On and off that day, I thought about that Missing Child poster I’d seen and what Mom and Dad were feeling and thinking about all this. Did they know I was trans by now? They almost certainly knew I’d venned into a girl body at least once; they’d have heard from Tim’s parents by now, even if the police hadn’t told them about the details of their investigation and what they’d learned from Meredith and Sophia.

Thursday morning, I remained in the window as the sun rose (on the other side of the building) and the light outside got brighter and brighter. Birds, insects, and squirrels gradually became more active. Then Carmen’s phone alarm went off behind me, and after some shuffling of blankets, it went silent.

“Good morning,” Carmen said. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’ll leave you on the window till I’m dressed.”

Once they’d showered, dressed, and put me on, we were soon on the way to High Point. They set up the Venn machine for a two-year change and put me in the left-hand booth —

— and instantly I was back to my original body, bundled up in the raincoat and stocking cap I’d worn the day Sophia had venned me into a dragon statuette, with wads of gum in each cheek. I was startled for a moment by the return of my other senses, and the feeling of breathing and circulating blood and so on. But by the time Carmen entered the machine on the other side, the startlement had given way to severe dysphoria, and I was trying hard not to panic.

“Hey, you okay?” Carmen asked, concerned.

“Yeah, I’ll be okay. Just change me back as soon as you can.”

“You need to press the green button before I can do that. Quick, before it times out.”

Oh, right. When you put someone who’d been changed into a fully inanimate object into a Venn machine, it wouldn’t let you transform them again without their consent. If I just waited, the doors would open and the session would end. But I didn’t want that. I pressed the green button, which had already half phased out, and the interface lit up with bubbles representing ways I could transform Carmen.

“Okay, do you want to be the necklace again until after today’s classes? Could you see and hear fine that way? Or go back to the dragon statuette form and audit them from inside my messenger bag again?”

“Statue, please.” I squirmed. “This feels awful. Why is it so much worse now?”

“Hang on a moment, Lauren. I know it hurts, but if you want to have your spending money handy for next time we go out somewhere, take your wallet out and set it down where it’s not touching you, and then I’ll venn you.”

“Okay, just a minute.” I did so. “Ready!”

“History,” they said, then reached out and tapped a bubble, then the green button, and I was back to my familiar dragon statue form. I relaxed, feeling calm again as the waning green button counted down my opportunity to transform Carmen. While we were waiting, Carmen said, “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah. Just had kind of a panic attack from the dysphoria. I forgot when you put me in the machine I’d go back to my original body.”

“Yeah, that’s an issue. I doubt inanimate venning’s ever going to catch on among trans people. I liked letting Zoe wear me that one time I was a dress, but changing back to my old body afterward wasn’t fun, even though I don’t think I ever had dysphoria as bad as yours. Not doing that again.”

The doors opened, and I trotted toward the door in time to meet Carmen on the threshold. They picked up me and my wallet and were about to put us in their messenger bag, but I asked, “Can I have a hug?”

“Oh, of course.” We hugged, as well as we could with the size differential, and got in the car.

“I’m going back to eat some more at the caf,” they said. “I can’t afford to eat out all that often, or I’d have offered to venn you into something human for an hour like yesterday.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just ride along and listen. Did you bring something for me to read on the way back?”

“Yeah, I stuck one of your high school books in the bag... there you go.”

I pulled the geometry book they’d gotten from the library for me out and opened it to my bookmarked place.

* * *

On and off that day, I thought about that Missing Child poster I’d seen and what Mom and Dad were feeling and thinking about all this. Did they know I was trans by now? They almost certainly knew I’d venned into a girl body at least once; they’d have heard from Tim’s parents by now, even if the police hadn’t told them about the details of their investigation and what they’d learned from Meredith and Sophia. If the police had been able to look at camera footage going back several months, they’d know about my other venned forms and how all of them (except the tiny quadrupedal dragon) were obviously female. Would the police tell my parents about that?

That evening, I talked to Carmen about it.

“I think I might send my parents a letter,” I said. “Telling them I’m safe and healthy, but well hidden, and they’re not going to find me.”

“The postmark would lead them to your general location,” they pointed out, “unless you have somebody remail it for you. And then there’s danger the police could get your friend’s fingerprints and DNA off the envelope.”

“I think I can get my pen-pal Tatiana to remail it,” I said. “And I’ll put the envelope addressed to my parents inside a plastic bag so she doesn’t have to touch it. She can just dump it out of the plastic bag into the mail slot. Preferably at a mailbox in some other city... I think she said she goes to San Francisco at least once a month for one thing or another. And maybe to be on the safe side, she could remail it while she’s in a temporary venn whose fingerprints aren’t recorded anywhere.”

“That could work,” they said. “You’ll have to write it while venned into something about the same size as your original body, though, or your handwriting won’t look right. In that form, your handwriting’s either unreadably tiny or sloppy and still fairly small. You can’t type it in a word processor; if I print it out, there would be evidence pointing to a university printer, and if your friend Tatiana prints it out, it would pin it down to her printer.”

“Yeah, maybe next Wednesday when we go to High Point again? I could write the letters and address the envelopes during breakfast, and then you could venn me into the necklace and send the outer letter to Tatiana.”

“If you’re going to do this thing, you should do it sooner rather than later. One advantage of this is that the police might believe the California postmark enough to call off the search locally. Or at least focus their efforts on the Venn machines near expressway exits on I-40 west of Greensboro, going on into Tennessee and beyond, to see if they can get a photo of your new body to give to the California police. After that, if they haven’t already looked at the camera footage from the Siler City machine, they never will.”

“Okay, let’s do this as soon as I can get Tatiana’s physical address.”

* * *

I emailed Tatiana that evening. We hadn’t exchanged email since the day before I ran away, when Dad was at the job fair and I’d been able to use the computer privately for the first time in weeks. Then I thought more about what to say to Mom and Dad until I heard back from Tatiana late Saturday morning.

We had just enough time, then, for Carmen to drive me to High Point, venn me into a girl body with hands about the same size as my original body’s, and let me write the letters to Mom and Dad, Nathan, and Tatiana before venning me into a dragon statuette again and dropping me off at her dorm room before work.

The letter to Mom and Dad went like this:

“Dear Mom and Dad,

“I am safe and healthy, and have a safe place to stay and study to take my GED once I turn eighteen. But even though you’ve been good parents in a lot of ways, I don’t feel like I should see you again until I’m eighteen and no longer under your authority. I think you can guess why by now, after what you’ve heard from Tim’s parents and probably from the police about me venning into a girl at the mall that day, but I’ll tell you straight out if you haven’t guessed: I’m transgender, like Meredith. Well, not exactly like Meredith, because no two trans people are alike, but similar enough. It took me a while to figure it out, but in the last year or so, I’ve only been really happy when I was venned into a girl body.

“And ever since I heard you talking about how Meredith’s parents should have sent her to conversion therapy, and how you’d be willing to pay for it if they couldn’t afford it, I’ve been scared of what would happen if you found out I was trans. I looked up conversion therapy and found out it’s basically legal torture. You can’t really cure people of being gay or trans, just make them scared to admit it to anyone, maybe even themselves.

“Anyway, you’ve got about fourteen months until I’m eighteen to think about that. Please consider talking to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey about this stuff. I think they can help you understand it. I hope by the time I turn eighteen and contact you again, we can get along okay as parents and daughter.”

The letter to Nathan was shorter:

“Dear Nathan,

“I don’t know how much Mom and Dad have told you about my disappearance. They might not have mentioned that the reason I ran away is that I’ve been hanging out with Meredith and Sophia Ramsey, and venning into a girl, and they just found out. I’m transgender and I didn’t want to risk them putting me in conversion therapy. Look it up if you aren’t familiar with it — it’s basically torturing gay and trans kids to make them stop being gay or trans. You remember when Dad was talking about how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey should do that to Meredith?

“Anyway, I’m safe and have a good place to stay. I’ll be in contact again after I turn eighteen and Mom and Dad can’t force me to pretend to be a boy. Try to learn something about transgender people from unbiased sources sometime before then, okay? Maybe Caleb Ramsey can tell you something, if you’re still in contact with him.”

* * *

Things continued routinely for another week or so. Serena came by and hung out with us for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon, having venned into a small centauroid, around three feet high at the scalp. I couldn’t identify which species her venn partner had mixed together to get that, but she was extremely fluffy. Other friends dropped by at different times, both Tuesday and Thursday evenings and on the weekend, and I pretended to be an ordinary statue while they hung out with Carmen, not being ready to trust them yet. I “met” Carmen’s friend Zoe from high school that week, as well as some of their other friends such as Bailey, Ty, and Guadalupe.

I’d heard Guadalupe’s voice before from inside the messenger bag, but wasn’t prepared for her appearance; she was a cyborg, with a couple of air exchange valves on either side of her neck constantly blowing and sucking air at a much higher rate than a human would breathe. One effect of this was that she could talk continuously without pausing for breath, which she proceeded to do, in Spanish, to my admiration and mild frustration. The other, more primarily intended effect was that she was constantly extracting carbon and other pollutants out of the atmosphere. She was trying to persuade other people to venn into similar bodies and fight global warming that way, although she recognized that even if everyone did that all the time, we’d still have to reduce carbon emissions in other ways to make a sufficient dent in climate change. She had ideas about more efficient carbon-sequestrating venned forms; once, as a proof of concept, she’d had herself venned into a whole stack of carbon-sequestration machines, collectively enough to fill up a Venn machine booth and individually small enough to fit through the door. Her friends had scattered the machines around Greensboro and Winston-Salem with signage explaining what she was doing. Carmen showed me one of her videos on YouTube after she left.

I audited classes on Tuesday and Thursday in statue form, and on Wednesday in necklace form. That evening, Carmen had enough energy to re-venn me into a dragon statue at the machine in High Point before going back to the dorm to crash. We didn’t go to the Queer Student Union that week, although Carmen did go to a meeting for the wetlands bill protest that Guadalupe was organizing. Since they were going to work right afterward, I stayed in the room and read.

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.

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