Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"I've got to get out of this hellhole," Mackenzie announces, and drops down at the table across from Emily. Emily, textbook and notes spread out in an untidy fan in front of her, doesn't look up. "Hey, did you hear me?"

"You only say it a hundred times a day." Emily tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, and chews on the end of her pencil.

"Well, it's true." It has become Mackenzie's slogan, her mantra, her reason for being. She reaches over, and takes a long gulp from Emily's coffee cup. "God, that sucks. How long have you been sitting here?"

"Since the lunch rush ended." Business at Iggie's had picked up slowly but steadily over the past month. They'd been open for lunch and dinner for three weeks now, and last week, Duck Macdonald had brought over a sign with the new hours, and a chalkboard for the daily specials.

"Hello, that was hours ago." Emily's smooth, dark head bent over her books annoys Mackenzie. She should be looking at her, not her fucking homework.

"Yeah, well, I don't want to fail summer school, too. Mom just made a fresh pot of coffee if you want some. You know where it is."

Mackenzie wanders over behind the counter and pours herself a cup, takes a sip, and grimaces. She'd decided a while ago that black coffee was sophisticated. But no-one is looking, so she adds three sugars.

"These today's dinner specials?" She picks up the scrap of paper taped to the back of the chalkboard by the door.

"Yeah, I wrote them up after lunch."

Mackenzie nods, pulls out the box of coloured chalk, and gets to work. The chalkboard has been hers since the second day it was up. Emily had chalked the lunch menu up in careful block letters, grilled cheese sandwiches and cream of mushroom soup. Mackenzie inched her way over to the chalk, and gradually improvised a border of curliques, flowers, and stars, and added a few well-placed exclamation points and adjectives.

When Mrs. Anderson came in and saw the adorned board proclaiming "Yummy toasty grilled cheese and the world's best cream of mushroom soup!" Mackenzie had hidden her chalky fingers behind her back and waited for her to start yelling, feeling like a kindergarten kid caught at crayoning the walls. But all she did was smile and say, "Want me to get you some more colours to do that tomorrow?" Mrs. Anderson is cool like that.

It’s kind of a little-kid thing to do, but she’s spending all summer hanging out at the diner anyhow. Hanging out with Emily. Mackenzie sits down cross-legged on the floor to finish the border, using green for leaves, and yellow for sunflowers. Today's dinner menu is chicken pot pie with walnut fudge brownies for dessert.

"If I'm not careful, you're going to put me out of work."

"Oh, hey, Mr. Macdonald." Mackenzie scrambles to her feet and dusts her fingers off on the edges of her cut-off shorts, inwardly swearing at being caught sitting on the floor, playing with chalk.

"Coffee for you?" Emily bounces up like she’s on some kind of string. Mackenzie grits her teeth. Emily hadn't even looked up when she'd come into the room. "One large double-double, one large black?"

"Black with three sugar. Guess I can't handle the straight stuff." He shrugs, and grins. "Too damn bitter without."

Mackenzie quietly resolves to stop putting sugar in her coffee altogether.

"There you go." Emily pushes the paper cups across the counter, pathetically eager.

Mackenzie stomps her way over to the back table. She’s so pathetic, tripping over her own feet to help him. God. Somebody should tell her how ridiculous it is, like she has some sort of stupid crush. Emily shouldn't be--if she was going to be falling for anyone-- No, it isn't like Mackenzie’s jealous or anything, but there was no fucking way she’s going to babysit Emily again, listening to her go on for hours like she had with Taylor. 

And she could at least bother to look at Mackenzie every once and a while, her only friend on this shitty little island, instead of slobbering over fucking Duck Macdonald.

"You know, he's a fag," she says, when Mr. Macdonald had gone, and Emily slid back into the seat across from her.

"Shut up. Do you even know what that means?"

"That he's going to hell, if you listen to Irene Whitby. Not that anybody does."

"She also says you're an ungrateful brat, I'm no better than I should be, and my mom's a slut," Emily recites by rote, and rolls her eyes.

"Like I said, who listens to her? Bossy old bitch. And I could care less if Duck MacDonald's queer."

"He's gay, Mackenzie," Emily corrects, all big-city holier than-thou. "Which means--"

"I know what it means. We have the internet. It means he fucks men."

"Mackenzie!"

"Means he fucks Dan Jarvis," she adds, just to see Emily squirm.

"Eww! You are so gross!"

"What, because it's two guys? Don't be so prejudiced," Mackenzie says loftily, ignoring the way her stomach twists. 

"No, that's like thinking about my parents having sex!"

"Oh." The knot in her stomach loosens. Mackenzie tries to shove it out of her mind, and stirs her coffee idly, fingers curled around the still-warm mug. "Hey, what happened with you and Taylor, anyhow?"

"He's an arsehole," Emily says shortly, and opens her textbook again.

"I could have told you that. In fact, I did tell you."

"And what about you and Stuart?"

"There never was any me and Stuart. He's a dink. And I think he's gay, too."

"What, just because he didn't want to make out with you?"

"He tried kissing me once, but it was totally gross. He so wasn't into it--and his tongue, talk about dead slugs."

"Now you're just trying to make me puke all over my bio notes."

"Besides, I know he used to shove chalk up his nose in grade two. That's the problem, all the boys on this fucking island are lame." 

And that's what she'd thought, for years. That it was island boys that were the problem. They were such dickwads, and she'd known them all since they were in diapers. Why couldn't there be anybody interesting around? If she could just get off the island, maybe she'd find somebody.

But then Emily Anderson showed up, with her long eyelashes and smooth dark hair, her city-girl cynicism and that terribly interesting pout when Mackenzie tries to talk her into doing something she knows she wants to but thinks she shouldn't. And even though she'd started out sucking face with the lame-ass Taylor, she’s cool. Cool enough to hang with Mackenzie.

Emily’s new. And that makes her interesting. And at first, that's all Mackenzie thought it was.

They eat supper at the diner, and go down to the beach later. Past the Watch, past the sandy tourist beaches, down to the coastline on the east side of the island. It's rocks and gravel there, but all they need is a clear stretch to sit and drink. Emily's got a six-pack, and Mackenzie has a third of a thermos of scotch carefully siphoned out of her parents' liquor cabinet. 

She watches Emily drink. She watches the way her throat moves, and the way her sweatshirt rises up when she stretches. 

It took her a month and a half, but she’s finally realized it. She feels like the world's biggest loser. She’s in love with Emily. And if that isn't gay, she didn't know what the hell is.

The next day, Mackenzie throws herself down at the table across from Duck Macdonald. "When did you know for sure you were gay?"

"This some kind of school project?" 

"Yeah. Sure." Mackenzie stares at the scarred tabletop, ignoring the way that it blurs and wavers.

"Because I don't think--"

She can't stop it. The knot in her throat is too tight to swallow past, and she can feel the tears slipping hotly, humiliatingly down her cheeks.

"Oh. Oh, hey. Don't cry." 

She shakes her head, and concentrates very hard on breathing. 

He grabs a fistful of napkins, and holds them out to her. She takes them, and pressed the scratchy paper to her face.

"This isn't for school, is it."

Mackenzie's head snapped up. "What the fuck do you think?" she said thickly, around the napkins.

"Thought not." He turned, and looked out the window, watching the rain streak slowly down the glass, each drop gathering speed as it grew. The streaks made his reflection waver and blur, and distorted the view of the growing puddles in the empty street outside.

"Guess it was when I was fourteen and jerking off thinking of co--thinking about guys instead of girls," he said finally. "But I didn't know for sure until I left the island for a bit, and got out into the rest of the world."

"So I need to get off this fucking rock, then."

"I didn't say that. It was different then. You've got cable TV and the internet and sex ed in school now. Took me years to figure out what a fag was. Ever try looking it up in the dictionary? All you get is some stuff about bundles of wood. At least in the school dictionaries we had."

That's never been her problem. By now, she's damn certain what a lesbian is. And that she probably is one.

Duck tilts his head sideways appraisingly. "It's Emily, isn't it. No, I shouldn't have said it. Don't tell me."

"It is," she says, voice thick in her throat. What the hell. She's got nothing to lose now. But when she looks up, there's pity in his eyes, which makes her want to smash the napkin dispenser into his fucking face.

“Are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know.” 

Somehow, it becomes a regular habit to stop by the diner Sunday afternoons, and slide into the chair across from Duck. Sometimes they talk. Sometimes, they don’t.

She doesn’t tell Emily that she’s fallen for her. By the time they’re halfway through grade twelve, she’s glad. The initial giddy crush has faded, and it would have been utterly mortifying, because without a shadow of a doubt, Emily Anderson is straight. And with even less doubt, Mackenzie Fisher is not.

Chapter Text

By the time she leaves for university, Dan Jarvis has started to join Duck at Iggy’s at least two or three days out of the week. Emily thinks the two of them sitting together reading the paper is adorable. Mackenzie still feels weirdly nervous for them. 

Bill C-38, The Civil Marriage Act, passes on Monday, June 20th, 2005. On Sunday, June 26th, Emily and Mackenzie ambush Duck and Dan at Iggy’s.

“Are you going to get married now?” Emily asks hopefully. Duck spits his coffee out all over the table.

“Tried it once, but it didn’t take,” Dan says wryly, passing Duck a handful of napkins. Three years from now, they will quietly sign a civil partnership agreement with no witnesses. 

“Save it for your own wedding, kid,” Duck says affectionately.

Mackenzie comes out to Emily the week before she leaves. It is, without a fucking doubt, one of the most awkward conversations she’s ever had. 

Emily calls her two days later. “I… sorry if I was weird,” she says. “I just.. It was this really big thing about you I didn’t know. And I didn’t know what to say.”

“I… still friends?” Mackenzie blurts out.

“Of course, idiot!” By now they’re both crying. 

Mackenzie goes as far as possible without leaving the country, starting her first year with a marketing major at UBC, with her dad’s encouragement. Emily’s asshole dad is paying her tuition. She’s taking pre-law at the University of Waterloo. They both swear they’re going to email every day.

Mackenzie had flown out to Vancouver with her mom in June to check out housing arrangements and tour the campus. Her mom hadn’t known it, but Mackenzie picked the weekend to coincide with Vancouver Pride.

Saturday morning, she’d told her mom she was going to go meet up at a coffee shop with someone else she’d met yesterday from the new student orientation group, and slipped away to watch the Pride Parade. She vastly underestimated the crowds, how long it would take her on transit, and the battery charge left on her cell phone, and was two hours late getting back. She told her mom she’d gotten lost. She’d never felt so incredibly seen, and incredibly alone at the same time. She was surrounded by real live gay people, and she didn’t know any of them

University turns out to be not bad, actually.  Her roommate is okay, but they don’t really have much in common, and she spends most of her time at her boyfriend’s place. Mackenzie doesn’t mind having a bit of time and space to herself. Her first few weeks on campus, she wanders in a haze of possibilities, sampling tiny hole-in-the-wall cafes and restaurants on her meagre student budget, lurking at the back of open mic nights and coffee shop concerts, spiritually drunk on all the possibilities of living in a big city for the first time in her life.

She waits until a night when her roommate is out and googles “feminist sex shop Vancouver” with one hand over her face in embarassment, squinting through her fingers, and ventures out to buy her first vibrator that weekend. It’s a tiny, cheap bullet vibe that is exciting for the novelty value at first, but eventually languishes at the back of her bedside table drawer until two years later, when she discovers that the batteries have corroded, and pitches it with no regrets.

Her parents buy her a plane ticket home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and spring break. Mackenzie thinks it’s overkill when she leaves in September, but by the time mid-October comes around, the novelty’s starting to wear off, she misses familiar faces far more than she thought she would, and she’d kill for proper brewed coffee on steel and vinyl diner chairs with Duck and Dan. She has news to share.

“There’s an LGBT student association!” she announces first thing, in a joyous whisper. “I went to a meeting last week!” 

“There was a gay and lesbian student group at UBC when I was there,” Dan says nostalgically.

“Did you ever go?”

“Ah, no. I kept walking past the bulletin board where their notices were posted though. I picked up a flyer once, but when I got it back to my dorm room and looked at it, half of it was safe sex information, and we were all so terrified of AIDS back then that I panicked and it made things even worse. I was too afraid to throw it out, so I decided to burn it. Almost set the curtains on fire too.” Dan looks sheepish. “I’d forgotten about that until now.” 

Duck can’t stop laughing. Mackenzie feels vaguely indignant, and pretty sad for poor, scared teenage Dan.

A week after Thanksgiving, she hooks up with the LGBT club secretary, a jaded poli sci major, and loses her virginity while watching The L Word in Jane’s tiny off-campus apartment. It will be followed by three more hook-ups ending in a mortifying coffee date where she backpedals frantically when Jane offers to let her move in with her next semester.

Her first year is also the first dubious milestone of having a slur shouted at her in the street, holding hands with Jane on the way home from a movie. Jane shrugs. “At least they didn’t throw anything.”

Mackenzie has always thought she’d stand up bravely to discrimination once she left Wilby. Instead, she spends the next few weeks feeling exposed and vulnerable every time she walks into the student association meetings. She’d thought the anonymity would make her feel safer. She was wrong.

She hits a stretch after Christmas where everything feels pointless, and spends three weeks skipping class, renting pile after pile of DVDs from the independent video store, and works her way through everything she’s read about online but has never seen. Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, But I’m a Cheerleader, Better Than Chocolate, Hard Core Logo, and Paris is Burning.

She almost doesn’t go back to class, but eventually, boredom wins out, and much to her surprise, her GPA doesn’t even drop.

Halfway through fall semester in her second year, she drops her marketing major for women’s studies and comes out to her parents. She comes home with her hair buzzed short, a nose ring, and a new taste for Doc Marten boots and ripped plaid.

Her mom cries. Her dad looks vaguely uncomfortable, but comes to find her later that night. She can smell the scotch on his breath when he sits down on the edge of her bed. Prime Fisher coping mechanisms.

“She’s worried about what people will think,” Mackenzie predicts.

“She’s worried they won’t treat you well,” her father corrects. Mackenzie blinks. “I… always just wanted you to marry a nice boy and be happy,” he continues. “I guess you can marry a nice girl now, right?” Mackenzie cries. Much to her surprise, so does her dad.

She brings her first real girlfriend home with her the next summer. Aileen has never lived anywhere but Vancouver, and keeps looking around with a mix of condescension and fear. 

Her parents are perfectly polite to Aileen. Her mom offers to make up the spare room. Mackenzie cringes, but surprisingly, it’s her dad who comes to the rescue.

“Oh for chrissakes Elaine, let the girls be. Pull out the air mattress, and put her in Mackenzie’s room.”

They don’t use the air mattress, but her parents don’t need to know that.

That was the year her parents almost separated. Her dad has a ridiculous, shiny new sports car, and her mom spends most of the summer over at the neighbour’s, having coffee with Lorraine Ivanson. (Formerly Lorraine Whitby, and that just weirds Mackenzie out, remembering the vile things that woman’s mother had said to Duck.)  

She’d been sure they were going to get divorced, but then her grandma Joan has a stroke the following spring, and when she comes home for two weeks in the summer--she’s got a TA gig lined up for both spring and summer semesters--the sports car is gone, her dad has moved out of the spare room back in with her mom, and to her amazement and vague horror, has started cooking supper three nights a week and doing all the dishes. 

Mackenzie takes Aileen to meet her other family too. “They’re totally my gay uncles, even though neither one of them is actually my uncle,” Mackenzie tells her.

“Family of choice,” Dan murmurs. He’s been doing some more reading lately. 

“The lesbians are getting uppity,” Duck tells Dan seriously. Mackenzie blows a straw wrapper across the table into his face.

“I prefer to be called queer these days,” she says lofitly.

“I would rather be called a fucking faggot than queer,” Duck says bluntly.

Aileen immediately jumps in with a long explanation of reclaiming the word. She’s not wrong, but Mackenzie feels defensive nonetheless. Honestly, it’s condescending. Duck nods along, but she can tell by the sardonic twist to his mouth that he is not impressed.

It only lasts another month once they’re back on campus. It sucks to get dumped, but in some ways, it’s a relief.

She doesn’t come home all summer every year, but she’s always back for at least a few weeks.  She and Emily do their best to match up their schedules. Sandra’s always happy to have her pick up shifts at Iggy’s during tourist season.

She doesn’t bring her next serious girlfriend home with her at Christmas, during her fourth year. It’s not too much of a loss when things implode dramatically a week into the new semester once she’s back on campus. The intensity in Julia that she found charming during the first months of their relationship has become stifling, and it turns out Julia finds Mackenzie’s straightforward bluntness “deeply hurtful and toxic,” as Julia’s ex earnestly tells her. It then turns out that the ex has never really been the ex, and they’ve been fucking on the side since November.

Her friends from her senior thesis group drag her out to the campus pub when she shows up for class red-eyed with pockets full of soggy Kleenex, but she begs off after the first pitcher of watered-down margaritas. Her first week on campus, she’d gotten black-out drunk at a frosh party, and it scared her badly enough that she’s rarely had more than one or two drinks at once since. She knows her family history, thank you very much, and has no intention of repeating it.

Most of the group stay, but Hilary and her girlfriend Simone walk her to the bus stop. When she gets back to her apartment, it’s only seven pm, which is ten in Waterloo. Not too late. She stares at her phone morosely, and texts Emily.

You know how I always told you boys suck? Turns out girls suck too.

She drops the phone when it rings thirty seconds later.

“What happened?” Emily demands.

Mackenzie lets out a long, shaky sigh, and shares the sordid details. Emily is suitably indignant, and bullies her into staying on the phone to synchronize their DVD players and watch Lilo and Stitch together, while they both make microwave popcorn and pretend they’re in the same city. And she's not sure if she's homesick for a place or a simpler time.

Chapter Text

Mackenzie ends up at Dalhousie for her master’s, and after a dissatisfying first six months focusing on gender theory and Canadian identity, narrows her focus down to queer identity in rural communities, to her advisor’s very vocal bafflement. 

She spends three months back in Wilby during the last year of her graduate degree, after her dad’s heart attack. His recovery is slow but steady, but it’s her mom she’s really worried about. She says she’s fine, but Mackenzie can see her sleepwalking through the day the same way she did when Grandma Joan died.

That was the year that she first noticed the tiny rainbow flag sticker on Iggy’s front door. Because she is no longer an angry, scared, closeted seventeen year old, she thanks Mrs Anderson--Sandra--for putting it up.

“Do you know how many we had printed?” Sandra says, lips tight. 

Mackenzie shakes her head.

“We did a small batch of fifty. I know we don’t have fifty businesses in downtown Wilby, but one of the teachers asked too, and we thought some of the classrooms, and oh, I don’t know, maybe the clinic and even some of the parents might want one. Do you know how many we have left?”

Mackenzie shakes her head again.

“Forty six. One here, I have one at home, your mom took one, and so did Lorraine. They wouldn’t let Russell Chan put one on his classroom door. Said there were no political symbols allowed in the school.”

Sadly, none of this surprises Mackenzie. Except--”Lorraine Ivanson? Isn’t she Irene Whitby’s daughter?”

Sandra blinks. “Didn’t your mom tell you? Lorraine’s son Simon told everyone that he was a boy instead of a girl about three years ago. She and your mom spent hours together. Knowing someone with a gay daughter--sorry, queer, your mom keeps reminding me--was a lifesaver for her. They started our local PFLAG chapter.”

“Wilby has a PFLAG chapter?”

“That’s why we printed the stickers. I mean, there are only four of us, but we thought a few more people would step up.”

“You, Mom, Lorraine, and… Russell Chan?” Russell was a year ahead of her in high school, one of the jocks. His parents still ran the Bamboo Garden restaurant, with its small town trademark mix of western buffet and westernized Chinese food.

“Russell is most definitely the G part of the acronym, not any of the A’s,” Sandra says wryly. “No, Ian McDowell down at the garage. Oh, wait, make that forty-five stickers. He picked one up yesterday.”

“Mr. McDowell ?” she says faintly.

Sandra looks uncomfortable for a minute, then leans in confidingly. “Okay, I think it’s okay if I share this, because he’s been telling anyone who comes in for an oil change lately, and the whole town knows by now anyhow. But it’s a sad story.”

Mackenzie waves her coffee mug. “Top me up, I’m ready.” 

“His older brother left for the city right after high school, in the late seventies. He wrote home for a while, but dropped all communication about five years later. Ian’s parents told him that Chris was a junkie, and died of an overdose.”

Mackenzie can see where this is going. “AIDS or gay-bashing?”

“AIDS. A friend of his partner found a bunch of papers and photos when he was going through his estate last year, and reached out to Ian. Ian was so angry when he found out they kept it from him. He’s been telling everyone Chris’s story. Says he’s so glad he didn’t die alone after all.”

It’s not a shock, but it still hits Makenzie’s stomach like a blow to the solar plexus. It’s easy to forget sometimes, the devastation of previous generations. They sit together in silence for a long moment.

“Just don’t mention it to Duck,” Sandra cautions her. “He went to school with Chris, and I think it hit him pretty hard.” 

Mackenzie resolves to grill Dan later and find out how Duck’s doing. Duck has other things on his mind, however.

“They’re trying to start a G-S-A, a gay straight alliance, at the high school,” Duck says in a tone of bewilderment.

“QSA,” Dan corrects, shifting over to make room for Mackenzie beside him. 

Duck grumbles a bit. He never did reconcile to the word queer, and Mackenzie isn’t in the mood to push it today. “I never heard anyone officially admit ‘homosexuals’ existed in high school.” 

“When we did sex ed, Mrs. Johnson looked at the class, and told us ‘Heterosexual. That’s what we all are,’ “ Mackenzie says.

“It gets better,” Dan quotes softly. Duck squeezes his hand, face soft.

Russell meets her at Iggy’s the following week. Mackenzie looks at the sharp-faced, sharply-dressed man across from her, and has a moment of double-vision trying to reconcile him with the stolid hockey player with a crew cut from high school. And then she realizes where else she recognizes him from.

“Do you do drag?” she asks, squinting. 

Russell throws back his head and laughs. “Busted!”

“I saw you a couple years ago during Halifax Pride!” 

He quirks an eyebrow at her. “The all ages show, or the after-hours one?”

“The after-hours one. I was volunteering with the backstage crew. You were filthy! I loved it.”

They end up spending a couple hours catching up after that.

“When did you come out?” he asks her. “I know it was after you left Wilby.”

She laughs. “To my parents? To my friends? To myself? That’s three different life events there, buddy.”

“Touché,” he says wryly. “God, I was so miserable in high school. I was already the only Chinese kid, I wasn’t going to be the gay Chinese kid. I just want it to be better for them, you know? But school administration…”

“Well, why does it have to be at the school? Call it a community youth initiative. I bet you can get a grant from the community foundation to cover the rent for meeting space and buy snacks once a week.” Mackenzie may not have gone into small town politics, but she’s still her father’s daughter.

Russell crows with delight, and points at her accusingly. “Only if you join me!”

She’s still got another two months until she’s headed back to the mainland. She might as well.

They end up with four kids total, gathered in the multipurpose room at the back of the Wilby Public Library. The room is free for community groups, and Sandra’s donated cookies, so logistics are the least of their worries. 

Mackenzie’s put together a list of potentially useful topics and speakers in advance, but Russell starts the first meeting by grabbing a whiteboard marker and doing a group brainstorming session. It turns out the essential ingredients are a) snacks, and b) a chance to hang out together. Because it’s Wilby, they all know each other already. 

Lily Cheung is fourteen going on twenty-three. She’s a tiny, spiky-haired baby butch in plaid flannel and a spiked dog collar. The first thing she says to Mackenzie is an aggressive, “Don’t ask me if I’m related to Mr Chan, because I’m not.” 

Mackenzie kind of wants to put her in her pocket and take her home, she’s so fierce and inadvertently adorable. Mackenzie herself has settled on a preppy, androgynous style most of the time, adopting blazers, jeans, and boots for her default classroom look, and has kept her hair chin-length ever since the buzz cut grew out. Though she does end up in jeans and old camp t-shirts most summers home.

Cameron is fifteen, and painfully awkward and unhappy. A tall, gangly kid who hides behind his dishwater blonde bangs and pulls his hands into the sleeves of his long-sleeved t-shirts, he spends most of the meetings doodling in a notebook. He doesn’t offer to share, but Mackenzie’s caught the odd glimpse of elaborate ballgowns and fantasy scenes.

Max is twelve, nonbinary, and just plain shy. Despite being a tiny human, they can put away a ridiculous quantity of snacks in one sitting when no-one is looking. 

Ten year old Simon has unofficially been adopted as their mascot. He’s a sweet, cheerful kid, who loves video games, and is Max’s unofficial interpreter, repeating his friend’s barely-audible mumbles for everyone else.

After the first month, Max only pulls their hoodie over their face if they get overwhelmed, Lily’s dialed the attitude back about twenty degrees, and Mackenzie’s actually seen Cameron smile, so all in all, it feels like a success.

By the end of the summer, they’ve had three marshmallow roasts at Dover Beach, watched both Adventure Time and Ru Paul’s Drag Race, volunteered with a town park trash pick-up along with all six PFLAG members (Max’s dad and Cameron’s aunt have both joined too), and have started talking about some more ambitious projects for the next year. 

Chapter Text

Mackenzie discovers a few days before she’s due to head home for Christmas that her neighbour’s holiday plans have fallen through. 

Sal is, as Duck would say in one of his more old-fashioned moments, a tall drink of water, and works in environmental science. They are calmly self-assured, and prone to adding old-fashioned touches like suspenders to their wardrobe with a blazer, jeans, and hiking boots, to devastating effect. They were planning on going to their sister’s, but there’s some family drama going on right now, and they’re taking a hard pass.

Mackenzie and Sal had dated briefly, and eventually settled into a friends with occasional benefits arrangement. They’d met volunteering at a mentorship program for LGBTQ+ students, offering interview and CV help for new grads, had gone for coffee after, and ended up going back to Sal’s together, not realizing they lived two floors down from Mackenzie in the same building until then.

The two of them are tangled up together on Sal’s incredibly ugly, incredibly comfortable couch when Makenzie hears the news and in a rush of sentiment, invites Sal to come home with her to Wilby instead.

“Crashing someone else’s family Christmas in a small town sounds like hell to me,” they tell her flatly. “No offence.”

“I mean, I get it, but I promise Wilby’s really not that bad.”

“Honestly, I’ll be fine. I’m going to order Chinese food, spend the holidays marathoning Animal Planet, and my youngest brother will share all the family dirt afterwards. There’s a group from the lesbian softball league going to volunteer at the soup kitchen, and I might tag along.”

Sal stops for a long minute, absently petting Mackenzie’s hair.

“My hometown is a bit smaller than your Wilby. A small group decided to try to have a flag raising. Town council wouldn’t let them use the town hall flagpole, but they were able to make arrangements with the park.” This sounds encouraging. Mackenzie suspects the story is about to take a turn for the worse.

“They raised the Pride flag for the first time this year. Three times in a week. The first time, it was torn down. The second time, they set it on fire. The third time, a dozen people camped out overnight to make sure it made it to the end of the week. The following week, they were told that town-owned flagpoles could only be used for official flags, and that there would be no exceptions next year. I have been sworn at, spit on, and dead-named repeatedly in that town. And I’m very tired of people telling me they’ll pray for me.”

“I’m pretty amazed that they bothered with the flag.”

“There’s a small but dedicated group of kin and allies. I just couldn’t be one of them. I’m glad you found a space for yourself where you’re from though.”

Mackenzie isn’t sure she found a space so much as she tried to help make a better one. It’s not too hard to convince Sal to do a talk for the Wilby QSA over Skype. It’s officially become a school club now, which feels like a small victory. 

“Who was the kid who spent the whole time with their hoodie drawstrings pulled shut? I never saw their face.”

“That was Max Swanson. They’re thirteen, also nonbinary, and couldn’t keep their eyes off the big they/them button on your shirt. I didn’t introduce you because Max is super shy.”

Sal sends Max a button. Max tells Mackenzie later that Sal is the coolest person they’ve ever met. 

The QSA has two new members this year. Sadie has just turned twelve, still wears her hair in pigtails, and tells anyone and everyone cheerfully that she likes girls. She, Max and Simon are a tight little middle grade bundle of joy and weirdness.

William is sixteen, Indigenous, and very quiet--or so they had thought at first. He and his mother moved in with his aunt over the summer. Lily had greeted him with “Hello, fellow non-white person! Where are you from?” which did not go well.

William squinted at her, and icily said, “Here.” When pressed for more details, he had delivered a precise, informative, five minute lecture on unceded Mi’kmaq territory that wouldn’t have been out of place in a post-secondary classroom. No one will be surprised when he goes into politics.

Cameron has gone through a transformation this year, and has reinvented himself. He’s developed a taste for tight jeans and t-shirts with questionable slogans, and the shaggy bangs he hid behind last year have been replaced by the obligatory queer undercut, bleached blonde. He’s painfully, performatively, flamingly gay with the dedication that only a newly-out teenager can bring to it. Cameron, William, and Lily have an uneasy alliance, but are not close. 

Russell did walk in on Cameron and William making out in the art room supply closet, though. It appears to be an arrangement of proximity and convenience.

Mackenzie thinks about Sal, and about Wilby. She’d be lying to herself if she said it was always easy, and even if she’d taken a different career path outside of academia, she’s not sure she could move back the way Russell did.

The rainbow flag sticker on the diner window has been graffitied countless times. Sandra just keeps replacing it, since she’s still got most of the box left. Russell’s finally got approval for a rainbow flag in his classroom, and it’s been stolen twice. Last time, they found it stuffed in a urinal in the boys’ bathroom.

Ian McDowell has had a brick through his front window twice, and spray-painted slurs on the garage wall as many times. The third time, he was waiting, and chased them off with a tire iron.

There’s been more insidious pushback too. Irene tried to organize a boycott for local businesses who support homosexuals and promote deviant behaviour, but Wilby’s much more comfortable with sideways looks and gossip about ‘those people’ than definitive action. Her church group also tried to get Russell fired, and a dozen books pulled from the public library that were counter to ‘family values.’

Russell called his union rep first, and Mackenzie second. She had half a dozen connections lined up for him for support within the hour. It turns out, however, that even in Wilby, being gay and doing drag isn’t enough ammunition to consider firing a teacher. Russell’s also got a certain amount of protection because he’s a Wilby boy. Unfair, but true.

“I’m surprised the drag thing wasn’t a problem,” Mackenzie confesses to him a few months later.

Russell snorts. “That’s just about the only thing we can thank Ru Paul for.”

“Not a fan?”

“Of the commodification and capitalization of a grassroots counter-culture movement? You’re not the only one who knows the big words, professor lady.”

“You and me both, brother.”

They didn’t need to do anything for the public library, who it turns out has policies for just this sort of situation. The provincial library association had a press kit and talking points over to Janie Cormier in hours, and the board meeting was tense, but nothing came of it. Russell had gone in support as a member of the community, and had given her the inside scoop.

Janie’s making a list of some more books to add when she’s got the budget next year. Mackenzie goes through her own bookshelves and donates a small pile of historical lesbian fiction, mostly Sarah Waters and early Emma Donoghue, a few essay collections by Ivan Coyote, and a copy of Weyson Choy’s The Jade Peony from an undergrad CanLit class. She scrounges up some recent self-help, parenting, and kids’ books from her friends and colleagues. She’d never seen And Tango Makes Three before. How can you hate gay penguins? 

Wilby’s not perfect. But they keep trying. And speaking of trying… 

“The kids want to interview their ‘elders.’ They want to interview me and Dan.”

“Are you going to do it?”

Duck’s silent for a long minute. “I think those poor kids aren’t really prepared to hear what I’d have to talk about.”

“You mean you don’t want to talk to twelve year olds about cruising and suicide?” Dan says, mock-appalled.

Duck snorts. “To start with, yeah.”

“I don’t think the suicide talk has lost its relevance, sadly,” Dan adds. He says it easily, but Mackenzie can see Duck’s hand tighten on Dan’s shoulder.

The QSA had started out wanting to do a queer history project about Wilby. They’d been able to find exactly three possible topics in the Island Sentinel and local history archives. There was a 1920’s arrest for indecency that was probably some poor gay couple, bawdy house charges that could be queer if you read between the lines, and the raids at the Watch. Russell had shepherded them carefully through their disappointment. The interview project is a compromise.

Lily had spent the next three months wearing a sweatshirt she’d ordered online that said in big rainbow letters ‘We have always been here.’ She gets into a vicious shouting match with William about political activism and whether or not it’s appropriating Indigenous voices. 

“At least she remembers to wash it,” Russell shrugs. “I don’t know that most of the boys would.”

Max and Simon spent the first part of the summer fighting about Harry Potter. Sadie is devastated, and cries on and off every time they sit across the room from each other. The feud lasts a tense two weeks, and ends in a ritual bonfire on the beach, in an incomprehensible bit of pre-teen weirdness. 

Later that fall, Emily calls her out of the blue. “Derek just told me he’s pansexual. What do I even say?” She sounds panicky and anxious like Mackenzie hasn’t seen since high school. 

Mackenzie can’t resist. “Does he prefer nonstick or stainless steel?” 

Emily’s squawk of indignation indicates she’s pulled out of her out of her straight-girl panic spiral.

“Why are you upset?” It’s not like Emily’s unfamiliar with queer people. Quite often when she and Mackenize are together, they all have her outnumbered. 

She and Derek have been together for about four years now, and have made a habit of meeting up with Mackenzie at least once or twice a year. The first time she met him, Mackenzie took one look at the buttoned-down architect, and took the two of them out to a drag show. She had to admit, he passed with flying colours. Not remotely weirded out, polite but appreciative of the performers, remembered to tip. She also knows, based on the time she walked in on them in the handicapped bathroom last year, that the two of them are hella kinky. Not that she swings that way, but the boy did look very good on his knees.

“What if I’m not enough for him any more?”

“Number one, I think you need to talk to Derek about that, and number two, that is bullshit and you know it.”

Mackenzie puts together a care package for Emily with brownies, a suggested reading list, the obligatory small rainbow flag on a stick, the zine the Wilby QSA made over the summer, and a bright pink, blue and yellow button with a line drawing of a frying pan that says ‘It’s Not About The Cookware.’ Also, a hand-drawn voucher for a free toaster. If you can’t troll your high school best friend a bit, who can you troll? 

The zine has the interviews from their queer history project. She did one with the kids about finding community when she started university, there’s another one with Russell about moving back to Wilby after he came out, and one with Molly Atkins, who is in her early fifties, and moved to Wilby with her partner two years ago to run a B&B-slash-artists’-retreat. Molly’s interview is about covert lesbian relationships at her all-girls’ school in England, and is sweet and wryly funny. Dan didn’t do an interview, but came in to talk to the kids. They all know the suicide talk is still relevant.

Max contributed a cartoon about neopronouns. Simon didn’t want to write anything, but made a list of mental health resources together with his mom. William wrote an essay about two-spirit identity, and a scathing commentary on Canada Day. Cameron included a list of potential drag names. Russell had to nix about a third of them on the grounds of school appropriateness. Sadie, who’s so very twelve, submitted three pages of Naruto fan art with boys kissing. 

Lily wrote an incredibly violent stage play where thinly-disguised versions of her classmates die in a series of escalating gruesome ways, but Russell had made her change the identifying details, gave her a twenty-four hour cooling off period, and she’d pulled it at the last minute.

Mackenzie got a copy autographed by all the contributors mailed to her. She is both amused and slightly horrified that she seems to have become the QSA’s long-distance cool aunt. Lily texts her a couple times a week, short messages punctuated with long strings of emojis, and incomprehensible gifs. Max doesn’t text, but has started ironically sending her postcards. They’ve found a box of the ones produced by the Wilby Tourism Board back when she was in junior high. (She knows it’s ironic because the first one said “THIS IS AN IRONIC POSTCARD.”) Sometimes there are notes and doodles from Sadie and Simon around the edges.

Mackenzie’s become Russell’s sounding board for the QSA, and all things queer and Wilby related. She keeps protesting that she doesn’t work with queer youth, and isn’t the best person, but he always tells her firmly that he needs someone else who knows Wilby.

It’s weird, but she doesn’t mind being someone who knows Wilby.

Chapter Text

Mackenzie finds out about the Pulse Nightclub shooting when Lily calls her, weeping so hard she can’t breathe. She saw it on Tumblr, and has been watching news clips on repeat. Lily’s been counting the days until she turns nineteen and can go to a real gay bar on her own. This is the first tragedy she’s known that feels like it could have touched her.

Mackenzie is horrified, and devastated, but a part of her is not surprised. She’s always known that the world isn’t always safe for people like her. Like Lily. Like Duck and Dan. The decade between her and Lily feels like fifty years. 

She calls Duck and Dan first. Duck hates talking on the phone. “Sorry, kid,” he says, also sounding grimly unsurprised, and passes the phone to Dan. Dan lets her know Emily had just called too, asks her how she’s doing, and makes her promise to call tomorrow. She thinks she’s probably more rattled than she realized. 

There’s a flurry of text messages flying back and forth from various corners of her life, everyone checking in on each other. She shares her rage and sorrow in bits and pieces. She’s teaching as a sessional and it’s her last day of office hours for the term, and some of her undergrad students are oblivious or blasé. Others have Lily’s depth of betrayal. Her colleagues make comparisons to other tragedies. The Montreal Massacre. Columbine, and Matthew Shepard. Mackenzie feels young and naive, in a reversal to her earlier mood.

She makes sure to send an individual text to Hilary, one of the few members of her undergrad study group that she’s kept in touch with. She’s at Chapel Hill University in North Carolina right now. It’s not Florida, but it’s in the US, and in the south, which is too close for comfort as far as Mackenzie’s concerned. 

Sal’s working on a project in Norway right now, some collaboration involving invasive fish species that Mackenzie doesn’t pretend to understand. They call when she texts, regardless of the time difference, and she startles herself by bursting into tears. Emily texts too, and Mackenzie responds with a string of dumpster fire gifs, until she feels a bit more like herself again.

She calls her mom last, and spends half an hour reassuring her that she’s not going to any risky nightclubs. She’s sick to her stomach at the thought of a gay bar as now being more risky. She was already planning on coming home in two weeks, and it’s worth the cost to change her ticket. Her classes are done anyhow, and she can submit final grades from home.

Lily keeps texting her the latest news updates and death counts. Mackenzie considers just muting the conversation, but finally calls her, and convinces her to take a break from the news for the rest of the day, and texts Russell with a heads-up. On it, he replies tersely.

By the next day when she gets home, checks in on her parents, and is checked in on by Dan and Duck, Russell has Lily focused on a plan, organizing a vigil. They’ve taken over the back half of the diner to plan and make signs, and Sandra and Lorraine are busy assembling votive candle holders.

Russell is on the phone with the Wilby police department, making arrangements for a police presence. He looks grimmer than she’s ever seen him.

They were supposed to be planning for a rainbow crosswalk this year as their big goal. Mackenzie had sent Russell contact info for the rights to screen a new documentary about Pride in Iqaluit for a community activity. Last week’s plans seem like a million years ago.

The Wilby chapter of PFLAG have ordered a new sticker this year, with both the rainbow and the trans flags on it. “How many stickers did you get?” she asks Sandra.

“Twenty five. It was the minimum order.”

“Give me the box.”

She slams one of the stickers down on the counter of the hardware store, and looks Stuart LeBlanc flat in the eye. “Almost fifty gay people were shot dead this week in a nightclub in Florida. Your niece is devastated because she can see a future where it might have been her, but right now she’s organizing a vigil tonight. She’s scared and feels alone. If you put this sticker on your door, she and other people like her--and me--will know that someone cares and wants to keep them safe.”

Stuart takes the sticker.

It turns out that she still knows a surprising number of people in town, and it only takes an hour before the box is empty, and almost every sticker is up in a window.

There are about forty of them gathered on the steps of town hall with candles, which is more than Mackenzie expected. Two uniformed police officers are present, and Chief French is out of uniform and  standing next to Sandra, but there are no disruptions to the somber occasion.

Lily does very well, only stopping once when her voice breaks in the middle. Russell is on one side of her, and to Mackenzie’s surprise, Max is on the other, white-faced but resolute. William’s running the sound system. Mackenzie leans against Duck, and videos the crowd and Lily’s speech, and sends a copy to Emily. 

Brave kid! Who’d have thought Wilby had it in them? Emily texts back. 

Chapter Text

Wilby holds its first Pride Parade in 2018. “Wilby Proud,” reads the sign over the bridge.

It’s a joint PFLAG-QSA project. Mackenzie rearranges all her commitments to make sure she’s home, and is unsurprisingly roped into volunteering, which is how she finds herself standing in the field behind the community centre at ten AM on a Saturday morning.

The QSA is leading the parade. Russell looks harried but happy, shepherding his overexcited charges into position. Max, Sadie, and Simon have become the senior members, and Mackenzie finds it kind of adorable. They’re all taller and more confident, but the three of them together still have the same manic energy they had as middle-schoolers. Sadie’s got the ace flag wrapped around her shoulders. She still has pigtails. Simon looks so grown up Mackenzie didn’t recognize him until he smiled, and was instantly familiar as the ten year old she’d first met. Max is standing on tip-toe behind Simon to lean over and rest their chin on his shoulder, and has a small gaggle of middle-schoolers hanging off their every word. 

There are about a dozen other students of various ages with Wilby QSA t-shirts, and two other teachers she doesn’t recognize. Mackenzie and the original four have all been declared lifetime members, and Mackenzie’s proud twice over to be wearing their t-shirt today. Lily’s home for the summer and working at the diner, and has helped Russell with the planning for the parade. They’ve even managed to get some regional media coverage for the event. CBC Nova Scotia was out to do an interview yesterday. 

The Wilby PFLAG chapter has grown from four to a dozen members on a good week. Mackenzie’s breath catches when she sees close to thirty people with the PFLAG banner, professionally printed and donated by her mom.

William’s gathered with the Indigenous youth alliance group for the surrounding region. Their banner says “We Have Always Been Here.” She catches Lily flipping him a salute from across the crowd. 

A handful of local businesses have come out, and two nurses from the health unit in scrubs, and one of the legal offices wanted to come and represent as well. Half of the Wilby Girl Guides are there. She knows it’s half, because her mom has been sharing the local gossip, and there is a potential schism in the troop impending because of this. The Wilby Lions Club was invited but is explicitly not in attendance. 

There’s a small contingent from Fredericton Pride, and a few people from the Pride boards in Moncton and St John’s, based on their t-shirts, who’ve come to show their support. Some of them look wary, and others are exuberant.

She’s just spotted the gaggle of drag performers when a pink-mohawked queen in towering heels sweeps her up into an exuberant hug. It’s Cameron, she recognizes with a thrill, home for the mainland for the occasion. It’s going to take her weeks to get the glitter out of her hair and clothes, and she could care less.

“Happy Pride,” Emily shouts, and tackle-hugs her from behind. Cameron hands Mackenzie off with a twirl. 

Emily and Derek got in last night. Derek’s rocking facepaint in the pan flag colours, and Emily’s wearing a shirt that says “I love my gay uncles.”

“Have Duck and Dan seen your shirt yet?”

Emily grins wickedly. “Not yet.”

And then there’s a whole milling crowd of families, kids on bikes and in strollers with streamers, and dogs with rainbow bandanas. Mackenzie spots faces she knows from Wilby, and recognizes from surrounding communities. Her mom seems to know everyone. Her dad’s waiting at the end of the parade route at the school, helping set up the family barbeque they’ve organized to follow.

She wonders if there will be anyone left to watch the parade. She spots Dan in the crowd with Sandra, but not Duck. She’s not surprised--crowds have never been his thing. Sandra’s trying to talk Dan into joining a committee she’s setting up for Pride next year. Much to everyone’s surprise, he’s going to say yes. 

Eventually, the whole chaotic crew is marshalled into order, and set on their way into the heart of downtown Wilby. Mackenzie hopes there will be a few people watching. The first couple of blocks, she’s happy to see a few people out in lawn chairs, some of them waving rainbow flags right back. 

Then they turn the corner onto Main Street. And there is what can only be described as a crowd on both sides of the street, shouting and waving. It’s so unexpected that Mackenzie tears up. 

But it’s what they find in front of the high school at the end of the parade route that takes her breath away.

There’s a rainbow crosswalk, in all its glory. And Duck, leaning against a lamp-post.

“He painted it last night,” Dan says in her ear. “The hockey team stayed up all night to guard it, in case anyone tried anything.” She’s in real danger of ugly crying now.

And then, Duck straightens up, steps off the curb into the parade, and takes Dan’s hand.

“Happy Pride,” Mackenzie says, smiling so hard her face hurts.

Duck smiles back. “Welcome home, kid. Happy Pride.”