“No,” I said firmly, shutting the magazine and handing it back to him. “Do not want.”

“If you’re sure... I don’t want to pressure you or make you feel like you owe me.”

 

“Tell me what you want,” I said. “I can’t promise I’ll do it, but I’ll at least consider it. And I won’t judge you for it.”

 

He was silent again. Then: “All right... promise not to laugh or freak out?”

Katie had told me some about her family during our dates, and I pieced together more from what people said during the weekend. Katie’s dad had stayed male for the first five years after the Divergence, and he and Katie’s mom had married Gus a year or so afterward, who’d been his best friend, and changed into a woman right after the Divergence. Then five years ago, Katie’s dad became female as well, and rather than break up the family, they decided they’d all stay together and find another man, and if they took too long to find one, maybe one of them would turn male. They married Katie’s stepdad Iris a little over a year later, and things had been stable since then except for a couple of the children changing sex when starting a new grade.

I got the phone call just after lunch, and I was late to my next class, sitting in a restroom stall until I got my tears under control. I couldn’t concentrate to pay attention to my afternoon classes anyway; I might as well have skipped them.

“If you go off and leave her alone while you dance, maybe you don’t deserve her.”

 

“She’s still my girlfriend even if we’re not glued at the hip every minute. Go away.”

“You were probably confused by being kissed. I understand that can be pretty distracting for people of your species.”

“Look,” I said, “I know this is a shock to you, and maybe I’m expecting too much for you to get over it in a day or so. God knows it’s taken me several months to get used to the idea of being a girl... But what about if we pause the game, and you just stare at me for as long as it takes for you to get it out of your system? Instead of, you know, glancing at me out of the corner of your eye and then trying to pretend you weren’t looking.”

“It’s okay if you call me a boy and ‘he’,” I said. “Or girl and ‘she’, either way. I’m wearing skirts for now but I think I’ll go back to pants when I stop growing and can buy stuff that will fit me long-term.”

“I thought I was getting used to the idea of being a girl, but... I guess I wasn’t as used to it as I thought.”

 

“Hmm. You said you’d wanted to be a boy. Why do you care which you are?”

 

“I was a boy before the Divergence. And... I’ve lived as a boy ever since, even though I technically wasn’t. My aunt and uncle and all the kids at school treated me like a boy, and the idea of being a girl is hard to get used to even though I’ve known for a long time that it might happen.”

“It’s too late to back out. Even if I got on a train to Nebraska tomorrow, I’ve still been exposed to enough Raleigh rabbit pheromones that I’m going to go through puberty one way or another.”

I knew I had to obey, but he’d been pretty vague, so I changed myself into a girl I didn’t think he would be attracted to: acne-scarred, scraggly-haired, and flat-chested. But he wasn’t satisfied, of course; he gave me detailed specs on his ideal woman, and I changed myself to match.

“Mom said supper’s almost ready, but I think I’ve got time to scrub the toilets...”

 

“Already?”

 

She shrugged. “They’ve been used several times since this morning. And Craig has terrible aim.”

“The usual punishments don’t work,” Steve said. “No sense giving her extra chores when she’s already doing way more than her share, or grounding her when she doesn’t want to go anywhere and she’s quit playing games or watching TV on her own. I said we should stop her from cleaning something, but —”

When we went out clothes-shopping, she didn’t fuss about trying on bras or skirts, or insist on buying only jeans, like some people. And you saw how she was dressed, just now — she picked that out herself. But we didn’t have time to buy very much because she got so anxious about the housework she’d left undone.

We were being Serenikha with both bodies at the moment.

“Well, that was a complete waste of time,” Taylor said. “Do you know why the Knowing One used an illusion instead of a transformation when he came to see the portal here in the women’s quarters?”

 

“Um, I thought we’d decided that was because he’s a wuss?”

Taylor looked so worried and guilty that I had to give her a hug. “Come on. We can’t do anything until we talk to the Gray One, but for now, you need to relax. How about a game of — Tag! You’re it.”

“I like being a nagini well enough, just on the physical level, but — well, I don’t know how other people in my country will react.... Even if people are getting used to seeing magical stuff happen, they might stare at me a lot.”

“I think the transformation spell is interacting with your link with Serenikha. It’s making you look more like her.”

My psychic link with Serenikha had held steady all through high school, growing no stronger but no weaker, ever since my first trip to her world. I still shared dreams with her, and I still had occasional moments of aphasia, where I couldn’t think of a word in English, only in one of Serenikha’s languages. And then, my first semester in college, it suddenly seemed to get a lot weaker — I shared no dreams at all with her, and had much less aphasia than usual.

A young woman is singled out of superherodom, but is having none of it. A group of teenagers disturb a malicious spirit. A radical plan to improve the American political process. Hit play on the last TG Mixed Tape for 2015 for all these stories and more, featuring contributions from Efindumb, Ellie Dauber, Desert Willow, Misaania, Jenny North, Callie Messenger, Person42, Hikaro, Shauna, Trismegistus Shandy, kandijayne, Desert Willow and Anon Allsop