“I still miss them, though, even though I’m worried about how they’ll react. Does that make sense?”

I had a surprise when they returned. Savannah was an animate doll as well, more of a life-size action figure in the style of She-Ra or Wonder Woman than the classic porcelain doll look that Sophia wore day-to-day. Their brief conversation as they put away their purses before returning to the living room to play card games didn’t tell me much, but I learned more when they came back to “go to bed.”

“This is so awesome!” Savannah said. “I don’t feel sleepy at all.”

“You won’t,” Sophia told her. “You’ll never yawn or feel your eyes trying to close on their own and force you to sleep. But you still need to zone out once a night, and if you go too long without it, you’ll zone out without warning while you’re in the middle of something. I generally pick a time toward dawn and reduce stimulus — I stop reading or watching movies or playing games or whatever, and maybe sit quiet in the dark, or listen to a podcast or audiobook on low volume.”

“Thanks for talking my parents into letting me do this.”

“I guess reminding them that they’d have one less bladder needing to be emptied every couple of hours on the way home was a factor.”

Savannah giggled. “Yeah. I’ll still have to change back tomorrow when we get to the last exit with a Venn machine before home, but I’ll have... thirty hours to get used to this and figure out if I want to do it longer-term next semester or next school year.”

“I’m glad the Greensboro Mall has a Venn machine now. My friends at UNC Greensboro will be happy about that, not to mention all the people who live there year-round.”

“Who all do you know there?”

“Well, Caleb, obviously, also my sister’s friend Carmen, and some other people we met when we went to visit Caleb and Carmen...”

They talked for several hours, then watched a couple of short movies before Savannah took one of Sophia’s dinosaur books down from the shelf, and Sophia picked up the genetics book she’d been reading, and they read quietly for most of the night. I worried that without me being able to speak up and remind Sophia to relax and go into a fugue near morning, she would forget as she’d sometimes done, but my worry was needless; Sophia had set her alarm for it, and reminded Savannah to put down her book at six a.m. I had gone into a fugue earlier, not long after they’d finished the second movie and started reading, so for the first time, I was able to watch Sophia fugue out while remaining fully conscious myself. There wasn’t much to see. Even while reading, she had been pretty still when not turning the page. Savannah fidgeted more while reading than Sophia, but she was pretty still compared to when she had a flesh body, too.

Sophia came out of her fugue around the time her curtained window started filtering in some dawn light. She looked at me for a moment, then picked up her book and started reading again. Her motion seemed to startle Savannah out of her fugue as well; she said, “That was weird. It didn’t feel like falling asleep or waking up... more like getting distracted by your thoughts and forgetting where you are until someone speaks to you? Only I wasn’t thinking.”

“Yeah. If you stay like this, you might sometimes come out of that fugue remembering a dream or something like it, but most people say it doesn’t happen often. Less often than when you have an organic body.”

(I only had two or three dreams that I could remember in the fourteen months I spent as a dragon statue. They weren’t particularly memorable or thematically appropriate, so I haven’t included them here. Sophia asked me about them when she did my monthly questionnaire for her longitudinal study, though.)

“What time is it?”

“Just past seven.”

“I guess I’d better start packing my stuff.”

“Yeah. Need any help?”

“There’s not much to do. I need to get my toiletries from the bathroom — I guess I won’t need them today, will I?”

“You’ll still need to brush your hair,” Sophia said. “Though maybe not as often. And you’ll need to wash up once in a while, but not as often as when your body produces oil and sweat. More like as often as you wash your windshield or wipe down your laptop screen and keyboard. Your glass eyes get dirty and your vision will get blurry until you clean them.”

(That hadn’t happened to me while I was living with Carmen, because I was re-venning at least once a week and my eyes didn’t have enough time to get dusty enough to blur in between venns. But it had started happening after I moved back in with Meredith and Sophia.)

After breakfast, Sophia’s family left for church and Savannah’s family got on the road to go home. I saw only a little of those preparations as Caleb came into the room to help Savannah carry her luggage to the minivan. And then I was alone.

I took a stroll around the house, as I sometimes did on Sundays when the family was at church, seeing the mild chaos left by company staying for four days, and returned to Sophia’s room to check my email and Discord servers.

They hadn’t been home from church long when Meredith and Sophia left for work, and Caleb returned to UNC Greensboro. I didn’t learn any more about what had happened at Thanksgiving dinner until evening.

“So what did y’all think of your relatives?” I asked when Meredith came into Sophia’s room after supper. “It seems weird to me to have relatives that close and go that long without seeing them. We used to see all my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins at least every couple of years and the ones who live in North Carolina more often. Although it’s almost a year now since I’ve seen my own parents and brother...”

Meredith rubbed the back of my head sympathetically. “Savannah’s nice, and Aiden’s kind of cute when he’s not being bratty. Will is okay, I guess? We barely interacted this weekend — he didn’t talk much when I was around. Caleb said he talked more when it was just the two of them. Asked him questions about college and things like that. And his parents talked about his art, but he didn’t, and he seemed kind of embarrassed when they showed us pictures on their phones.”

“And your aunt and uncle? I never saw them at all.”

“Uncle Eric and Aunt Vanessa look like they’re just barely old enough to have a kid Will’s age,” Sophia said. “Mid-thirties, I guess? They use regular human bodies. When they arrived, Uncle Eric was kind of deliberately jovial, like he was trying hard to pretend everything was wonderful, but now and then the facade would slip and he’d look worried or scared. Dad was acting kind of like that too, though probably not as much. Aunt Vanessa seemed to be trying to smooth things over and keep the conversations from going anywhere controversial.”

“None of them said anything about my transition all weekend,” Meredith said. “Except Savannah, and she asked Sophia if it was okay first — you heard that conversation, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“They tried pretty hard to gender me correctly,” Meredith continued, “although Uncle Eric and Aunt Vanessa both messed up once or twice and apologized right away. I don’t think any of the kids did, but Savannah or Aiden didn’t remember me from before and Will didn’t talk much, like I said.”

“That sounds pretty great,” I said. “I wish I could be that sure that my aunts or uncles or grandparents would be decent about my transition after I turn eighteen. Much less Mom and Dad and Nathan. I still miss them, though, even though I’m worried about how they’ll react. Does that make sense?”

“It’s how you feel,” Meredith said. “It doesn’t have to make sense to be valid. But yeah, I remember feeling that way after Sophia venned me and before Mom, Dad and Caleb came home... or, you know, for months before that, after I figured out I was trans but before the Venn machines showed up.”

Sophia said to her, “I told Lauren I’d ask your advice before I told her anything about Thanksgiving dinner. Wasn’t sure if you might think we should keep it in the family.”

Meredith winced. “Yeah, probably better not go into too much detail. I don’t think Dad or Uncle Eric would like it, even though they don’t know Lauren’s here... Basically,” she turned to me, “I don’t want to talk about the details, but Dad and Uncle Eric got into a bad argument about something years ago, and didn’t talk for years, like we told you. And then during Thanksgiving dinner, they talked it out, or started to, and then went off and talked some more in private.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I don’t need to know any more than that.”

I didn’t know what Justin and Eric had fought about, but it didn’t matter. If it was bad enough to keep them apart for years, it couldn’t be any worse than what was keeping me away from my family. And their reconciliation gave me hope that maybe, though it might be years from now, I could sit down to Thanksgiving dinner or gather around a Christmas tree with Mom, Dad, and Nathan.

* * *

The following Saturday, when everyone was out and I took my walk around the house, I saw the Christmas decorations. They had started putting up the decorations the previous Sunday after their relatives left, but I had seen very little of them, except the few in Sophia and Meredith’s bedrooms. (When Meredith or Sophia took me from one room to another in the evening, it was usually inside a bag.)

Mom usually waited until a little closer to Christmas to decorate the house. A week or two after Thanksgiving, she would send me up into the attic, and I would hand down the boxes of decorations to Nathan, who would stand on the ladder, and he would hand them to Dad, who would set them down where Mom wanted them. Then we’d work together to unpack them and put them up, most of them in the same places every year, but she would also experiment with arranging some things differently. Then on Sunday after church, we would go shopping for a Christmas tree and set it up in the living room, and decorate it from the boxes of tree ornaments, and the nativity scene would go in front of it — all except the baby Jesus, which she would set aside and not put in place until Christmas Eve after we got home from church. Nathan and I would take turns year to year putting the baby Jesus in place while Dad read aloud from the Christmas story in Luke.

This year it would have been my turn. It hurt that I wasn’t going to be there to do it. But I reminded myself that I might not be safe at home, now that Mom and Dad knew I was trans. That didn’t make the hurt go away, it just made it worse.

How much of this did I still believe? I wasn’t sure. It had taken me a while, back in the first few months after Meredith got me unfiltered access to the Internet and started teaching me Gender 101, to process those new ideas and untangle what I’d learned from my parents and at church. I wasn’t sure everything they taught at church was wrong — Meredith hadn’t lost her faith when she figured out she was trans and what she wanted to do about it. But realizing that one part didn’t make intuitive sense, and this other explanation of gender fit the facts (the existence of people like me and Meredith) better than what they said at church, made me suspicious of some other things they said. Not enough to positively disbelieve it or embrace some other religion or atheism, but enough that I missed our old church a lot less than I missed Nathan and Mom and Dad.

Or rather, less than I missed the way they used to treat me before they knew I was transgender.

Back before I’d run away, I had done some research on churches that were cool with trans people, as Meredith had mentioned doing in one of her early emails, but decided to wait until I was eighteen and could come out of hiding to actually visit those churches and see what they were like. From what Meredith said, it sounded like the church they’d been going to since a few months after they left Crossroads was pretty accepting of her, and did at least as much good for the community in terms of helping the poor and sick as Crossroads had done.

There weren’t as many sick and disabled people needing help as there used to be before the Venn machines, but there were enough people the Venn machines wouldn’t work for that the need for that kind of ministry hadn’t gone away. And poverty and mistreatment of poor people was as bad a problem as ever, although the Venn machines were beginning to help in some ways as the word spread about them — for instance, you didn’t need much money to have a professional-looking wardrobe, just access to a Venn machine and some old clothes to transform. Carmen and their friends had been mainly concerned with environmental protection and LGBT+ rights, but I’d heard them (and Carmen’s professors) talking about oppression of the poor, too, and learned a lot about the causes of poverty that Mom, Dad, and the conservative-leaning teachers at church and school had never hinted at. I was pretty sure if I did wind up going to a church regularly once I turned eighteen, I’d want it to be one that really helped people in need.

After contemplating the nativity scene for a few minutes, I returned to Sophia’s room and threw myself into study until the girls got home from work.

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