"I’m reluctant to put her back in the same transphobic school system that fired you for being trans."

* * *

After Essie fell asleep with her head on the table beside her plate of nachos, I helped Patience carry her upstairs. She didn’t want her to sleep alone after that, so we laid her in Patience’s bed, which was king-sized, and tucked her in. But Patience and I were still too wired to sleep, so we sat on either side of Essie, watching her sleep, and talking in low voices for another couple of hours. I told her more about myself than I’d ever told anyone, even Ethan or Kathy, not just about my hatching and transition and outing, but about my sporadic, rocky dating history, my depression, my mom’s constant comparisons between me and my brother. Patience told me about living in that old house alone with her grandfather after her parents died, trying to learn magic from him and failing at most of the spells he tried to teach her, suffering from his short temper and resentment, and hearing him tell her over and over again that she need to marry someone with strong magic and produce an heir who wasn’t useless like she was. She told me how she couldn’t stand the idea of sex, and how she’d finally told her grandfather she was going to make the rounds of the other Oldcroft family enclaves and find a distant cousin to marry. He came with her, of course, but secretly, she sounded out her younger relatives and found two about her age who were willing to help with her plan. Molly cast a spell on her so she would get pregnant the first time she had sex with a man, and Roy became Essie’s father, trying his hardest to make the experience okay for her. Patience had never heard the term “asexual,” so I was able to help her a little there.

I woke up late in the morning in Patience’s bed, Essie and Patience still asleep beside me. At some point before she’d fallen asleep, Patience must have pulled the covers over me. I lay still for a few minutes, trying not to wake them, before urgent business required me to get up. I thought about going downstairs and using that bathroom, so the noise wouldn’t wake them, but I was in too much of a hurry.

When I came out of the bathroom adjoining Patience’s bedroom, Essie was sitting up and blinking. “Good morning, Ms. Brand,” she said. “I guess we slept late.”

“Yeah, it’s okay. We were doing hard work during the night, and you more than any of us. You were such a brave girl!”

She beamed. “I couldn’t have done it without you and Mommy!”

Patience woke up a few minutes later, and over breakfast we decided to take the day off from lessons and celebrate. We went for a walk in the woods before it got too hot, and then played board games (mostly old ones that had been in the family since the fifties and sixties) for a few hours. We talked about all sorts of things during our walk and games, though nothing quite as intense and personal as what Patience and I had talked about during the night. It was like a barrier had broken down between us, and in one night I had become closer friends with Patience than I’d become with Kathy after four years of working together and hanging out on weekends.

Days and nights passed, and the ghost didn’t return. Patience did some sort of magical tests and confirmed that he wasn’t anywhere near, even dormant. She continued teaching Essie magic and I continued teaching her everything else, and it seemed like banishing her great-grandfather had been a breakthrough for her, because within just a couple of weeks, Essie finally got enough control of her magic to repeatedly achieve the same effect whenever she wanted. It took a few more months before Patience decided she had completely stopped having outbursts of uncontrolled magic, though.

At that point, I asked Patience if she wanted to put Essie back in school. “Since she’s got control of her magic, she’s no longer a danger to the other students. And she’d benefit a lot from having other kids to socialize with.”

She looked conflicted. “You may be right, but... I don’t know. I’m reluctant to put her back in the same transphobic school system that fired you for being trans. She has chances to socialize with her cousins when we go visit our relatives a couple of times a year, or when they visit us.”

“Yeah, I can see that. Maybe you can find a home-schooling group where she can socialize with local kids? The parents are likely to be just as transphobic as the school, but they don’t need to know Essie is trans.”

“Maybe.”

We didn’t talk about it again for a while, and we defaulted to me continuing to teach Essie at home. I didn’t press the issue, because I’d already grown attached to Patience and Essie; I cared about them almost as family. — No, there was no “almost” about it; I was closer to them than any of my living relatives, with the possible exception of Ethan. And there were things I’d shared with Patience that I’d never told even him.

There was another, more selfish reason I wanted to stay: though it would be a while before Essie learned enough structured magic to transform me into something closer to my ideal body, I wanted to stay until then. I didn’t want to bring it up any time soon, though, for the reasons I already mentioned.

As time passed, and my relationships with both of them deepened, while I visited my parents less and less often, Essie grew up. When she reached middle school age, she finally went back to public school, but I didn’t move out. Patience stopped paying me a salary, and I started doing online tutoring for students all over. Not long after that, Patience and I finally admitted our feelings to each other, and started cuddling more often, and more intentionally, instead of just one falling sleep leaning against the other occasionally. The next time after that when Patience and Essie went on a road trip to visit Essie’s father and some other relatives, I went with them.

The NDA became both more and less onerous due to those changes, because I could now talk about my work with my brother or Kathy or online friends (I was barely talking with my parents anymore), but I couldn’t say anything about my girlfriend. After some discussion, Patience amended the NDA so I could tell people I was dating her, as long as I kept quiet about the existence of magic, and how it ran in her family.

Essie was sixteen before Patience thought she was skilled enough to reliably give me the body changes I wanted without ones I didn’t. And she was nearly that old before I felt comfortable talking with her about how I wanted to keep my penis but get rid of my testicles, shrink my larynx and make a few subtle changes to my face. That spell didn’t change anything about mine and Patience’s relationship, but it was nice not to get misgendered anymore when I went out to the grocery store or post office.

I wouldn’t be able to tell you this now, if some of Patience’s distant cousins in Florida hadn’t exposed magic to the world by cleaning up that oil spill in an extremely visible way, millions of gallons of oil converted into seawater in moments. After that, Patience and Essie (who was twenty by then) agreed to free me from the NDA entirely. So now I can tell my friends about all this... and I’m telling you first.

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