NotExpected 10

Not What We Expected by Tiffany B. Quinn Every once in a while whatever little bit of male that was left in me yelled STOP! I had to take time out for my old favorite past times. I did a little wood working in the garage, skied or hiked some of my favorite trails, read a few action novels, and even played my favorite violent video games. I would have liked to go sailing, but winter in Wisconsin is neither the time or place for that activity. One day, while skiing on the local cross country ski trails by myself, an older guy tried getting a bit too friendly. It felt wrong and creepy. I quickly excused myself and got out of there. Tom and Sandra chided me for being out alone like that when I told them about my experience. I quit hiking and skiing without a companion. Since everyone was either working or in school that meant that I only got to go out on weekends if I could talk someone into coming along. It's just not safe for a young girl to be out on her own in today's world. It came home to me that life as a young girl had its serious limitations, whether or not I liked it.

Chapter 10

It turned out that getting let go from work was a timely thing. I was in pain most of April and the early part of May. While the pain was not excruciating, it was always there. At times the pain was moderately severe and prolonged. Usually at night. I could normally keep the pain under control with over the counter painkillers. Occasionally I had to use something a little stronger that had been prescribed by my doctor. If I had still been working, I would have taken a lot of sick days.

The pains that I endured were similar to what my mother had called growing pains when I was young. For me, however, it was a case of shrinking and realigning instead of growing. During this time period, my skeletal structure slowly and painfully morphed to align with my new chromosomes. My pelvis widened a bit into something more fitting a preteen child-bearing female. My shoulders contracted to typical female specifications and I lost a lot of height. My facial structure morphed to display a very feminine heart shaped face with high cheekbones. If you had known me before the changes, you could still some of the old Andy. I was a much better looking young feminine version of my former self. I developed a graceful, slender, feminine neck. The pitch of my voice rose to be a very definite soprano. I was still eating almost nothing so my weight continued to drop.

My appetite returned, after a fashion, in early May and the structural changes seemed to stop, relieving the pain. My doctor said that I now, at 5' 2" and 90 lbs, possessed the skeletal structure and the stature of a tall, skinny, twelve-year-old girl. Since I was now a preteen, it would seem that Grandma Broussard was a little off in her estimate of the age of the girl that would be Sandra’s best friend.

By all accounts, I had turned into one of the cutest twelve-year-olds that anyone claimed to have ever seen. You had to be one of my doctors to view the only external evidence that I was not complete female yet. I was only missing a vaginal opening to be complete. I had a clitoris, the urethra was in the right place, and the labia were perfectly formed but I didn’t have an opening. My medical support team were fascinated. An ultrasound showed a lot of confusion inside, which accounted for the frequent strong cramping that I had been experiencing.

My gynecologist had been monitoring me since the end of March. In mid-May, she assured me that if the changes continued, and why wouldn't they, I'd be a fully functioning female in short order.

The crystal agreed with the doctor’s assessment. It was getting progressively more and more pink. I found myself urging it to hurry up and complete the transition. There wasn't very much blue left at all. The remaining bluish tinge was only found at the heart of the crystal.

——<0>——

Sandra turned thirty-two in mid-April. I encouraged Tom to take her out for a romantic dinner, but Sandra wanted to include me in the celebration, so we ended up having a quiet dinner at the condo with just the three of us. Tom and I worked together to fix her a nice meal. Tom turned out to be a fair hand in the kitchen, making a very credible Louisianian Jambalaya. I made a birthday cake which we ate it with ice cream for dessert before opening her presents.

I gave Sandra a card with a drawing of two girlfriends walking together, one with her arm around the shoulders of the other. The caption read: ‘Best Friends make the good times better and the hard times easier.’

When she opened the small box that I had wrapped for her she gushed, “I love it!”

My gift to her was a pair of simple necklaces, each having half of a heart. When the pendants were put together the engraving said ‘Best Friends’. They were made of sterling silver and I had one engraved with ‘Sandra’ and the other with ‘Andi’.

“I guess that this one belongs to you,” she said as she hung the one with my name around my neck. I hung hers around her neck and we hugged.

“I love you,” I whispered in her ear. “It’s not much, but it says what’s in my heart.”

“And what’s in mine,” she whispered back. “It is a very thoughtful gift. Actually, you gave me an early birthday present last month when you set me free. That was a true act of love that I can never repay, but these are wonderful too. These necklaces represent our love and friendship, and speaks to your kindness.”

We both cried mostly happy tears for a minute before breaking our hug.

Tom gave her a very nice, and expensive, pair of dangly diamond earrings. She gave him a quick hug and a peck on the lips when she told him that she absolutely loved them.

The poor guy looked confused.

When Sandra was off taking a birthday call from one of her sisters and the two of us were alone cleaning up after dinner, he quietly asked me, “I give her a couple of thousand dollars worth of diamonds and all I get is a quick kiss. You give her a nice, but relatively inexpensive necklace and she hugs you like she got the best thing in the world. What’s up with that?”

I sighed, “First of all, this is not a competition. You’ve already got the girl, but you still have a lot to learn about women, lover boy. She does love your gift. It is impressive. Mine, on the other hand means something special to her. The necklace may not be much, but it represents years of love and shared experience. The necklace, by itself, is not important. The value is in what it represents. Meaning trumps monetary value every time with your girl. You need to remember that.”

“What you are saying,” he reflected back to me, “is that I don’t need to spend lots of money on gifts for her. I just need to select something with meaning.”

“Who said that you were a slow learner?” I grinned as I gave him a poke in the ribs. “The gift should speak to your relationship.”

“This is going to be hard,” he groaned.

“It doesn’t hurt if your gifts are meaningful AND expensive,” I gave him a sly smile. “But, with Sandra, meaning is better than expensive if you can only do one. Money does not mean as much as love to her.”

“Thanks for the tip,” he sighed.

“No problem, lover boy.” I grinned. “Just keep treating her right and demonstrate your love every day and it will all workout. She will pay you back by doing the same for you. Remember that she’s marrying you, not your money.”

——<0>——

Speaking of money, after getting let go by the University, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I was going to do to earn a living. I applied for quite a few jobs without success. The glowing recommendation from my former supervisor usually got me in the door but when I showed up for interviews, the interviewer typically got mad at me for pretending to be an adult.

I thought of going into business for myself, but my current expertise was in helping people with their computers. Since I had to interface with real people, I would run into the same problems with a consulting business that I had at the University.

Not only that, but the only business expertise in the family was leaving me. I have never had any talent for business. I strongly dislike marketing, accounting, and all the other tasks that a business owner must do.

I wasn’t a software developer so I couldn’t hide at home and just write code either.

The clock was ticking on my severance pay. I was getting very worried as the weeks went by without a job. Unemployment benefits would never make up for the lost salary.

As I previously mentioned, I was getting the condo in the dissolution. Sandra wouldn't need it. I knew that I had to find a way to pay the mortgage or I would have to rent or sell it soon. My share of the soon-to-be-separated joint savings and checking accounts wouldn't last too long and it was unlikely that I would find a good enough job to afford the mortgage payments. It had taken both of our incomes to qualify for the loan in the first place.

Sandra did agree to pay rent until she moved in with Tom after the wedding, which helped for a few weeks. I was seriously thinking of putting the unit up for rent when she moved out. I hadn’t made up my mind whether to take up my mother's offer to move back home or to move in with the newlyweds, though I was leaning towards my mother’s offer. It was quickly becoming apparent that I would have to do one or the other.

Sandra had told me, early on, that I could live with her and Tom and become a part of their family, as stated in the prophecy. I wasn't convinced that was in my best interest. She adamantly reaffirmed that she really did want me in her life and had told Tom, in no uncertain terms, that she and I would continue to be close friends and confidants. What she had proposed was a lot like having your wife's best friend and/or ex-husband move in with you as part of the family. That seemed a little weird to both Tom and me. She tried to convince us that her proposal was different because of our apparent age difference. It was more like him marrying a woman with a preteen daughter. The girl is part of the package. I had to think about that idea.

——<0>——

I started having trouble driving my big F250 pickup truck when my height slipped under 5’ 4” at the end of March. It was hard to reach the pedals and to see over the dashboard. It was with great sadness that I traded my favorite truck for a five-year-old Honda Accord, which is much more friendly to short people. The car was a bit worn around the edges, but I eventually came to love it. I even gave it a name: Butterfly. It was a dainty, compared to my truck, beige colored car.

Unfortunately, I was stopped a few times by the police on suspicion of joy riding in my parent's car. Sandra came to my rescue each time since my driver’s license didn't match the person. The letter from my doctor about the changes I had experienced was useful in convincing the police to back off. I had been waiting for the name change to take place so that I could get a license that had a female name to go with the new gender identifier, but finally broke down and got a new driver’s license in the name of Andrew Matthew, female, age 32. My picture on the license was pretty cute, for a change.

I got pulled over a few more times after updating my license. The policemen didn’t seem to be convinced that I really was thirty-two even when they ran a check on my license. They were convinced that I was no more than thirteen. I think that word got around the local police force that it wasn’t worth stopping me. One day when I got pulled over, there was a long wait while the policeman was obviously running my plate through dispatch. Eventually, the policeman turned off his lights and drove away with a wave without bothering to come check my license. The dispatcher must have told him of my circumstance. I didn’t have any more problems with the local police after that. Nevertheless, I wasn’t about to try my luck outside my hometown unless it was absolutely necessary.

——<0>——

After their formal engagement, Tom and Sandra's wedding preparations kicked into high gear. It was decided to hold the wedding in Louisiana where Tom's substantial extended family was centered. As luck would have it, the earliest date that they could hold the ceremony and accommodate the most family was exactly nine months after our first visit to the Bayou State. It was also was on the day that would have been Sandra’s and my tenth wedding anniversary. A pair of coincidences that was not lost on either of us.

I eventually resigned myself to the inevitable, and, as her BFF, was immersed in the wedding planning. We spent many a long evening going over the plans while Sandra gave me girl lessons.

When Sandra and I were married, we were pretty poor and just out of college, so our wedding had been simple. Not so with this wedding. Sandra's commissions had been piling up and she was marrying a wealthy man from a prominent family who was ecstatic that their last child was finally getting married. It quickly became obvious that Tom’s family expected a big wedding and no expense was to be spared. Tom and his family picked up most of the bill. Sandra’s parents had already paid for one wedding for Sandra and, being merely upper middle class instead of filthy rich, weren’t excited about going into debt for another one.

I know that the couple would have been happy with a quick visit to a Justice of the Peace to do the deed, but that would not have gone down well with Tom’s family. Sandra admitted to me that, while she had been happy with our modest wedding, as a little girl she’d always dreamed of having a big wedding. She was excited to finally have one.

I went dress shopping with Sandra and her mother and we looked at dozens of dresses before she decided on a full skirted affair with an impossibly long train that cost a little more than three months of my former university salary. She could have spent a lot more. The dress seemed to be missing a lot of its top, showing her shoulders and a lot of cleavage. I think that we spent just as much time finding the right lingerie to go with it. That wasn’t cheap either. I am constantly amazed that the cost of a few ounces of women’s fine lingerie. Ounce for ounce, it rivals the price of silver. I am pretty sure that Tom knew that he'd won the sexual lottery when he peeled Sandra’s wedding dress off her on their wedding day and baby making began in earnest.

Early in the process, Sandra approached me as her best friend to be her Maid-of-Honor. I pointed out to her that I was a little young looking to be a Maid-of-Honor and too old to be a flower girl. It also just seemed wrong for the Bride to recruit her ex-husband to be the Maid-of-Honor. I wryly suggested that I be the one to give her away as I was the last one to have the honor to "hold her hand". At first, I wasn't sure that I even wanted to go, but I saw that it would mean a lot to her, so I consented to a least being there. She eventually wore me down and I signed on to be the youngest looking ever Maid-of-Honor. This commitment put me even deeper into the wedding planning.

There were endless details to attend to. As Maid-of-Honor, I was obligated to organize a wedding shower and bachelorette party. I had no idea where to begin. Sandra's mother and one of her sisters came to my rescue and helped with the planning. As the rest of the bridesmaids were chosen, they also started to help. I didn't realize just how many women that Sandra was friends with until we started putting together invitation lists. It was daunting and I felt like a fraud with my name next to those of all these real women.

The couple had receptions both in Louisiana the day of the wedding and at the house in Wisconsin right after the honeymoon. The one at the house was an informal barbecue buffet with a couple of hundred of their closest friends and business associates along with family. The parties ended up being the social event of the year in both towns. I nearly choked when I saw the budget allocated for the wedding and two receptions. The budget, covered mostly by Tom, equaled two years of my former annual salary, before taxes, and nobody seemed to care. Hanging out with the rich took some time to get used to.

Pulling off a big wedding in only three months takes a lot of effort. Tom hired a couple of wedding planners, one to handle all the arrangements in Wisconsin and another to handle things in Louisiana. The wedding planners cleared their schedules and worked full time on the wedding, with Tom, Sandra, and their mothers intimately involved in the bigger decisions. I was also dragged into the planning.

The wedding preparations turned out to be a welcome distraction through the first of May. The planning helped to take my mind off the pain of my skeletal restructuring.

Sandra and Tom went on dates as often as they could. Their relationship seemed to deepen with every time they went out. I spent many a lonely evening at home, practicing my feminine arts, while waiting for Sandra to get home. She seemed to love to have someone to share the euphoria of each evening with. If I was asleep when she got home, she’d wake me up to talk about her deepening love for Tom and their plans for the future. It was a bit of a downer for me, but it was good to see her so happy and bubbly. I am pretty sure that, on these evenings, she forgot that she was talking to her soon-to-be ex-husband instead of her BFF. I wondered if she was this way after we got engaged?

Sandra would be moving in with Tom after the wedding, of course. When I was non-committal about joining them, she kept trying to convince me. Tom eventually got on board with the idea and joined forces with Sandra to entice me to become part of their household.

I was invited to his house a few times for war councils as plans were being made for the wedding. They tried enticing me with the opulence of his mansion.

Sandra was truly winning the lottery.

The house was five to six times the size of our upscale three-bedroom condo, sat on ten acres of prime land, and required a housekeeper and groundskeeper to keep things running. The driveway must have been a hundred yards long, after you passed through an imposing security gate at the street. Being located on a hill overlooking Lake Michigan, the house had a stunning view. The grounds were immaculate and there was a private dock in a well-protected cove. Of course, the rich guy had pools, both inside and out, and a court that could be used either for tennis or basketball. There was a large flat lawn out front where it is rumored that helicopters occasionally landed. There was a large nanny apartment over the five-car garage. There were outbuildings that included two small guest cottages, a large shed, and a large barn-like building that had apparently been built as some kind of studio by a prior owner. The studio building had two stories and at least twice the square footage as our condo.

After the first couple of visits to the mansion, I was still not responding positively to their efforts to get me to move in with them. It was on one of the third visit to his mansion that Tom finally dangled the right carrot in front of me.

The first couple of times I visited he showed us all the rich guy stuff that most people are interested in. He also showed me the suite that would be my room. It was amazing, with a sitting area, a king-sized princess bed complete with canopy, a walk-in closet that looked like it could be a warehouse, and a bathroom that you could get lost it. It was all fine and good, but not enough to draw me in. But on my third visit, Sandra suggested that he show me the inside of the studio building.

He had, off-handedly, mentioned that he used the studio as his creative space during our prior visits but didn’t focus on it, thinking that we wouldn’t find it interesting. Sandra went out there once when he needed to get something and one look was enough for her to realize that I would die to see such a place, being the techno geek that I am. I knew that Tom was a fellow techno geek, but I didn't realize just how much of tech wizard he was until he showed me the Studio.

I was bowled over just walking through the door.

"OMG!" I had exclaimed in reverent awe when we first walked into the building.

"You like it?" He asked with a smile.

"This place is amazing!" I enthused as I tried to take it all in.

The ground floor was totally open and had a high ceiling. There was a machine shop on one side of the space, fully equipped with the latest and greatest automated milling machines, lathes, cutters, etc. There were welding machines and everything else that a mechanic/machinist could ever want. He showed me all the equipment and some of the current projects that he and his team were fabricating. He told me that he had several technicians that worked full time with him developing and testing prototypes of his inventions. As he gave me the tour, he explained that the reason that he wanted Sandra to help on the financial side of things is that he was targeting the medical equipment business for his next start up. This I already knew. Her expertise was a perfect fit for his business plan. When he discovered that the medical industry was competitive with the defense industry in wealth, he had decided to focus his energies there. He had spent most of the last year researching the medical equipment and prosthetics industry and toying with new designs for each as he discovered opportunity. He had spent a lot of time talking with medical professionals to see what they really needed to do their job better. He already had several design projects underway.

In other parts of his shop, he had assembly areas, an electronics development area, and even some wood shop equipment. I was amazed at the quality of everything on display.

Upstairs, there was a large room with four state-of-the-art workstations and two top of the line 3D printers.

"We do a lot of design optimization," he explained. "We are trying to design products that are efficient, effective, and cost as little as possible to manufacture. The computing power required to get answers in a timely fashion is very substantial."

He then opened the door into the computer room at the back of the building and I fell in love.

There, in the middle of the room as a small mainframe and rack upon rack of hard drives, switches, air conditioning equipment and other computing parts and pieces.

Having your very own computer center is WAY beyond cool. There are not words to describe it. I about burst into flame with the excitement.

"You weren't joking about needing computing power," I observed when I could collect myself, I was so excited that I felt like hopping up and down and squealing like, well, like a young tween girl at a Jonas Brothers concert. I barely restrained myself.

"Who maintains all of this?" I asked in wondering awe once they peeled me off the ceiling.

"We have a contract with a software guy who manages the center for us," He grinned at me. He and Sandra were both laughing at my obvious excitement. "He maintains the system and optimization software, making modifications as needed. We call the manufacturer if there's any problem with the hardware and they fly a technician in if something needs working on."

I wandered around the room in awe, almost afraid to actually touch anything. I did risk a gentle caress of the mainframe. "I would love to spend time here."

"The university has gone almost exclusively to PCs," I mentioned to him. "But the engineering college has their own mainframe computing center for the bigger projects and simulations. The science researchers use it too. They even let me help them out with it from time to time. I think that your setup is even more impressive"

"Don't be so modest, Andi." Sandra chided me with a grin. "From what you've told me, you even found a way to increase the speed of their machine."

"That was a fluke," I waved off the compliment. "Their technicians just couldn't see the obvious."

I sighed.

"What's wrong," Tom asked with concern.

Sandra answered for me, "What's wrong, is that I think that working with your computer system would be a dream come true for little miss computer geek."

"Really?" Tom asked thoughtfully.

I just nodded.

The rest of the tour was anti-climactic, but impressive just the same. I just don't remember much else as I was overwhelmed thinking about that computing facility.

It had never occurred to me that Sandra was marrying the real-world equivalent of Tony Stark.

I couldn't get that computer system out of my mind. The computer geek in me really wanted to spend some time with it.

Tom promised me access if I moved in with them.

Oh, that was so VERY tempting!

At one-point Sandra excused herself to take care of some detail related to the wedding. I think that the tour bored her. This was one of the first times that Tom and I had ever been alone together.

After she was gone, Tom said with sincerity, “You know that I didn’t intend to take Sandra from you?”

I sighed, “You didn’t take Sandra from me, your Grandmother’s magic accomplished that. We wouldn’t be standing here if she hadn’t turned me into a girl.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, “I feel responsible for that. I know how much your marriage meant to her and to you and I tried to honor that. I did my best to stay out of it until Sandra informed me that the marriage was over. Honestly, I thought you were a great guy. I think that we could have been friends.”

“For the record,” I informed him with another sigh, “I think that you are a pretty great guy yourself. You treat Sandra with respect, and I appreciate that. Your love for her is obvious. I agree that we could have been friends if you hadn’t been so infatuated with my wife. Maybe we can be friends now that there is no longer competition for her affections.”

“Maybe,” he replied, “I’ve never been friends with a young girl before, but I think we can make it work. We do seem to have a number of common interests, beside Sandra.

“I hope that she can come to love me as much as she loves the memory of Andy and their time together,” he said wistfully. “Your love must have been a wonder to behold. I am more than a little intimidated by her memory of what you two had and with the love that you two share now. I don’t know if I will be able to measure up.”

“Just keep treating her right,” I advised him, “and build your own good memories with her. Love grows over time with shared loving experiences.

“If you don’t treat her right,” I added with a stern expression, “you’ll have me to deal with. I’ll be watching you.”

He groaned, “Nothing like a little pressure!”

With a sly grin, he asked, “What should I know about her to stay on her good side?”

I laughed, “You are on your own there, buddy. You need to gain those insights on your own the same way I did. By experience.”

——<0>——

As the wedding plans and my girl training ground on, I kept in touch with my lawyer.

One afternoon at the end of April she called me to let me know that we had a court date set in mid-May.

I let Sandra know about our upcoming court appearance when she got home from work. She broke her date with Tom that night and the two of us stayed home together and ignored the phones.

We pulled out our photo albums and spent the evening reminiscing. That evening we laughed a lot and cried a lot as we talked about the good times that we had shared.

It was a double chocolate ice cream kind of evening. We consumed more than was healthy.

I learned that chocolate ice cream is surprisingly therapeutic.