the scenes.  Maybe Craig wouldn’t have stayed with him until things literally blew up if he hadn’t felt so much like Tweek’s one connection to the outside world.

Maybe Craig had even done what some people considered ‘emotional cheating’ on Tweek, he wasn’t sure.  But he didn’t immediately nullify his crush on Heidi Turner or his desire for a girlfriend just because he felt like he had to be with Tweek, and maybe some of that spilled over and got noticed by someone who privately thought him terrible for it.

Since Tweek, he had tried to date casually, to middling success.  Nothing ever got serious or ever lasted long enough to be considered a real partnership.  It was mostly just him hanging out with people—like Clara behind the funnel cake stand, whose brown eyes caught dazzling topaz at sunset.  That had just been one of those summer things, spurned on by the warm evening air and the brilliance of the world around them, and it lasted three weeks.  She found him disagreeable outside of work, boring against the monochromatic backdrop of reality, and she told him so one night.  He hadn’t said much back to her and certainly didn’t stop her when she turned on her heel and left in a huff, and he ate far fewer funnel cakes.  He didn’t miss her.  Had she been seeing other guys during that time, it would not have gutted him.

He sighed, which was supposed to be an attempt at a laugh, but Kenny’s words were not especially funny, and he could not gather up the will to pretend like they were.  “That’s some Facebook mom humor if I ever heard any,” he said, which was the subtlest way he had of conveying that it sounded like something his own mom would say.

Craig’s bitterest experience with cheating had not been experienced firsthand but instead came from his father, what he did to Craig’s mother, the subsequent messy divorce, the ruination of what had been one of South Park’s more stable families up to that point.  His mother hadn’t even told them when she first found out, trying to quietly plan an escape, wanting to take her time to get things in order.  Craig had thrown a wrench in those plans by catching his father in the act and needing to be pulled off the other woman he was with.  Thomas shoved Craig in the car with profuse apologies to his date at the time, and he shut down the tirade that followed by saying, You’ll understand when you’re a little older, with such an anguished look, half on the boy in the passenger seat and half on the road in front of him, that it sapped Craig of most of his will to fight.  He had stared out the window the rest of the way home and daydreamed about the future, when he would be old enough to understand why his father had done what he did.  His jaw was set hard, and he quickly blinked away every rush of tears that came upon him in the fifteen minute drive back to the Tucker residence, determined to be more composed and dutiful and loyal, more of a man than his father was presently acting.

Well, he was a little older now, and he still didn’t really get it.  Part of him did, and part of him didn’t.  He had been tempted to cheat on Tweek, so he sympathized with that part of it, the tantalization of achieving happiness in a miserable situation by any means necessary.  But he also hadn’t cheated on Tweek, though the desire had been there, and if any situation warranted cheating, it would have been that one.  As far as he knew, neither of his parents were hitting each other or hearing voices or on drugs.  They weren’t forced into it by someone else; they had chosen to get married.  It had been more or less easy for Craig to resist cheating on Tweek—by the end, he was far too preoccupied to think much about entertaining any other flirtation—so he still didn’t know why his father did it when his mother was, by all accounts, fine.  But he was trying, still working on conjuring up some empathy for his father’s side, never really getting there.

He looked over at Kenny, who had been stuffing himself and probably had not noticed Craig slipped off into thought.  He had no idea what the dude had been on about, whether he was venting or trying to comfort Craig somehow or simply offering up one of his quintessentially Kenneth McCormick colloquialisms.  “I mean, yeah, it sure won’t,” he said, certain his mystification was evident in the stitch of his eyebrows.  “Are you good, dude?  Did you break up with someone recently or something?”