“Too much pillow-fighting?” he asked with a grin as we walked back toward our van.

 

I swatted him on the arm. “I’ve been to two girl sleepovers so far, and neither involved a pillow-fight.”

 

“Man, you got cheated.”

---

Pioneers

part 15 of 15

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.

Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

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Of course, it wasn’t that simple. For one thing, I only had a limited learner permit, so I couldn’t drive without an adult driver in the passenger seat, and Hunter, because he’d been disabled until a few weeks ago, didn’t even have that; he’d signed up for the next driver’s education course, but it wouldn’t start for another week and he couldn’t apply for his learner’s permit until he completed it. So we’d need my mom or dad, or Hunter’s mom (his dad was deployed in Afghanistan) to drive us somewhere if we were going to go on a date before my sixteenth birthday.

The other, possibly bigger obstacle was telling Mom and Dad that Hunter had asked me out and I’d said yes, and the corollary: telling them I liked boys. When I’d been hurriedly thinking through whether to accept Hunter’s invitation, I’d still been riding the high from Mom and Dad telling me I’d be un-grounded after Friday and could buy skirts and dresses Saturday; I was pretty confident that they accepted me as a girl and wouldn’t mind my dating, either. But by the time I got home, I’d twisted my stomach in knots again, worrying about how they’d react.

I started with the easy stuff, Lily and Andrew inviting me to come over and hang out the weekend after I was ungrounded. To my surprise, Dad scrutinized the invitation from Andrew and asked if it was a date.

“No,” I said. “Andrew’s dating somebody else. We’re just friends, same as always.”

“Is he dating anyone we know?” Mom asked. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it... but I suppose we haven’t seen much of him since you were grounded.”

“Emilia Read,” I said, worried that my face might be showing a hint of jealousy. “She’s in my homeroom; I haven’t known her that long, but she seems nice.”

“Good for them,” Mom said. “Don’t take this wrong, but I’m kind of glad... I’m still getting used to having a daughter, and you’re still getting used to being a girl, and even though we said a while ago that you could start dating when you turned fifteen, I think maybe this might be too soon.”

I had just opened my mouth to say “Well, actually...” when Dad said: “What about this Lily Bannister? Do we know her?”

“I don’t think so. She’s in my homeroom, too; I didn’t really get to know her well until a few weeks ago.”

“Let us talk to her parents and figure out when and whether it suits for you to go over to her house, or invite her over here. And Andrew’s parents too, I suppose.”

“Um, there’s one other thing...”

“Yes?” Dad asked.

I took a deep breath and said: “You remember Hunter Gorman? He testified at the school board meeting — he had muscular dystrophy until he and his mom used the Venn machine.”

“Yes, he seemed like a nice — wait. Are you saying...?”

“He asked me out on a date,” I put in. “After I told him I wasn’t going to be grounded anymore as of Saturday. We haven’t figured out when or how yet, because of the driving situation, but...”

“Driving situation?” Mom asked. Dad was speechless for the moment.

“I’ve only got a learner’s permit and he doesn’t have a license at all. He’s signed up for the next driver education course, but...”

“Oh, of course. Hmm.” She glanced at Dad, who had opened his mouth but hadn’t said anything yet. “I suppose we could give you a ride... but like I said, we’re still getting used to this, and I’m not sure you’re ready for it either.”

“You want to go on a date? With a boy?” Dad asked.

“Yes,” I said patiently, trying to hide how scared I was. This might be a bridge too far for him. “You told me and Sophia we could start dating when we were fifteen, and I’m almost sixteen now. And I’m a girl, so dating boys is... typical.” I didn’t quite like the way that sounded, but I wanted even less to say “normal.”

“I don’t want to be unfair or go back on what we said,” Mom said, after giving Dad a few moments to see if he’d say anything, “but... I get that you’ve felt like you wanted to be a girl for a long time, but we didn’t know that until recently, and we haven’t taught you much of what you need to know to be a girl out in the world. So far you haven’t gone anywhere without us except school. It’s just... I worry about you.”

I smiled a little. The overprotectiveness was a little annoying in itself, but as a form of validation that she thought of me as a girl now, it was totally welcome. “So is the problem that you don’t trust Hunter? Or are you not sure he can protect me if some other guy is a problem, because he’s not used to having a strong healthy body yet, or what?”

“I don’t know Hunter very well yet. He seems like a nice boy, like I said, but we only talked with him for a couple of minutes. And... give us some time to think about it, okay? And to get to know Hunter and his parents a little better. Do you have a phone number for them?”

I gave them his mom’s number, and told them about his dad being deployed, and almost everything else I’d learned about him in the last few weeks. And then I was on pins and needles for a couple of days while they talked it over privately and talked with Hunter’s mom and I don’t know what else.

Then, Saturday morning at breakfast, Dad said: “Meredith,” (it still gave me a thrill to hear him use my name), “we’ve discussed it with Hunter’s mother, and given our respective work schedules, it makes more sense for one of us to pick up Hunter and drop the two of you off at a mall or something for a couple of hours than it does for her.”

“Thank you!” I exclaimed. “You’re such awesome parents. Would next Saturday be okay?” Hunter and I had been talking the last couple of days, and we’d decided that if my parents were cool with it, we’d go hang out at the mall in Catesville the following Saturday, watch a movie, eat at the Italian place, and do some shopping.

“Sure,” Dad said.

A few hours later, after Mom and Dad got home from their yard-saling, Mom, Sophia and I went to the library with a big bag of my old boy clothes, and some of Sophia’s clothes that were getting a little too small or wearing out, and figured out how to change each other’s clothes without changing the person’s body. We had to take breaks to let other people use the machine, but after a couple of hours, I had a bunch of cute dresses, skirts, and blouses in different styles, as well as new bras and panties. I found out later that I’d also extended my own three-year change by a few weeks.

(A few months later, someone discovered that you could just bring a bag of clothes into the machine with you and press the green button, and they’d all change to fit you; you don’t need to put them on and then have your partner tweak the images so they fit. That would have saved us a lot of time on the casual clothes, but it wouldn’t turn pants into skirts or dresses, just baggy boy pants into girl-tailored pants of the same style and materials.)

Afterward, Mom dropped me off at Lily’s house for my first girl sleepover away from home. I had a weird surprise when I met her older sister Alyssa; Lily had mentioned her, but never shown me a picture of her. She was the girl who’d asked me if her boyfriend could get pregnant if they had sex while venned into opposite-sex bodies. She didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with us younger girls during the sleepover, though she did watch a movie with us. I didn’t ask her how things were going with her boyfriend, though I kind of wanted to. She’d done a two-day Venn on Friday evening, getting a set of cat ears and a tail.

Lily’s parents looked really young, like in their mid-twenties. Both of them were taller than Caleb and had matching red hair that neither of their kids had. Lily had told me they’d started experimenting with the Venn machine recently, though so far only on weekends.

Jada, a girl I sort of knew from my Geometry class, was also there when I arrived; once Lily showed me where to put my stuff, we sat around in Lily’s bedroom and started talking. Emilia arrived a little late, as she and Andrew had had a date that afternoon; I saw him briefly as he dropped her off.

“Oh, hey, Meredith, I didn’t know you were gonna be here,” he said, waving at me.

“Hi, Andrew. Yeah, I told you Lily’d invited me over, right?”

“I remembered you told me a girl you knew had invited you for a sleepover, but I didn’t realize it was the same girl Emilia asked me to drop her off with.”

“I didn’t realize you knew each other that well,” Emilia said.

“Yeah, we’ve known each other since grade school,” Andrew said. “We used to be neighbors. Are we still on for tomorrow, Meredith?”

“Sure — my dad said we’d go by and pick you up after church.”

Emilia looked curious and maybe a little jealous. I wasn’t sure what do to about that except to tell her about my date with Hunter the following weekend, and right this moment wasn’t the time for that. Andrew said, “Looking forward to it,” then said to Emilia, “And I’m really looking forward to our next date,” kissed her, and turned to go.

Lily and Jada giggled, and when Andrew was gone, said: “Tell us about the date!” I forced myself to smile. I wasn’t completely over Andrew, and probably wouldn’t be for a while, but I was determined not to mess things up between him and Emilia.

Of course, Emilia telling us about her date with Andrew led to Lily talking about her last date with her boyfriend Sebastian, and that gave me an opening to tell them how Mom and Dad had said I could go out with Hunter (I’d already told Lily and Emilia about him asking me out), and about our plans for next weekend. I thought Emilia looked reassured after that, though she asked me more about Andrew later in the evening, and why I’d never told her how well I knew him when she’d talked about him in homeroom. I didn’t have a good answer. “...I kind of didn’t want you two using me as a go-between,” I said, “asking me questions about each other and all.” That was partly true, but it didn’t really satisfy her.

After supper, we watched a couple of movies and set up sleeping bags in the living room (there wasn’t room for all four of us in Lily’s room), though we kept talking for a while before we finally dropped off to sleep. In the morning, I woke to find Mrs. Bannister nudging me gently, trying to wake me without waking the other girls. I thanked her quietly, went to get my stuff from Lily’s bedroom, showered, got dressed for church, and ate breakfast with her and Mr. Bannister.

“So I understand you’re one of the youngest people in town who can use the transformation booth,” she said. “It won’t work for Lily.”

Lily had never told me she’d tried it and it didn’t work; she’d just said she was satisfied with her body (I sure would have been, if I’d had it). I didn’t let on, though. I just said, “My sister’s sixteen months younger than me, and she can use it. I don’t know of anybody younger it works for in person, but I’ve heard of a thirteen-year-old who can use it.”

“Did you just use it the once, or have you tried other things?”

“Just once. I was grounded until yesterday, remember.”

“Oh, right, Lily mentioned that...” Mr. Bannister shot her a glance and she seemed to change her mind about whatever she was going to say. “I’m glad you’ll be able to explore more options now.”

I didn’t tell them that Sophia and I still weren’t allowed to use the Venn machine for anything except adjusting clothes to fit. I just said, “I’m happy the way I am for now. And I’m afraid if I try out a nifty semi-human form for the weekend, I might not be able to get back to this body afterward, and nobody would recognize me and I’d have to file all that paperwork with the school again.”

“Yes, that’s an annoyance,” Mr. Bannister said. “Our employers both have a similar policy. That’s why we’re only changing on weekends, so far. Once Valerie and I find a couple of bodies we’re really satisfied with, we’ll inform our employers and make a long-term change.”

Just then Alyssa came in, looking bleary, and helped herself to some of the grits and scrambled eggs, but not the bacon. “Morning, Meredith. You’re up early.”

“Yeah, my family’s picking me up for church in a little while. I didn’t want to make them wait while I finish getting ready.”

“What church do y’all go to?” Mr. Bannister asked, and I told him a little about it.

He raised his eyebrows. “I’m pleasantly surprised that they’re okay with you being transgender.”

I internally debated how much to say, and contented myself with “Not everybody is, but Mom and Dad have stood up for me.”

Not long after we finished eating, the doorbell rang, and I followed Mrs. Bannister to the door. Mom was there, and our van was in the driveway with Dad, Caleb and Sophia in it.

“You about ready?” Mom asked me.

“My bag’s right here,” I said. I’d set it by the front door after I got dressed.

Mom surveyed the girls still sleeping in the living room floor. “How late did y’all stay up?”

“Um... maybe one in the morning? Or it could have been later. It was too dark to see the clock after we turned the lights off.” The reminder of how little sleep I’d gotten made me yawn, and Mom laughed.

“Thanks, Mrs. Bannister,” I said. “Tell Lily I’ll see her tomorrow.”

“Bye, Meredith.”

At church, I looked for a chance to talk with Joseph privately, but didn’t even get a chance to talk with her with other people around. The Wallaces were a few minutes late to church, and we left pretty soon after the service ourselves. We drove over to Andrew’s house, and I went up the door and rang the bell.

“Hi, Meredith,” he said, opening the door. “You have fun at the sleepover?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t get enough sleep, though.”

“Too much pillow-fighting?” he asked with a grin as we walked back toward our van.

I swatted him on the arm. “I’ve been to two girl sleepovers so far, and neither involved a pillow-fight.”

“Man, you got cheated.”

We got in, and Dad drove us all to the Mellow Mushroom. After lunch, Andrew hung out at our house for a few hours until his mom came and picked him up just after supper. We played a lot of video games; I hadn’t played many games since my grounding ended, what with one thing and another, so I still wasn’t used to using the controllers with girl-size hands, but after a while I got used to it and started beating Andrew around half the time. We didn’t talk a lot about Andrew’s relationship with Emilia, though Andrew wanted to know about my plans with Hunter, and congratulated me. “He seems like a pretty great guy,” he commented.

The lack of sleep was catching up with me, and by the time we ate supper, I was yawning and drifting into a fugue between one bite of food and the next. I managed to stay awake until Andrew’s mom showed up, and said goodbye to him, then went to bed early.

---

That week at school was fairly routine except for some tests on Friday. I sat with Hunter at lunch every day, whether at Andrew’s table, or with Hunter’s other friends. At the sleepover, I’d found out that I had the same free period as Jada, and I met up with her at the library a couple of times. Since I’d been too busy to talk on the phone with Carmen all weekend, I talked with them for a little while after school Monday evening.

Thursday night, Mom took me aside after supper and gave me a talk about dating. “Hunter seems like a nice boy, from what I can tell,” she said. “And you two will be in a public place all through this date. So some of these precautions might sound paranoid. But he probably won’t be the last boy you’ll date — hardly anyone marries the first person they ever go out with — and I want you to make them a consistent habit long before you’re off on your own, dating boys that your dad and I have never met.” Then she gave me the usual advice about not being alone with a boy in a secluded area until I knew and trusted him really well, not drinking anything that had been out of my sight since it left the waiter’s hands, having cash hidden in my shoe in case I got stranded and lost my purse, and so on.

Saturday, after Mom and Dad got home from visiting several yard sales in the Winston-Salem area, Mom and I went over to Hunter’s house and picked him up. Mom let me drive to Hunter’s house, but when he got in the van, she suggested, “Why don’t you get in the back seat and I’ll drive you two to the mall?”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and got out and got in the back seat next to Hunter, while Mom went around and got in the driver’s seat.

On the way to the mall, our conversation was a little subdued; Hunter was more shy and diffident than I’d usually seen him, and I was more than a little nervous, too. But after a few minutes of awkward small talk about school with longish silences, we started talking about we’d heard about Red Moon and Black Mountain, the movie we were going to see, and by the time we arrived, we were talking as freely as we did at lunch with other friends and acquaintances to buffer and bounce ideas off of.

Mom let us off at the entrance nearest the movie theater and told us she’d be back in about four hours. She made sure Hunter had Dad’s cellphone number and our landline number, and she loaned me her cellphone. “Let it go to voicemail if anybody calls but Dad, Caleb, or the house landline. You probably won’t need it, but...”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and Hunter and I disappeared into the mall. We got in line at the theater and bought our tickets, and then sodas and a big tub of popcorn to share, and found our seats. Red Moon and Black Mountain had been out for several weeks, so the theater wasn’t crowded. It was the first movie I’d seen in a theater since July, when Caleb, Andrew, Nick and I had gone to see Oblivion’s Flight. And it was the first time I’d been alone with Hunter for more than a few moments. Not alone-alone, but with nobody around who cared who we were or what we were talking about — or, within broad limits, what we were doing. It was exciting and a little bit scary.

We chatted in low voices until the previews started, making fun of the pretentious advertisements disguised as pre-show entertainment and nibbling on popcorn. When the previews started, we didn’t talk again until after the movie was over, although after we finished off the popcorn, we held hands for a while. That felt good.

Hunter had checked ahead of time and found that there wasn’t an extra scene after the credits, so we left as soon as the credits started and, after using the restrooms, walked over to the Italian place on the other side of the mall. As we left the theater, he took my hand again, and I squeezed his a little and smiled at him.

We talked about the movie in between studying the menu and ordering. Then talking about the backstory of one of the characters led to Hunter talking about his his family.

“Back when we lived at Fort Benning,” he said, “and my MD wasn’t as bad, Mom used to work, too, and let Dad or Aunt Carolyn take care of me when she was at work. But then Dad was deployed to Afghanistan — not the first time he’d been sent overseas, but the first time we couldn’t go with him — and then my MD got worse, and Mom had to quit work to take care of me whenever I wasn’t in school. We moved here and lived with Grandma until she died, and then Mom inherited the house. Grandma and Grandpa had paid off the mortgage before he died, so we’ve been getting by okay. Still, since I got fixed up and Mom was able to start working again, things have been better. I’ve been trying to find a weekend job, too, but with only one car and driver’s license it’s gonna be hard to find one where the schedule fits Mom’s schedule so she can drive me to and from work.”

“Mom and Dad don’t want me working during the school year,” I said, “at least not unless I get my grades up a lot. The last few years before I transitioned, I was depressed often enough that it was hard to get all my schoolwork done. Hard to care about it, sometimes. Things have been a lot better lately, but I guess it’ll be the end of the semester before I know how much it’s impacted my grades.”

That got us to talking about how we’d both been depressed a lot, from my gender dysphoria and his disability, and I told him things I’d never told Andrew. Mostly because we’d never been alone with no likely eavesdroppers since I came out. I’d never heard Hunter say any of this at school, either, probably because we were always around either Andrew and Evan or Hunter’s other friends. By the time we finished eating and started wandering from store to store, looking at a lot of stuff and buying very little, I felt a lot closer to him than I’d felt when he asked me out — enough to think this might work long-term.

After a while, Dad called and said he’d be there to pick us up in twenty minutes. We got sourdough pretzels at the food court and sat eating them on the bench outside the entrance where Dad was going to pick us up.

“I had fun today,” Hunter said.

“So did I.” I smiled at him and squeezed his hand, wondering if he was planning to kiss me, if I should kiss him, if I should hint that I wanted him to kiss me...

“I hope we can do it again sometime soon?” he asked. “Probably not next Saturday, because I’m planning to spend most of the morning job-hunting, and after all that walking, I might be too tired to do much in the evening.”

“Walking?”

“My mom’s going to drop me off downtown before she goes to work, and I’m going to walk around looking into every business that might be hiring, and then Mom’s going to drive me home during her lunch break.”

“Hmm... you know, if you’re downtown, you won’t be far from our house. We’re eight blocks south of Main Street. Maybe you and your mom could join us for lunch, and Mom or Dad or Caleb could give you a ride home after your mom goes back to work?”

“That would be great... if your parents are okay with it.”

“I’ll try to talk them into it.” I squeezed his hand. “Speaking of which...”

Dad pulled up to the curb and honked — unnecessarily, because I was already standing up and starting toward him. Hunter followed me to the car and we got in the back seat. I was pretty sure Hunter wasn’t going to kiss me now, with Dad watching us through the rear-view mirror, so the opportunity had passed for now. But I knew there would be a next time.

---

A couple of Saturdays later, Hunter and I went on a double date with Andrew and Emilia. Emilia had come up with the idea; she mentioned it to me in homeroom, and Andrew suggested it to me and Hunter at lunch. I was a little reluctant for reasons that will be obvious to you, but a lot more reluctant to tell them why, so when Hunter thought it was a good idea, I agreed. The car situation was just as tricky to deal with as before, though, because at sixteen, with his provisional license, Andrew couldn’t drive with more than one non-family passenger. So Hunter and I wound up getting a ride from Caleb to the Thai restaurant where we were meeting them; it was in easy walking distance of a bowling alley. Spending the evening with all three of them went a long way toward me getting over my jealousy of Emilia and Andrew’s relationship, and another one-on-one date with Hunter a week later deepened our own.

The Sunday after that, Joseph and I finally managed to get a moment to talk somewhat privately, with nobody close enough to overhear us. I slipped her a flash drive with Tor Browser on it, which she could use to surf the web privately and get past the nanny software. Not long after that, she got a new email account and we started corresponding, though she was only able to get enough privacy to read and write emails, or search for information about trans issues, at long intervals. It was quite a while before — but she tells me she’s working on writing her own story, so I’ll let her tell it in her own way.

It was a good thing we’d found a way to privately communicate, because not long after that, we stopped going to church with the Wallaces, and after a few weeks of visiting other churches in the area, started going to one that was more open to trans people. I didn’t see Joseph again in person until — but no, she’ll tell you all about that.

A few months later, after the history feature was discovered and we could safely go back to previous forms after trying out something else, Andrew and Hunter (and a lot of other people who’d done long-term venns) started trying out alternate forms sometimes on the weekends or at night. Mom and Dad didn’t start letting me and Sophia do that for several more months, until a full year had passed since the Venn machines appeared and we knew a lot more about their effects. They strictly warned us not to let anyone but family members or old, trusted friends transform us — nobody we’d known for less than five years, and certainly not our boyfriends. By then, we’d learned about some of the possible abuses of the Venn machines, and how skilled users could induce certain mental effects that, if one stayed in the altered form long enough, could have permanent effects on someone’s personality after the physical transformation wore off. I trusted Hunter not to do anything like that, but I understood why Mom and Dad wanted me to be cautious.

I loved being a hummingbird, a cat, a centaur, a griffin... and when Sophia finally got to do her science fair project on certain uses of the Venn machines, I volunteered as one of her guinea pigs, fulfilling the promise I’d made that day she’d given me my ideal body. But though I tried out many alternate girl bodies, mostly human but sometimes elves or other species, and enjoyed most of them for a few hours or a day or two, I didn’t find any that suited me as well as the form that Sophia had designed that Wednesday after the Venn machines first appeared. Maybe someday, when I’m almost as old as Mom and Dad are now, I’ll shift back to a younger version of this body, but at least five days a week and usually seven, I’m perfectly happy being me.

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Wings, the sequel to Pioneers, is now over 125,000 words. If you would like to beta-read it when it's finished, send me a private message via this site.

My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon