I felt like Mom had suddenly developed X-ray vision and was going to see through my pants at any moment.

I felt irrationally nervous when I got home and Mom, who was doing something on her laptop while she half-watched the news on TV, asked me, “How was your day?”

“Pretty okay,” I said. I felt like Mom had suddenly developed X-ray vision and was going to see through my pants at any moment. “After I got off work, I stopped at the Chinese place and saw some of the kids from church and ended up sitting with them and talking for a while.”

“That’s nice. How much more homework do you have to do?”

“Not a lot, I got most of it done yesterday evening. I’ll finish up the rest now.”

It seemed like a miracle that I got away without her spotting that I was a vaguely boy-shaped girl, even though I knew she shouldn’t be able to tell as long as I had clothes on. I had a similar experience later on with Dad, and to a lesser extent with people at church and school, but after a couple of days passed and nobody noticed anything different about me, I was able to relax, and I felt a lot better about life in general.

My dysphoria was a lot milder now and my anxiety was noticeably less bad, too, at least a lot of the time. I gradually figured out that I had not just the external genitals of a girl, but some or all of the internal organs, too. I found myself more easily emotionally affected by the stories I was reading, when I had time to read fiction — something Tatiana said had happened after she started on hormones. And a few weeks later, I started my period.

Fortunately, the first time I noticed blood was when I went to the toilet one morning at home. I stuffed a bunch of wadded-up toilet paper into my jockey shorts to take the place of a pad or tampon, and went back to my room to change my underwear, then back to the bathroom to spritz the bloody pair with peroxide before hiding them in my bedroom closet. I made sure to go to the restroom in between every couple of classes at school that day and change the toilet paper, and went to the bathroom every couple of hours at home that night to do the same. The peroxide hadn’t quite worked, so before I went to bed, I took out the trash with the incriminating bloody underwear and toilet paper. Since Nathan had gone off to college, taking out the trash was my responsibility anyway, and I tried to do it a little here and there throughout the week to avoid having to rush around emptying all the trash cans in the house right before the trash truck arrived, like Nathan used to do. So that didn’t raise any suspicion.

The toilet paper was kind of uncomfortable, though, and wasn’t perfectly effective — I got a little spot or two of blood on my jockey shorts a day or two later. I found out later, comparing notes with Meredith and Sophia, that I had a relatively light flow and a mild period overall — I hadn’t noticed any significant cramps before the bleeding came on.

I considered trying to steal some tampons from Mom and Dad’s bathroom, or buy some, but the risk of sneaking into the master bathroom was too high, and though I could explain my purchase to a pharmacy clerk by saying they were for my mom, I couldn’t explain having them if Mom or Dad looked through my stuff. They didn’t do it that often these days, but just often enough to make me paranoid.

I made do with toilet paper throughout that first period, and the next time I met up with Meredith and venned, I asked her to specify that my not-really-a-boy body would be infertile. It seemed to work at first — after that, it was about a month before I saw her again and I didn’t have a period. But then after our Venn meetup in early November, I started my period just two weeks later. I realized then that in picking a form from my history, Meredith probably couldn’t easily distinguish between the fertile body she’d venned me into the first time and the infertile body she’d designed the second time — they both looked the same. This time, I went by the pharmacy after school and bought some tampons. Before I went home, I took them out of the original packaging, threw the box in the trash can at the pharmacy, and put the tampons in my backpack. When I got home, I put most of the tampons under my mattress, keeping a couple hidden at the bottom of my backpack for use at school. I had some nervous moments, but neither Mom nor Dad found them.

The next time I met up with Meredith and Sophia, I had her redesign my infertile boyish-girl body with a distinguishing mark: a little mole near my belly-button. I could lift up my shirt before she pressed the green button to let her make sure she’d picked the right version from my history. After that, I didn’t have any more periods, and after a while I threw out the leftover tampons.

We met up four or five times in the last half of that year. One day, Sophia venned me and Meredith into little girls, around four or five years old, and Meredith venned her into a woman in her late twenties who could be our mom, and she took us to the indoor playground at the mall. “So you can get a little taste of what you missed out on, not growing up as little girls,” she explained. It was so much fun! Another time, Sophia and I venned into little flying creatures — I was similar to the tiny dragon form Nathan had first venned me into, and Sophia was an itty-bitty winged zebra — while Meredith chaperoned us and made sure we didn’t get into trouble we couldn’t handle. Then Meredith venned me into a teen girl body (similar to the one I’d worn as “Amber,” but taller and with darker hair), while I venned Meredith into a griffin-kitten and watched her fly around the mall parking lot with Sophia. The time after that, I tried out a six-inch-tall version of the purple-scaled dragon-girl I’d been the day we were dragon sisters, and got the hang of flying in that form, which was a little harder than when I was quadrupedal but not by much. I also tried a couple more human-size dragon-girl bodies with different heights, scale colors and patterns, and different crests, ridges, or spines on my head. And of course I tried on several girl names during those meetups, too.

Nathan came home from Mars Hill for Christmas a couple of days before the Everett Academy’s Christmas break started. I didn’t manage to get together with Meredith and Sophia during the break, as I found almost no time to use the computer privately; I found out later that they’d been pretty busy with family stuff, too. Mom took a week off around Christmas, and Dad took a lot of time off, which I didn’t understand the significance of until later.

Dad, Nathan and I went camping in a park up in Virginia during the first week of my Christmas break; we hadn’t done that in several years. When I found out what he had planned, I panicked and tried desperately to find a chance to get to the library or the Catesville mall and undo the venn that gave me girl bits. I doubted I could hide my nethers for almost a week of sharing a tent with them, and if I couldn’t... I would be off to conversion therapy as soon as Dad could fill out the paperwork. I finally managed to end the venn right after my last shift at Subway the day before the camping trip, terrified that someone I knew would see me using the Venn machine alone and wonder what unobvious change I was undoing.

So I was able to change clothes in the tent without worrying about Dad and Nathan seeing my girl crotch, although it turned out I might have worried needlessly. We all turned our backs on each other, at least, when changing clothes, and more often than not we took turns using the tent to change, because it was crowded in there with multiple people doing anything more complicated than sleeping.

The weather was beautiful for that time of year, brisk but not really cold except at night, and the park was a wonderful place that I might like to go back to someday as a dragon. But the increased dysphoria from having a thing between my legs again for the first time since September made it hard to wholeheartedly enjoy it.

Not long after we got back from the camping trip, we and Mom went to visit Mom’s parents down in Pensacola, Florida for several days. Grandma and Grandpa McNeill had rejuvenated each other not long before, and Dad didn’t approve, but he tried not to make it obvious. Then we went to stay a few days with Dad’s parents in Raleigh (where we spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) and my aunt and uncle and cousins in Knightdale, a suburb of Raleigh; we didn’t return home until New Year’s Day. Nathan left for Mars Hill the following morning, and a couple of days later, I started the spring semester of my junior year.

Dad didn’t go back to work, though, and it was only then that I found out he’d been laid off a few days before we went on that camping trip. He knew nobody would be hiring during Christmas, so he didn’t start trying to find a new job until after New Year’s Day, and he and Mom didn’t want me and Nathan to ruin our Christmas with worry. Having him around the house all day most days made it harder for me to find private time to use Tor Browser and exchange emails with Meredith and my trans penpals, and I was really getting desperate to be a girl again. Preferably an hour or two as a dragon-girl, but I’d settle for just a five-minute meetup for Meredith or Sophia to venn me into the “original me but with a secret” form from my history.

Finally, one Saturday in early February when Dad was at a job fair in Greensboro and Mom was out shopping, I had several hours to do email and websurf. Meredith and I exchanged several emails back and forth that day, and set up a meeting for the following Sunday afternoon, after church and before I had to be at work at Subway.

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here: