When they returned, Jada was a cyclopean llama-taur and Steph was an octopus-taur. She was riding on Jada’s back, having apparently gotten tuckered out on the way back — she was surprisingly fast on her tentacles, but they’d tired after walking a third of the way across campus.
The next day, I went to church with the Ramseys while Jada was at church with her family, and we got together in the afternoon for a couple of hours before she returned to college. We went for a walk in the river park again, and went to watch Lisette and Poppy at the racetrack. Lisette was riding Poppy this time; Poppy’s motorcycle form had a wider wheelbase with a colorful blue and orange chassis, in contrast to the plain black clothes she usually wore. And it was odd to see Lisette in motorcycle leathers instead of the fancy dresses and corsets she usually wore. They raced against several other riders on venned cycles and placed second. Afterward, as we were loading Poppy on the truck to take her back to the library, Jada asked us if we had any plans for Halloween weekend.
“Poppy and I are gonna be watching horror movies on Halloween night,” Lisette said. “You girls are welcome to join us. I don’t think we have any plans yet for the weekend before Halloween, though.” Halloween was going to fall on a Monday that year.
“I don’t have any definite plans yet,” I said. “Sophia and her parents are volunteering for the Trunk or Treat at their church on Sunday evening, and I might join them if y’all aren’t doing anything.”
“What about if y’all come visit me?” Jada asked. “The queer group is having a Halloween party on Saturday night. Those of y’all that don’t have cars could ride with Lisette or Britt, and venn into party bodies at the Venn machine on campus.”
“And then drive all the way back here after midnight?” Lisette asked. “Or pay for a motel room?”
“No,” Jada said, “you could venn into small bodies and sleep in my dorm room. We could all venn into tiny bodies and share my bed, only we’d need to get Steph or somebody to carry us to my dorm room and open the door for us and take us to the Venn machine the next morning... probably better if one of us stays big enough to reach the doorknob.”
“You’d better make sure Steph’s okay with that,” I said. “But if she’s fine with having guests that night, I’d like to come.”
“Let’s see if we can get the days off work,” Poppy said in her mechanical voice.
After that, we hugged Britt and said goodbye to everyone, and Jada drove me home.
* * *
So the next day, I asked for Halloween weekend off work. It was another week before I found out for sure I could get those days off. Things continued to be fairly uneventful in Brocksboro; I worked, hung out with Desiree, Sophia and Bianca at home, had a therapy appointment, went on dates with Britt and watched Lisette and Poppy race. I was also continuing to get to know some of my co-workers a little better. Anna and I got to talking one day during a slow shift and she invited me and Britt and Desiree to join her and Genevieve for a double date, which we did about a week later. Then Joy invited me to a Halloween party she and her boyfriend were hosting. It would be the day after Britt, Lisette, Poppy and I returned from visiting Jada, assuming all of us were able to get those days off work.
Meanwhile, at college, Jada and I were watching Steph cautiously poke her head out of her shell. She’d gone to the chess club meeting the weekend Jada was visiting at home, and it had gone well enough, with a small enough group of strangers to be manageable for her anxiety and most of them no more brash or outgoing than she was. “It helped that mostly I just had to deal with the one person I was playing with at the moment,” she explained.
There were a few groups of friends who used the Venn machine regularly, but no organized Venn club. Jada was trying to start one, beginning with her new friends in the queer group and the anime club and a few people she’d met through her classes. It was a fairly small group at first, and Jada had invited Steph to hang out with them one Saturday morning in early September, but she’d declined. The Saturday after Jada and I re-split, however, she agreed to go on the condition that she’d turn right around and come back to the dorm if there were too many people. So I was left alone and spent a pleasant hour reading.
When they returned, Jada was a cyclopean llama-taur and Steph was an octopus-taur. She was riding on Jada’s back, having apparently gotten tuckered out on the way back — she was surprisingly fast on her tentacles, but they’d tired after walking a third of the way across campus. Jada stood alongside Steph’s desk for a few moments while Steph wriggled off her back onto the chair.
“Thanks for the ride,” she said. “This is a fun body, but it’s not made for distance walking.”
“No problem,” Jada said. “I guess we’d better buckle down and study for a while.”
So they did. I sat on Jada’s shoulder, since she didn’t really have a lap in llama-taur form, and read along with her. Then when she’d finished reading a chapter of her poli sci book, I took the book and quizzed her on what she’d read. Then Steph asked me to proofread her Freshman Comp essay. A while later, she said, “I’d kind of like to go to the chess club meeting, but I’m not sure. It’s not as far as from here to the Venn machine, but it’s a pretty good distance for walking on tentacles...”
“I can give you a ride,” Jada said. “It’ll be on my way to the queer group meeting, if I remember right about where y’all meet.”
“I’m sorry to keep imposing on you,” Steph started to apologize, but Jada waved it off.
“It’s really no big deal. Come on, let’s go.”
So Steph wriggled onto Jada’s back again and rode out the door. A couple of hours later, they returned, chatting about something that I didn’t get all the context of until later.
“— more I think about it, it probably is a date,” Steph was saying. “And I don’t know... he seems nice, but I barely know him, I’ve played like two games of chess with him and we didn’t talk all that much beyond the game.”
“Are you worried about what he might do?” Jada asked, standing by Steph’s bed so she could wriggle off Jada’s back. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about at the student center, there’d be lots of people around to stop him if he tries anything.”
“No, I don’t think he’d do anything bad, it’s just... I don’t know if I can handle it.”
“You don’t have to go if you don’t feel like it,” Jada said. “Just tell him something came up and you’ll see him in class Tuesday. Maybe go out with him later once you get to know him better through the chess club and class, assuming he’s still interested.”
“He’ll probably be going out with somebody else by then... I don’t think this is gonna happen all that often, so I guess I should probably take advantage of it when it does. I’m just super nervous.” She turned to me where I was sitting on Jada’s desk; I’d been reading when they came in.
“Can I hug you, Lydia? And ask you for dating advice?”
“Yes to the hug,” I said. “And you can ask, but I doubt I can help. I never went on a date until a few months ago when Jada asked me out, and I didn’t realize it was a date until after she picked me up and took me to the park.”
“Originally we were gonna hang out with some other friends, but they wound up not being able to come, so it was just us, and one thing led to another,” Jada explained.
“Oh,” Steph said. She had already climbed down off her bed and was now climbing Jada’s desk chair to pick me up and hug me. It was a very thorough hug and I squirmed happily. She passed me off to Jada, who snuggled me as well.
“So,” I said, “tell me about it from the start. I heard some of it just now, but it seemed like it was only the tail end of the conversation.”
There was a guy named Greg in her Freshman Comp class who was also in the chess club. She’d never exchanged a word with him in class, not until last week when she played a game of chess with him, and then again tonight.
“And as the meeting was breaking up, and I was waiting for Jada to get back from her meeting to give me a ride to the dorm, he asked me if I wanted to hang out at the student center and go over our notes from class and maybe play another game of chess afterward. And I thought about it for a moment and said yes, but after Jada came, I started thinking about it more, and it seems like a date, and that’s got me all nervous. Like what if I mess it up and then I can’t go to chess club meetings anymore because it’s too awkward and that’s the only club on campus that’s not too big and noisy for me?”
“Slow down,” I said, remembering some of the techniques my therapist had taught me. “Look around you; tell me five things you see...?”
After Steph had calmed down a little and stopped catastrophizing, I asked, “Would you want to go on a date with him?”
“Maybe? He seems like a nice guy, and he looks good, but everybody looks good now because of the Venn machines. And he said nice things about my octopus-taur form and how I played chess.”
“I heard tentacled forms go over well with the guys,” Jada said knowingly, and Steph squeaked.
I shushed Jada and asked Steph, “When are you supposed to meet him?”
“Tomorrow afternoon at two.”
“Did he give you his contact information or ask you for yours?”
“Um, no. So I guess I can’t tell him I can’t come... I’d just have to not show up. And that would be mean. I guess I’ve got to go.”
“You don’t have to,” I reassured her, “if you don’t feel like it. But I think it would be good for you. I don’t think it’s likely to go so badly that you can’t go to the chess club meetings anymore. And remember, if he’s disrespectful or pushes your boundaries too much, you can leave early.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it, but I’ll probably go.”
* * *
She went. Late Sunday morning, she and Jada went back to the Venn machine and changed back into their everyday bodies; Jada venned her clothes into a slightly nicer blouse and skirt for the date, but nothing super fancy, as it was a fairly informal date at the student center. Steph hovered around the room, bouncing back and forth between the desk and the bed and standing by the chest of drawers and rummaging through it, unable to sit still for long. She hugged me and her own plushies several times, trying to calm down, without much success.
She left to meet Greg at fifteen till two and didn’t return for well over an hour. When she returned, Jada paused the episode of The Necessary Beggar we’d been watching and sat up straighter, asking: “How’d it go?”
“Pretty well, I guess? It was a close game, I don’t think he was deliberately letting me beat him, and afterward he asked me if I wanted to go somewhere off-campus next weekend.”
“What’s he like now that you’ve spent more time chatting with him?” I asked.
“Well, he told me some about his family and the extracurricular stuff he did in high school, chess club and the yearbook, and he asked me about myself, and he didn’t seem too freaked out when I told him about going to the school for the blind and getting my sight and learning to read and all.”
“Cool. What did you say about going on another date?”
“I said probably, let’s talk about it after class Tuesday. I wanted to think about today and decide whether I want to see more of him.”
“I figure he didn’t do or say anything creepy, or you’d have already decided,” Jada inferred. “And he didn’t exactly sweep you off your feet, either?”
“Yeah, it was nice, but not romantic. I guess he just wanted to get to know me better before asking me out for real and it wasn’t a real date?”
“It sounds like a real date to me,” I said. “At least the part after you quit studying and started chatting and playing chess. Did you eat or drink while you were doing that?”
“Yeah, we got sodas.”
“Well, then.”
* * *
So the weeks passed until Halloween. Steph went on another date with Greg the following Friday, off-campus at a sit-down restaurant, and then another a couple of weeks later. She got Jada to venn her into something a little more exotic each time, though with more mobility than the octopus-taur she’d been when he first asked her out, and told us that Greg had venned into variant human bodies with extra or unusually structured arms or legs, unnatural skin colors, and so on. Jada and I cuddled a lot and spent a lot of time on the phone with Britt and Lauren, planning our Halloween costumes. We couldn’t do much preparation on our end, since I couldn’t go in a Venn machine, but during the weekly informal Venn club meetings, Jada tried out some early versions of her Halloween venn.
Back when I’d still been pretending to be inanimate, Jada had once invited Steph to watch something with her. Steph had demurred, saying she had tried watching some movies not long after she’d venned into a sighted body, but found them too confusing with the moving camera angles and frequent scene changes. Not long after my second plushie split, I asked her if she’d ever seen any old movies, like the ones from the 1930s and 40s my parents had raised me on. “They don’t mess around with camera angles or jump cuts as much as modern movies,” I said. “They might be less confusing.”
“I haven’t seen a lot of movies from that era either,” Jada said. “You want to suggest some stuff? Hopefully not super racist?”
So I’d made a list of some of my favorite old movies, and we poked around online to figure out where to find them and find more recommendations, including some silent movies, many of which were public domain and on the Internet Archive. We torrented some of the ones we couldn’t find on the Internet Archive or Jada’s streaming services, and gradually got Steph used to cinematic conventions in a more gradual way than by throwing her in at the deep end with a recent action movie like her parents had apparently done. After a while, Steph started watching some anime with us, too.
And we studied. Steph spent more time studying than Jada, but Jada was no slouch. I wasn’t auditing classes from inside Jada’s bag like I’d done during my months with Carmen, but I listened to the lectures that Steph had recorded on her phone, and I read both girls’ textbooks and the supplemental reading and Jada’s handwritten lecture notes. I read a lot faster than either of them, whether because I’d always spent more time reading as I grew up or because of my semi-animate form, I don’t know.
Now that I could use my claws to type, I would sometimes use Jada or Steph’s laptop when they weren’t using them, reading ebooks or Wikipedia articles or looking up books in the university library catalog that I could ask Jada or Steph to check out for me. I was following up on the topics Jada and Steph’s freshman classes were covering, trying to make sure I was as prepared as possible for my own freshman year, as well as reading other nonfiction in areas I thought I might major in — biology, ecology, paleontology, anthropology, history.
The Translator in Spite of Themself, which was only available from Smashwords and itch.io for a while, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format as well. It's a first contact portal fantasy from the point of view of a sapient portal, with gender-bendy elements.
My new short story, "Carpet-Bound," is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed stories by trans authors for $8.
