“Can we talk without the police listening?”

The following day, Meredith and Sophia came home late, and they told me that their parents had met them at school, where they’d been pulled out of classes and questioned separately by a couple of police detectives and a woman from Child Protective Services. Their mom, dad, and their parents’ lawyer were present.

“If the police find him, would you take him back to his parents or put him in a foster home or what?” Meredith had asked them.

“Honestly, it’s going to have to depend on what [deadname] tells us,” the lady from CPS had said. “You still haven’t said why you think he would be unsafe at home. But the police tell me you used the Venn machine to transform him into a girl. Is he transgender, like you?”

“Why [deadname] wanted to be a girl for a couple of hours and whether he wants to do it again is not my business to tell. If you find him, you can ask him yourself. I just know he was terrified of going home.”

“The more you tell me,” the social worker said, “the more likely I can protect [deadname] effectively, if his parents are abusive as you imply.”

“Can we talk without the police listening?”

So after some argument, the police left, and Meredith told the social worker that she wouldn’t out me if I were trans or gay or anything, but that my parents were the sort who would send a kid like that to conversion therapy, maybe the kind involving electroshock torture.

The social worker kneaded her brows and sighed.

“I wish I could act on this. Unfortunately, however unscientific and inhumane it is, conversion therapy isn’t illegal in this state, and I don’t know if I can convince my supervisor to act on a vague suspicion that [deadname]'s parents might use it once he returns home. Has [deadname] ever talked about his parents doing something specific that I can point to as evidence that he would be unsafe at home? It doesn’t have to be physical abuse, verbal or emotional abuse might be enough.”

“He never said anything about them being physically abusive. But he told me that he hasn’t felt safe at home for a while, and I’ve seen evidence of his dad’s short temper back when Mom and Dad used to be friends with them. I think he was safe as long as he kept up the appearance of being the obedient kid they wanted, but he didn’t think he would be once they found out he’d been venning into a girl.”

* * *

I had to be extremely quiet when Meredith was away and her parents were around, which, as they worked from home, could be any time. They spent a fair amount of time scouring garage sales and thrift stores for things they could sell online, or at the post office shipping packages, but they were still at home during the day a lot at unpredictable intervals. I would sometimes have to quickly get into position and freeze when I accidentally made a noise that caused them to come investigate; for instance, when I was trying to get at a book that was under another one and the top one fell off Meredith’s desk. After one of those incidents, Meredith told me that her parents were calling an exterminator to check for mice and rats.

Sophia hung out in Meredith’s room in the evening a lot, partly under the pretext of checking each other’s homework — apparently they actually did that a lot, with Meredith checking Sophia’s Literature homework and Sophia checking Meredith’s Chemistry homework. But she also kept me company, and after the first couple of days, she interviewed me about my experience of being a tiny animate statue.

“I can’t use this as part of my science fair project, obviously,” she said. “But I hope I can find a use for it someday after you turn eighteen and I can talk about it. None of my other subjects have stayed venned like that longer than two days, most of them eight hours or less. I’d like to interview you about once a month until you change back. Just a few questions about how you feel about your situation and your body.”

“Sure,” I said.

The following Saturday morning, Meredith was reading her Psychology textbook and I was using her laptop to check my email when her phone buzzed. She checked it.

“Oh, hey, Carmen is in town,” she said. “They want to get together. Do you want to meet them?”

“That would be great,” I said.

They texted back and forth and decided where to meet and when. Then, after Meredith finished her homework, I crawled into her purse while she got dressed to go, told Sophia where she was going, and texted her parents (they were at an estate sale).

We met Carmen at a small diner on the outskirts of Catesville, which was roughly halfway between Carmen’s sister’s house and Meredith’s. After their waitress took their orders, Meredith set her purse on the table.

“I’d like you to meet someone,” she said. “Last year I gave you an email address for a trans friend who wasn’t out to her family yet and wanted some pen-pals, remember?”

“Yeah, we exchanged emails for a few months,” Carmen said. “It’s been a while since I heard from her... I seem to remember she hadn’t figured out a girl name yet?”

“Yeah, she’s going by Amanda with the few people who know she’s trans lately, but she’s not sure it fits for the long term. Well, for the last few months, since she got her driver’s license, we’ve been meeting up once a month or so and I’ve been venning her into a girl body for a little while before she changes back and goes home. But then last Sunday...” She told Carmen the basics of what had happened. I listened for my cue.

“So she’s a runaway, basically,” Carmen replied in an even lower voice (not that Meredith had been particularly loud) “and you’re hiding her at home? I think we need to go over the events of last Sunday more carefully and make sure there’s no way the police could figure out she could be hiding at your house in a tiny venned body.”

“Yeah, we should. Um, first, though, I’d like you to meet her. Amanda?”

I poked my head gingerly out of the purse and looked around. Carmen was a Hispanic person several inches taller than Meredith; they had short black hair with a lock of electric blue hair over their right ear. They spoke like me or Meredith or anybody else that had grown up in Mynatt County, and I vaguely remembered them saying in one of their emails that they’d been born here. “Hi,” I whispered.

“This wasn’t a great idea,” Carmen said in a low voice, looking around. “You should have invited me to your house for this, Meredith. Hide, Amanda, and we’ll go somewhere safer after lunch.”

So I squirmed back down into Meredith’s purse and waited. The waitress brought their food and they ate. I couldn’t smell it, and didn’t feel hungry, but I felt a little bit wistful about not being able to share the meal with friends.

Then they went out and got into Carmen’s car, and she started driving. Once we were in the car, Carmen said, “Okay, Amanda, you can come out now.” I crawled out of the purse into Meredith’s lap and then onto the cup holder between the front seats.

“So tell me everything in detail,” Carmen said. “Start with when you two met up on Sunday and tell me everything you did, especially after you ran into that bully from Amanda’s school.”

So Meredith and I told her everything we could remember. Carmen asked a few questions, like whether we were in sight of a camera when Tim confronted me, what my parents were like and how they were likely to react to me being trans, and so forth, and then proposed a plan.

“There’s a decent chance the police will look at the security footage from the Siler City machine at some point in their investigation. They’d probably check all the Venn machines within forty or fifty miles of the point where you left your car. And the chewing gum might fool facial recognition or not, I don’t know, but it’s not going to fool a human who’s probably already interviewed Meredith and Sophia after they saw the footage from the mall. And then they’ll search Meredith’s house, looking for anything that could be a venned person.”

“That could be almost anything,” Meredith pointed out. “Anything small enough, I mean.”

“Yeah, this is new territory, I’m just guessing about how they’ll investigate. But a missing white kid with well-off parents, they’ll pull out all the stops.

“So I suggest that Amanda not stay in your house for a while. She can come back to stay with you until she’s eighteen once enough time passes that the police will have already searched your house if they’re going to do it at all.”

I was reluctant to leave Meredith and Sophia, my only real-life friends. For a moment I thought of asking Meredith to mail me to Tatiana — but I didn’t know exactly where she lived. She’d had mentioned that she lived in California, but she hadn’t told me the name of her town, much less her address.

Meredith was furrowing her brow, probably trying to think of where else I could go. “Most of the people I would trust to let her go live with are friends the police would question if they started getting suspicious about me and Sophia. They’d certainly talk to Hunter, and probably Lily and Andrew...”

“Me?” Carmen asked.

“Maybe not. Probably not. We don’t hang out that often anymore, and even before you went off to college we talked on the phone more often than we hung out.”

“I know you don’t know me as well as you do Meredith, Amanda. But you’d be welcome to stay with me for the rest of the semester. I’ve got a single dorm room, because of being genderqueer. And mostly because I venned into a neuter body,” they added with a smirk; “the housing administration was so confused. They’d barely gotten used to giving trans students single dorm rooms when most of them started venning into cisnormative bodies, and then I come along.”

If my glass eyes could have gotten wider, they would have. “That would be great! I mean, not to say anything against Hunter, Lily or Andrew, but I’ve never met them, just heard about them from Meredith. And I’d rather stay with a fellow trans person, anyway.”

“That would be good,” Meredith said. “We’ve been planning to have her study along with me through the last three semesters of high school so she’ll be ready to take the GED after she turns eighteen.”

Carmen frowned. “That’s not ideal. A GED’s not going to get you into a great school, and you’re probably going to have to take remedial classes in college you wouldn’t need if you’d finished high school... but I guess that’s not an option. I’ll help you with that as much as I can while studying for my own classes.”

“Thank you!”

“Well,” she said, “what about just stay in the car when Meredith gets out back at the diner, then? You can read in my bedroom while I’m visiting with my sister tonight and tomorrow. We’ll be at my dorm tomorrow night.”

“That sounds great. Thank you again!” I turned to Meredith and said, “I’ll miss you, but I guess we can still email.”

“Better not,” Carmen put in. “If the police get suspicious, they could subpoena your email archives from your ISP or Google or whoever. It would be safer to send handwritten letters. And in case the cops are opening your mail, we’ll send our letters to you in care of somebody else.”

“Hunter, then,” Meredith said, and wrote down his address for Carmen. “And I might come down to UNC Greensboro to see you both. I should do a campus tour at some point anyway.”

We got back to the diner a little later, and Meredith got out. Before she did, she picked me up and hugged me, and I put my little arms around her as far as they would go, which was... not around her at all, just across about five inches of her chest.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, just as she opened the door. “Sophia’s going to be disappointed about those interviews.”

“What?” Carmen asked.

“I’ll explain later,” I said.

I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you'd get more value for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.