She did a twirl, which was adorable and would have been much prettier if she’d had room for her dress to flare out without bumping into the walls and furniture.

Saturday evening after Carmen got back from work, I was studying on Carmen’s bed and they were sitting at the desk working on their laptop when there came a knock at the door. Carmen got up and answered it.

A little girl with light green skin and dark green hair said, “Hi, Carmen.”

“Serena?” Carmen stepped aside to let her in.

“Yep!” She did a twirl, which was adorable and would have been much prettier if she’d had room for her dress to flare out without bumping into the walls and furniture. “I asked Drew to make me small and cute, but give me some weird feature that would make it obvious I was venned and not an actual little kid. This is what he came up with.”

“It is pretty cute,” Carmen said with a smile. “Have a seat; here, let me move a few things out of your way.” They came over toward the bed and with an apologetic look at me, started moving the books I had spread out (carefully marking my place in each one).

“Oh, hi, Amanda,” Serena said, and curtsied. It looked much nicer with a real dress.

“Hi, Serena,” I said, and waved. “I figured out my name. I’m going by Lauren now.”

Serena stared at me. “You’re venned!”

“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but...”

Serena turned to Carmen. “You’ve got a venned roommate living with you! How long is she venned for?”

“Two years,” I said, and I started explaining why. Serena sat down beside me and Carmen sat back down in the chair, not saying much more until I got to the part where I ran into Tim at the mall.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Serena exclaimed when I was less than halfway done. “Can I give you a hug?”

“...Yes, please?” A moment later, I was being pressed against her upper chest and neck. It felt nice, and for a moment I wished I were plush rather than hard ceramic, although in that form I might not be able to hear. She put me down gently on the bed next to her again.

“So you decided to run away. And then what?”

I finished my story, and she hugged me again. “I’ll help keep you safe,” she said. “My parents weren’t anywhere near as bad as yours, but they weren’t all that supportive either. I had to pay for my own girl clothes and stuff, and they wouldn’t help me get hormones... Fortunately the Venn machines came along when I’d only been socially transitioning for a year or so, in time for me to convince the university I was a ‘real’ girl for housing purposes.” She made air quotes for ‘real’.

“Did you use a Venn machine during your senior year of high school or was it just before you went off to college?” I asked.

“It was early in my senior year, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I heard about them on a trans subreddit, and I thought it was a hoax at first; if they were real, I figured the news would have been all over it. But then a couple of people in a chatroom told me they were real, they’d used them to transition, and they sent me a link to a list of known machines. So I got my best friend Drew to come with me and we drove to the machine in Lenoir, which was the closest at the time, although Lincolnton — that’s where we’re from — got its own machine just a couple of months later. He helped me transition and I fixed up some health problems he used to have.”

“You mentioned someone named Drew earlier. Is that the same as your friend from high school?”

“Yeah, we’d already been planning to go to college together for a while at that point, and had our applications in here and some other places. He helped me start the Venn trips. Did Carmen tell you about the Venn trips?”

“Yeah, after you mentioned it when you were here Monday night. That’s so cool.”

“It is pretty cool! You should join us sometime. But we’ll have to come up with a cover ID for you. Maybe you and Carmen can go to Burlington earlier in the morning, and they can venn you into a human form you like and y’all can go eat breakfast and come back to meet the rest of us at the machine when we arrive? And we can pretend you’re a student at Elon, maybe, or from the community college over that way, and you’re a friend of Carmen from online and you heard about the trips from them? Or maybe you’re a friend from Carmen’s hometown and you went to Elon instead of here.”

“That would be awesome!” I turned to Carmen. “Could we?”

“Maybe,” they said. “Not next weekend, but maybe the one after that. We need to come up with a deep, tight cover story for how we know each other and why I’m giving you a ride to the Venn machine, and we both need to memorize all the details so we don’t contradict each other.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

We chatted for a while longer, getting to know each other better, talking about weird forms we or our friends had venned into at various times, and coming up with a more and more detailed cover story for me to use, and then Serena started yawning. It wasn’t much past eight.

“This always happens when I venn into a little girl body,” she said. “The main downside is how much sleep this kind of body needs. Well, and being too short to reach high shelves, and... Anyway, I’d better get back to my dorm before I fall asleep.”

“Good night,” I said.

“It was great to meet you,” she said, and hugged me again, then hugged Carmen and said goodbye.

* * *

Sunday evening after they got off work, Carmen returned to the dorm with some hooks, tools, a curtain rod and a dark blue curtain, and hung the curtain between their desk and their bed so I could read by the desk lamp at night without disturbing their sleep. I thanked them profusely, especially when I realized they would need to set up the curtain every night before bed and take it down in the morning, or at least before they had guests over who didn’t know about me.

When I had more to do at night besides just think, I found that I spent less time in the fugue state, but I still tended to go into that state for a while every day. If I didn’t set aside idle time for it during the night, or while Carmen was out, I might find myself fuguing out in the middle of a conversation with them, which wasn’t good. My mind was still a human mind and needed sleep, or something like it, even if my body was very different.

Carmen and I worked on my cover story for a little while every day for the next two weeks, but I still spent most of my time studying to keep up with the Human Rights course and for my GED. On Wednesday morning after that meeting with Serena, Carmen set their alarm earlier than usual.

“You’re up early,” I said when I noticed the time.

“Yeah,” they said. “We’re going somewhere before class.”

“Where?”

“The World’s Largest Chest of Drawers. And while we’re there, we might as well use the Venn machine. I’ve figured out how you can see what I’m doing in Biology lab.”

“Cool!”

Carmen showered and dressed, then put me in their messenger bag and went to the dining hall for a cup of coffee, and got on the road. Once I heard the engine start, I crawled out of the bag, dragging the American History textbook Carmen had gotten out of the library, and read while they drove down to High Point.

“Do you want to be human for a little while before I venn you into something that can watch during lab?” they asked after a while.

“Oh! Yeah, that would be great if we have time.”

“I’ve still got to eat breakfast, and there’s several restaurants near the Venn machine.”

A few minutes later, Carmen parked and gently picked me up before getting out of the car. We were in a parking lot on a street corner, empty of other cars at this time of morning. In one corner of the parking lot was a Venn machine, and across the street there was a giant chest of drawers, taller than either of the neighboring businesses, with two enormous socks dangling from one of the drawers. Carmen fished around in their wallet and stuck a ticket stub in the slot of the Venn machine, then set the timer for eight hours and set me down just inside one of the booths.

“History,” they said as they entered the other booth. “I don’t think I’d better let you walk around in one of the same forms the police might have seen in the Catesville Mall camera footage,” they explained, “but we can use one of those forms as a starting point.”

“Sure,” I said. “I haven’t eaten food in weeks, so maybe make me big, with a healthy appetite?”

“That’ll be a good contrast to these petite forms,” they noted, and picked one of the forms from my history — I couldn’t tell which one. “Taller... heavier... warmer clothing...,” They selected a bubble. “Hungry.” They picked another bubble. “Okay, this form looks like five-ten or five-eleven, two hundred and seventy or eighty pounds. Not too overweight for that height. Do you want that?”

“I wouldn’t want to look like that long term,” I said, “but for my first meal in weeks and maybe my last for another long while, it might be worth a try.”

“Here goes.”

I was suddenly human again, and the shock of breathing for the first time in weeks had me gasping for a few moments, but I managed to calm myself. My breasts and butt were larger than they’d been in any of my previous human girl bodies, not to mention my arms and thighs. I was wearing a yellow sweater and a long sky-blue skirt over warm leggings. I figured out later, seeing myself in a bathroom mirror at the restaurant, that Carmen had based this on the “Amber” form from my history — the skin and hair color were about the same, and there was a vague resemblance in the face, but no one would have looked at a missing child poster with a still from security camera footage of me as Amber and recognized me.

The chance for me to transform Carmen timed out and the doors opened.

“Where are we eating?” I asked. It felt odd to look down to meet Carmen’s eyes; they were two or three inches shorter than me now, where before they’d been around ten or twelve times taller.

“There’s a couple of places in walking distance,” they said, “or we could drive a little farther.”

We looked at the maps app on their phone for nearby restaurants, and ended up going to a diner. I was studying the menu when I realized that the cash I’d withdrawn from the ATM at the Catesville Mall before I left to meet Meredith and Sophia in Greensboro wasn’t on me. Neither were my wallet or phone, battery, and SIM card. (I’d taken it apart before leaving the mall to keep myself from being tracked to Siler City by phone company records.) They must have all been venned as part of my body or clothes.

“I can’t pay for my breakfast,” I said. “I thought I’d have money to pay for it, cause I had money last time I was human, but —”

“Don’t worry about it,” Carmen said. “I mean, don’t order something super expensive, but I can afford a decent breakfast.”

I started looking for the least expensive things on the menu that I thought might be enough to satisfy me, and ended up ordering a combo with fried eggs, sausage, and hash browns with a big glass of grapefruit juice. Carmen got a lighter meal with a cup of coffee. We talked about options for what Carmen would change me into for the rest of the day. “Hopefully just the rest of the day,” they said. “I think I can come back here to change you back after I get off work tonight. I definitely won’t have time between lab and going to work. Maybe if we went to the machine in Burlington, but we’d be too likely to run into people I know there, and even then I’d risk being late to work if traffic is heavy or the line at the machine is too long.”

“I’m surprised the local Venn machine doesn’t get more traffic,” I said, “since it’s in such... picturesque surroundings.”

They shrugged. “The Chest is a funny novelty, but I don’t think anybody’d come to see it multiple times, like a great natural wonder or a museum you can see new exhibits in pretty often. There might be a lot of people there on evenings and weekends, though.”

There were a couple of people waiting to use the Venn machine when we got back, an older straight couple who were there to rejuvenate each other and fix some health problems. We didn’t have long to wait before the doors opened and a couple of college-age girls came out. Given the odd way the old couple stared at them as they walked to their car and got in, I guessed at least one of them had been male before; I wondered if they were binary trans and making a long-term change, or just curious and trying it out, or gender-fluid and regularly switched back and forth. From what I overheard, they were talking about their plans for the day, not about anything gender-related, so I guessed this was probably something they’d done before.

The old couple started working on the machine, constantly referring to a printout they’d made of a how-to. Carmen offered to help, and soon they had the timer set for three years and were inside.

We didn’t have long to wait before the doors opened and the newly young couple came out. The man wasn’t as young-looking as the woman, but both were a lot younger than before. They left, and Carmen and I set the machine for a month and went in. “Just in case I can’t get back here until the weekend,” they said, “I don’t want you reverting to your baseline body and getting reported by someone who’s seen your photo on a milk carton.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

It took Carmen a few minutes to work through the interface and find something close to what we’d talked about. “Ready?” they finally asked.

“Hit me,” I said, and the booth expanded vastly around me again, even more so than when Sophia had turned me into a little dragon statuette. This form could see and hear, but couldn’t move. My emotions felt more muted than they’d been when I was a dragon statue. I waited passively until Carmen came into the booth and picked me up, then fastened me around their neck. That felt good, like I was fulfilling a purpose.

“Let’s see how this goes,” they said, and went back to the car.

Riding back to UNC Greensboro and then to Carmen’s American Politics class was more interesting when I could see where we were going, and somehow I didn’t miss the ability to move as much as I’d expected. My vantage point was just a few inches below Carmen’s eyes. On the drive, Carmen bluetoothed music from their phone to the car stereo, an eclectic mix of nerd rock, classic rock, and jazz, which they hadn’t done on our previous drives. Later on, they told me they didn’t like to have music playing while they were having a conversation with their passenger.

I got more out of American Politics when I could see the professor’s gestures, the projector and the whiteboard, though not as much as I might have if I’d kept up with the reading. After class, Carmen went to the restroom; they took me off and put me in their messenger bag before using the toilet, but not before I saw myself in the mirror. I was a sort of loose choker or tight necklace, whose pendant was a combination lens/tympanum to let me see and hear. I felt slightly numb and bereft when they took me off, and a little spike of joy when they put me back on again after washing their hands.

Then they ate a snack at the student center and went on to Biology lab. Today they were doing an electrophoresis lab, taking samples of different proteins and inserting them, along with a tracking dye, into a gel that they then ran an electric current through. The different proteins would migrate different distances toward the positive or negative electrodes depending on their pH values, which I thought was pretty neat. It made sense with the reading I’d been doing, but it was more advanced than what we’d covered in my high school biology course. Carmen’s lab partner was a quiet girl named Zuleika who didn’t say much beyond what was required for the experiment.

Afterward, Carmen left for work. They worked at a Chili’s near the university campus, mostly waiting tables, and it was a busy shift, keeping them on their feet pretty much constantly for most of the evening. For the first hour or two, I was reeling from the sight of a “Missing Child” poster near the cash register, with my deadname and a photo of my old body that seemed to be cropped from one of the group photos we’d taken with Mom’s parents around Christmas. Until more customers came in and Carmen got busier, I spent a lot of time thinking about my parents making that poster and putting copies up in various places. They might have started back home the day after I didn’t come home, at the Subway and various gas stations and fast food places on my route home from there, and then once they heard from Tim or his parents, or heard from Mrs. Ramsey or the police about Meredith saying she and Sophia had hung out with me on Sunday at the mall, they would have put the posters up around the mall and other places in Catesville. Then the police would hear about my abandoned car from the manager at the Waffle House, and Mom and Dad would spend their free time for the next few days putting posters up around Greensboro, and maybe various gas stations, fast food places, and truck stops at the exits east and west of that Waffle House for who knew how far. Probably Dad was doing the bulk of the driving around and putting up posters, since he was out of work.

I’d been focused on my fear of what would happen when Mom and Dad found out I was trans. I hadn’t given enough thought to what Mom and Dad would feel when I disappeared. And now that it was brought forcefully to my attention, I found I couldn’t really imagine it, not having ever had children. It must be terrible, but terrible in what way? But after a couple of hours of muted guilt and self-recrimination, I finally decided that however bad they were feeling, it probably wasn’t as bad as getting electroshocked until I associated every aspect of being a girl with pain.

But the more time I spent on Carmen’s neck, the more I focused on what was going on around us and the more I identified with them. I was moving along with them, hearing what they heard, seeing most of what they saw — I say “most of” because when they bent or turned their head, their neck and my field of vision didn’t move as much. By the end of their shift, when someone spoke to Carmen it felt almost like they were speaking to me.

So as Carmen got busier with more tables to wait on, Mom and Dad were driven out of my mind temporarily. But I thought more about them later on.

My own restaurant experience was behind the counter at a fast food place, so some of the details of waiting tables were new to me, but I could relate to Carmen’s frustration with the occasional asshole customers who complained about getting exactly what they ordered because they hadn’t read the menu carefully, or the ones who treated you like an idiot because you were working a service job. I’d had to clean up after klutzy customers or their kids spilled their drinks, too, which happened at least three times during Carmen’s shift.

They were frequently misgendered by customers, called “waiter” or “waitress”, “mister” or “miss” about equally often, and “Carmen” only occasionally; they never corrected anyone or explained they were non-binary. Their co-workers and manager called them Carmen.

When Carmen went out to their car after clocking out, I wondered if they would drive down to High Point and change me back to my dragon statue body. They didn’t, and with the way they were dragging their feet on the walk from the freshman parking lot to the dorm, I didn’t blame them. I realized that they’d forgotten they were wearing me until they started getting undressed for bed. They absentmindedly unfastened me and then stared at me for a moment before blurting out, “Oh, I’m sorry, Lauren, I was going to change you back. I’m just too fucking tired to drive to High Point or Burlington again after all that. We’ll go tomorrow, I promise.” Then they set me on the desk, facing away from them while they undressed.

A few moments later, they hung me in the window, looking outward. They were such a thoughtful friend.

I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.