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The costume hangs limply on the back of his hotel room door. He bought it ironically at a Spirit Halloween in Orlando, and in the two days since, it’s become less and less ironic every time he’s looked at it. He keeps waiting for the damn thing to talk to him like the Green Goblin mask. Jess knocks on the door.
“Hey Dan, are you good to leave in twenty minutes?”
When he answers, his mouth feels suspiciously dry and his voice doesn’t sound like his own. “Sounds good.”
“Cool,” Jess says, “Tom has a cousin from the area, so he’s picked out a really cool place for us to go.”
He can hear her walk off, down the hallway. He’s torn between thinking about how many times she uses the word cool and barely even thinking about what she said at all. Dan has a bad habit of becoming a bit of a petty bitch when he’s stressed out.
They’re going to leave in twenty minutes. It’s too late for him to change his mind. Besides, it probably won’t matter at all. It’s a nun costume from Spirit Halloween. A women’s nun costume. It wasn’t made for him. He’ll look ridiculous, they’ll have a good laugh, and then they’ll all forget about it in the morning. He puts on the costume, and the matching fishnets that he also bought ‘ironically,’ which don’t tear when he expects them to.
There’s only one problem with this otherwise flawless plan. Dan looks fucking great. Somehow, this plus-sized women’s costume from Spirit Halloween fits him like he was born to wear it. He looks like he was born to wear it. He takes pictures of himself in the mirror and even in the pictures, he looks like he’s morphed into an entirely different version of himself. That is, to say the least, absolutely fucking terrifying. Dan’s jaw won’t quite shut. His hands are trembling. He repeats to himself, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. Now that’s ironic.
They’re going to leave in twenty minutes. It’s too late for him to change his mind. But it’s not too late for him to call Phil.
The FaceTime tone rings and rings and rings. “Come on, you spleen. Pick up. Fuck.” He curses to himself when he realizes that it’s 4 AM in London. Phil’s got to be asleep. He’s on his own for this one. Then, the FaceTime tone makes a familiar, comforting little sound, and he’s greeted by the welcome sight of Phil with his hair disheveled, his glasses recently shoved-on and crooked.
“Did you know that there’s a lawmaker in Tennessee named Dan Howell?” he slurs, “That’s your clone, Dan. Are you going to fuck him or kill him?”
Dan giggles, already a bit more relaxed. “You should be asleep, you spoon.”
“ You called me,” said Phil. His eyes sharpened slightly as he entered the land of the living. “What are you wearing?”
Dan’s cheeks flame. Phil can only see him from about the collarbones up. “Oh. Uh. It’s. My costume.”
“Yeah, I guessed that,” Phil teases, “What are you dressed as?”
Dan sighs. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
“I might laugh, if you look stupid,” Phil says absentmindedly. He yawns so aggressively that it becomes less a yawn and more a snake-style jaw unhinging.
“Phil, I know you’re just messing with me, but now really isn’t the time.”
“Okay, okay,” says Phil, “I’m focused. Are you alright?”
Instead of answering, Dan stands up straight, taking a few steps away from the camera. He feels awkward just standing there without context dressed like a slutty nun, so he does a little spin, then turns back to look at Phil, his heart pounding. It feels almost ludicrous that the evil part of his brain is tricking him into thinking that Phil would have any kind of problem with this, but judging by Phil’s dead silence, maybe it isn’t so ludicrous after all. He walks back towards the camera.
“Phil?” he prompts tentatively, “What do you think?”
“...I think it’s incredibly unfair that you’re thousands of miles away from me right now.”
Dan cackles. He feels a weight lift off his shoulders, which threatens to let him float away. He feels a little bit like he did the first time he’d come out to someone on purpose and wasn’t punched in the face for it. Ironically, the person in question was also Phil. “Someone’s not thinking pure Christian thoughts,” he teased. The words felt unfamiliar and clunky on his tongue.
“You saying that is not helping!” Phil grins hard, and Dan notices that he isn’t the only one who’s bright red. Phil always blushes easily, because of his alabaster, Casper the ghost complexion, but this is a little extreme. “You told me that you’d bought the costume, but I didn’t expect it to look this good.”
“Well, I’m offended by that,” Dan teases, even though he’d thought the very same thing.
“And the fishnets? Do you just become a whole different person at Spirit Halloween?”
“I think I might’ve, yeah,” Dan says, more to himself than to Phil, “And you sound like an amateur Drag Race judge. Like if RuPaul invited an influencer to be a judge on Drag Race only to find out that he knew absolutely nothing about drag and just ended up getting flustered and complimenting all the contestants instead of actually judging them.”
“Which is exactly what would happen if I was a Drag Race judge,” says Phil.
Dan catches sight of the clock in the corner of his screen, counting down the minutes until 10 PM. “Shit,” he says, “I have to go.”
“Where are you going?” asks Phil.
“Uh, not sure. Tom has a place in mind.”
Phil frowns slightly. “Okay. Be careful.”
Dan sighs and feels himself bristle. “Phil–”
“I know, I know. Just… be safe.” I don’t want anything to happen to you is unspoken, but it’s very, very present.
He’s not naive enough to not know that this is a risk. At the very least, he should have had this… whatever this is, back in Boston, or in New York. Tennessee is, to say the least, not the safest place for people like him.
The thrum of fear behind Dan’s ribcage is intensely familiar to him, though he’s been protected from it for a while. The stories coming out of the Southern United States remind him of home in the worst way.
“He’s a dickhead, isn’t he?”
Phil’s brow furrows in confusion. “Who?”
“Dan Howell the Congressman. I’m guessing he’s not the nicest person.”
“No.”
Not the nicest person was a gentle way of saying that he would put them both six feet under, directly or indirectly, if he was given the chance. Dan’s hands are shaking again.
“Dan? Are you okay?”
Is he okay? It's a question that he learned to ask himself in therapy. He also learned that when his hands are shaking and his breath is speeding out of control, it’s usually not because he’s okay. But the lesson that he internalized the most was that nothing that happened to him in school was fair or just or right. That he’s allowed to be angry about it. Because it is anger, not fear, that’s prompting this reaction. He knows himself well enough to know that. It’s the righteous, red-hot kind of anger that he usually only feels on behalf of others.
He really could just change. He has other club appropriate, non-costume outfits that won’t threaten him as directly. Rationally, though, he understands that it’s not the costumes that are threatening him. And the people who hurt him in the past – the people who would gladly still do so today – can haunt him as much as they damn well please, but he can’t let them win.
“Yeah,” he answers after a few seconds of prolonged silence, “I’m doing fine.” Maybe by the end of the night, it won’t be a lie. A knock sounds at the door. “I have to go, alright?” he says.
Phil nods. “Have fun. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
The call goes dark.
“Dan?” Jess calls through the door, “Are you coming out?” In the brief, fading solitude of his hotel room, Dan lets out a breathy laugh.
Dan hated being tall as a teenager, and he hates being tall now. He floats about a half a foot over the rest of his crew, making it impossible to disappear. Everyone else in their little group is laughing, swapping backstage stories, telling the others what Halloween looked like in their childhoods, but Dan just can’t relax. How could he? Everyone on this street is staring at him and they can tell that something about him is broken and wrong.
He avoids making eye contact with passersby and falls back into the age-old habit of staring at his Doc Martens. It’s a useful way to avoid seeing the Trump 2024 signs that keep popping up like a computer notification warning about a parasitic, software destroying virus.
Besides, when he looks up, he has to look at all the people walking towards them, and individually crunch the numbers on whether or not each of them is to grab him by the neck and shove his head into the nearest wall. The man approaching them now seems like a likely candidate. He’s got an old flannel under a denim jacket with an American flag stitched into it, a backwards baseball cap and a thick red beard. In a few hours, with the terror drained from his body and hindsight on his side, Dan will recognize that he was actually kind of handsome.
In the moment, though, he stares at Dan, who does nothing but brace himself for the inevitable. In the fight or flight lottery, Dan was unlucky enough to get freeze.
Then, the man smiles. “Sick costume, bro.” He keeps walking. He leaves Dan unharmed. Dan looks back at him as he walks away, and notices that the front of his baseball cap reads sow seeds, not hate.
“Thanks,” he breathes. The man is already well out of earshot. Dan’s not sure it matters. He leans over so that Jess can hear him. “I think I just did a classism,” he laments.
Jess shakes her head, then grins. “Don’t worry about it. It’s happened to the best of us. But seriously, I’ve been to Nashville a bunch of times, and the people here are really nice. I mean, there are some assholes. Especially in the suburbs and the small towns. For the most part, though, everyone’s just trying to live their life. The rich, suit-wearing lawmaker is a lot more likely to screw you over than the farmer just trying to get home to his kids. I mean, for all you know, that guy is gay. For all you know, he’s an off-duty drag queen. Almost no one is as evil as you expect them to be.”
Dan says nothing. He just looks at Jess, who’s built herself a pirate costume made entirely out of thrifted items that she’s been collecting across cities on the tour. She looks relaxed. She looks confident. Ergo, she looks great.
Dan considers asking her what her secret is. Instead, he sets himself a personal goal: to stop seeing people on the street as monsters hell-bent on hunting him down. He’s not sure what possesses him to wink at the elderly woman staring at him disapprovingly from a set of church steps. Whatever it is, he decides that he wants to nurture it.
“Can we take some pictures?” Dan asks. He isn’t sure if he wants to post this, or even tell anyone about it other than Phil, but he does know that he’ll want to remember it for as long as he lives.
They take a group photo. When they stumble upon a street sign that reads Church St., Ben insists on taking one of just Dan, and if he gets a little slutty with it, that’s between him and God. And the people on the street. And his friends. And millions of people on the internet, really, because if he’s being honest with himself, this is too much of an event for him to keep it to himself. He’s an attention whore first and everything else second.
Somehow, taking the pictures makes Dan feel less scrutinized instead of more. It makes sense, after all this time, that cameras feel like home to him. He doesn’t notice how much he’s relaxed, but he does notice other things, like how nice the night is. It’s cool but not cold, the sky is a dark shade of blue, the streetlights send gold streaks over puddles that his boots are protecting him from and the stars seem to be smiling down at him.
By the time they get to the club, the tension has drained out of his shoulders and he’s stopped trying to ball his hands into his fishnets. He really, really likes the idea of a club called the Black Sheep. The bouncer IDs him, which always makes him feel good, and then they’re granted entry.
It takes Dan’s eyes a second to adjust to the multicolor lights and the movement surrounding him on all sides. When he does, though, he realizes pretty quickly that the Black Sheep is a gay bar. Dan went to a gay bar once in London, very shortly after coming out. He had a good time, but he got overstimulated pretty quickly and didn’t really know who to talk to, since Phil didn’t like clubs and hadn’t come with him. In truth, Dan didn’t tend to love clubs either, so he went home at eleven. And then COVID hit and clubbing ceased to be a thing for a bit.
Now, here, Dan doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. He buys himself a margarita and drinks it slowly – he has to get up pretty early in the morning tomorrow and haul ass to Ohio, and that’s not going to happen if he’s too hungover to stand. He figures that a drink is as good of an excuse as any to stand ominously in the corner, so that’s where he parks himself, just like at every party he’s ever been invited to.
It becomes very clear to him that this is not every party he’s ever been invited to. The DJ is playing some club remix of Jolene, while a drag queen, who may or may not be dressed like Dolly Parton herself, is voguing in the center of the dance floor. Somewhere along the way, voguing turns into the Macarena, and Dan laughs. He feels a little weird, just staring at a stranger in the club, but he gets the sense that she would appreciate it. When Dan turns slightly to the left, he feels like he’s tripped and fallen into the Matrix. There’s a woman standing in the corner, maybe in her mid-twenties with dark skin and bright blue hair, wearing the exact same costume that he’s wearing. He would say something, or at least nod, but she’s focused on making out with a tall redhead, and Dan would never dare impede someone on that particular quest.
“Dan!” Duncan shouts from the dance floor, “Come dance with us!”
His whole crew has formed a pulsing blob on the corner of the floor, bouncing up and down as the bass of the Jolene remix overtakes the entire rest of the song. Dan can feel his organs buzzing with the strength of what his feet are picking up from the floor. It’s like he can hear and feel the Earth spinning under him, and he decides that it’s spinning too fast for him to stand in a corner like a rejected kid. There’s a very strong chance that he’s going to show ass if he dances too vigorously in this outfit, but he doesn’t think anyone here would care.
He bounces with his friends to a slightly apocalyptic version of It’s Raining Men – he can’t help but feel relieved that this place plays something other than country music – leaves the floor, then orders a glass of red wine, because fuck Ohio. Overthinker that he is, he can’t make himself think about anything other than this night. Dan is at a party and he doesn’t want to peel his skin off. He can recognize miracles when he stumbles across them.
When he tries to maneuver his way back to the floor, his friends have somehow shifted to the other side of it, and it’s too crowded for him to get back to them, so he ends up just swaying with a separate group of strangers. One of them – a punk with a leather jacket bearing two pins, one that reads Ash and the other that reads xe/xem – looks up at him with excitement.
“Hold on, you’re Dan Howell!”
Dan can’t help the way his heart sinks a little bit. “Yeah, I am. Hi,” he tries.
“I went to your show last night. Good shit, good shit.”
“Thanks!” Thanking Ash is a bit more genuine. As much as Dan doesn’t want to do the famous YouTuber thing right now, he always gets a little giddy when someone compliments the show. He downs the rest of his wine glass.
Ash continues. “Yeah, I cried like four times. I wasn’t even going to come out tonight, but you’re right, you know? The world is so weird and fucked up, especially in this part of the country. And the only thing we can do about it is to build community. And to get louder and weirder and gayer, and to have more fun. It’s like… if these fucking politicians want me to be miserable and dead, then the best way for me to spite them is to be as happy and alive as possible.”
Huh. Ash had slurred half of xyr words, but Dan hung onto every single one anyway. He’d never thought about it like that, not directly. He’d written the damn show and he’d never applied it to a situation like this. But Ash is undoubtedly correct. Wasn’t that exactly what Dan was thinking when he put this costume on in the hotel room, a mere couple of hours ago?
He waits for xem to ask for a picture. Xe doesn’t. Dan wonders if maybe Ash gets it, that he doesn’t exactly want to be Daniel Howell™ tonight. But if he isn’t Daniel Howell, then who the hell is he?
Before he has the chance to answer that question, an older butch lesbian offers him her hand. He takes it, she twirls him, and the alcohol hits him right in the stomach.
Dan is in the gender neutral bathroom of a gay bar, staring into the mirror with tears streaming down his cheeks. He stopped feeling like he was going to vomit a few seconds after he left the floor, but he still feels off balance somehow. He thought the silence would help him collect his thoughts, but as he stares into the mirror at a teary hot mess with fucked up, sweaty curls in a sexy nun costume, all he can think is what the fuck are you doing? And he doesn’t really want to hear that. He’s heard enough of that in his lifetime, thank you very much.
He tells himself that the sudden burst of emotion comes from the wine/margarita combo, but while that can’t possibly be helping, he knows that it isn’t the alcohol that sent him here.
Dan heaves a sob, which he tries and fails to repress as the door to the bathroom swings open again. It’s the same woman from the floor, the one who tried to twirl him.
“Oh, no,” she says, “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” says Dan, and somehow, he doesn’t feel like he’s lying, “I’m just… you know. Drunk girl in the bathroom.”
She frowns. “Is it because of a relationship?”
Dan laughs. “Not even close.”
God, he misses Phil. He wishes Phil were here. He would say something dumb but incredibly profound like don’t even worry about it, or it’s literally fine, or do you want a KitKat, and everything would feel okay again. But Phil is thousands of miles away. That doesn’t cancel out the fact that he needs to talk to someone.
“It’s literally not fair that I was bullied in secondary school. I mean, I’m so hot and cool and… who would I even be right now if I hadn’t grown up afraid of my own shadow?”
“What the fuck is secondary school?” the woman asks. Damn Americans.
“Don’t worry about it.” He looks at her, like actually looks at her, and notices that her grey hair is streaked with blue and lavender, and that she actually pulls off the raccoon eyes eyeliner look that Dan has thought about trying so many times. “I wish I’d worn eyeliner,” he weeps, “Can you imagine how much more dramatic I would look right now with eyeliner streaming down my face? People would think it was a fashion choice instead of an existential crisis.”
“You can borrow some of my eyeliner, if you like.” She procures a pencil from one of her tactical jacket’s many pockets.
Dan sniffs. “I mean, I’m already crying. It’s a little too late now, right?”
She smiles in a way that makes him miss his grandma, makes him miss being five. “Oh, honey. It’s never too late.”
Dan is in the backseat of a limousine headed to a hotel somewhere in Nashville, with his runny eyeliner smudging on the window. He rolls that window down, partly because he’s still sober enough to avoid looking like a complete disaster, and partly because he’s sweating. And covered in glitter, for some reason. He’s not exactly sure how that happened. He has the four phone numbers of the people he danced with scrawled on his arm, and although he can’t remember whose is whose, he knows that he intends to try them all on the trip to Ohio tomorrow. He hasn’t sent out thank you notes since he was a child. Maybe it’s time to change that.
His phone buzzes and he fumbles to open it. It’s 3 AM, he’s drunk, and there’s a few seconds of delay between his mind and his hands. But it’s 9 AM in London, which means that Phil just rolled over in bed to send him a text.
fun? it reads.
Dan answers, perfect. (The text that he sends out actually ends up reading oerfct but he won’t figure that out until he rereads it on the bus the next day, texting with one hand and eating a greasy burrito with another.)
He pokes his head out the window like an excited dog, letting his curls and his headdress fly backwards in the wind. A hundred feet above him, he spots a red and blue billboard, which, to be fair, is hard to miss, with its bright nightlights and ClipArt fonts.
It asks, WHERE ARE YOU GOING? HEAVEN OR HELL?
His cheeks hurt from smiling and his eyes tear from the cold. His phone buzzes again on the seat, and he can smell all-too-familiar sharpie fumes wafting up from his forearm. There is no Heaven that’s better than this.