Stay Another Day

by Juno Dawson

‘I think it’s time for another wee gin in a tin, don’t you?’ It had been buy-three-get-one-free. So we got twelve for the train ride. That’s the kind of mathematics I like.

‘I told you I grew up in a haunted house.’ ‘Seriously?’ Thom – for someone very sensible – can’t cope with horror films or ghost stories. ‘Oh aye. Haunted by middle-class guilt and bad wallpaper.’

I can’t actually remember his name because he is a footballer and I use that part of my brain to remember the forgotten drag queens eliminated first from Drag Race.

The gag is I can’t make cocktails FOR SHIT. Babe, I literally make it up as I go. I learned early on that if you set fire to a bit of citrus peel, the basics think it’s pure witchcraft.

He laughs. ‘I meant write your own stuff. Write characters like you.’ Well, that’d be a novelty wouldn’t it? A story about a young gay man; unapologetic, not dying of AIDS; has a love-hate relationship with gender norms. A story where his gayness wasn’t the only thing that defined him. A gay policeman, a gay doctor, even a gay guy just falling in love, and his relationship being of equal importance to the straight people’s around him.

Syd’s eyes light up. ‘You watch Schitt’s Creek?’ ‘Of course! Obsessed.’ It sounds batshit, but after pills, doctors, group therapy and being fed through a tube, a gentle sitcom about a family living in a motel cured me more than any of those things.

There is a point, though, about a millimetre of flesh, between the ideal thinness for girls – “slim” – and being repulsively thin – “skinny”. Fucked if I can tell, but there was about a week between people telling me how good I looked, congratulating me on the weight I’d lost, to holy shit, are you OK?

‘I swear on Nana’s life.’ Nana has been dead for eight years, but go off.

What’s the non-binary equivalent of mansplaining?

Why am I so keen on men my sister has boffed? There’s one for the therapist I can’t afford.

Fern’s eyes blaze with fury. She looks possessed. A different demon from the one that lives inside Willow; there’s a real Karen brewing inside her, and one day she will verily ask to speak to the manager.

‘You know how you always think you’re the main character? All that stuff with my mum. It was such a drama. You forget that everyone else has drama too. Like all those little houses over there. Fuck knows what they’ve got going on. Little dramas in every house.’

‘It’s a struggle, life. Everyone is struggling with something. It’s why we’ve got to be kind to each other, even when it’s really fuckin’ hard. You just don’t know. You can’t tell by looking.’