“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.”
You Could Go Home Again
part 7 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This novel is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Monday evening, I went over to Grandma and Grandpa Hampton’s place with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler. They were surprised to see me like that — I think Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler had procrastinated on telling them I was developing as a girl until the last minute. Grandma seemed pleased that I was dressing well; she asked if Raleigh rabbit girls wore earrings (a few do, but not as many as among Lincoln bison or some other neospecies), and had some other suggestions about making myself look nicer. Grandpa didn’t have much to say to me or anyone else; I was worried he was upset with me, but it wasn’t like I could do anything about turning into a girl. I couldn’t even dress like a boy unless I had money to burn.
Tuesday, Carl was busy doing boyfriend-girlfriend things with Julia, but I hung out with Ron and played video games for a few hours. I asked him to tell me some more about Lindsey, but he seemed oddly reluctant to part with any details. “She’s nice,” he said. “I don’t know her that well yet, but we both like Ken Liu; that’s how we met, I saw her checking out his latest book at the library.”
I’d suspected something was up Sunday afternoon, and by Tuesday evening I was sure of it. When we were playing games and Ron’s eyes should have been on the screen, they were too often on me instead, and it was throwing him off his game. I finally confronted him about it when we took a break.
“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.”
He looked down at his lap, mumbling something incoherent.
“I didn’t quite catch that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said a little louder. “I’ll try not to look at you like that... it’s just...” He shut up.
“No, I wasn’t being facetious. Really, stare at me all you want, just get it over with.”
Again he mumbled something I couldn’t make out, but he looked at me this time. I looked him in the eyes and smiled encouragingly. But I realized his eyes weren’t on mine, they were a little lower down. On my breasts... well, he wasn’t used to me having them. Still, it was kind of creepy; if he were a Raleigh rabbit it would be more understandable, maybe flattering, but from an Omaha sheepdog...
“I’m still me, remember. Let me know when you’re done staring and we can get back to me kicking your ass at Road Hog Mountain.”
“Yeah, let’s do that.” And he picked up the game controller to unpause it, but as he did, he shifted uncomfortably on the sofa, and I glanced down... and saw he had a huge bulge in his pants. Involuntarily I squirmed away from him a couple more inches.
“Are you a xenophile?” I asked in a low voice.
He flinched and looked at me in horror.
“Don’t tell anyone, please?”
“...I won’t. Oh... but, you understand I’m not, right? I like guys, but only Raleigh rabbit guys.” I paused. “At least, as far as I can tell. It’s all still pretty new to me.”
“I know you’re not... I mean, I didn’t really expect you to be. Even though you grew up here with nobody else of your species around, and some people say that causes xenophilia...”
“Maybe for some people. But I didn’t go through puberty until I was surrounded by Raleigh rabbits, remember.”
“Yeah. Please promise you won’t tell anybody, especially not Carl, or my parents?”
“Of course. I promise. But... oh. That’s why you said you didn’t have any pictures of Lindsey to show me.”
He nodded and smiled weakly. “She’s a Mississippi mudcat. She’s pretty, even on land, and the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen in the water.”
“Do you really not have any pictures of her?”
“No, I just didn’t want to show you. Here,” and he pulled out his phone and brought up a head-and-shoulders shot of a girl with mud-brown skin, no hair, ears flat against the sides of her head, and whiskers like a cat or catfish; she looked like she was laughing.
“She’s pretty.”
“Yeah.”
We were quiet for a minute or so, and then I said: “Let’s get back to the game,” and he agreed.
Later, when he was giving me a ride home, I asked him: “So... I kind of gathered you were attracted to me?”
“Yeah. It’s not something I can help, but I’ll try not to stare at you like that again.”
“If you’re a xenophile, why are you attracted to me now when you weren’t before?”
He shivered a little. “You weren’t so pretty before. And, um... you didn’t have breasts.”
“So that’s it, huh?”
“As far as I can tell... and I’m still figuring this out... I’m attracted to girls of any species that has breasts. Chicago tripods don’t do it for me, for instance.”
“Or Athens magnolias,” I added.
“Who?”
“Amy, my roommate at NC State — I think I mentioned her? She’s an Athens magnolia; they don’t have breasts except while they’re nursing a baby.”
“Oh. Yeah, I probably wouldn’t be attracted to her either.”
There was a lull in the conversation, and I hesitantly asked: “What about guys who have breasts?”
He didn’t respond right away. Eventually, he said: “I don’t know. I haven’t met any. Do you know where there’s a neospecies where the guys have breasts?”
“I can’t remember where they live offhand, but yeah, I’ve heard about them.” I was regretting asking that question; it was way too personal, and I’d had enough of people asking me too-personal questions in the last few months.
“Well. I guess I’ll find out eventually.”
“What about Lindsey? I mean, if it gets serious you’ll either have to tell your parents, or not invite them to the wedding...”
“Man, that’s way too far off to think about yet. We haven’t done anything but kiss yet.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem.”
We reached my house and he let me out, but didn’t come inside.
A couple of days later, Julia invited me to join her and a couple of friends for a girls' day out. “We’re going to Lincoln to do some shopping and maybe see a movie, if you want to come,” she said on the phone, and I said I’d be glad to come. It was time to replace some of my shirts and blouses that were getting too tight.
Julia came by my house a little after nine, with two other Lincoln bison girls in the car. I got in the back seat, Julia told the car where we wanted to go, and we were off.
“So, Joel, I think you know Leanne and Teresa?”
“I’ve seen you around, yeah.” We’d all gone to Thayer Central High together, though I hadn’t really gotten to know any of them except for Julia, because she was Carl’s girlfriend.
“Joel?” Leanne asked. “Wow, you look different.”
“Everybody keeps saying that. I wonder why.”
Teresa laughed. I was afraid I’d have to answer a barrage of questions from Leanne and Teresa about how I’d turned into a girl, but I guess Julia must have filled them in on the basics, because they didn’t ask. We talked about school for a while — Leanne was going to the University of Nebraska with Carl and Julia, but Teresa was going to Loyola in Chicago. Leanne and Julia talked about their boyfriends for a while; Teresa wasn’t dating anybody at the moment, though there was a Lincoln bison in her Calculus class that she was trying to get to notice her. I said briefly that I wasn’t ready to start dating.
It was a long drive from Hebron to Lincoln, and when conversation died down, Julia put on some music and she, Leanne and Teresa sang along. I didn’t know most of the songs, but when a song came on that I knew, I tentatively joined in. It was about as fun as a long car ride can be.
We pulled into the parking lot of a mall outside Lincoln just before eleven, and started seriously shopping. I tried on a bunch of shirts and blouses and bought three that were just a little big on me, and got another pair of bras that fit my new size. When the other girls wanted to go to a jewelry store next, I said I’d go to the bookstore and meet up with them later, but Leanne said: “Come on. You wouldn’t try on dresses because you said you’d outgrow them too fast, but you won’t outgrow a necklace or a bracelet.”
“Yeah, but I can’t afford that stuff, I’m having to buy new clothes so often what with outgrowing them so fast.”
“Some of it’s not as expensive as you probably think,” Teresa said. “And you don’t have to buy stuff just because you try it on.”
I’d run out of excuses and had to give them my real reason. “Look, I don’t actually want to wear jewelry. Even if I could afford it. I may be female but I don’t want to be that feminine.”
“Go easy on her,” Julia said. “She’s new to all this.”
We met up at the food court an hour later. Julia was wearing a new silver necklace; the others hadn’t bought anything. I’d bought a new novel by Mira Grant.
Lincoln was only a little more diverse than Hebron; we saw more Omaha sheepdogs around the mall than we saw at home, and a handful of North Platte dreamers, but only two people of other species. One was a Chicago tripod, the other was something I didn’t recognize. I had Mississippi mudcats on the brain after Ron’s revelation about his new girlfriend, but I didn’t expect to see any here, so far from the Missouri — nearly all of them live within a few miles of one of the big rivers.
“So,” Leanne said to me when we’d eaten a few bites, “you said you don’t want to wear jewelry... you don’t want to be the kind of girl who wears jewelry?”
“Yeah, that.”
“So what kind of girl do you want to be?”
I was stymied. Not that I hadn’t been thinking about it, but a lot of my thoughts were hard to put into words. “I guess I’m still getting used to the idea of being a girl, period. I want to take it slow. Maybe I’ll wear jewelry someday, but not any time soon.”
“What about makeup? Do Raleigh rabbit girls use it?”
“Maybe some do? Not many, I think; it doesn’t go well with fur.”
“I don’t think any of the Omaha sheepdogs I know use it,” Teresa said.
“Yeah, some dye their fur, but that’s not the same thing,” Julia said. “Do Raleigh rabbits do that?”
“I’ve seen a few, but it’s pretty rare. About as rare as shaving part of your fur; I’ve seen maybe two or three kids on campus that do either, and one or two people off-campus.”
“What would you wear if you had more money to spend on it, and you wouldn’t outgrow it in a few weeks?” Leanne asked.
“A lot of jeans and T-shirts, and a few nicer things to wear to church or job interviews or whatever. What do they call them, those outfits like men’s business suits but tailored for women?”
“Pant suits,” said Teresa.
“Yeah, I’ll probably buy one or two of them once I stop growing.”
“No reason you can’t try some on now, to get a feel for the kind of thing that looks good on you, even if it doesn’t make sense to buy them yet.”
“And you should try other things too,” Leanne said; “several different styles of dresses, for instance. You won’t know you don’t like them until you try them.”
“No, thanks.”
After lunch we hit several more stores, but I didn’t buy anything more, though I tried on a couple of different pant suits and several different styles of jeans and other pants, wondering how long it would take before I could actually buy and wear them. The tops of those pant suits were either way too big for me or were too tight across my lower breasts; stuff made for the local neospecies wouldn’t fit most Raleigh rabbits. One suit, I realized only after I’d tried it on, had a little round hole in the chest designed for a North Platte dreamer’s middle arm; on me it served as a boob window, which I didn’t like at all, even though Leanne said it looked good on me.
The other girls went to a salon to have their horns buffed and polished; while they were in there I went by a game store, but didn’t buy anything there either.
We ate supper at a Mexican restaurant nearby, and got back to Hebron an hour later.
Saturday, we visited my parents' graves. We had a little walk up a hill from where we parked the car, and though the slope wasn’t steep, my hip was aching by the time we got to the Hampton family plot. My parents were buried there, along with a couple of great-uncles and aunts, great-grandparents and other remoter ancestors. I stood between the graves for a while, thinking, Uncle Tyler right behind me and Aunt Ellen a little further off. It was almost ten years since they’d died, but I’d be thousands of miles away when the actual anniversary of their deaths rolled around. I felt like I should do something more besides just visit their graves, but it was the wrong time of year for flowers in our garden, and I wasn’t sure I could afford to buy them from a florist.
I wondered, not for the first time, what might have happened if my parents had lived. Would my dad have married a second wife? Or would he have changed into a woman, and her and Mom married some guy together? Or split up and married different guys? Maybe none of those things; some couples who’d been together since before the Divergence were still monogamous, but among young people it was considered selfish for a woman to want one man all to herself. And whatever might have happened to them, whatever they would have done, I’d have grown up in Raleigh, and gone through puberty at the usual time in the normal context — surrounded by people who were going through the same confusing experience at the same time, instead of people to whom puberty was old hat, for whom dating and sex were routine things they’d figured out years ago.
I hated the way my thoughts were drifting into self-pity, and I tried to focus on memories of my parents from way back. Oddly enough, the first that came to mind was a Nebraska-associated memory: of Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa Kritzer’s house, when I was about five or six. I had woken up early, gone and looked over my presents with awe, and then dragged Mom and Dad out of bed to “show them what Santa Claus brought me.” I remember excitedly pointing out one toy after another to them, and then asking Dad how the robot worked. (It wasn’t a Transformer, but one of the cheap knockoffs. I was too young to be class-conscious about that, the way I was a few years later when I was in second or third grade and had friends from school over who didn’t think much of my off-brand toys.)
That led to a memory of the plane ride to Nebraska, how Mom let me sit in the window seat, and I craned my neck to see out while the plane was taking off, and then took off my seat belt once they said it was okay so I could stand by the window and see better. I remember Mom’s arm around me, holding me steady as the plane jiggled and jostled in the slight turbulence.
I’d probably never ride a plane again; they were more expensive these days, with fuel costs so high, and probably wouldn’t be very comfortable for me with my bad hip.
“You about ready to go?” Uncle Tyler asked.
“I guess so,” I said, and we started back down the hill.
That evening, Carl hosted a little Christmas party at his house. There were only about eight or ten kids there, mostly our age but with a couple of younger siblings who were juniors or seniors in high school — Carl’s little sister, Ted’s little brother, maybe someone else I’ve forgotten. Most of them hadn’t seen me since I’d been back, but all of them remembered how I looked before — I really stood out in our homogeneous little high school — even if they couldn’t remember my name.
After a while, Carl put on some music and we started dancing. Andrew, a Lincoln bison I didn’t know well, asked me to dance, and after some brief hesitation I joined him. I decided nobody would think I was a xenophile because I danced with someone of another species at a party like this where there wasn’t anybody else of my species around. (I hadn’t gone to any of the big dances in high school, for obvious reasons.) It was a little awkward, since I’d rarely done any dancing before because of my bad hip, but once I got over my anxiety it was fun. And that gave me an idea.
There were only two Omaha sheepdogs at the party besides Ron, and they were boyfriend and girlfriend, Will and Macy. Ron had danced once with Macy, but every other time she was dancing with Will, naturally enough, and Ron was sitting out the other dances. I went up to him and said, “Want to dance?”
He looked panicked and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. I said in a low voice, “Nobody will know. Nobody’s going to think I’m a xenophile because I danced with Andrew when no other Raleigh rabbits were around, so why would they think that about you?”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
So we danced. It was a loud fast song, so we didn’t have our arms around each other or anything, and I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing, but it was fun. I kind of regretted it afterward when my hip was aching worse than usual, though.
We sat down when the next song began. I saw Leanne talking with her boyfriend Ted, and they were glancing over at me and Ron. I was worried that I’d done something wrong, that Ron’s secret was going to be out because of me. But then Ted came over and said to me (ignoring Ron), “Do you want to dance?”
“Sure,” I said, and got up. We danced through the end of that song, and then I asked: “So, were you asking Leanne for permission to dance with me, or was she telling you to ask me to dance?”
“Um... she told me I should dance with you. Since there aren’t any guys like you around.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked with him back over toward where Leanne was sitting with Teresa. “Thanks for letting me dance with Ted,” I said.
“No problem,” she said, and to Ted, “Let’s take the next slow dance, sweetie.”
I went back and sat with Ron, and we chatted about inconsequential things for a while. When the party was almost over, I gave Carl and Ron their Christmas presents, and also gave out little things I’d bought at the last minute for Julia, Leanne and Teresa.
If I get four or more comments on this chapter, I'll try to post the next one in three or four days rather than the usual week. I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to, though; I'll be traveling, and time and Internet access may be in short supply.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
Comments
A very nice chapter. Take
A very nice chapter. Take your time when it comes to offering new chapters, we can all wait and fit into your schedule, rather than you trying to fit into one of ours.
xenophilia
I guess that would be bound to happen, with so many nanospecies across the world.
Confusion...
With that many nanospecies in such a small geographical area, you'd almost need a roadmap of what area has what type living there if you wanted to find someone to talk to who might have the same issues you have that are unique to your subspecies, everyone can talk about the whole, we changed and changed a lot issues but I'm sure each group has issues unique to themselves.... lol Thomas Guide eat your heart out! =]
Sara