Free Range
by Amber Nuyens
The first time Jamie goes to a gay bar, she thinks of those viral videos of cows being released into fields for the first time in their lives. The doors to their barns or livestock trailers swing open and the animals are timid at first, stepping gentle onto ground that’s softer than they have ever known. The light is bright above them, their eyes unaccustomed to the unfiltered sun, and the green grass before them is unlike anything the cows have ever seen in their barns. They’ve only ever known the grey of walls or dividers in front of them. After ensuring that this soft dirt ground is safe, the cows flow out of their doors, running and jumping like they shouldn’t be able to. They act like dogs, dancing through grass, never knowing this kind of openness and freedom but their animal brains teaching them how to be in an instant. This is what the gay bar feels like to Jamie. Open pasture after a life staring at a concrete wall.
The first time Jamie goes to a gay bar, she spends two hours deciding what to wear. She wants to come across as cool, butchy, capital-L Lesbian, but not too butch that she can’t get with a dyke if she wants. Her friend from the dorms, Mara, helps her decide. Mara is her closest gay friend, a girl who grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver and has been out since she was in her early teens. Jamie envies her comfort in herself, how easily she seems to embody her queerness, whereas Jamie approaches it clumsily and confused with too many muscle tees and never understanding how her hair should be. They’d slept together twice, a few weeks into the semester, but decided they weren’t each other’s type. Jamie doesn’t really know what her type is yet. She ends up wearing a wife-beater and jeans. Mara says it won’t matter, the vibes in the club are what’s important.
They take the bus—Jamie almost remembers which one—most of the way. On the walk to the bar after the bus, Jamie holds down her anxious dry heaves because she knows if she lets them get too bad, she’ll psych herself out and turn around. She’s sure once she gets there, it’ll be worth it. Mara’s convinced her. As they walk, Mara tells her about the last time she came to this place, how she met a girl that she’s pretty sure was her soulmate, a beautiful ginger twenty-three-year-old from Langley. For one full night at the club, Mara danced with her and they made out. Mara always reminds Jamie of how good of a kisser this girl was. They felt each other up, followed each other on Instagram, and haven’t spoken in five months. Mara says she looks for her every time she goes out. Jamie wonders if she’ll meet someone she ends up searching for like that.
There’s a line out the door, all sapphics waiting to get into the club on the outskirts of Downtown Vancouver. Jamie feels under-dressed, the people she passes as she walks to the end of the line wearing mesh and thin bras and tiny, uncomfortable-looking shorts and glitter all over. Two hours deciding how to look and Jamie feels like she fumbled her first gay outing. She is so bland, boring, compared to these cool girls. She has dropped the ball, will be forgotten in the haze of the sweat and music. Mara will lose her, nondescript jeans and tank not bright enough to hold on to.
When Jamie was too young she watched a too-graphic documentary on veganism where the activist subjects spoke about how “free-run” eggs are a fake marketing term, that those “free-run” chickens don’t even get to see outside, only the floor of a barn, before they are discarded when they stop laying. “Free range” is what people are thinking of. They get to roam a pasture, on occasion, the activists said. Not that you should be taking advantage of them at all, the activists said. Jamie started asking her parents for free-range eggs, but they said those were way too expensive. She stopped eating eggs for a while as a kid. This didn’t last long, but now when she eats eggs, she thinks of chickens in their cages or crowded on a barn floor. She doesn’t quite know why she empathizes so strongly with the birds.
Probably around the same time as seeing the documentary, Jamie started picking out her own clothes. The clothes in the girls’ section didn’t appeal to her, they looked forced and unnecessary even on the racks. The boy clothes Jamie wanted were always so much more muted. The closest she could get, what her mother would let her try on, were the quietly-coloured clothes in the girls’ section. Jamie wore browns and denim, hoping the jeans she could find didn’t have floral embroidery on them though her mother would often say Jamie needed to take what she could get. Eventually, Jamie settled for dressing as a boring girl. When she got to high school, she wore makeup for a bit, matching the girls around her with clumpy eyelashes and foundation-covered pimples, but by grade twelve she couldn’t be bothered with the effort. There was nobody in Winfield to impress. Boring girl, guilty about eggs.
Scattered throughout the line are less vibrantly dressed club-goers, more similar to Jamie’s look. She looks at the spread, mostly bright and glittery with some that almost make her feel better about how she looks. Make her feel normal, whatever that means. Nothing about this is really normal to her. Jamie fantasized about gay bars, dyke nights, about being in this kind of place before coming to Vancouver. In Winfield, there were two pubs populated by the same people, and Jamie could never see herself in either. There was no clubbing, the only parties were in basements or fields or forests or drinking in parks and at beaches. Jamie didn’t do the bush parties or beach drinking often, rarely had invitations to those things.
It’s all so different in Vancouver. Jamie doesn’t feel like she’s hiding something here. She has friends that she sees on weekends. Parties with, goes clubbing with. It’s happening fast, scaring Jamie a bit, but somehow she can already tell there’s a chance she’s meant to be here. So many things that seem more fitting to her.
As Jamie and Mara wait in line, Jamie’s anxious dry heaves fade into tingling in her fingers. Her outfit is still making her anxious, making her feel out of place in the lineup. She knows she’s bland compared to most of the other girls but she also knows she would feel like an idiot in the glitter, bras, girl clothes. The Winfield still lives in her, she realizes. She wonders how it will be possible to make her love of Vancouver and her remnants of being a girl from Winfield coexist.
Mara clocks Jamie’s anxiety.
“Are you excited?” Mara asks.
“I think so.” Jamie is honest.
“You’ll have fun,” Mara comforts. “I promise. You won’t know what to do with all the girls in there. You’ve never seen anything like it. And the drinks are so good. We’re gonna be fucked up.”
“What should I drink? I’ve never ordered anything in a club before.” Jamie only knew bad coolers booted for her by the older siblings of friends. Cocktails and bar drinks evaded her.
“I love a sex on the beach. Tastes like juice.”
“Okay, I want a drink that tastes like juice.”
At the front of the line, they flash their IDs to the bouncer who doesn’t look as hard at Jamie’s license as she expected him to. Jamie had a flash of anxiety handing him her very real ID, a movie scene where he held it up to the light and bent it and held it down to her face, then told her the ID was fake and confiscated it. Fake scenarios in Jamie’s head creating fake anxiety when, really, everything is going so smooth and simply. Mara and Jamie get into the club with no real-life issue, and suddenly, the cold air and streetlamps are gone.
The air is hot and dense enough that it feels like it’s holding Jamie. Music is loud, some Gaga song blasting through the bodies. Multicolour lights bounce off skin, turning the people shades of pink and blue and green, Mara next to her smiling under the strobe lights. She drags Jamie straight through the crowd of people, their clothes much less visible and less of an anxiety to Jamie in the dark mess. They head to the bar. Everything is so fast, Jamie can hardly process the steps she takes.
There’s no real line at the bar, just a crowd. It’s confusing, waiting around in a group of people until the bartender accidentally makes eye contact with her. When the bartender, a muscly girl with a mullet that Jamie finds beautiful, finally does find her, the memory of the drink Mara told her about has completely slipped her mind, like it’s the first time she’s ever drunk. The drink had a ridiculous name, and Jamie doesn’t have the time to remember it, now on the spot. She orders the first drink that she thinks of.
“I’ll get a G&T.” Jamie has never had gin, it’s just so easy to say. It makes her feel adult, like she’s in the movies.
The bartender nods silently, pours clear liquid from a large bottle, Gordon’s, and finishes with a spray of bubbly water from a nozzled hose.
She slides the glass across the bar to Jamie, and asks, “Open or closed?”
The look Jamie gives her must have effectively communicated her confusion, deer in the headlights, all of this new and terrifying, and yet the bartender’s job.
“The tab, babes. Do you want to pay now or keep it open and pay later?” The bartender is rushed but gentle in her explanation.
“Oh, pay now, please. Thank you.”
Jamie swipes her card, tips twenty percent. She doesn’t even look at the screen, everything too much around her. She has no idea how much the drink was, but can’t imagine it was more than five dollars. She doesn’t care.
When she turns away from the crowded bar, Mara is gone. Jamie’s stomach drops, her only tether to the outside missing. Mara had told her she would stay with her tonight, but in this mess, she’s nowhere to be found. Jamie is trying to look calm, to prevent anyone from noticing her panic like the bartender did. She searches a sea of people, blurred, all the same, none distinct enough to be distinguished as Mara. She’s shorter than Jamie, dark hair, easy to lose in the bodies, but had decided to put some sparkly clips in her hair. Butterflies, maybe. Jamie didn’t remember. She just remembered thinking that she had never been the kind of girl to wear things like that. Seeing all the girls in line dressed like that, like Mara, had frightened her. Now, she’d lost Mara in the sea of girls like her. Jamie sees several girls with hair clips like Mara. None of them are her.
When Jamie was around eleven, she ate veal for the first time. It really was spectacular. Tender, leaking juices, slightly sweet. She felt evil with every bite for how much she enjoyed it. She couldn’t cleanse her mind of the image of a wobbly-legged calf being slaughtered and processed as she savoured the meat.
She was so angry with her dad for buying the veal chops. There wasn’t even a special occasion. She was angry with her mother for agreeing to fry them beautifully. Jamie’s sister didn’t seem to have any qualms about eating the meal, so Jamie was mad at her, too. It was just morally wrong, all of it. And Jamie was having an excellent time, loving every bite. Everyone around her enjoying themselves, no qualms, Jamie’s head flashing her with reasons why she was doing something wrong, even if she couldn’t take it back.
Jamie didn’t really even know what gay was until around then. She remembered the boys her age being loud and aggressive on purpose, posturing, calling things gay and getting scolded by the adults as though they were cursing. In that sense, Jamie understood that gay was not something to be. When Jamie watched the girls around her begin to crush on the loud and aggressive boys or the airbrushed, muscular male celebrities in their Teen Vogues and felt nothing for them but a sort of jealousy in the way they looked and the way clothes sat on them and the way they held their heads up all confident and male, she pretended for a time that nothing was awry. By the time she started feeling the same way for the much softer women in the magazines, when she couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t stop watching the singer in the Paramore music videos, Jamie had come to learn that she was what they called gay, not in the insult way but the real way. Still, she wondered how it could exist in both states.
For a while, she tried to find boys attractive, tried to see something in their short hair that made their faces look too round, or the too-buff celebrities that looked simultaneously dehydrated and sweaty. Jamie pretended, for the people around her. She thought it was probably almost convincing for a while, too.
Jamie shifts slowly to the edge of the club, couples to either side of her flirting, kissing necks, holding waists. She sips her drink, mostly tasteless but fizzy, and watches the people dancing in front of her. Girls like her and not, jumping to Icona Pop, while Jamie’s still looking for Mara and suddenly she thinks of the times when her mother would leave her alone in line at the grocery store. She feels deeply exposed, like she’s walked into some place she wasn’t invited and perhaps she should leave while she’s still mostly sober. Are these people looking at her, so intimately aware of how inexperienced she feels?
She downs the drink, leaking across her chin and ice hitting her top lip. There’s not actually a clear exit but Jamie heads to the door she entered through where people are still streaming in. As she locks in on the door, ready to escape into the cold air, a hand on her shoulder stops her. For a moment Jamie thinks Mara must have found her, but when she turns, it’s a stranger. A girl in her mid-twenties, Jamie thinks, around her height, with a buzzcut. In the flashing lights, Jamie can see freckles and long eyelashes. She’s wearing a sports bra and baggy jeans, and Jamie is stuck in a momentary loop of feeling jealous for not looking like her, and wondering what kissing her would feel like. Jamie looks at her face and the girl is smiling wide and something clicks. She forgets about losing Mara, about leaving.
“Wanna dance?” the girl asks.
Jamie says nothing but nods, smiling back at her.
The girl pulls Jamie into the crowd, skin brushing on skin, air even hotter than Jamie thought it could get, everything so loud. Jamie’s holding onto an empty cup with one hand, this new girl holding her other, and when they reach an opening, they face each other. Bass runs through Jamie’s chest, and she can barely hear anyone speak around her.
The girl leans in and yells so Jamie can hear her over the music. “I’m Liz. Who are you?”
Jamie yells her name back. She has to get so close to Liz’s ear that the hair on the back of her neck stands up. They’re so close to each other, Liz’s hands on Jamie as they dance. Jamie suddenly understands what Mara meant every time she talked about her ginger girl from Langley. She cannot imagine this night ending and returning to the ringing silence of her dorm room.
There’s a wave of comfort washing over Jamie, and it can’t only be the alcohol because she’s only just finished it, but there’s something entirely correct about where she is. Even if she feels terribly bland and incomplete compared to the sparkly, tiny-clothes girls who vastly outnumber the girls dressed like her, Jamie feels maybe like she is allowed to be here. She and Liz are dancing together, surrounded by girls like them, and when Liz kisses Jamie, she thinks that yes, this is where I am meant to be. She forgets, for a moment, about Mara and Winfield and glitter and how her jeans are too hot. Something is right. Cows, running through a field for the first time.
Jamie stopped eating meat two years before she moved to Vancouver. She started feeling too guilty, thinking of the creature the steaks or strips or chops came from. She couldn’t even eat sushi without thinking that the salmon or tuna might have felt pain in its final moments, or that its life was cut short because of her. For the first while, she couldn’t quite figure out how to eat real meals that didn’t have a meat protein in it. It seemed like everything had chicken or beef or pork mixed into it, and then all the soups were made with chicken broth and then all the candy had gelatin in it. It frustrated Jamie, transitioning her life like this, but also being too guilty to go back. She couldn’t look at a chicken strip without thinking of birds in cages, steak without thinking of cows staring at walls, or pork without hearing pigs squeal in those vegan documentaries.
When Jamie moved to Vancouver, she felt so incredibly spoiled. She’d never been to restaurants that made special vegan meals, and she certainly hadn’t been to vegan or vegetarian restaurants. She hadn’t been able to look at a menu and choose something other than fries or salad in two years. It may seem silly, but it was one of the reasons she felt like she belonged in Vancouver. There were places in this city that were meant for her.
Jamie didn’t remember her visits to Vancouver as a child, always thought the city was so busy and loud. Her parents dragged her from excursion to excursion, tense and aggressive trying to get to the next location. When she came to Vancouver to live, for the first time she could give herself the opportunity to slow down and look at the place she was in. On one of her first solo excursions in the city, a few weeks after the start of classes, Jamie bussed to Gastown. It was raining, not enough to wish she had an umbrella, but enough to make her hair cling to itself. She didn’t care. As she explored her new city, pretending she didn’t still feel like a tourist, Jamie watched an older lesbian couple a few lengths in front of her. They were mundane, wandering like Jamie was, but she had never seen a lesbian couple in Winfield. In real life. They were something Jamie had only ever thought of as a possibility in a distant future, but in the rain, on the wet concrete, they existed as real people, not knowing that they beaconed to Jamie that there were places and people in this city that were meant for her.
Jamie and Liz dance together all night. They make out in the outdoors smoking area, something about the smell of the second-hand and the cold night-time air making it all more exciting. The night fades and the club closes at 1:00 a.m., and as the girls all filter out of the gay bar, Jamie and Liz still attached at the hip, Jamie knows she has to find Mara to get home.
Outside on the street, girls are paired, flirting and kissing and feeling each other up like inside, or hopping in cabs or making their way to the SkyTrain. Mara is so easy to find out here under street lamps, Jamie wonders if she was out here the whole time.
“Oh my god, girl, I thought you’d left,” Mara says, obviously drunk. “You never answered your phone.”
Jamie hadn’t thought of her phone at all inside the club. First the anxiety blurred rational thought, then she was too entranced by Liz.
“Did you have a good time?” Mara asks as she puts her hands on Jamie’s shoulders, mock-interrogating. She has barely noticed Liz next to Jamie. Liz is looking around the stragglers on the street, presumably for her friends.
“Yes, of course,” Jamie says. She looks at Liz who is beginning to pull away.
As Liz walks away, having found her people, she looks back at Jamie and tells her it was nice to meet you! before disappearing down a street corner.
Mara says “She’s cute,” almost like she can’t help it.
Jamie already hopes to see Liz the next time they are at one of these things. Unlike Mara’s girl from Langley, Jamie does see Liz again. About three weeks after meeting Liz at the club, Jamie sees her at a vegan restaurant near the UBC campus. She is eating soup at a corner table, alone, and Jamie orders her food to go. They do not speak. She finds she kind of likes the mystique of having someone to search for.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Amber Nuyens lives on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən and WSÁNEĆ territory with her elderly lizard. She is the author of the chapbook THESE DEAD THINGS ARE NOT MY FAULT (broke press, forthcoming 2025). Her work has appeared in PRISM international, Moss, HAD, and elsewhere. Amber has been shortlisted for the Bridge Prize and the Okanagan Short Story Contest and is currently working on a collection of short fiction and a novel.
Website: amberwnuyens.wordpress.com