“So Joe was upset, and wanted my advice about what to do. I didn’t know any more about LGBT people than he did, at the time, and I didn’t give him the same advice I would now, but I hope I did sort of okay given what I knew then.

On Christmas morning, most of us slept a bit later than usual. I snuggled sleepily with Desiree until I needed to pee, then went to do my business, went back to the bedroom, and brought Desiree with me to the kitchen. Through the window, I saw Grandpa on the porch, and I saw he’d already made a pot of coffee, so I poured myself a cup and (Desiree still perched on my shoulder) went out to sit with him.

“Hey, Grandpa,” I said.

“Good morning, Lauren. — And Desiree,” he added, belatedly noticing Desiree on my shoulder. Desiree waved at him.

“Good morning, Mr. McNeill,” she said.

“Sleep well?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Y’all have got a really comfortable guest bed.” More comfortable than my futon back at the Ramseys’ house.

“Got any plans for today?”

“I was thinking about doing video chat with Jada and some of my other friends back home. I’ll give them more time to get up and get done with breakfast and family stuff, though. Most of them’ll be opening their presents this morning.”

“Yeah. Maybe wait until around noon or one. Your grandma and I usually go for a walk in the morning before it gets hot, but it looks like she’s sleeping late today. You want to join me?”

“Sure,” I said. “Desiree, do you want to come with us? I mean, I’d like you to, but...”

“Yeah, staying perched on your shoulder while you’re walking for half an hour is different from doing it while you walk around the house. I’ll stay here and watch kitten videos on your laptop.”

Soon Grandpa and I set out walking along the road they lived on, then turned onto the main road of their subdivision.

“So I noticed your dad called you ‘Lauren’ a couple of times last night,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said with a slight smile. “I wonder if he might be coming around... but probably not. He probably just wanted to avoid making a scene in front of y’all, like when he didn’t want to get into an argument with Mrs. Sproxton about the Venn machines. That’s progress, anyway; he didn’t care about making a scene when he got in a loud argument with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey in a crowded restaurant a few years ago...”

“I’d suggest you give him some more time,” he said, “as long as he’s not being any more rude than he has been the last few days. At least, I hope he hasn’t said anything awful to you when I wasn’t around?”

“No — he’s mostly just been avoiding me. But he hasn’t said anything mean like he did when I met with them back in April.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah.”

We walked a little further without saying anything, and then he said,

“This reminds me of something that happened back when your mother was around nine or ten. There was a guy I worked with at the engineering firm; he and his wife had a couple of kids, a girl about your mother’s age and a boy a few years older. Anyway, after I got to know Joe at work, we started hanging out together as couples, and our kids became friends too. Patrick, that was the boy’s name, wasn’t too stuck up to hang out with girls several years younger than he was.

“Anyway, after we’d known them for two or three years, Joe and I went out to lunch one day and he told me he’d just found out Patrick was gay. He’d caught him kissing another boy, a friend from school who’d come over to play video games.”

If Mom was about nine or ten at the time, this would have been in the mid-eighties. A bad time to get outed as gay. I would have held my breath if I hadn’t needed it to keep up with Grandpa’s pace.

“So Joe was upset, and wanted my advice about what to do. I didn’t know any more about LGBT people than he did, at the time, and I didn’t give him the same advice I would now, but I hope I did sort of okay given what I knew then. I said although it was wrong, and he should keep the boys separated and talk to his son about it, he shouldn’t go overboard with the punishment, because it wasn’t actually that bad compared to how horrified and disgusted people got about it. I told him I’d much rather my daughter kiss a girl than talk mean gossip about her or copy off of her test, though if I could have whatever I liked, I wouldn’t want her to do any of those things.”

I was conflicted. That wasn’t good, obviously, but it was a lot better than how Dad had reacted to me being trans, or how Grandpa Wallace probably would have reacted to a situation like that back in the eighties. I kept listening and nodded vaguely.

“So Joe paid some attention to my advice; he’d been thinking about sending Patrick to a military academy, and he decided against that, though he was harder on the boy than I would have been. Grounded him for a couple of months, if I remember right, in addition to not letting the other boy come over any more, and forbidding Patrick to hang out with him at school. That didn’t matter for long, because if I remember right, the other boy’s parents sent him to another school after they found out — I don’t know the details.

“Well, Joe and I both meant well, but that doesn’t excuse us. Grounding Patrick for a couple of months didn’t accomplish anything except make him try to hide his attraction to boys, and make him trust his parents less. There was another incident like that a year or two later — at least, only one that his father told me about; I’d guess there were more that Patrick made sure we never found out about. Joe grounded him for several months this time, and restricted what he could do while he was grounded more, and he thought that was that. But when Patrick got old enough to live on his own, he moved away and didn’t speak with his parents much for years after that.”

“Did he ever?” I asked.

“Yes, but not for a long time. Maybe ten or fifteen years? We weren’t as close to Joe and Sandra by then, since he’d left the company where we worked together and took a job out in Texas, and we only spoke with them once in a while, so I didn’t hear about it until a good while later.”

“Was that what started changing your mind about LGBT people? Or was it later?”

“I guess seeing what happened between Patrick and his parents was the start of it, yeah. But it wasn’t one big thing, it was several little things over the years. That whole thing with Patrick, plus getting to know a gay engineer at my next job, plus talking with Brenda’s sister about her lesbian daughter, and then having a good visit with Brenda’s niece when she came to Florida for a conference —”

“Wait, one of my cousins is a lesbian? Why did I not know this?”

“Hmm, I’m not sure. I’m guessing your parents didn’t want to say anything to you about it? And it just never came up when you came to visit us. I’m talking about Alyssa, your great-aunt Carolyn’s daughter.”

“I vaguely remember meeting Great-Aunt Carolyn at Grandma’s birthday party a few years ago, but I don’t think I’ve ever met Alyssa.”

“She lives out in California — some college town on the coast, I think. Not Palo Alto; what’s the name...? It’ll come to me later. Anyway, she’s a marine biologist and goes to conferences at various universities, and like I said, she had a conference to go to at the University of West Florida, and visited with us after the conference.”

I nodded. “I’d like to meet her. I guess I could ask her if she’s going to a conference in North Carolina anytime soon, and get a ride from somebody to go see her when she’s not busy with conference stuff.”

“Brenda can put you in touch with her, I expect. Or I might have her in my phone — let’s see...”

By the time we got back to the house, I had Alyssa’s phone number and email in my phone’s contacts, and the conversation had moved on to other, less intense topics. Everyone else was up when we got back.

Mom was fixing breakfast, and Grandma, Dad, Nathan and Desiree were sitting in the kitchen and chatting with her. I thought for a moment about staying out of the kitchen to avoid Dad, but, emboldened by the thought of Dad using my real name last night, I followed Grandpa into the kitchen and sat down with everyone else — at the opposite end of the table from Dad.

“Merry Christmas, everybody,” Grandpa said as we entered, and several of them said “Merry Christmas” in return.

I wondered why Desiree was in the kitchen with the others, rather than in my guest room watching videos on my laptop, but I didn’t bring it up just then. I was glad to see she seemed to be getting along well with the others when I wasn’t around. “Hey, Lauren,” she said as I sat down, and nuzzled my hand where I rested it on the table next to her. “Y’all have a nice walk?”

I stroked the fuzz on her back. “Yeah, we went about a mile and half west and back again.”

“We were talking about things that happened at Christmas years ago,” Grandma said. “Like when your mother was nine, and was so excited to have a present wrapped in She-Ra wrapping paper that she unfolded it instead of tearing it off, and hung it up in her room like a poster.”

I’d heard that story before several times, but I smiled anyway. “We should watch the new She-Ra show together sometime,” I said. “It’s really good.” I’d watched the first couple of episodes on one of my dates with Britt a few weeks earlier, and then a few more on my own here and there.

“I enjoyed it when I was nine, but I don’t know if I’d enjoy it now,” Mom said doubtfully.

“This one was written to appeal to adults as well as kids,” Desiree put in. “It’s not quite my kind of thing, but our friend Britt really loves it and so do a lot of people twice her age.”

“Maybe I’ll give it a try sometime.”

My new short fiction collection, Gender Panic and Other Stories, contains 253,948 words of transgender fiction: seven short stories, seven novelettes, one novella, and two short novels. Six of the stories (including both novels), 163,318 words, have never appeared online before. It can be found at:

• Smashwords (epub)
• itch.io (epub, pdf, and mobi)
• Amazon (Kindle)

Also, Unforgotten and Other Stories is now available on itch.io in a variety of formats as well as on Smashwords and Amazon.