“Has anyone ever told you that you shop like a stoner?” Ashleigh peeked into my cart as we approached the self-checkout lane at the grocery store. Inside, as I well knew, she would see three bottles of lemon juice, a bag of tomatoes, six potatoes, and a quart of ice cream. I suppose she would think that was a little weird, but ever since I’d been changed and allowed to eat for the first time, I’d been craving citrus and random dairy products. Potatoes were just a plus today.

“Uh…I guess I just get weird cravings,” I said the first thing that came to mind. She’d already questioned why I needed to go shopping; I guess there aren’t many twelve year old girls that go grocery shopping these days.

“I totally understand,” She nodded. “I crave pickles, like, all the time.”

“Pickles?” I asked her as I scanned the lemon juice and set it on the conveyor belt. “That’s a weird thing to crave.”

“Not if you’re trans,” She smiled. “I take a pill called sprio, right? It suppresses testosterone but makes it REALLY hard for my body to absorb salt, sooooo pickles. Lots of pickles.”

“Um,” I said, slightly distracted as held my transparent credit card beneath the scanner. It made a satisfying beep and I retracted it. “You ever try olives?’

“Olives are good, pickles are better!” She responded in a very upbeat tone with a smile on her face. I stared at her for a long moment and then dropped my bags into the cart. Her phone buzzed, and as she checked the screen, the smile faded momentarily from her face, until finally she put it away and looked back toward me. I finished dropping the items in the cart and walked toward the door, walking around several other shoppers as the cart wheels clattered against the tile.

“There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” I told her after we’d finished packing the groceries in the car and sat down up front. “If you don’t mind…I mean…what’s it like being trans? Does it feel weird? Is it different? How did your family take it?”

I watch her stop for a moment, perhaps lost in thought. I’d asked her to take me shopping because Meghan was noticeably absent today and I couldn’t use the mirrors. She probably hadn’t expected an interrogation but I really, really wanted to know what my life could have been like if Angela hadn’t changed me. It was impossible for me to say if I would have ever come out; back then I was afraid of my parents even though I’d moved out. Even still I felt their invisible grip around my heart and mind, one driven by manufactured dogma and control issues that I couldn’t even begin to diagnose.

“It’s um…funny you ask,” She sighed. “I told my mom four years ago and I thought she would have had time to adjust but she told me that…that I took her son away. I tried to explain to her that this has always been me, that I spent my entire childhood being…so…sad. I guess sad is a good way to put it. But she said to me ‘I’ll always remember him, and that you took him away from me, and everything that I hold dear’. You know, Jasmine, in my mind I know it’s bullshit but my heart, my heart is aching right now. In my heart, it feels like I…feel like I hurt a person that I’m supposed to care about. I feel…responsible.”

“You can’t be responsible,” I shook my head. “You didn’t take anything away from her, you…didn’t belong to her. You made the best choice, for you, to survive, and if she can’t handle that then…it’s gotta be on her.”

“That’s what I keep telling myself,” She nodded, her voice cracking a little bit. She still hadn’t started the car. “I just keep trying to…”

“Have you thought about writing it down?” I suggested. “I used to keep a journal, sometimes it really helps to get the emotions out through words. Heck you could even turn it into a story, post it online, get some feedback.”

“I don’t really like posting stories online,” She laughed a little bit. “It’s easy at first, when you don’t have much character development fleshed out. See in the beginning your character is someone that people can relate to, they can project onto. But, as you get further into the story you start to really develop your character, give them a personality, and then your readers will be like ‘Well I’d never do that’ or ‘I’m really losing interest in this story now that I can’t picture myself in it’. It’s…just a problem that happens as the story evolves.”

“Wait, hold on,” I cocked my head at her. “Doesn’t the quality of the story matter? Like, at all? Dynamic characters, branching plotline? I see books all the time that are really complex. You can’t really project yourself onto a character in a Steven King book but the story is what matters.”

“Well, sometimes,” She nodded. “But then you have books like Twilight or Fifty Shades of Grey where the character is basically an empty template that you can jump into. Everyone could picture themselves as Bella, but not everyone can be Roland the Gunslinger.”

“Did love me some Dark Tower though,” I smiled softly. She shot me a strange look.

“You’ve read the Dark Tower?” She finally turned the ignition key, the car roared to life. “That’s like…old…and you’re like…eleven.”

“A classic is a classic,” I affirmed. The truth was that I’d gotten into it around the time the movie was still pretty popular, but did she really need to know that?

“So here’s…the truth,” She told me with a sigh. “This thing…happened. My mother said that to me and you know what? Everyone around me sees me as the strong one, the one who always cracks a joke, the one who lets everything roll off her shoulders and to be honest, I am that way because I had to be growing up. My parents, they weren’t really ones for listening or helping me solve problems. I had to put up this wall, build this hard shell, never let anyone know how I was feeling. Because of that everyone comes to me with their problems, they expect me to solve so many things, or be that sympathetic ear but you know what? Now I’m the one that needs help. Now I’m the one that’s hurting, and there’s no one here for me.”

“I’m here for you,” I said softly. “I’ll listen, I promise. You can tell me anything.”

“Why do you seem so much older than you are?” She looked at me as she pulled the car into my parent’s old driveway. Meghan had insisted that I stay there while Broderick and company were gone, and now, her car was sitting in the driveway. I guess she was home.

“Well,” I sighed. “The truth is, I was eighteen years old in 2019, and a guy but I bugged this Fae girl to dominate me, and she did, and accidentally left me to clean her house for eleven years and turned me into one of them. Now I’m immortal, and instead of being a 35 year old guy I have the body of a 12 year old girl. Wild, right?”

There was a long pause and a pregnant silence in the car, and then, finally, Ashleigh burst out laughing. I joined in momentarily before her phone rang and she lifted it to slide the ‘answer’ button.

“That’s good, that’s real good,” She snickered just before holding the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

I sat quietly for a moment and tuned into the conversation at the other end of the phone. It was in this moment I realized that the Fae had extremely good hearing.

”Did you leave a shirt on top of the washing machine?” I recognized the voice as that of her roommate. I craned to listen a bit more.

“Uh, yeah,” She said. “I need to wash it after you guys get done with your clothes.

“What did I tell you about leaving clothes on the washing machine?”

“I’m going to wash it when I get home, you guys were just doing laundry and-“

“You know what? You do things like this because you don’t care. You don’t care about ANYONE but yourself. I let you live in my home, I let you use my kitchen, I let you use my laundry room. The least you could do is say thank you.”

“Thank you,” She said quietly and flatly. “I’ll take care of the shirt when I get home.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Her roommate said sharply. “I already threw it away. I’m going to throw ANYTHING that you leave laying around away from now on.”

“Okay, I’m sorry,” She said. “I won’t do it again.”

“I wish I could believe you,” The phone clicked, the line was dead. Ashleigh held it out in front of her and hung up, her face grim for a moment.

“Okay,” She said, smiling at me. “You ready to get these groceries in the house?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “Let’s go.”