I thought about what Sophia and Savannah had talked about last night, about their fathers and their long estrangement and how they were trying to be friends again now. Would it be like that between me and Nathan when I made contact again after I turned eighteen?

Not long after dawn on Thanksgiving day, I heard Mrs. Ramsey bustling around in the kitchen hours before Sophia or Savannah got up. I thought about my parents and Nathan. Would they be spending Thanksgiving with Grandpa and Grandma Wallace, or Grandpa and Grandma McNeill, or would it be just the three of them at home? Mom would probably be taking the turkey out of the freezer to thaw pretty soon, whoever’s house they were staying at. If I’d been able to participate in the Ramseys’ Thanksgiving, I don’t think I would have missed my family’s Thanksgiving nearly as much. I kept reminding myself that Thanksgiving with my family wouldn’t be as much fun as it used to be if I was recovering from the trauma of conversion therapy and terrified of showing an inch of my real self. It didn’t help.

I thought about what Sophia and Savannah had talked about last night, about their fathers and their long estrangement and how they were trying to be friends again now. Would it be like that between me and Nathan when I made contact again after I turned eighteen? Or would Nathan not want anything to do with me after I’d come out as trans — or after I’d run away and worried our parents half to death — and we wouldn’t talk again until we were Eric and Justin’s age, if then?

Then there were voices from the living room or kitchen. Someone else was awake, too. Then the doorbell: Eric and Vanessa returning from the hotel. A little while after that, Sophia rolled over in bed, blinked, and then jumped up and ran from the room.

She returned five minutes later, grumbling, “I hate organic bodies. Having to wait for the bathroom — needing the bathroom — I’m going back to the doll body for good after this.” Savannah didn’t reply, apparently still sound asleep, and I didn’t reply either, just in case Savannah wasn’t as sound asleep as she looked. I did nod sympathetically, though, as Savannah’s head was turned away from me. Sophia rubbed my back with a finger, then gathered some clothes and returned to the bathroom.

Savannah still hadn’t gotten up or showed signs of waking when a gangly prepubescent boy, presumably her brother Aiden, came in and bent down to shake her shoulder. “Wake up, sleepyhead!” he said, much too loudly. Savannah rolled over and scrunched deeper into the sleeping bag.

Aiden shook her again, then started singing what sounded like the theme song to some cartoon. Not something I’d seen or had heard of, probably something that was new since I was his age and watching cartoons. Savannah groaned and punched him, then scrunched back up in the sleeping bag. He scooted back out of arm’s reach and kept singing.

“Get out, squirt,” Sophia said, coming back in. “I’ll make sure she gets up.”

“You better,” he said. “Or I’ll come back and sing all thirty-four verses.”

“No way it has that many.”

“It does! I found six verses on YouTube and I wrote the others myself.”

“You’re a regular Irving Berlin, aren’t you?”

“Who’s Irving Berlin?”

“A guy who wrote a lot of songs. Scoot.”

Staying still was much easier for me than for an organic person, but not laughing at this display was one of the hardest things I’d done since I decided to trust Serena with my identity. Sophia got Savannah up, much more gently, and after sitting up and rubbing the sleep from her eyes for a couple of minutes, she collected some clothes from her suitcase and decamped to the bathroom. Sophia closed the door behind her and said to me, “I see you’ve met Aiden. I pity Savannah, having to live with him all the time.”

“And sit with him in the car for however many hours.”

“I think they said it was seven hours? Well, you should have the room to yourself for a good while now.”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

She smiled wryly. “Happy Thanksgiving. I wish you could join us for dinner. One of the only good things about being organic... Next Thanksgiving, though.”

She left, and after thinking for a while about how things would change after I turned eighteen, I started reading.

* * *

I read Fire and Hemlock for several hours, hearing but not distinguishing sounds of conversation and clattering dishes from the living room, dining room and kitchen. The noise was loud enough at times that I considered using Sophia’s laptop; surely nobody would notice the sound of me tapping the keys? But the thought of Savannah’s duffel bag and suitcase deterred me. Who knew when she might want to come grab something from them? If she spilled something and had to change clothes in a hurry, for instance, she might notice that Sophia’s computer was active, not hibernating as it had been when they left the room that morning. So I stuck to reading.

Eventually, Sophia returned, followed a moment later by Savannah. Having gotten back into my usual position at the sound of the opening door, I watched and listened.

“So that was a thing,” Sophia said, looking a little dazed.

“Yeah,” Savannah agreed.

“Do you think he planned that?”

“No. If he’d planned it, he would have said it when he was alone with your dad. He probably did plan to say it later on when they were alone, but... I don’t know. The conversation just led there, I guess?”

“I guess we’ll know how well it turned out when they get back.”

“Yeah.”

Someone knocked on the door, and Sophia said “Come in.” Meredith came in and shut the door behind her.

“I did not expect that,” she said.

“Did you understand everything they were saying?” Savannah asked.

“Not much; they were sobbing too much to talk clearly, I guess.”

Nobody said anything more for a few moments. “Well,” Savannah said, “it’s a good thing, right? Them letting their feelings out?”

I wondered what that was about, but I could guess the general outline of it, and I decided I wouldn’t ask Sophia or Meredith about it later unless they brought it up.

“Probably,” said Meredith. “So. Sophia said you had some questions for me?”

“Yeah. Is now a good time?”

“Sure. Or we could go for a walk or a drive while we talk?”

“Uh... yeah. What’s the weather like?” All three girls simultaneously checked the weather apps on their phones. Only belatedly did Sophia pull aside the curtain and look out the window at the overcast sky and the light drizzle.

“Let’s stay here,” she said, glancing apologetically at me.

So Savannah asked Meredith several questions about gender issues, and told her about her trans friend-of-a-friend at school, and got Meredith’s advice. “The best thing you can do is just treat her like any other girl,” she said. “Use her chosen name when you talk to her and her preferred pronouns when you talk about her. Talk with her about the same kinds of things you would talk about with other girls you don’t know very well yet. Then when you get to know her better, talk about the specific things you’re both interested in.”

“Yeah,” Savannah said. “That helps. Thanks.”

They talked for a few more minutes until Meredith’s mom stuck her head in and said, “I just got a text from your dad — he says they’ll be gone a good while longer. Do y’all want to watch a movie?”

“Sure,” Savannah said. The girls went out to the living room, and Sophia shut the door behind them.

* * *

A few hours later, after I’d finished Fire and Hemlock and gotten back to the trigonometry textbook I’d been working through earlier in the week, Sophia and Savannah returned. Savannah took her pajamas out of her bag and went down the hall to the bathroom, and I turned my back while Sophia changed.

“This has been a weird day,” she commented in a low voice. “I’ll tell you about it after they leave.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.

“I’ll think about it, I guess. I don’t think it’s super private, but I guess I should ask Meredith what she thinks. But I just don’t think we’ll have more than a minute or two of privacy before then.”

As if on cue, Savannah knocked on the door. “Hold on,” Sophia called out. A few moments later, she tapped me on the shoulder, silently indicating I should turn around and get back in position. Once I was ready, she opened the door and Sophia came in and plopped down on the air mattress.

“Your sister is an absolute fiend at Scrabble,” she commented.

“She knows all the words,” Sophia agreed, getting into bed. “Your mom wasn’t half bad, either.”

“Yeah, she almost always wins when we play, which is why we usually play something else that the rest of us have a chance to win.”

“So do you want to try venning into an animate doll or statue tomorrow, like we were talking about yesterday?”

“Yeah. Are all the stores at the mall okay with venned customers?”

“Pretty much, as long as you’re close to human size and don’t have a weird odor or shed a lot of fur or something.”

“Then let’s do it first thing.”

“Cool. Any preferences about what your doll or statue body should look like? I can’t guarantee anything exact, but it’ll give me something to aim for.”

They talked about that for a while and gradually drifted off to sleep. The next morning, they were up early and getting ready for the Black Friday sales, not much later than on a school day, although they didn’t leave before dawn to be at their favorite store when it opened like Tim’s mom or some people I knew at church. Sophia didn’t have a chance to talk to me alone before they left, but she did manage to work some “as you know, Bob” exposition into the conversation to let me know that I wouldn’t be alone in the house and should keep a low profile; their dads and the boys would be staying at the house, at least for a while. I heard some of the menfolk watching TV, playing video games and talking in the living room for a while, but when the noises stopped after a few hours, I played it safe and didn’t assume they’d left.

When the girls returned from the Catesville Mall around five or six hours later, Sophia was back in her usual doll body, and though Savannah was back to the same body she’d worn when she arrived, I learned from their conversation that she’d spent several hours, nearly the whole shopping trip, in a doll body similar to Sophia’s. She’d enjoyed it, and wanted to try it again for a longer time, but her mom had made her change back before they returned to the house.

“It was pretty cool, staying on my feet for so long and not getting even a little tired,” she said. “And you said you barely have to sleep in that body?”

“It’s not exactly sleep, but I sort of zone out for an hour or so every night. And I can focus on studying or video editing or whatever I’m doing better than when I’ve got a bladder and appetite and hormones to distract me.”

“That would be so cool. But never eating anything...”

“You can change back for special occasions like Thanksgiving dinner or birthday cake.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. The kind of guys I’d attract looking like that are not the kind of guys I’d want to date, though.”

“I’ve sworn off high school boys. They’re too immature. I’ll start dating again in college, or maybe grad school.”

Savannah giggled. “Let me know how long you stick to that plan.”

That led to some discussion of Sophia’s short and stormy dating history and the boys Savannah liked but hadn’t gone on any dates with yet, until Meredith came and told them supper was ready.

* * *

That night, as Savannah laid down, she asked Sophia, “Are you gonna sit in the dark all night, even though you don’t need but an hour of sleep?”

“No. I’ll sit with you and talk until you’re ready to fall asleep, then I’ll slip out quietly and read or listen to podcasts in the storage room until morning.”

“I wish Mom’d let me stay in that doll body the rest of the weekend.”

“Maybe next time we hang out. I have a feeling we’ll be coming to see y’all next year sometime.”

“That’ll be neat.”

They talked about their plans for Saturday, what would be involved in the different careers that Savannah had vaguely considered, and the pros and cons of animate doll bodies for another hour or so. Then, hearing Savannah’s little snores, Sophia gathered up a few things — including the books I’d been reading, and me — and slipped quietly out, tiptoeing down the hall to the room where her parents stored the things they bought low, at yard sales and small-town thrift stores, and sold high, mostly on eBay. It was stuffed to the eyebrows with bookshelves and boxes, and there was a small desk with a docking station for a laptop, a bunch of cushioned envelopes and other packing material, and so forth. Sophia carefully set down the stack of things of which I was the crown and I climbed off to let her sort out the books and plug in her laptop.

“Finally,” she said. “Savannah’s much cooler than I would have expected, but I’m glad to have some privacy again.”

“I could go back to your room, or read in the garage, if you want to be alone.”

“No, it’s cool. You’re there when I want to show you something cool I’ve found, but you don’t talk nonstop like Savannah.”

“That’s probably because y’all just met. Back when I was figuring myself out and getting to know you and Meredith better, I talked a lot more.”

“Still not as much as Savannah. But yeah.”

She had said she might tell me what had happened on Thanksgiving when we finally got some privacy together, but it sounded like she didn’t want to talk just then, so I didn’t ask. She checked her social media and email, then let me use the laptop to check mine, and we settled down to our books, occasionally sharing a funny or interesting quote but mostly leaving each other alone. Around five or six a.m., I reminded her to relax, and we closed our books and eventually fugued out for a while.

When we heard voices from the rest of the house, Sophia said, “Do you want me to leave you here for a while? I’m gonna go hang out with whoever’s making breakfast, and after Savannah drags herself out of bed I’ll take my stuff back to my room.”

“Sure,” I said.

A while later, Savannah looked into the room. “Hey, Sophia, I’m — oh.” She seemed like she was about to go, then came on into the room and looked at the shelves stuffed with old and rare books, collectible edition Coke and Pepsi bottles, dolls and action figures, and so on. After a minute or two of that, she glanced at the desk and saw me sitting next to Sophia’s laptop.

“Huh,” she said. She picked me up and looked at me closer, then put me back down and left the room.

A little later, Sophia came and took me, our books, and her laptop back to her room. “She asked me why I took you in there with me,” she said. “I told her you were my study mascot.”

“I’m honored.”

Sophia smiled. “I’ll be back in a few hours. We’re going to the mall in Greensboro, and probably to Country Park after the weather warms up.”

“Have fun.”

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