The leader was a blond guy with a Romney boy haircut. He was waving a draft beer at the other bros, punctuating his story with dramatic sweeps of the glass, splashing beer all over the table in the process. When he noticed North and Shaw, he paused, his brain trying to paddle through the booze, and then he grinned. “Hey. Hey! We’ve got a bet going about you guys. We saw you. We saw you guys sitting over there. And we’ve got a bet going. We’ve got a bet about whether you—” He punched the glass toward Shaw. “—whether you’re a girl or a tranny because, you know, the hair. And that fucking face.” He burst into howls of laughter, the other bros aped his laugh.

North could feel his knuckles pop as he made fists. He felt a smile growing on his lips.

“Ok,” Shaw said, bouncing on his toes, the eighteen Cokes making his words shoot out machine-gun style. “Ok, hey, not cool, not cool, the tranny thing, you’re not even supposed to say that anymore. But I don’t think you realize how much you’re upsetting the people here, and I know you wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t try to make them upset, if you knew that. I just wanted to talk to you about that. Maybe I could buy you guys some drinks, just kind of talk it out, and then you can go.”

“Oh my God, oh my God,” the Romney boy said. “You’re not even a tranny, are you? You guys are here, like some kind of—Buck, what’s the word?”

Buck. North wanted to roll his eyes, but all he could feel was the smile stretching his cheeks and the taut skin over his knuckles.

“Solidarity,” Buck said and then belched.

“Yeah. Fuck yeah, Buck. You guys are here in some kind of solidarity, right? You guys are like, what? Fags? And these are your hags?” Another round of laughing and clinking glasses and bumping fists. “Dude, no homo, but you are definitely not my fucking type.”

For a moment, the punch was crystal clear in North’s head: the force of the impact rippling through this Romney boy’s jowls, then the follow-up, the glass crunching under North’s hand as he smashed it against the bro’s face.

But he didn’t throw the punch. And he didn’t grab the glass.

“You guys need to go.”

“Fuck off, faggots,” Romney boy said, his voice turning hard and menacing. “Or do you need us to make you fuck off?”

Still bouncing on his toes, Shaw said, “I just think if I could talk—”

North grabbed his arm and hauled him toward the bar.

“Hey,” Romney called, “you, yeah, the blond one. You can do better than him. You know that, right?”