Being Samantha Masters

an homage-prequel to Being Christina Chase

Like You

“Wakey wakey, sunshine,” giggled a voice, coupled with a gentle shake to Sammy’s shoulder.  He wasn’t in bed.  He was on something… not quite hard.  Something smelled weird.  He started, suddenly full awake.

A tall white girl was leaning over him, smirking.  Stark white-blonde hair tumbled around her pale, open face; her lean body was encased in a fluffy white crop top.  Sammy’s brain informed him that he’d been woken up by an angel.  Sammy told his brain that it was being stupid.  “Uh.  Hey.  Are we there yet?”

The girl giggled again.  “Yeah, you’re the last one off.  I’m Rowan.  Your cousin.  They let me come wake you.  You almost ended up parked in the bus lot until morning.”

“You’re my cousin?” he croaked.  “But you’re so…”

“Amazing, I know,” she grinned, and primped her hair.

All his life, Sammy’s cousins were younger than him.  The eldest among them was four years younger than he was.  “Cousin” was wedged in his head alongside “little kid” like they were the same concept.  He’d been preparing for this weekend for six weeks, and in all that time he’d assumed that there’d be some rugrat to contend with.  He’d told himself one annoying little cousin was better than fifteen of them, swarming all over.  But now…

“We should go,” his older and very pretty cousin reminded him with a gentle smile.

Groggy, Sammy pushed himself up to sitting straight, then scooted sideways into the aisle.  “I, uh, didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

“And yet,” she laughed, and started striding down the aisle to the door.  “Come on, my dads are waiting outside.”

Sammy trailed after her, trying not to stare at her butt, which bounced along in tight white jeans shorts.  This was his cousin; he shouldn’t look at her like that.

“Sound asleep, like a little baby,” Rowan declared as she hopped off the last step and onto the pavement.

Sammy followed, sneakers hitting the ground for only a moment before he staggered backwards.  An overwhelming stench rolled over him: spent motor oil, cracked asphalt, old chewing gum, and what was almost certainly an undernote of urine.  “Urk,” he coughed, and shook his head.  “Wow.  That’s… a smell.”

“You get used to it,” chuckled a barrel-chested man waiting on the curb.  He had Sammy’s blue rollerbag at his side, one hand resting on its telescoped handle.  He’d attached the sleeping bag by its straps.  “It’s good to finally meet you, Samuel.  I’m your uncle, Henry.”

“Sammy,” he corrected mildly, blinking.  Somehow the smell had got into his eyes.  “Just call me Sammy.”

“Sammy it is,” his uncle nodded.  “And this is my husband, Gideon.”

Another man, much shorter and leaner than Henry, stepped forward, arms outstretched tentatively.  “Pleasure to meet you, Sammy.  Do you hug?”

“Uh, yeah?” he responded, and shuffled forward to hug his uncle.  His gay uncle.  He’d of course hugged uncles before, but they were all straight, and they liked women and women’s bodies, and now here he was, hugging an uncle who liked men, and men’s bodies and… He told his brain to stop thinking about it like that.  “Sorry, I’m still a little muzzy.”

“Don’t worry, ‘a little muzzy’ is the ideal headspace for riding the subway,” Gideon grinned, linking arms with Sammy and guiding him down the long line of empty bus terminals.

Sammy just barely caught himself from voicing his surprise that they were taking the subway back to his uncles’ place instead of driving, as well as his initial impulse to say, “I’ve never been on a subway.”  He was in New York, now; of course they were going to ride the subway.  That’s what you did in the City.

As they descended white-tiled steps into the subway station, Henry started patting his pockets.  “Oh, um.  Sam…mmy.  We grabbed one of these for you.”  He held out a plastic card.  “Subway pass.”

“Old school,” Rowan grinned, pulling out her phone and tapping it to the turnstyle reader.  “He wasn’t sure if you’d have a phone, Country Mouse.”

Sammy took the card and made his lips form a grateful smile.  “Thanks.  I mean, I do have a phone, but that was thoughtful.”

Henry went about demonstrating how to use the subway pass, which was so straightforward a child could do it.  He pointed at the card.  “That’s good for as many trips as you like for the next two weeks, so you can go anywhere in the City that you like.”

Gideon followed after the both of them, gently adding, “Although your parents are kind of expecting you to stick to campus and the Upper West Side.”

“Pssh,” Rowan snorted.  “Like there’s anything good there.”

“I was kind of hoping to see the City a bit,” Sammy admitted sheepishly.  The four of them walked a little ways down the platform and then came to an unspoken but mutually agreed-upon stop to wait for their train.

“Maybe you could take Sammy out for some night life after dinner,” Henry suggested to Rowan, bushy eyebrows raised.

Rowan’s face blanked, and then she looked over at Sammy as if slotting him into any scenario adequately described as “night life” broke her brain.  “Um.  He’s underage.”

“So are you,” Henry shot back archly.

“Yes, but I have a really good fake ID,” she responded with a laugh, “and I have tits.  So I get in everywhere.”

“So maybe you could drag him along,” Gideon suggested gently.

Sammy couldn’t help but grin at the thought of his cousin—his older cousin—his older, honestly kind of hot cousin—taking him out to sample the city nightlife.  “I mean, I would love that, but it’s only Thursday.”

Rowan blinked, and then looked uncertainly to her fathers.  “I don’t understand.  Why would that matter?”

Gideon chuckled and placed his hands on Rowan’s shoulders.  “My dear, dazzling urbanite,” he chuckled.  “Outside of the City,  most places are dead empty on weeknights.  Out there, people only go out on the weekends.”

“Ew, but that’s when the bridge-and-tunnel kids show up.”

Henry snorted.  “How exactly do you think your cousin got here, if not a bridge or tunnel?”

“That’s different,” Rowan declared, and stepped around her father to hook an arm around Sammy’s neck.  “Sammy isn’t gonna try and claim New Yorker status despite having a 201 area code.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he grinned at his uncle, leaning into his cousin.  “Even if I knew what that meant.”

Before anyone could explain or the vague suggestion of late-night plans could be confirmed, wind rose up out of the tunnel, shortly followed by a moaning wail.  A minute later, their train pulled into the station.  The doors opened, a few people got off, and they got on.  The car wasn’t even a quarter full, so they had their pick of seats.

Once they were settled in, Gideon explained, “We’ve got dinner waiting at home, and you can borrow Rowan’s bed tonight—”

Sammy frowned.  “Wait, where will Rowan be sleeping?”

“My dorm room, of course,” she giggled.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were in school,” he stammered.  “Wait, are you at Columbia?”

She bobbed her head.  “Pre-med, just like Daddy.”

He grinned.  “Like Daddy but not like Daddy.”

“Oh no,” she said with a shake of her head, not even registering Sammy’s comment as humor.  She pointed across the subway to Henry.  “This one’s Daddy.”  Then she pointed at Gideon.  “This one’s Tate.”

“Tah teh?” Sammy echoed, frantically trying to switch tracks from a joke gone awry to projecting respect for his gay uncles’ lifestyle.

“Close enough,” Gideon laughed.  “It’s Yiddish, which I only barely speak.  Kind of a family joke that went too far and just became our common parlance.”

“Anyway, they’re the dads,” Rowan summarized dismissively.

“And the dads will feed you dinner, put you up for the night, stuff you full of bagels tomorrow morning, and deliver you to Preview Days in time for registration.”  Gideon grinned.  “Henry can take you, since he’s got a morning class.”

Henry nodded in agreement.

“That’s right, you teach at Columbia.”

“We both teach at Columbia,” Gideon put in.  “I just also teach at SUNY and CUNY and occasionally Marymount and NYU. But Henry has tennnnure.”  He stretched out the word teasingly; it was clearly a very old joke.

The tenured professor coughed to change the subject.  “After Preview Days, we can take you back to the Port Authority for your bus.  Although by then I’m sure you’ll be an old hand at taking the subway and won’t need us.”

“But we’d still like to say goodbye,” Gideon added with a smile.  “If only to assure your parents that you’re safe and sound.”

“In the loving embrace of Greyhound,” Rowan smirked.

Their stop came up and the four of them filed out of the subway and up the stairs.  It was still a couple blocks’ walk, but at least the stench seemed to have abated (or, Sammy feared, he was already acclimating).  Both sides of the street were lined with stoops and townhouses, a sight with which Sammy was familiar thanks to countless movies and television shows.  He couldn’t help but grin.  He was really here.  He was really in the City.

His uncles’ townhouse was almost indistinguishable from the others, although it had a cheery rainbow flag in the window.  Henry led the way up, blue roller bag in tow.  Once the door was unlocked, they all filed inside.  In the foyer, he held out the bag to Sammy.  “Rowan, why don’t you take your cousin upstairs to your room.  Dinner in half an hour.”

“Right this way, Country Mouse!” cried the girl, bounding up the wooden stairs with long familiarity.  Sammy hurried to hoist his suddenly heavy bag up after her.  Where was Andrei when you needed him?

Rowan’s room was, like Rowan herself, immeasurably cool.  The walls were a deep purple—except one wall, which was a rich butter yellow under a lattice of black wooden slats.  An accent wall, supplied something in the depths of Sammy’s brain.  The light fixtures on the walls were all dark gold, angled down for indirect lighting.  A computer desk sat beside the door, the bed to the right and a large, half-emptied closet on the left.  The other wall, though, was all windows, looking out onto the street.  A big reading chair sat in front of it, with a little table at its side.

Sammy stepped up to the window to gaze out at the townhouses and budding trees.  He couldn’t help grinning.

Two of the window panes, in the upper left and upper right corners, were covered by stripey banners.  Baby blue, pink, and white, then the pink and blue again.  They didn’t match the rest of the decor, but Sammy figured they were some sentimental remnant from a baby shower or something.  You put something up in the corner like that and you can forget it’s there; then it sticks around for years.  He lifted a corner of one banner to better see down the block, and shot his cousin a smirk.

She responded with the most hesitant smile he’d yet seen on the girl, and then a shrug.  Was she embarassed at the old decorations stuck in the corners?  “Your room is… really nice,” Sammy said, trying to shove compliments at her to make her feel better.  “Like, it’s out of a movie or something.”

“Thanks,” she smiled, now with genuine satisfaction.  “I mean I mostly just stole the look from a pinterest board, but the three of us tore out all the old stuff and repainted and rewired the lights and… yeah.  It was a really cool family project.  I almost feel bad that I only lived in it for a couple years before college.”

“That’s so cool that your dads did it with you.  My mom’s very handy and crafty and all that.  My dad, not so much.  He’d rather hire somebody than do anything himself.”

Rowan put her butt on the back of the reading chair.  “They’re big into that.  Or they were, when I was smaller.  Very intentional about family time.  Which is, you know.  It’s very Gay Dads.”

“I don’t actually know,” Sammy said with a shrug, and was suddenly struck by a realization.  Gay dads didn’t have babies on their own, did they?  They adopted.  Which meant Rowan had to be adopted.  Just like Sammy.  “But it’s good that they, you know, make you feel welcome,” he said, trying to turn the conversation towards his realization.  “It’s… it’s a whole thing, you know?  Making sure that you know you’re loved, and you belong, and it’s always going to be your home.”

Rowan lifted an eyebrow.  “I mean… sure?”

Sammy waved his hands as if he could conjure up the conversation topic he wanted, even though he knew it could be awkward, even painful.  “Where I’m from, everybody knows everything about everybody,” he sighed.  “Except they don’t really, you know?  They think they do.  Everybody’s in everybody else’s business, and no matter what they whisper, they only ever have a piece of the picture, but they still… say things.  Louder than whispers.  And sometimes they don’t mean any harm, but.  Other times they do.  They want to make sure you know that they don’t think you belong.”

Rowan folded her hands over her knees, quietly listening.  “Yeah,” she said softly, more to coax more words out of her cousin than anything else.

“So it’s awesome that your dads do stuff to make you feel like you belong.  You know?”  He was fucking this up; he knew he was sounding like a crazy person.  He looked out the windows.  She followed his eyes.  It was a nice view, even if those baby banners blocked the corners.

“I’m just saying,” he said, unable to make eye contact, still looking out at the street.  “I’m like you.  You know?”  He darted his eyes back to hers, just for a second.

She tipped her head just slightly.  “Oh.”  She looked over at the windows and the baby banners, and then back to him.  “Oh!”

“I don’t… I don’t talk about it much,” he said, and thought back to the handful of times he awkwardly described to his uncomprehending peers what it was like being adopted.  He shook his whole body as if that could shake off the stress.  “Nobody at home would understand.  Small town, you know?”

Rowan gave him a shaky, encouraging smile.  “Well you’re not in a small town anymore.”

“I hope it’s different here,” he told her.  “Big city and all.”

“It is,” she said, bobbing her head.  “It really is, it’s hardly a thing here.”  Her encouraging smile was blossoming into something much warmer and wider.  Excited.  Like they had something that they could share.  Sammy felt it, too.  “I mean, sometimes it is a thing, just a little, but… everybody I know, knows about me.  And the vast, vast majority of them are cool with it.”

“Really?” he grinned, and then something tickled his temple.  He touched it, finding a drop of sweat.  He realized he was overheating inside his hoodie.  That’s what happened when the conversation topic made you blush all over.  Spotting his bag, he reached down, scooped it up, and dropped it on the bed.  He’d jam the hoodie in here, and then they could head downstairs for dinner.  He unzipped the roller bag and flung it open.

Released from its confines, the stack of clothing inside erupted outwards.  A torrent of colors and patterns—pinks, reds, blues—squeezed its way out of the bag’s opening.  These were not the hoodies and sweats, all grey and black, that Sammy had packed. These were all girl clothes.  A plaid skirt flopped out, unfurling its pleats across the bed surface.  A lacy bra and matching panties tumbled out, and then slid off of the bed and onto the floor.

Rowan scooped up the lingerie and placed them on top of the rest.  “Very cute,” she commented, her smile wide and encouraging.

He opened his mouth, closed it.  Tried to make words come out.  Finally, he said, “I don’t… I don’t normally wear clothes like this.”  He thought he was blushing before?  Now he was blushing.  His whole body must have been beet red.

She blinked.  “What, never?”

He laughed shakily.  He could make this into a joke, right?  “Yeah, no, not ever.  It’s, um.  Not really my everyday look, strolling around Oak Grove in a cute skirt.”  He felt like he was falling backwards.  Of course he couldn’t make this into a joke; none of this made any sense.

“Oh my god,” she gasped, fingers to her lips and everything.  “Are you not out yet?”

He blinked and tried to ignore how his face felt like it was on fire.  “Out?”

“Out of the closet,” Rowan explained.  “Does anybody at home know you’re a trans girl?”

“Trans girl,” he heard himself repeat.  “Like, transgender.”  He tried to remember what he knew about transgender people, all of it gleaned from television, memes, and one very awkward school presentation.

Rowan nodded, her look all sympathy.  “I can’t imagine it’s easy living out in the middle of nowhere, everybody riding tractors and going to… I dunno, barn raisings and 4H animal shows and shit.  Oh, gosh,” she cried, and wrapped Sammy up in a fierce hug.  “And you came to the City, hoping that you could finally try out being you.”

“I did?” he squeaked, trying to ignore how his face was buried in his cousin’s cleavage.  Belatedly, he realized that that had not sounded like a question, but confimation.

Rowan broke the embrace and held Sammy out at arm’s length.  “Okay, you don’t worry about a thing, okay?  I’ve got you.  And obviously my dads are cool.  They’ve been through all of this once already.  It’ll be like old times for them.”

She beamed into his face, and Sammy felt himself smiling back.

“This is so exciting!” she squealed.  “We are going to have so much fun.  I am going to show you everything.”

“You— you mean tonight?” Sammy stammered.  “Like, after dinner?”  If the price of getting his cool, hot cousin to show him around the City was to pretend he was trans for the night… was he seriously considering this?

“Yeah, bitch!” Rowan crowed.  “We gonna go clubbing!” She bathed him in a dazzling smile, and it was almost as if he could hear airhorns underscoring her enthusiasm.  But then her expression wobbled as her eyes slid sideways.  “Assuming you have something to go clubbing in?”

“Uh,” Sammy hedged, looking at the bright-coloured pile of clothes.  “I don’t even remember what I packed in there.”

“Well let’s see,” Rowan said, and started digging through the clothes.

Sammy watched with trepidation.  What was in the bag?  Where did the contents even come from?  But then it struck him: the girl on the bus, the one who’d been so pissed that Andrei helped with her bag.  Her bag looked just like Sammy’s bag.  So this must be hers.  He’d fallen asleep on the bus, and she’d disembarked first and rolled off with his bag.

“This could work,” Rowan said, and Sammy wrenched his attention out of his head and onto the bed, where she’d laid out a few pieces of clothing.  Was he supposed to be able to envision what those would look like on him?  Wait, was he supposed to wear girl clothes?  Surely he could just wear, like, shorts and a shirt or something?  A girl shirt and girl shorts, of course, to placate Rowan, but stuff that would still look… relatively normal, right?

Rowan waved her hands in front of herself.  “Whatever.  We’re getting ahead of ourselves, anyway.  Dinner first.  And you probably want to change before that, right?  Get out of the dysphoria hoodie?”

“What’s a dyspho—”

“Oh gosh!” she squealed, cutting him off before he could ask.  “Pronouns!  And, like, name.  Of course.  Talk about getting ahead of ourselves.”  And then she abruptly stopped talking, looking at Sammy expectantly.

“Well, I…” he jammed his hands into his hoodie pocket and twisted his fingers together inside.  This was insane.  He couldn’t do this.  How would he explain things in the morning?

…but the morning would be on the other side of going clubbing in the City with his cool, hot cousin.

The aforementioned cool, hot cousin gave him a reassuring smile.  “Given the contents of your bag—I mean, clothes aren’t gender identity, you can never tell, yadda yadda, but… this is some girly shit in here.  So.  You wanna use she and her?”

Sammy blinked.  He’d only caught about half of that.  “What… else would I use?”

“Well, there are femme they/thems,” Rowan shrugged.

“Like…” he scowled, thinking.  “When you were talking about me, you’d say… they are visiting from Oak Grove.  But there’s only one of me, so…  They is visiting from Oak Grove?  That sounds even weirder.”

“Gender’s weird,” Rowan shrugged.  “I’ll call you whatever you want.  But what about name?” His cousin grinned and bit her lip, which was entirely unfair to Sammy’s capacity to string words together.

“I mean… Sammy is girly enough, right?”

“Of course,” Rowan nodded enthusiastically, and then her face exploded in excitement again.  “Holy shit, are you an Always Knew Tran?!”

Sammy sank onto the bed.  This was getting too much.  He recognized most of the words that Rowan was using, just not in the ways she was using them.  “A what?”

“An Always Knew Tran,” she repeated.  “Like you didn’t have an egg crack moment like I did halfway through freshman year when you realized, oh my god, I’m a girl, you just… always knew.”  She sat down on the other end of the bed, the pile of clothes and roller bag between them.  “I only ask because I heard that the girls who go for the names converted from their deadnames are usually Always Knew Trans, because when they were, like, four years old, their little four year old brains concluded that they really should be called Samantha, not Samuel, and that’s how they thought about themselves for years and years until they could finally come out.”

Sammy gulped.  This seemed like the path of least resistence. “Um.  Yeah.  That sounds about right.”

“Okay, Samantha,” Rowan said smilling, and reached forward to squeeze his hand.  “And she/her to go with that?”

Sammy felt his head nodding.  “Yeah.  That’s me.  Samantha.  She/her.”  What the fuck was he doing?

“Okay, cool.”  Rowan bounced off the bed.  “So.  You’re gonna get dressed for dinner, right?  You want some privacy for that?”

Sammy wasn’t about to get naked in front of his cousin.  Even if he was pretending to be one of the girls, that was a bridge too far.  Besides, he didn’t want her to see him fumbling through girl clothes that were supposed to be his.  He nodded.  “Yes, please.”

Rowan all but danced out her own bedroom door.  Sammy waited until the door had clicked shut before he let all his false confidence drain out of his body.  He slumped onto the bed next to the girl’s accidentally-stolen suitcase.  Was he really going to do this?

He had come here to see what real life was like in the City, outside the little bubble that was Oak Grove.  His most far-fetched dreams about how this weekend might play out all centered around going to a club, maybe drinking a little bit.  There was dancing at clubs, but Sammy didn’t know how to dance, so he wouldn’t be doing that, anyway.  Just watching.  For next time.  And if he was watching for next time—getting the lay of the land—then did it really matter if he was wearing a skirt, or even fishnets?  He’d still get to see it.  He’d be there.  And when he came back, as a student at Columbia or however else, then he’d wear whatever he wanted.

It wasn’t like he’d go to a club in a hoodie and sweatpants, which was all he packed for this trip in the blue suitcase that was now… somewhere else in the City.  So it wasn’t like he had actually been prepared to go clubbing to begin with.  So maybe this was… lucky?

“This is not lucky,” he sighed to himself.  “This is bonkers.”  But he sat up and started mechanically going through the mostly-folded stack of clothes.  He just needed something to wear downstairs, to eat dinner with his uncles.  Girl shorts and a girl shirt.  He would worry about what to wear clubbing when he’d cleared this first hurdle.  Surely there had to be shorts and a teeshirt in there somewhere, right?

There was not.

The closest he could find was a pleated skirt and a shirt.  Technically, he supposed, it was a blouse.  What was the difference, anyway?

With a glance to the door to make sure it was closed, Sammy threw off his hoodie, the white undershirt under that, and his sweat pants, then pulled on the skirt and blouse.

The skirt was relatively straightforward, he felt, but the blouse fit all wrong.  “Oh, I’m missing boobs,” he muttered, and then looked fearfully at the pile of clothes.  He nudged aside another skirt and a tangle of fabric that he couldn’t even identify to expose the lacey bra.  Sammy stared at the lingerie for a long moment, picked it up, and contemplated it with a sigh.  “I guess I really really want to go clubbing.”

The next few minutes were consumed by a great deal of twisting, stretching, grunting, and fumbling.  After Sammy nearly fell over the second time, he sat down to prevent it from happening again.  He was sweaty by the time he finally had the damned thing on.  Sammy looked down at the empty cups, flattened them with his hands, and wondered if the struggle had all been for nothing.

“Oh wait, socks, right?” he muttered to himself.  “Rolled up?”

He rooted around in the ever-spreading pile of clothes until he came up with two pairs of socks, which he slipped into the cups of the bra.  They did not fit well, but he mashed and squished them until they were close enough.  Then he pulled the blouse over top of that.  His “boobs” were all sorts of lumpy, but at least the shirt fit better.  He tried smoothing out the shape through the blouse, which made little change.

Finally a timid knock sounded on the door.  “You okay in there, Samantha?” came Rowan’s stage whisper from the other side.

“Not really,” he groaned at the closed door.  The back of the door bore a full-length mirror, and there he was, in all his awkward glory.  Very plainly a boy who’d lost a fight with a girl’s wardrobe.  “I mean.  I’m dressed, you can come in, I guess.  I just look stupid.”

Needing no further invitation, Rowan hurried through the door.  She turned towards Sammy with a giant smile preemptively radiating positive energy.  It immediately crumbled.  “Oh!  Oh.”

Sammy shrugged and let his arms slap against his sides.  “I’m no good at this.  It’s a bad idea.  I should just… put my hoodie back on.”

“No, no, we are not crawling back into the closet, not on my watch.”  She shook her head and advanced on Sammy.  “Besides.  I can work with this.  You just made some… rookie mistakes.  But you picked great colours.”

“Colours,” he repeated, and looked down at what he was wearing.  It had not even occured to him that the colours of the clothes might matter.  The skirt was blue and the top was green.  “Uh.  Yeah.  I like these colours.”

“I love that teal paisley,” Rowan went on, gesturing vaguely at… either the top or the skirt; Sammy couldn’t be sure.  What was teal, again?  Blue or green?  But his cousin was asking a question: “What is up with your breast forms?”

“My breast fo—” he started to echo, and then gestured helplessly to his lumpy rack.  “Oh, it’s just… rolled-up socks.”

“Oh, right, of course.  DIY breast forms.”  Then her eyebrows shot up and she looked over at her closet.  “Actually…”  The girl dove into the bottom drawer of her closet, a big bin-sized thing, and started digging.

Sammy averted his eyes from her ass as it waved in the air behind her.

A moment later Rowan shouted “Ah ha!” and came up with a beat-up cardboard box about half the size of a shoebox.  She shoved it into Sammy’s hands.  “I haven’t worn them for years, but you can use them.  Heck, you can have them.”

Sammy opened the hinged top, glanced into the box, and immediately dropped it with a yelp.  Two floppy silicone boobs, complete with cherry nipples, bounced out of the box and across the floor.  “Oh fuck, sorry.  Uh.  They’re just… so lifelike.”  Why the hell did his cousin have fake boobs in a drawer?

Rowan giggled as she scooped them up and held them out squishing one playfully as she did.  “I don’t think I have any adhesive in the house, but they can just ride in your bra if your neckline is high enough.  And I guess the skin tone wouldn’t actually match anyway, no matter how much blending you did.”

“These were yours?”

Rowan bobbed her head.  “When I was but a baby tran.  Like.  Four years ago?  About that.  For the first two years,” she confided, “you constantly know how long it’s been down to months and weeks.  And then that all sort of… fades out, and you’re just.  Girl.”

As she talked, things fell into place in Sammy’s brain.  He could swear he could feel the cartoon lightbulb turn on where it floated above his head.  Everybody she knew, knew about her.  Her dads had been through all of this once already.  She had fake boobs she used to wear sitting in a drawer.  Rowan was a trans girl.

Rowan was trans, and Sammy was an idiot.

He reached into the blouse and bra that he’d strapped himself into and pulled out the socks.  “Um.  How do I—”

“They’re pretty intuitive,” Rowan grinned, and then proceeded to yank open his shirt and slide the cool prosthetic breasts against his chest.  She fiddled a little, shifting and adjusting, and then pulled the neckline into place over them.

Sammy looked down.  The blouse covered up everything.  He had tits. “Whoa.”

“Exactly, Neo,” Rowan giggled.  “And uh.  Tuck in the blouse for me?”

Trying not to stare at his own tits—he had to bend way over to see what he was doing with the waistband of the skirt—he tucked in the shirt tail of the blouse, settling the skirt across his hips again.

Rowan smirked.  “Yeah, thought so.  Your waist, honey, is up here.”  She reached forward, wrapping her hands around Sammy’s belly, and squeezed gently.

Sammy didn’t move.  Couldn’t.

Seeing that her cousin was not getting it, Rowan reached down to tug the skirt’s waistband upwards, settling it around Sammy’s waist.  “It’s called a waist band, not a hips band.  Now tuck in your blouse again, keeping the waistband where it is.”

He did so, frowning softly.  “This feels weird.”

She shrugged in response.  “Yeah.  It’ll feel weird till you get used to it, and then wearing your pants like some skater boy feels weird.”  She gestured to the reading chair.  “Sit down, I’ll brush out your hair.”

Having someone else brush out your hair, it turned out, felt really good, and for the first time in an hour Sammy actually felt himself relaxing.  The chair was comfy, too.  “I bet you have to keep it short at home,” Rowan mused.  “But we can do, like, a cute soft dyke sort of style with this.  Pixie cut adjacent.”  He nodded dreamily as if that made any sort of sense.

Later—it must have been just a few minutes, but Sammy had no idea—Rowan declared his hair to be sufficiently tamed and squatted in front of him.  “Okay.  So.  You want some makeup?”

“Uh.  Isn’t it getting late?” he managed.  “Your dad said dinner in half an hour, like, forever ago.”

Rowan tipped her head side to side.  “I told the dads we’d be a little longer.  They’re patient.”  She grinned.  “Makeup?  Just a little.  Eyeliner, mascara, lipstick, brow powder.”

“That doesn’t sound like a little.”

His cousin giggled.  “Five minutes,” she promised.

His cousin’s infectious enthusiasm pulled a smile out of Sammy despite his reservations.  “I mean, okay.”

“Great!” she squealed, and went clattering through her closet drawers again.  “Okay, so.  You’re not supposed to share brushes and mascara, blah blah blah, but I haven’t used any of this stuff since, what, Christmas?  So I think we’re in the clear.  Trust me, I’m pre-med.”  She dropped a handful of items onto the little table next to the reading chair, touched the radiator under the window to make sure it wasn’t hot, and planted her butt onto it so she could lean over into Sammy’s face.

This of course put her cleavage on full display before him.  Sammy tried not to stare, in fact closed his eyes, but his cousin chided him for flinching and insisted he look straight ahead.  Which he did.  Because hey, if he was going to get an invite, he wasn’t going to say no.

He sat stock still when he was told to, he closed one eye and then the other as instructed, he blinked when she said to blink.  He made weird faces with his lips.  And then she was done.

Rowan leaned back, surveying her work with pride.  “You clean up pretty nice, Country Mouse.”

Sammy gave her a weak smile.  She had to be buttering him up.  He’d already seen himself in her mirror.  He looked ridiculous.  But he was willing to look ridiculous if it meant he got to go clubbing.  It was that simple.  Who needed self-respect, he mused, when you had an opportunity to do what you’d been dreaming of for weeks?

Rowan stood and gestured Sammy towards the mirror.  “Arise, Samantha, and look upon thy true visage.”

Sammy burst out laughing.  “I’m sorry, what on earth was that?”

His cousin looked up at the ceiling, not making eye contact.  “Okay, before I was a cool girl,” she confessed, “I might have been, like, a massive nerd.  I read all the books about elves and dragons, I watched all the shows about space ships.  And sometimes it all comes rushing back, and then it all goes spilling out of my mouth.  Nerd vomit.  I plan to make my graduate thesis the search for a cure.”

“I dunno, I think it’s kind of cute,” Sammy grinned and pushed himself up out of the chair.

“That makes one of us,” she quipped, and then reached forward to grab and turn his shoulders, pointing him towards the mirror on the bedroom door.  “Lookee there.”

Still chuckling, Sammy picked his way across Rowan’s room.  He’d spilled clothes just about everywhere, hadn’t he?  “I’ll pick all this up,” he promised, turning back to make eye contact, so she could see he was genuinely apologetic.

Rowan crossed her arms and lifted one eyebrow.  “Look in the damn mirror, Samantha.”

“I’m looking, I’m looking,” he laughed as he turned around, and… “Whaaaaat the fuck.”

Gone was the boy who’d been mugged by a girl’s wardrobe.  The lumpy, awkward, uneven clothes had all been straightened out, pulled taut where they should be pulled taut, draped artfully where they ought to be draping.  Rowan had brushed out his unruly hair and used a trio of tiny but sparkling-bright emerald hair clips to pull it into an actual shape.  His face, even hanging slack and gobsmacked, looked completely different.  How had just crayons and colored dust done so much?

Sammy took in his whole body, which had somehow been completely reshaped.  Sure, the fake tits explained some of it, but below that, his waist cinched in and the skirt flared out, and…

“Was this skirt always this short?” He could see his knees, and an inch or two of thigh above them.

“I mean, it was longer when you were wearing it four inches too low,” Rowan laughed.  “Hey, try this: smile into the mirror.”

Sammy turned back, scanning down and back up the length of his reflection.  The look of incredulity plastered across his face was almost comical.  He swallowed, cleared his features as best he could, and put on a tentative smile.

He staggered backwards.  “Whoa.”

“And that’s not even full power,” Rowan giggled, stepping up behind him and resting her chin on his shoulder.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking at,” Sammy confessed.

Rowan smiled.  “A girl.”

That was absolutely, positively not the right answer, but Sammy couldn’t let her see his honest reaction.  He put on another tentative smile and tried not to look at his own face in the mirror as he did so.  He still looked like himself, sure, but he also looked like not-himself enough that the little smile he was sporting was making his own knees weak, and his heart pound harder, and his stomach growl.

No wait, that last one had nothing to do with his reflection.  “Um.  Excuse me.”  It seemed strangely indecent to make such a sound while he also looked like this.

His cousin stepped backwards, laughing.  “We can go downstairs for dinner, but we have to open the door to do that, and to open the door you have to stop looking at yourself.”

“Oh ha ha,” Sammy retorted, and reached forward to open the door.  He did steal one last glance as the mirror turned and his image slid out of sight.  And then he was standing in front of the open door, looking out into the hallway.  “Um.  Rowan,” he said uneasily.  “You’re sure your dads will be okay with this?”

“Psssh,” she snorted, and gently pushed him out the door.  “They’re not going to bat an eye.”

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