'This is vegan?' Joe asks for the third time. Unlike most people awake at this hour on a Friday night, she isn't drunk, but she might be tired enough for it to amount to a few units of alcohol based on the way she eats her "fish" like it's a personal gift from whatever god she may believe in. 'How does it taste so real?'

'It's the nori,' I whisper.

Golda and Saanvi are in constant competition with every other chip shop in the country; it were only after I'd been coming here for three years that they finally answered me when I asked the exact same question. I've been vegetarian since I were nine so it's not like I remember what fish tastes like but as someone who has tried every vegetarian version of fish and chips in Manchester, I can vouch that this one is the best.

The shop is a hole in the wall with a singular picnic table on the street that we were lucky enough to seize, having left Spectrum earlier than normal. Though there's always a minimum of three people waiting for their takeaway, the queue will be a mile long an hour from now. Golda and Saanvi's chippy is open until six am on Fridays and Saturdays to reap the benefits of Manchester's nightlife and I've no doubt that the weekend alone earns them enough revenue to open a bigger space if they wanted.

'So how're you liking Manchester, Joe?' Eilidh asks, dipping a chip into curry sauce (menace). 

Eilidh is a personal trainer and volunteers as a swim coach; the walk here were enough to sober her up. Caleb has more or less passed out against her shoulder, rousing only to eat the chips she feeds him.

'It's okay, I guess.'

'So you hate it.'

Joe laughs, though drops her eyes and nibbles on a chip. 'It's not that. I just had a very romantic idea that moving away would solve all my problems and now I'm having to confront adult reality... Also, one of my neighbours is just awful. Every time I bump into him, he ruins my day.

'Either way, now that I'm single, I can't live anywhere within a fifty-mile radius of my mother or she'll start pairing me up with eligible Kittian bachelors and I'm not that desperate. My mum loves the "I carried you in my womb for nine months and was in fifteen hours of labour and you can't even do this one thing for me of going on a date with this complete stranger" card.'

Parker snorts. 'Classic.'

Joe leans around Allan to look at me. 'Are you parents like that?' My alarm must be etched into my face because she tacks on, 'Caleb said you're single so...'

My glare cuts to Caleb who lifts a hand, too tired to move more than the wrist off the table beside his takeaway box. 'It came up.'

'Bet it did.' It's not hard to imagine Caleb sauntering over to Joe, going "by the way, Nikki's single, in case you were wondering about that for any particular reason", and walking away immediately.

He sticks his tongue out. 'You can't hold me responsible for my actions: that's ableist. And transphobic. And you also hate Asians.'

I roll my eyes as visibly as I can before I force myself to glance at Joe. 'No, my parents aren't like that. They don't care who I date.' I shove the rest of my vegan fish into my mouth before she can ask me more about it.

It takes a second for the true meaning of her question—of my response—to dawn on the others. Caleb jerks upright. I didn't think his eyes, comically large from drag makeup, could get any bigger but they do when he shoots me "what the fuck" look. Rishi kicks him under the table and he rearranges it into a smile before Joe can notice.

I didn't reckon we'd become mates when I told her my parents were in Colombia "right now", did I? How am I supposed to correct that, "oh no, actually I'm just the worst son"?

Rishi drones summat about how his parents were fine with him being gay and asexual and doing drag, but when he announced he were moving to England for his postgraduate, they didn't talk to him for three months. 'Can't blame them either—we're Irish and Indian.' With the attention on him, I have the privacy to stitch shut the fissure in my chest.

But like a fly in a flytrap, my mind can't escape Joe's question. Why don't my parents care about who I date? Mamá and Papá's life mission is to safeguard the culture. Wouldn't they want to set me up with a Ticuna woman to keep the blood flowing, try to make up for centuries of mejorando la raza, twist the weapon in reverse? Wouldn't Cece and I be the ideal sites for keeping the culture alive?

So why didn't they stay to raise us into it? Were we lost causes, too English the moment I were born on this soil? They couldn't hack it in this country, that's what they wrote in the note anyway. And I suppose Cece and I were already tainted English by then. So maybe it's nowt to do with the soil and all to do with the fruit: they couldn't hack raising English kids.

I manage to wrestle free from the creepers of another crisis, delay it until I get home at least, just as Joe asks, 'So how do you all know each other?'

When the others share an ominous laugh, I join in; we might just be here for the next three hours explaining this.

Caleb takes the mantle, as he always does. 'So me and Nikki've been mates since nursery. Rishi and Allan met at uni during a LitSoc pub crawl–'

'To be clear,' Allan chimes is, 'I were only there cause my girlfriend at the time was in that society. I didn't go to university. Failed my A-levels, innit.'

'–They both got into drag at around the same time so they properly became mates through that. Rishi and Parker are old drag rivals so it were a whole "forbidden lovers" spiel with them–'.

'Still hate them ninety per cent of the time.' But Rishi's sourness slips when Parker leans in with a smile. 'No, you don't.'

'–When I started drag, Sasha let me perform at Spectrum which meant Nikki obviously were around too, so that's how we got to know them. Eilidh and I met on Tinder. Oh, and my sister and Parker were in school together, but she don't really come out anymore,' Caleb finalises. 'She's got kids and PTSD now.'

'Now we're just waiting for Nikki to get a partner,' Rishi adds.

'This isn't RuPaul's Bully Nicolás Race.'

Caleb bounces with a new burst of energy after his nap against Eilidh's shoulder. 'But it's so fun!'

'Joe's single too! Bully her.'

'We can't bully her: we've known her for thirty minutes. Besides,' Caleb adds. 'We don't even know if she wants to be in a relationship. Do you?'

Joe fidgets with her necklace. 'Not right now.'

He turns back to me. 'Hence, bullying you is fun. Bullying her is amatonormative.'

I don't catch the laugh before it's out of me. Fair enough, innit. Caleb throws a chip at me and Allan gives me an encouraging side hug with a reminder to the group that no one needs to be bullied.

The canyon in my chest hasn't gone away since I was eleven but it blankets with a vibrant vegetation cover as I take in my friends. Mamá and Papá might not have loved me enough to bother, but I'll never go a day without a single petal of love. If only I was able to give back as much as they give me.

For the rest of them, love is aluminium: infinitely recyclable, easier to reuse than produce new. But the love I receive in torn into flimsy shreds and carelessly woven into summat that pathetically resembles what it once was. It's like recycling plastic: the material always weakens, degrades with each circulation through my body until it breaks down into poison. I don't have the right equipment to love properly.

            'Allan, babes,' Parker says, dragging out each sound like they're beginning for Allan to interrupt, 'you are aware that Donald Trump, the president of the United States of America, is not British, right?'

'Yeah, he is. He's from Essex,' Allan persists and Caleb mutters, not so quietly, that he's not right in the head. 'That's where orange people come from.'

Our blend of concern and confusion is whisked away by laughter. It's lucky we don't collapse. Caleb hangs onto Eilidh for balance as he exclaims, 'I love white-on-white crime! Say more!' and another wave of cackles hit.

My own laughter mutes when my head sinks underwater. Or maybe water wraps around my head. Still, the laugh continues to rumble in my chest, echoing into a hollow body until I lose track of it. Somewhere, the conversation moves on. Somewhere, it's early Saturday morning and I'm walking down the street with my friends.

But I've left that somewhere, my consciousness sprinkled into my blood, into my breath, into the gyration of the wheels, and the blue letters on the side of the car.

'Nikki.' Like a ball of yarn, Caleb spools my focus to him. 'You're okay.'

He offers a hand. It takes me a moment to figure out the controls of my arm to accept it and Caleb massages my knuckles, unbothered by the sweat of my palm, until the police car passes.

With a gentle smile, he tucks locs behind my shoulder. 'You're okay.'

I'm okay.

We keep our fingers locked as we trail after the others, not in any kind of hurry to catch up. Caleb is too drunk or too tired to walk without support, though he still digs out his phone as it buzzes. He reacts to whatever the message is and idly checks the rest of his apps, more muscle memory than owt else.

He freezes so abruptly that it nearly dislocates my shoulder. His eyes are nailed to the screen as he mutters summat I catch only a cluster of consonants from. He looks up. 'I got chosen for London Drag Expo.'

It takes a second for me to process, head still swollen, ears waterlogged, thoughts stuck on: freeze, play dead, beg. London Drag Expo is one of the biggest drag events in the country, hosted every spring, and pretty much guarantees someone's fame in the scene... for better or for worse.

'Holy fuck!' I say, finally loading the full sentence. 'You got chosen for London Drag Expo!'

Caleb shrieks, jumping in excitement before he throws his arms around me.

'What are you two doing now?' comes Rishi's drone from the other end of the street. They've paused to wait for us.

'I got chosen for London Drag Expo!'

They look at each other, each person having caught a syllable that they have to puzzle into the right order. Then they have it and their congratulations erupt all at once. Eilidh sprints the distance of the street, not slightly out of breath when she reaches us and scoops Caleb into a hug. 'Baby, I'm so proud of you.' The thrill takes a minute to settle.

Caleb hooks one arm through mine and the other through Eilidh's to start walking again, though we're more or less carrying him now. 'I knew I'd get in. I'm Black, Asian, autistic, an amputee, trans, queer, and poor. And I have two mums which adds cool points: level one hundred, even if they are getting divorced. There's no job I can't not get. I could apply to be prime minister right now and they'd have to give it to me. I love affirmative action.'

He sighs theatrically, probably in reference to some meme considering we don't have affirmative action in the UK. I don't point that out. Nor the fact that I'm pretty sure you don't "apply" to be prime minister as that would undermine even the facade of democracy. We're not quite that far down the dystopia spiral yet.

'And if that cunt Aqua even thinks about winning, I'm going to Portsmouth and throwing all her wigs into the ocean.'

'How're ya getting there?' I ask.

'You're driving me.'

'Am I?' He nods and I lean into him, a smile in stubborn bloom on my face. I nudge him. 'Caleb, you got picked because you're the best.'

'Baby girl! You can't see it with the beard and all this foundation but I'm blushing.'

I chuckle but hold his gaze. Caleb talks so much in hyperbole that it's easy to miss when it becomes a shield but I've known him too long not to distinguish joke from buffer. 'You worked for this. You deserve it.'

Notes

Ticuna: Indigenous peoples from the Amazon in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru.

Mejorar la raza: (lit. better the race) Colonial mindset and phrase in Latin America that encourages you to marry a person as white as possible so that your children will be "better looking". Spanish colonisers in Latin America enforced a caste system that was based on appearance with Black Africans on the bottom and white people born in Europe at the top. Unlike in the USA, Spanish colonial rule actively enforced as many interracial relationships as possible as it was believed it was the most effective way of committing cultural genocide whilst keeping enough Indigenous people alive that they could exploited for labour alongside the chattel slavery of Africans. If everybody was every culture, then nobody could be any culture, and without that culture, they wouldn't pose a significant threat to the colonial rule. Though the caste system obviously doesn't exist anymore, the legacy is still alive today with some seeking proximity to whiteness.

As Afro-Indigenous people, Nicolás and Cece would be "Zambos" according to this caste system.

Nursery: Kingergarten. Daycare/school for kids under five.

LitSoc: Literature society. Societies are like clubs at university where you usually meet over common interests and also have recreation (drinking) activities.

Amatonormativity: The assumption that all humans desire romantic relationships, especially monogamous long-term ones. Amatonarmativity results in the undervaluing of platonic, polyamorous, sexual, or consensual short-term relationships.