Hand In Hand: A Pride Month Anthology

Runner

Right. Left. The concrete sang under Nadine's shoes. She was almost definitely ruining her pristine sneakers; they were the kind that were made to look nice rather than to be put to any real use, but she couldn't bring herself to care. Running always cleared her mind in a way that nothing else ever could. Her lungs ached, her calves were on fire, and finally, her brain was quiet.

One foot, and then another.

"Terrorist!"

"Faggot!"

Nadine.

She wiped the seat off of her forehead with the back of her hand. Climbed the steps to her apartment. Opened the door.

Nadine supposed that she really should have expected the scene in front of her.

"Do you have my fucking instant coffee," her roommate, Katya, said, rather than asked, in lieu of a greeting. Her face was neutral, but behind her eyes, Nadine could see absolutely nothing that resembled human emotion. Around her, screaming incoherently, were several of Britain's Finest Young Minds in various states of undress and mental capacity. An empty beer bottle rolled forwards until it nudged Nadine's foot gently. Katya held her gaze with the cold, dead eyes of a college student who would happily kill a man for an hour of quiet.

"All right! All right, guys, seriously, love you but get the hell out of my house," Jess, their third roommate, shouted over the din. She frantically gestured to Nadine, who stepped aside and held the door wide open for the crowd to leave through. Jess herded them out with expansive arm movements, slammed the door behind them, and locked it for good measure.

"Right," she said. "Sorry about that. They wanted to pregame, and, well, it's a Friday night. You can't expect them to-"

Jess glanced at Katya and changed tactics.

"How was your day?"

Nadine tossed the instant coffee on the couch next to Katya. Her day had been-uneventful, up until noon.

"Went to the mosque," she said. "The whole family went. It was fine."

Jess leaned against the counter. "Yeah?"

"Actually," Nadine said, and hesitated. But if she couldn't talk to Jess, and maybe by extension Katya, then she really couldn't talk to anyone. "We ran into a Pride parade after, when we were walking back to my uncle's house."

More flags than Nadine could identify had been held high, and everyone in the parade was laughing, and shouting, and a little high off the energy even if they hadn't had anything. God, how had she forgotten that today was the first day of June?

Jess looked at Nadine's face and bit her lip. She reached out and tugged at Nadine's elbow until she followed, and sat her down on the couch, which was strewn with odd bits of paper with equations scribbled on them.

"Fuckers," Katya muttered. She tried to tug a particularly messy sheet of paper out from under Jess, who didn't budge. "Are we doing feelings now? I'm awful at that shite."

"What happened?" Jess asked.

"My parents are-whatever," Nadine said. "But my uncle started shouting."

The thing was, twenty years of practice had taught Nadine that if she kept her head down and didn't think too much, she could ignore just about anything. But this was just too much. It was the first of June, for fuck's sake, and she should have thought before agreeing to go out with her family today.

Nadine had looked up and made eye contact with one of the parade-goers. He wasn't holding up his flag and shouting anymore. He was clutching it to his chest like it was a safety blanket; red, orange, yellow, green all bunched together in a visual cacophony and split into jagged, separate lines. What twenty years of practice hadn't taught Nadine was how to show those people in the parade that she was one of them without saying that she wasn't one of the people standing behind her uncle as his mouth furiously moved. That she wasn't, also, herself.

So:

"Terrorist!"

"Faggot!"

Nadine.

"Aren't you tired?" she asked. Her eyes stung a little as she rested her neck on the back of their cracked brown couch and looked up at the ceiling. "Aren't you tired of your existence being a political statement?"

"It's not easy," Jess said gently. "Every day that I walk out the door, I have a target painted on my back."

Jess had been sixteen when her parents had found out about her girlfriend. She had been seventeen when she had shaved her head and been kicked out of the house. She had been eighteen when she picked up the pieces of her life and forced them to fit together again.

"They looked at me like I was disgusting," Katya said without looking up from her textbook. Nadine noticed that her eyes had remained fixed on the same part of the page for a while now. "When I got an-an abortion. Like just because I wanted to wear a short skirt and have sex, anyone was entitled to treat me like dirt. Because I didn't fit into the mold of what people thought I should be."

"That's bullshit," said Nadine.

"So's yours," Jess said. "Pride doesn't have to be a 'fuck-you' to everyone. Neither does wearing your headscarf. Pride's the fact that we all decide, every day, to keep existing even when we see people like us being shot and killed for doing just that. You don't have to let your identity be a declaration or a statement or a controversy. You don't have to justify yourself to anyone. To either group, Nadine."

Then, more quietly: "You never have to prove yourself to us."

There were a few beats of silence. Katya looked at her book. Jess looked down at the red plastic cups littering the floor. Nadine looked out the window-it had stopped drizzling outside.

"That was depressing as hell," said Katya, who started to try to crack open the jar of instant coffee. "Can we watch Netflix now?"

Nadine shoved at Katya's leg with her foot. "I thought it was inspirational!"

"Katya, are you eating the powder straight out of the jar?" asked Jess incredulously. "You just streamlined two espressos directly into your digestive system. Who even are you?"

"Not having a gay identity crisis, unlike both of you, apparently," Katya responded, and promptly ducked under her textbook to shield herself from the crumpled notes that Nadine and Jess pelted her with. The instant coffee spilled, at least two people screamed, and suddenly they were all on the floor, rolling in a sea of beer bottles and suspiciously sticky carpet.

For Nadine, identity was never going to be easy. The jagged edges of who she was still caught at her lungs when she was trying to breathe. But she would have to keep doing what she had been doing since day one. Right. Left. One foot, and then another, until the ache in her calves outpaced Christchurch and the Pulse, her uncle and the boy, terrorist and faggot, Nadine. She would have to fall down, wipe the sweat off her brow with the back of her hand, and keep running.

(Runner by beanchtoast)