How To Lose Weight And Survive The Apocalypse

Chapter 25

As I hid behind the backyard mint bush while attempting to discretely swat bugs off my skin without alerting my friends to my presence, I decided this was officially the most awkward dinner party I'd ever been too.

Not the worst dinner party, mind you – Dean, when he was Dom to me, had dragged me along to a conference dinner once as a reward for losing weight. That was absolute hell. The food was fancy and rich, and I was conscious of the calories of every crumb I allowed past my lips as Dom watched me like a hawk. The people were awful, stereotypical douchebag lawyers and their vapid trophy wives, which meant the discussions were either about complex litigation matters I couldn't follow, or concerned the latest Kardashian/West dramas and where to find the best lipliner tattoo artist.

At the end of the night, Dom had critiqued me mercilessly, and I'd fallen asleep in tears – after doggy-style sex where he'd almost yanked my hair clean off my scalp. Funny, the things you forget... Being back in Dom's bed after so long caused all kinds of odd memories to float to the surface at unexpected moments, and I was doing my best to keep them submerged.

This dinner party had been awks from the start, as Nev would say. Nev had introduced Bailey as we'd walked in, but it was clear she hadn't thought about how to refer to them. "Mum, Nonna,, Jazz, Liana, this is my... This is Bailey. Bailey and I, we're- well, we have been really close on the road, and Bailey is important to me, okay?"

I'd winced, but Bailey's face had been neutral. I'd wondered if they'd retreated into their mind, to the places where they'd hid when their own family had treated them like an oddity. "Hi, I'm Bailey. My pronouns are they/them."

"Your what?" Nev's mother, a slender woman with dyed auburn hair and darkly tanned skin, blinked in confusion.

"Their pronouns, Mum," said Nev. "Like, instead of she and her, or he and him, Bailey uses they and them."

"But... There's only one of you." Mrs Cirillo looked around at her other daughters and her mother, her face seeking a sign that this was madness. "They is for more than one person."

I paused, waiting for Simon to launch into one of his classic lectures about gender and the limitations of the English language, forgetting for a second that he was dead. Guess it's up to me. "Actually, Mrs Cirillo, because we don't have a non-gendered pronoun, people like Bailey use they and them to refer to just one person. Most languages in the world don't even have grammatical gender – English is a minority that way."

"Yeah," interjected Nev. "And we do use they and them for one person in English too – like saying, 'if someone comes to dinner and they insult the food, they would get a boot to the arse.'"

"Ma, just let them in," said Liana, evidently bored. "Nev, give us a hand in the kitchen."

After only an hour in Nev's familial home, it was evident that gender lines were everywhere, like invisible duct tape stretched across the rooms. The men - Nev's step-dad, her sister's husbands and her nonna's partner - sat in the front lounge smoking in silence, which was where Rueben was immediately relegated to. The women dominated the kitchen; it was hard to tell if they were cheerful because of the large amount of yelling that went on, but they seemed content. The little girls were coddled and doted upon – Mischa happily wallowed in the attention – but the boys were screamed at and insulted constantly.

Bailey lurked in the corridor, not sent in with the men or invited to help with the women. I didn't want to believe they'd been deliberately excluded; it felt more like a case of not knowing what to do with them. I kept Bailey company, pouring us both pinot noir from the bottle I'd claimed from Dean's wine rack, and Nev shot us apologetic looks as she bustled around.