I’d pretty much given up on trying to convince myself I wasn’t trans by that point. I was still trying to convince myself that a girl body, whether human or dragon, was a “nice to have” rather than the burning need it had soon become once I’d started thinking about it.

We went to a different restaurant for lunch, just the four of us, but it was tense and nobody said anything except Dad and Mom, and they didn’t say much. A few minutes after we ordered, but before our food arrived, Dad said in a low voice, “Maybe we shouldn’t have walked out like that. I should have tried harder... I hate to end a friendship of twenty years like that, but they just weren’t listening! At all!” He was raising his voice some near the end of that, though not yelling like he’d done at the steakhouse, and Mom put her hand on his.

“Since they weren’t listening, there’s probably not much more we could do,” she said. “But we could send them a letter with the other stuff we were going to talk about.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “I didn’t even get a chance to offer our help to pay his tuition to a boarding school, or for conversion therapy.”

I didn’t know what conversion therapy was, but I looked it up the next time I had some private Internet time, and I was horrified. It seemed to be focused on “curing” gay kids — by giving them electric shocks while they looked at sexy pictures, apparently, so gay boys would associate sexy images of men with pain and misery, and similar for lesbian girls. I wasn’t sure how they would try to cure being trans, but it was probably just as bad. If Dad felt strongly enough to pay for Meredith’s tuition to a conversion camp, if the Ramseys couldn’t afford it, he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to pack me off to one if he had the slightest suspicion I was trans, too. After that, I became even more paranoid about not letting Mom, Dad or Nathan see me reading anything gender-related.

When we finally got home, Mom said she had a headache and was going to take a nap, and Dad and Nathan started playing a basketball game on the console; I studied for finals for a while.

I’d figured out a way to spend more time corresponding with Meredith and studying gender issues and the Venn machines without spending too much time with incriminating displays on the monitor. I would copy Meredith’s longer emails, and the contents of the crunchier web pages, into Word, reduce the font size to where it wouldn’t be easy for Mom or Dad to read it unless they got right up next to me, and hide them at the ends of documents like school essays and term paper drafts. Sometimes I’d change the text color to match the background, so I could read it only when I selected the text and could unselect it to make it unreadable in a moment.

That afternoon, after trying to study for my history final and failing to concentrate, I went to the end of my term paper document and started drafting a letter to Meredith, which I’d email later — perhaps only having the flash drive plugged in and Tor Browser running for a few critical minutes. I apologized abjectly for what had happened that day; I felt guilty about not saying anything in Meredith’s defense when Dad had gone on that tirade, and even though I knew that would almost certainly have made things worse for me and no better for Meredith, the guilty feeling still influenced the tone of that email.

“I’m so sorry for what Dad did. If I’d known he was planning that, I would have tried to warn you, but I don’t think I could have done anything to stop him. While he was talking, part of me felt like I should say something, but I was too terrified to think of what to say, much less to say anything, and now, looking back, I guess it probably wouldn’t have done any good anyway. You were great, and your parents are”

I got interrupted before I finished it, quickly Ctrl-Home’d to the part of the document with history notes, and didn’t get a chance to finish or send it until a day or two later. A few days later, I got a reply from Meredith; I copied it into a French notes document and read it later in snatches between study.

“Don’t beat yourself up over it, there was nothing you could do. I’m okay, and your dad going on a rant isn’t going to hurt me. You just need to keep your head down and stay safe until you can get out from under his thumb. I’m always here for you, but be careful and don’t check this email more often than you’re sure it’s safe.

“This isn’t the first time something like that’s happened, and your parents aren’t the only people at church that have talked to Mom and Dad or me like that, though your dad is probably the worst. So it’s been building up for a while, but I just found out for sure: we’re not going to Crossroads anymore. We left and went home for lunch, since Dad didn’t want to talk about stuff with all the waiters and customers having had their attention drawn to us, and then we talked about where else we might start going to church. I guess we’ll be visiting other churches for the next few weeks before we pick one. I’ve been looking into which churches are okay with trans people for a while, thinking long-term for after I turn eighteen and move out, but it’s suddenly become relevant right now.

“I hope you’re okay. Please be safe and take care of yourself.”

* * *

Things got worse after that. Mom and Dad hardly mentioned the Ramseys again, though I heard some other people at church gossiping about them occasionally. Nathan told me, one morning when he was giving me a ride to school the following semester, that he’d talked with Meredith’s older brother Caleb at the coffee shop, but didn’t plan to make a regular habit of it in case one of Mom or Dad’s friends might see them and report him. I wanted to ask him if Caleb had said anything about Meredith or Sophia, but I couldn’t get the words out, and after a few moments of me stammering, he took pity on me and said that Caleb said his sisters were doing pretty okay. “And they’re visiting a different church every Sunday, some of them in Catesville and one way down in Greensboro. Some of them are kind of screwy, it sounds like. He said the one they visited last Sunday had a lesbian pastor and ten or twenty people in the congregation were venned into something weird.”

I’d pretty much given up on trying to convince myself I wasn’t trans by that point. I was still trying to convince myself that a girl body, whether human or dragon, was a “nice to have” rather than the burning need it had soon become once I’d started thinking about it. I debated for a while about telling my friend Tim, whom I saw every day at school, but I scratched that idea after a conversation we had one day in January.

He was telling me about an anime he’d been watching — I don’t remember which one. I had a hard time remembering Japanese titles, and I didn’t get a chance to see much anime myself until later. Mom and Dad didn’t approve of it, and when I went over to Tim’s house, his mom respected my mom’s wishes on the subject. Anyway, there was a character in this show that, reading between the lines of what Tim was saying, seemed to me to be trans — they were under a curse where they turned into a girl at the most inconvenient times, and put on an unconvincing show of being upset about it but at times seemed to really enjoy it. In the process of giving me a rambling, confusing plot summary, Tim tossed in a few bigoted remarks about trans people. I made the mistake (or so it seemed at the time) of objecting to that kind of language, and we got into an argument. I hadn’t said very much before I realized it was really stupid to give any hint that I was interested in this stuff, lest it get back to my parents somehow, and I backed down after just a few minutes. “Never mind,” I said. “You were telling me about that show...?”

That was the beginning of the end of our friendship, though I tried to keep treating him the same, especially since his mom was giving me rides home from school on days when Nathan had football practice. But I couldn’t forget what he’d said and by the end of February, we weren’t really friends anymore.

I tried to participate in the trans teens’ chatroom that Meredith recommended, but my chances to use the Internet privately were so infrequent and so brief that it was hard to participate in conversations or make friends when you could only pop up in those social media for an hour or two a week at most. But through the chatroom I acquired a few email pen-pals, particularly Tatiana, a sixteen-year-old who’d already started getting HRT with her parents’ help before the Venn machines showed up. I also exchanged a few emails with Meredith’s non-binary friend Carmen, the only other local trans person she knew; they were a senior at the other public high school in the western end of Mynatt County, and Meredith had met them when they both testified at a school board hearing on the Venn machines. Between them, Meredith, Carmen and Tatiana kept me sane during the long, dry months that followed.

Nathan and I found a chance to use the Venn machine exactly once in the next six months. One Saturday in March, Nathan turned me into a little dragon again, and I turned Nathan into a falcon. It was fun at first, flying around together, but then Nathan started flying faster and farther afield, letting his falcon instincts take over, and despite trying to follow him, I lost him, and headed back to the library. I found a lost penny in the parking lot, fortunately, and picked it up in my claws (which took several tries), then got in line for the machine.

Once I was in my usual body again, I hung out in the library parking lot, hoping and hoping that Nathan would show up again so I could get him into the machine and change him back. I tried to think of some way to find Nathan and capture him or talk some sense into him, but if I couldn’t keep up with him in my tiny dragon body, my human boy body had no chance. Even if I illegally drove Nathan’s car around with my limited learner permit, how could I tell if I’d found him and not some random falcon? And how could I catch him?

Nathan didn’t show up, and didn’t show up, and didn’t show up. Finally, more than an hour after we were supposed to be home, I came up with an idea that would maybe salvage something from the situation. I went inside and asked the librarians for permission to use their phone to call my parents.

“What do you mean, Nathan went off and left you there?” Dad roared. “Stay put, I’ll be right there.”

I hated to hang Nathan out to dry, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. With Nathan lost for the next six hours, and probably needing to beg a ride home from wherever he was when he turned back, at least one of us was going to be in enormous trouble. And I guessed that Nathan would be in somewhat less trouble for going off and leaving me alone at the library than for using the Venn machine with me. I was going to be in enough trouble for covering for him and not calling until well after we were supposed to be home rather than right after he “ran off and left me alone.”

That evening, Nathan ended up having to climb down from the tree he found himself in and hike a mile or so until he got to an area with better cell phone reception. He called his friend Christopher and got a ride back to the library, from which he drove home to face the music. While I was waiting for Dad, I’d borrowed a cell phone from one of the people waiting in line to send Nathan a text, telling him about my plan, so he would know what story to stick to. He was a little mad at me, but later said he couldn’t figure out what else I could have done, and he mostly blamed the unknown makers of the Venn machines for making that falcon body so confusingly immersive.

“You’re stronger-willed than I thought, turning into an animal like that and not succumbing to its instincts. Didn’t think you had it in you, bro. I didn’t realize how impressive an accomplishment that was. But don’t push your luck again.”

Later on, I found out that people changing into new types of bodies — not natural creatures — had more trouble getting the hang of their new limbs and senses at first, like I had the first time, but were in little or no danger of losing control to their animal instincts, because they usually didn’t have any. Whereas people who changed into naturally-occurring animals didn’t have as much trouble learning to fly, for instance, or navigate by bat sonar or track things by scent, but tended to succumb to instinct, especially the first time they changed into a particular kind of animal.

Mom and Dad grounded me for a week, for not tattling on Nathan sooner, and Nathan for a month and a half — right up until his eighteenth birthday. And I didn’t get a chance to use a Venn machine again for months.