“I should be able to make up my mind by now, I’ve tried out like ten different girl names either online or in person.”

The next day or so was fairly uneventful, but not boring. I overheard a good deal of Carmen and her sister Alejandra’s conversation from inside Carmen’s messenger bag later that evening, until Carmen seemed to remember I was there and took the bag to their bedroom. But it was in Spanish, and because a counselor had told me a more difficult language would look better on college applications, I’d studied French in school. I amused myself by listening and trying to pick out common recurring words and match them to French or English cognates.

Back in Carmen’s bedroom, I found an anthology on the bottom shelf and read short stories until they went to bed. I thought about the sudden change in my circumstances for a while until I fell into a fugue state. I didn’t know Carmen all that well yet, but they seemed pretty smart and cool, and I was looking forward to hanging out with them at college. I’d been afraid my next fourteen months as a little statue would be boring, but maybe not as much as I thought?

The next day, while Carmen and their sister were out, I spent the day alternately reading and thinking about where my life was now. I didn’t feel dysphoric in this semi-animate body, no more than I had in the little quadruped dragon body, but this wasn’t exactly what I wanted, either. And even though I didn’t want to risk Mom and Dad sending me to conversation therapy, and Nathan was just as transphobic if not as potentially dangerous, I was still starting to miss them after not seeing them for a week. I missed our classic movie nights and Dad telling us cool stories about the how movies used to be made, I missed playing video games with Nathan, I missed working in the kitchen with Mom. I was missing the routine of school, too; even though I no longer had any friends at school, I got along well with my teachers. Would I have the stick-to-it-iveness to keep studying on my own without the structure of classes, homework and exams? Carmen and Meredith had said they’d help me study, but they had plenty of work to do for their own classes and I didn’t want to distract them and make them get bad grades.

Then Carmen came in and told me to hop in the messenger bag, we were fixing to go, and my excitement about hanging out with her at college came back with a rush.

“You can climb out of the bag now, we’re on the road,” Carmen said a few minutes later. “We’ll be at my dorm in a little over half an hour. So how about tell me more about yourself? I remember some of our email conversations from a while back, but a lot’s happened since then.”

So I told them what my family was like, and what my life had been like before the Venn machines came along and Meredith transitioned, and how it had changed since then. I hesitated when I got to the part about venning into a boy-like body with girl parts, not sure how much detail to go into, but she got the hint from my stuttering euphemisms.

“Huh, cool. That’s one way to beat dysphoria. I’m glad I never had to be that sneaky about it — my sister’s been pretty supportive, if not exactly from the beginning, from pretty early on. It took her a while to get it, but she was trying to understand as soon as she got over her shock.”

“How long were you out as non-binary before the Venn machines came along?”

They’d told me before, but I wasn’t sure I was remembering right — I’d read a lot of coming-out stories from different people around that time.

“About two years ago to my best friend Zoe and my sister, and at the beginning of my senior year to everybody at school. It didn’t really affect much at school, actually — a couple of teachers tried to use ‘they’ pronouns, and my friends made a real effort to use ‘they’ and got used to it after a couple of months, but most people didn’t bother. I was already the weird girl, but the mean girls were kind of scared of me, so I wasn’t bullied, at least not in ways I cared about. The staff had me keep using the girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, both before and after I venned into this body.”

“Was that okay?”

They shrugged. “I guess? It’s not like it would be practical to build a whole new set of non-binary restrooms. Even if all of us were out, there’d probably only be a couple of us in a middling-size school like Western Mynatt High. It would make more sense to abolish gendered restrooms and let everyone use common restrooms with both toilets and urinals in private stalls, like in some European countries, but we’re not civilized enough for that yet.”

I tried to wrap my brain around that idea and couldn’t.

“Of course, once I got Zoe to venn me into this neuter body, the assistant principal had a bunch of nosy questions to ask about how my plumbing worked, and finally decided I was basically a girl with no boobs, so I could keep using the girls’ restrooms.”

That topic led to the issue of how I’d come out as trans once I turned eighteen, and what I’d do and where I’d stay at that point.

“You’ll need to establish your identity,” they pointed out, “which means changing back into your baseline body in front of some witnesses who know you, and then venning into whatever girl body you want to live in long-term. I guess one of your witnesses would have to be Meredith... I’m not sure who else. Sophia’s not going to be eighteen yet at that point, will she?”

“No. She’s ten months younger than me.”

“Well, you’ll need more adult witnesses besides Meredith. Maybe she can talk her brother or parents into helping you? And I seem to remember she said there were a few people at her old church who were okay with trans people. Do you think they might help?”

I thought about it. “Yeah, maybe Ms. Southers would help. She was cool with Meredith’s transition.”

“Anyway, then you’ll need to get someone to venn you into your preferred body and have the witnesses attest that Deadname Wallace went into the machine and Amanda Wallace came out. And they’ll have to sign a form for the DMV and a form for the county court, where you’d have to file your name change.”

“I’m... not sure I want to keep using Amanda? I mean, I was just trying it out for the day when Tim saw me change back and everything went wrong. And then Meredith and Sophia kept using it for me after I came home with them.”

“Is it okay if I keep using it until you figure out what name you really want?”

I would have sighed if I’d had lungs. “Yeah, that’s fine. I should be able to make up my mind by now, I’ve tried out like ten different girl names either online or in person.”

“As long as you’re only out to a few friends, you don’t need to rush it,” Carmen said. “I talked a lot with Zoe and Alejandra and some online friends about what to do about my name when I came out, and finally decided to stick with the name Mama gave me. ‘Carmen’ is kind of a gender-neutral name in Spanish, though there’s hardly any Anglo dudes named Carmen.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that.”

“And Meredith told me one time that she’d thought about her name for months before she settled on that one. So don’t worry about it. You’ll know the right name when you find it.”

* * *

Once we had parked, some considerable distance from their dorm, I crawled back into the messenger bag and rode along as they carried it and their duffel bag of clothes and toiletries to the dorm and up to their room.

It would have seemed small to me if I were human-size; it was barely big enough for a single bed, a desk with a built-in bookshelf, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. But even a closet would have seemed cavernously spacious to me at that size. Carmen took me out and set me on their desk, then unpacked their duffel bag. The desk was a lot more cluttered than Meredith’s. I crawled around exploring it, finding assignments, handouts, and notes for at least seven different classes, five or six books, most with multiple bookmarks, several flash drives, pens, pencils, highlighters, and index cards. From the dates on some of the assignments, they were from the previous semester, so I figured Carmen wasn’t taking seven classes at once.

“Okay,” they said. “I don’t have a class until ten tomorrow, so I might sleep later than you’re used to. After class, I’ll be back here for an hour or so before I have to leave for work. Tuesdays and Thursdays I’ve got classes at twelve-thirty and four. Wednesday and Friday I’ve got the same schedule as Monday, except for a lab session on Wednesdays. When I’m not too busy, I sometimes go to the Queer Student Union meetings on Thursday evenings or to Defend our Future events. And I hang out with friends sometimes, usually at the student center or at their dorm rooms or mine. If you want to trust some of my friends with your secret, I can introduce you to them. When they come over here, it’s up to you if you want to stay still and pretend you’re inanimate or introduce yourself.”

“Okay,” I said, looking around and wondering where a visiting friend would sit. I guessed one person could sit in the desk chair and another one or two on the bed, but it would be hard for three people to sit side by side on the bed without one of them’s legs getting in the way of the desk chair. “Is it okay if I stay quiet for a while and see what people are like before I introduce myself?”

“Sure, of course.”

We talked for a while longer and then I read quietly while Carmen studied for tomorrow’s American Politics class. When Carmen finally went to bed and I was left alone with my thoughts, I suddenly realized that Sunday had passed, and for the first time since I was eleven and my whole family was down with the flu, I hadn’t gone to church.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Since I’d started figuring out my gender identity over a year ago, I’d started questioning other things my parents and church had taught me, too, but I hadn’t come to any conclusions. I still believed in God, but I didn’t trust the church I grew up in to reliably tell me everything I needed to know about morals and ethics, and I wasn’t sure how much else. Did I want to start going to a different church that was cool with trans people, like Meredith’s family? Or just pray privately and not go to church? Or... there wasn’t any hurry about figuring this out, I decided. It wasn’t like I could go to church again before I turned eighteen, anyway.

* * *

The next morning, Carmen dragged themselves out of bed about eight forty-five and mumbled a good morning to me before putting on a bathrobe, grabbing their toiletries and a more or less clean towel, and going down the hall to shower. When they got back, they were more awake.

“I’m gonna go eat breakfast and then go to class,” they said as they started getting dressed, pulling pants on under their bathrobe and then tossing the bathrobe across the door of the wardrobe and rummaging through it for a shirt. “See you in about three or four hours.”

“Could I come with you?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking — I’d like to audit your classes if it’s okay. At least the ones that aren’t too far over my head, what with not having finished high school yet.”

“Sure,” they said, pulling on a white T-shirt and then a red flannel shirt over it. “I’m not sure how much you’ll get out of them from inside my messenger bag, not being able to see the whiteboard or projector, but we’ll see what we can figure out.”

I crawled into their messenger bag while they got their socks and shoes on, and then they stuffed a notebook into the bag after me and picked it up. I was getting used to the swinging motion of the bag as they walked, and it was kind of nice, though I wished I could maybe ride on their shoulder, or in their shirt pocket with my head sticking out. I listened to the sounds of the busy campus as Carmen walked from their dorm to the dining hall, pausing to say hi to a couple of friends and acquaintances on the way, and seeming to join up with someone with a feminine voice who stayed with them and kept talking in Spanish most of the way to the dining hall, with Carmen making an occasional contribution. They went through the line together and sat together, and another friendly voice joined them a little later.

“Hey, Carmen and Guadalupe, how’s it going?”

Carmen and Guadalupe, as the other Spanish speaker was apparently called, switched to English as this other girl joined them. They talked about a protest Guadalupe was organizing about a bill in the state legislature that would weaken the protections for the wetlands in the eastern part of the state, until Carmen said they had to run to class and left.

Auditing Carmen’s American Politics class was not easy. Carmen unzipped the messenger bag so I could hear better, and I heard the professor’s voice pretty clearly most of the time. I couldn’t always hear the students asking questions or answering the professor’s questions as well. But she used enough terminology I wasn’t familiar with, presumably terms she’d introduced and defined earlier in the semester, that I couldn’t follow everything. And she seemed to be using the projector a lot to show graphs, diagrams, and maps. Later on, Carmen showed me where they’d copied down some of the diagrams in their notebook, or where the graph or map the professor had shown on the projector had come from in the textbook or the supplemental readings, and that helped.

After class, Carmen came back to their room. Once we were alone, they asked me how much I’d gotten out of the class.

“Not a lot,” I admitted. “I’d like to try to catch up, though, so I’ll understand more Wednesday or at least Friday. Could I read your textbook and your lecture notes while you’re at work?”

“Sure,” they said. “Here you go.” They pulled the notebook they’d been using from the messenger bag and opened it up on the desk, then extricated the American Politics textbook from the precarious stack on the desk and set that next to it, opening it to chapter one. “I’ll be reading for tomorrow’s Human Rights in History class,” they said, picking up another couple of books from the desk. “If you’ve got questions about what you’re reading, maybe save them for after work?”

“Sure,” I replied. “Thanks.”

They took the books over to the bed and laid down, reading, and I started reading the American Politics textbook. After the first couple of pages, I started skimming more, then going back and forth between Carmen’s lecture notes and the textbook to get a better idea of which parts were most important, and going back to some of the parts I’d skimmed to re-read them more carefully. After a while, an alarm on Carmen’s phone went off and they got up.

“I’m going to work now. Be back after supper. I might have a friend with me.”

“Okay, cool. Could you set the books you were reading on the desk, too? I might look at them later to try to be ready for tomorrow’s classes.”

They smiled at me. “Sure.”

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 would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.