It was early September — far enough into the school year that the teachers weren’t holding back on the homework, early enough that we still had some pretty nice weather. Which I was missing out on because I was sitting in my room doing homework, that Saturday morning when the world changed and only a few scattered people noticed.
part 1 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
It was early September — far enough into the school year that the teachers weren’t holding back on the homework, early enough that we still had some pretty nice weather. Which I was missing out on because I was sitting in my room doing homework, that Saturday morning when the world changed and only a few scattered people noticed.
The first inkling I had of it was when Mom called me and said, “Tyler, Andrew’s on the phone.”
I got up and went into the living room, where Mom was working on her quarterly taxes at the dining table. She handed me the landline phone. “Tell him you can’t hang out until you finish your homework,” she reminded me unnecessarily. I nodded and took the phone. Most kids my age had cellphones already — most kids my little sister’s age, for that matter — but not me or Sophia.
“Hi, Andrew, what’s up? I’ve got about another hour of homework before I can hang out, but then we can do whatever until suppertime.”
“Hurry it up,” he blurted, “and then get your butt over here to the library.”
“What? Why? I thought you were coming over after you got done there.”
He’d told me at school yesterday that he was going to get a ride into town with his brother, who had a weekend job as waiter at the Fisherman’s Cove downtown. He’d hang out at the library for a while and then walk to my house from there; we lived seven blocks from the library, an easy walk in this weather. (He had just turned sixteen after the school year started, and had a provisional driver’s license, but he didn’t have a car yet.)
“There’s something weird going on here,” he said. “I don’t know if I should even bother telling you on the phone, you won’t believe me... I’ll email you some photos. Just get over here as soon as you can, okay?” He hung up without waiting for a reply.
I procrastinated on the Geometry homework long enough to check my email. Andrew had sent several photos of a... big brown rectangular box, sitting out in front of the library. It was occupying some space that used to be lawn, accessible from the sidewalk connecting the different parts of the parking lot to the front door of the library. And there were several people crowded around it, looking at it. In the first photo, it was just a big box with no obvious features; there were some kind of markings in the middle of the wider face, but I couldn’t make them out. In the second, there were two big doors that had opened up in it, and a woman was stepping into one while another woman was peering into the other without stepping inside. I looked back at the first photo, and couldn’t see any seams or hinges where the doors would open.
The third photo showed a close-up of the markings in the middle of the broad face. There was a Venn diagram, with the intersection of all three sets glowing softly, and what looked like a slot. I couldn’t tell if it was intended to receive bills or coins or credit cards, or to print out photos or receipts or something, lacking any indicator of scale.
I couldn’t make head or tail of it. I thought about searching social media for posts about our town’s library, but decided the faster I finished my homework, the faster I could see the thing for myself.
Forty-eight minutes later, I was in the living room, saying, “I’m done, Mom. I’m fixing to go over to the library to meet Andrew.”
Sophia ran into the room. “You’re going to the library? I wanna go too.”
I rolled my eyes. I love my little sister, but sometimes I’d rather hang out with Andrew without her around. But Mom said, “I’ll take you later in the day, Sophia, after I finish this. Have you finished your homework?”
“Almost,” she pleaded.
“Finish it, and you can read or play games until we’re ready to go. Tyler, go ahead; be safe and have fun.”
“Bye, Mom. Bye, Sophia.” I was out the door like a shot before Sophia could wheedle Mom into changing her mind. I never could, but Sophia’s adorableness succeeded once in a while, and I didn’t want to risk this being one of those times.
In the twenty minutes it took me to walk to the library, I had a lot of time to think about what Andrew had meant, and what was up with that big box. You probably won’t believe me if I tell you that some of my guesses were surprisingly close to the truth; but I chalked those particular guesses up to wishful thinking and discounted them accordingly, so I was as surprised when I found out what was going on as anyone else who hadn’t been secretly reading transformation stories on the net ever since they figured out a way to circumvent the parental controls.
When I got to the library, I was surprised to see a couple of sheriff’s deputy cars in the lot. I could see the box over near the front door, and a couple of deputies standing by it; there were other people looking on, but not as many as there’d been in Andrew’s photos, and they were standing further off. I didn’t see Andrew. When I got close enough, I realized that the deputies were stringing “Police Line — Do Not Cross” tape around the machine.
“Stay back,” one of them said to me as I approached.
“What’s going on?”
“Members of the public are advised to avoid this thing. You can go around it to get to the library.”
I went in the library, figuring that was where Andrew must be, and looked around, first on the ground floor where the computer terminals and the reference books were, and then upstairs where the rest of the books were, but didn’t see him anywhere. I was about to go downstairs and look in the men’s room when a guy I didn’t recognize came up to me; he looked kind of like a jock, taller than me by six inches or more, and thirty pounds more muscular. He’d been talking in low voices with another guy a lot like him near the graphic novel shelf. Both guys were wearing T-shirts that had weird, abstract designs on them — not the kind of thing I associated with jocks.
“Hey, Tyler,” he said in a low voice, and I wondered who he was. I didn’t recognize him; our school had over 1200 students, and I didn’t know all of them, but I was sure I knew all the guys that tall who shared classes with me, plus a lot of my older brother Caleb’s friends and teammates. I noticed them for more than one reason.
“Yes?” I said.
“It’s me, Andrew.” I suddenly felt like my stomach was dropping out of my belly. “That’s Evan,” he said, gesturing to the other big guy, who came over toward us.
“Andrew Patton?” I said, gaping. “Evan Chastain?” Evan was a guy we hung out with at school sometimes, but he wasn’t a close friend like Andrew.
“Yeah,” Andrew said, grinning. “That thing out front changed us.”
“And it changed a bunch of other people,” Evan said in a somber tone. “And everything was going great until it killed somebody, and then the sheriff’s deputies showed up and shooed everyone away.”
“Killed someone?” I asked.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk and not have to whisper,” Andrew said. “Do you want to check something out before we go?” He and Evan both had a couple of books tucked under their arms.
“N-no, that can wait... let’s go.”
We walked downstairs and they tried to check out their books. I say “tried,” because when they pulled their wallets out of their pockets, they found that their library cards — and money, student IDs, and licenses — were all garbled; none of the text was in English or even the Latin alphabet, and the pictures on the money were weird. I thought about offering to check out Andrew’s books for him, but I didn’t want to pointedly snub Evan by not doing the same for him, and I didn’t know him well enough to be sure he wouldn’t saddle me with late fees or worse, lose or damage the books.
So we walked out of the library and saw that a county maintenance department truck had arrived, and some workmen were unloading a roll of chain-link fencing.
“Too bad,” Evan said. “If that thing were safer, it could help a lot of people.”
“Tell me what happened,” I demanded.
So Andrew told me how he’d arrived there that morning, before anybody but the librarians (his brother’s work shift started half an hour before the library opened), and found the machine. A couple of other people were looking at it, too, one of the librarians and the old guy who ran the antique store down the street from the library. Nobody knew what to make of it, but after they’d tried touching the machine in different spots, the old guy touched the center of the Venn diagram and a slot opened up like I’d seen in Andrew’s photo. Then he put in a quarter, and the Venn diagram vanished, replaced by several icons — you know all about them, but back then their meanings weren’t as obvious as they seem now. They tried pushing different buttons and by trial and error got the doors to open.
The old guy and the librarian went in to investigate, and the doors vanished, and Andrew was left standing there, wondering what was going on, for several minutes. Another librarian arrived, and the earliest library patrons, and some of them came over to look at the machine; Andrew told them what he knew. Then the doors opened and two much younger, hotter-looking people came out. They told people what they’d seen and done, and before long other people were trying it out.
Andrew wanted to use it to buff himself up, but they’d told him you couldn’t design your own new body; you designed a new body for the person in the other booth, and they’d design yours. So he wanted to try it out with somebody he knew well, and took out his phone and called me. But Evan arrived at the library around then, and they tried it out together as soon as Andrew could tell him what was up.
Then, not long after they’d beefed each other up, a couple of women went in the machine and only one came out. She looked into the other booth and screamed. Andrew, Evan and the other spectators crowded around and saw a little doll lying on the floor of the booth, maybe six inches high, proportioned like an adult — kind of like a Barbie, but without that trademarked face or those ridiculous proportions.
Everyone was scared to use the booth anymore after that, and somebody must have called the sheriff’s department, because one deputy and then another showed up a few minutes later and started questioning everyone. After they’d answered the deputy’s questions, Andrew and Evan went inside and browsed while waiting for me.
By the time Andrew and Evan finished telling me all that, we’d walked across the railroad tracks and Main Street to the coffee shop, got something to drink, and sat down. I had to pay for their drinks because of the wallet fiasco.
“What all changes did you see people make to each other?” I asked.
“Mostly they were old folks making each other young again,” Evan said. “An overweight guy and his girlfriend made each other skinnier and hotter, and the girl had ginormous boobs after she came out, and she was chewing her boyfriend out for making them so big. But one time a couple of guys went in and one of them came out looking like a girl... judging from his reaction, I think he really was a girl. He didn’t stay like that for long; after yelling at his buddy for a while, he went back in with somebody else and got changed back into a guy, although he didn’t look much like he did before.”
And it could change me into a girl, too, I realized — if it didn’t kill me by turning me into a doll. I’d take that risk, but the sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t let me.
The fact that the machine was being fenced off even as we spoke, and that Evan was there, made it an easy decision to once again put off telling Andrew I was probably trans. I’d started to suspect it a couple of years earlier, and I was pretty sure by then, but I hadn’t told anybody yet, except for some friends I’d made online.
Another thing I hadn’t told Andrew before, that hadn’t ever been relevant to our friendship until now, was that I was attracted to guys. But now Andrew and Evan were both seriously hot, which was making it hard to concentrate on what they were saying.
“Hey,” Andrew said when they’d finished telling me about all the people they’d seen transformed, “let’s see if anybody online knows anything about it. I posted those photos I sent you on Reddit a couple of hours ago; lemme check that thread...”
But his phone, when he pulled it out, showed the same kind of weird foreign language text and abstract icons that were on his T-shirt and the cards and bills in his wallet. Evan’s phone was the same.
“Look it up on your phone, would you?” Evan said to me.
I blushed as I said, “Ah... Mom and Dad won’t let me have a cellphone until I’m sixteen.”
“Seriously?” Evan said. “That sucks.” Andrew, who already knew about my parents' strictness, just nodded.
We wound up going back to my house and using my laptop to check for replies on Andrew’s Reddit thread and look for other news about the machine. That necessitated telling Mom and Sophia who these two strange guys were, and about the machine and most of what Andrew and Evan had told me.
Mom scolded Andrew roundly for getting into such a machine without knowing anything about it, where it came from, who made it or how it worked. She didn’t scold Evan directly, because she’d never met him before, but she gave the impression he was just as dumb as Andrew. When we finally escaped to my room and looked up the Reddit thread Andrew had started, we found over a hundred replies; most of them were random speculation, but a few later on featured photos other people had taken of machines like it — a couple in indoor malls, one on a courthouse lawn, one in a park.
They’d all appeared overnight in small towns around the size of ours or a little bigger in at least four countries (by the next day we knew it was a lot more). The redditors told about how they and other people had transformed each other and what had followed. Mostly people started out making each other younger and better-looking, then some started making more drastic changes — there were photos of furries that skeptics claimed were expert cosplay, but were supposedly transformed people; there were people with blue or purple skin and women with three or four breasts; there were dogs and wild animals like bears and wolves, posing calmly for the camera in a mall or in front of a courthouse, and videos of animals doing arithmetic for the camera to prove they were transformed people. And there were several sex changes. But eventually, the authorities stepped in and cordoned off the machines. In at least one case, it had been precipitated by someone getting changed into a pair of underwear.
Nobody had any idea where they came from. A bunch of people pointed out that the technology was way beyond anything we could do, or were anywhere close to being able to do. They talked about the lack of any text on the outside or inside interfaces, and the way money and ID cards got garbled in the process of transformation, and said the makers of the machines didn’t speak any Earth language. On the other hand, the green and red buttons inside had meaning not just for Earth, but for a specific range of Earth cultures. Some drew the obvious conclusion that aliens had introduced them, others thought it must be humans from the future or from a more advanced alternate timeline. Almost all the speculations you’ve heard in the last few years, we saw in that one Reddit thread six hours after the first machines were discovered.
It was hard to keep the disappointment off my face as I thought about the chance I’d missed. Andrew and Evan, of course, thought I was regretting not getting to bulk up into a six-foot hundred and seventy-pound stud, and I didn’t disabuse them of the notion. Finally, after we’d overdosed on Reddit and Twitter and Tumblr (hashtag #vennmachine showed up pretty early, along with some others based on proposed names that didn’t catch on), we played video games for a while, and Andrew and Evan borrowed our landline to call home and tell their parents where they were and what had happened. That led to a whole mess with them trying to prove to their parents who they were that I’m not going to get into here. My big brother Caleb got home from football practice in the middle of that, and my dad not much later.
I fell asleep that night scheming about what I could do with a set of wirecutters and a trusted accomplice. My choices basically came down to Sophia or Andrew. I was pretty sure Andrew would be okay with me being trans; I’d have to tell him after I transformed, anyway, if I didn’t tell him first in order to get his help to transform. I hadn’t told him yet because... well, I was a coward. And I’d talked to people online who told me that friends they’d known and trusted for years had turned on them, said and done the most horrible things, when they came out. I’d been figuring I couldn’t actually do anything about it until I was eighteen and not living at home, at the soonest, so there was no urgency about telling my friends. But now — I had to tell somebody in order to change, and then I would have to tell everybody why I’d changed.
Sophia would be delighted to have a sister. She’d complained often enough, when we were younger, about only having brothers, especially after Dad tore me a new asshole one time for playing dolls with her. But even though the neighborhood between our house and the library had some of the lowest crime in the area, I wasn’t sure I wanted to take my little sister out after midnight and make her an accomplice to breaking and entering. Taking the risk for myself was one thing, but I didn’t want to risk Sophia getting hurt or arrested.
Caleb was obviously not an option, nor were Mom or Dad. I thought Mom might be slightly more likely to be okay with me being trans than Dad or Caleb — but I wasn’t anywhere near sure enough to tell her, or ask for her help breaking the law to get at the machine that could give me the girl body I needed.
As it turned out, all my scheming was unnecessary.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Since the prospect of getting my new body had come closer, my intermittent dysphoria had gotten worse.
part 2 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
The next day, after we got home from church and lunch (we usually ate out after church), I checked the news to see if anybody had learned anything more about those machines. And there was almost nothing. None of the major news outlets were reporting on them, only a couple of tabloids. Our local newspaper’s website had a short article about sheriff’s deputies fencing off an illegally installed, unsafe vending machine at the library, and that the county would be filing charges against the manufacturer when they were identified — but nothing about the fact that it was a transformation booth with technology decades or centuries too advanced for us.
The people on the new /r/vennmachines subreddit were talking about a government conspiracy to cover the things up, which seems pretty plausible — the claim that none of the reputable news outlets thought the stories were plausible enough to investigate doesn’t hold up. On the other hand, nobody made any attempt to censor the forum or social media posts about the machines, either.
Over a hundred of the machines had popped up in small towns like ours all over the world, and nearly all had been cordoned off by the authorities by the end of the day Saturday. And what’s more, some of the first transformations had worn off, the people who’d pressed the icons we now know to represent a third of a day, or a day, having changed back to their normal selves when the time expired. That strengthened the theories people had put forward on Saturday about the meanings of those Earth, Moon, and Sun icons.
So, I figured, if I broke into our machine at night and got Sophia or Andrew to change me into a girl, I’d have to do it again a year later, and a year after that... We didn’t know yet that you could press the duration icon you picked up to three times.
People on the trans teens chatroom I frequented were talking excitedly about the machines, too; none of the regulars had been lucky enough to get access to one of them before the authorities closed them off, but some of the older members were already talking about driving as far as necessary and getting past whatever security the local authorities had set up to use them.
Monday morning, Caleb gave me and Sophia a ride to school as usual. We took the bus home on days when he had football practice after school. I didn’t have homeroom with Andrew or Evan, but I did share my first class of the day (Biology) with Andrew, and he wasn’t there when class started. He arrived about twenty minutes into class and handed a note to Mr. Collins, who stared at him in astonishment for a moment and then said, “Ah... be seated, Mr. Patton. — As I was saying, eukaryotes aren’t just a kind of single-celled life; fungi, plants and animals are also eukaryotes...”
I didn’t get a chance to talk to him until after class, and then only for a couple of minutes, because we needed to go in different directions for our next classes. “Why’d you get here late?” I asked him.
“Trying to prove to the school administration who I was,” he said. “It was a lot harder than convincing Mom and Dad. Evan and his mom were there, too. I wish we’d exchanged phone numbers with the other people who were there when we transformed, but oh well... I finally suggested they call the library and talk to some of the librarians who changed, or saw people change, and they did, and finally let me attend classes as myself provisionally until they have more evidence.”
By lunchtime, there were rumors going around school about Andrew and Evan. Evan joined Andrew and me for lunch, as did his closest friends, who usually sat with him at another table.
“Convincing the admin and the teachers that I’m me was a hassle,” Andrew said as we dug into the cafeteria’s approximation of food, “but it’s been worth it. You had any girls notice you who didn’t before, Evan?”
“At least four,” he said with a cocky grin. “How about you?”
As Andrew listed the girls he’d caught staring at him and whispering about him, and the girls who’d actually come up and talked to him between classes, I silently wished I were one of those girls. Before long, we had other people coming over to our table to talk with Andrew and Evan — girls who didn’t know who they were but saw we had a couple of hot new guys, people who’d heard the rumors about their transformations and wanted to know if they were true, people who wanted to get rocking new bods for themselves and were disappointed to hear how the Sheriff’s Department had fenced off the weird machine at the library.
But Tuesday morning, half a dozen other students and one teacher showed up changed. Some just better-looking versions of themselves, but a couple had weirder changes: there was a guy with ears like an elf or Vulcan and a girl with green skin she said was photosynthetic. And they told us that a new machine, just like the first, had shown up outside the library — just on the opposite side of the front doors.
“Hey,” Andrew said to me, “that’s great news! Let’s get you over there right after school, before the sheriff’s deputies fence that one off too.”
“They’ve probably already done it by now,” I said, trying not to get my hopes up even while my heart pounded at the thought of finally getting the body I needed — and the prospect of telling Andrew what I wanted him to change me into. “But yeah, let’s go over there as soon as we can, just in case.”
Andrew didn’t have a new cellphone yet, but he borrowed a phone from Evan’s friend Ian to call his dad. He asked if he could ride home with me and get a ride home later, but no dice. Caleb didn’t have football practice, so Sophia and I rode home with him. I told them what I’d heard about the kids who’d transformed with the newly-appeared machine.
“Yeah, some of them are in my classes,” Caleb said. “I’d kind of like to try it out, but I’d better check with the coach first. I’ll bet once the athletic association finds out about that thing, they probably won’t let anyone who’s used it play. Seems like cheating, kind of like steroids.”
“And there’s that lady who got turned into a doll!” Sophia exclaimed. “Don’t, Tyler! It’s dangerous!”
“That reminds me,” I said. “I forgot to ask Andrew if he knew what happened to that doll-lady. Did the sheriff’s deputies take her away or did her friend turn her over to her relatives to bury, or what?”
“Way to be morbid, Tyler,” Caleb commented, and I realized I was freaking Sophia out, so I shut up.
After the way Sophia had reacted when I mentioned the machine, I didn’t think I wanted to try to talk her into going to the library and changing me that afternoon. And Andrew’s parents wouldn’t let him come over again until Friday, at the earliest. So I bided my time; I figured if the sheriff’s department hadn’t fenced off the new machine by now, they probably wouldn’t do it before the weekend, either. Or they would, and whoever was making and installing those machines would put in another one, at the library or somewhere else in town.
But since the prospect of getting my new body had come closer, my intermittent dysphoria had gotten worse. Looking down as I peed or showered and knowing I could be rid of that thing so quickly and easily, without needing a letter from a psychologist or tens of thousands of dollars or my parents' permission... that made it harder to bear. All I needed was to trust someone. I couldn’t wait until the weekend. Wednesday afternoon, after I’d helped Sophia with her English homework, I said: “Can I tell you something and ask you not to tell Mom and Dad or Caleb?”
“Of course,” she said. “Do you need me to help you find out if a girl you like likes you or something?”
I smiled wanly. “No, that’s not it. It’s really important that you don’t tell anybody. It’s not something bad, but Dad would think it is, and I think probably Mom too...”
Her eyes went wide. “Are you gay? Like Austin Hoffman?” He wasn’t the only out gay guy at our school, but he was probably the best known — a track star who’d gone to state competitions two years in a row.
“Not exactly. Do you know what ‘transgender’ means?”
She nodded. “So you want to be a girl...? Oh! You want me to go to that machine at the library with you and change you, don’t you?”
I started to say something, but she kept going.
“But what if it turns you into a doll or something instead? You’d be dead and it would be my fault! I’d go to jail, but that wouldn’t be the worst part, it would be losing my favorite brother!”
“Listen, it’s okay,” I said. “People have been figuring out more about how they work. There was a guy in Fort Dodge, Iowa that got turned into a little plastic figurine of a dwarf a couple of days ago, and everybody thought he was dead, like the woman here who changed into a doll. But then yesterday he suddenly changed back into himself, like a lot of other people have done. I’m sure the woman who changed into a doll is going to change back, too — after a month or a year, whichever button she or her friend pushed, or maybe sooner if whoever has her puts her in the machine again and goes in the other booth to change her back. And you can do that, too; if you accidentally change me into the wrong thing — if you make me a pretty boy or a grown woman or a kitten or a doll, we can just go back in the machine and you can change me again and again until you get it right. A girl the same age as me, who looks like she’s your big sister.” My eyes were tearing up as I visualized what I hoped to look like. “Please?”
“Okay,” she started, but then she said: “How do you know all that stuff about the plastic figurine changing back into a guy is true? It’s just people talking on the Internet.”
“Yeah, but that’s the only source for this stuff, because the government won’t let the media cover it.”
“I guess,” she said. “I’d feel safer if we’d heard it directly from somebody we knew.” Her eyes lit up. “Oh, we can be scientific about it! We can get a mouse at the pet store and turn it into a catnip mouse or something and wait and see if it turns back —”
“Unfortunately, no,” I said. “A couple of people have tried transforming animals, and it doesn’t work.”
“Do you believe everything people say on the Internet? Scientists are supposed to check each other’s results, like trying to do the same experiment other scientists did and see if they get the same results.” She was better at science classes than me.
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s do that. But I think we can test it cheaper than buying a mouse at the pet store.”
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“For science!” Sophia exclaimed, and went into the other booth.
part 3 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Since Caleb was at football practice and Mom and Dad had told us they’d be back late and we should fix our own supper, Sophia and I didn’t waste any time. Less than an hour later, we were standing in front of the new machine (the old one still had chain-link fencing around it). There was a sign posted next to it:
“Mynatt County Health Department does not recommend the use of this machine. This machine is under surveillance; attempts to coerce others into the machine, or use the machine for purposes of fraud, will be prosecuted under criminal statutes.”
“I guess they decided there wasn’t any point in trying to fence this one off,” I said, looking around to see if I could spot the cameras.
“Yeah,” Sophia said. “How do you start it?”
I pushed the button at the center of the Venn diagram and put a penny in the slot, then selected the icon with the one-third wedge of the Earth, which we’d heard would make the transformation last eight hours. The doors opened, and I set down the jar with holes in the lid we’d used to catch lightning bugs earlier in the year; just before leaving home, we’d dug up an earthworm from the back flower bed and put it in the jar.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. The door didn’t close behind the worm.
“For science!” Sophia exclaimed, and went into the other booth. It instantly closed behind her before I could follow, but the door to the booth with the worm jar didn’t close. I went over and looked into that booth, but didn’t go inside or even lean my head in; I saw at an angle the screen or window Andrew had described, and Sophia standing in the other booth, looking perplexed.
“Can you hear me?” I called.
“Yeah. I don’t see any pictures of the worm or the jar either one, like Andrew said he saw pictures of alternate Evans.”
“Try talking — saying what you want it to change into.”
“Mouse... lightning bug... preying mantis... rubber bait worm... no, I’m still not getting any pictures.”
“Do you see any other buttons?”
“There’s a green button and a red button. That’s all.”
“Uh... try the green one?”
“Nothing’s happening.”
“Give it a minute or so, I guess... but I don’t think it’s going to do anything.”
“Let me see if there are any hidden buttons.” She started touching the screen wall in various places, then the other walls; I lost sight of her as she wasn’t always visible from my awkward angle. Finally she gave up and pressed the red button; her door opened.
About then, a straight couple in their mid-twenties walked up to the machine.
“You kids just starting or just finished?” the guy asked.
“We’re doing an experiment,” Sophia said, and I added: “And we got a negative result. We’ll let you use it... Just a minute.” I dragged Sophia out of her booth and retrieved the earthworm jar from the other side. As soon as I removed the jar, the doors closed.
“Who did you change into a worm?” the guy asked, looking morbidly fascinated.
“Nobody,” I said. “We were testing if the machine would work on animals, and it’s still a worm — the machine wouldn’t even give us the option to change it into something.”
“Yeah,” Sophia said. “We independently verified some other scientists' results. I’m going to write a paper for school about it.” That was news to me; was she making up something to justify what we were doing, or had she just decided to do a paper on the machines?
“Good for you,” the woman beamed. “Let’s go, honey,” and she pushed the center of the Venn diagram to get the money slot.
“So,” I said to Sophia as they pushed the Earth button and went in, “if you want to write a paper for school about these things, you’ll need to do more than one experiment, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And I’ll need to do a review of the, um, prior literature on the subject.”
“So,” I said, “I’ll let you use me as your experimental subject as long as you change me into a fifteen-year-old girl at the end of each series of experiments.”
She looked at me speculatively for a moment. “Deal,” she said, and we shook on it.
So we waited another minute or two and then the booths opened again, and a couple of anthropomorphic cats came out. The girl was nearly human, with cat ears and a tail, but the guy was a lot more catlike, with fur, claws, whiskers, and vertical pupils. They immediately started arguing about what cat-people were supposed to look like as they walked to their car.
I put another penny in the machine and pressed the sun icon; then, on a whim, I pushed it again and again — I would have kept pressing it if it hadn’t disappeared after the third press. Three years, maybe? I’d take it. “Okay,” I said, “I think you’d better just turn me into a girl now so we can be home before Mom and Dad and Caleb. We can do experiments on the weekend.”
“If Mom and Dad ever let us near the library again after this,” she said. “You’ll be in more trouble for being a girl than we would be for coming home late.”
“Do you want me to tweak you a little too, while we’re in there?” I asked.
“Maybe next time,” she said. “I’ll wait and see how long you get grounded for before I let you change me.”
“It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission,” I said. “Come on.”
The door closed moments after I entered, and I saw Sophia through the screen or window looking down at the interface in front of her. I couldn’t see what she was seeing, of course; I saw a bunch of circles with pictures of Sophia in them. In some she was older, or younger, or darker-skinned, or chubby or athletic, or simply wearing different clothes. I was careful not to touch them, although I could have done so without mishap as long as I didn’t then press the green button.
“I don’t see any pictures of you as a girl,” she said. “How — oh, it suddenly brought up a bunch of girl pictures when I said that.”
“Try to pick the one that looks the most like me,” I said, “even if it’s not the prettiest, as long as it looks feminine enough. I want people to know I’m me.”
“Okay,” she said, reaching out and touching the screen before her, and then looking up at me. “Oh! You already — I thought I had to press the green button to make you actually transform? How does it feel?”
“What? Oh, no, you haven’t changed me yet. What do I look like to you?”
“A girl just slightly shorter than you were. Same hair and eyes and skin, not much different besides being a girl, clothes similar but different — your T-shirt’s blue and looks newer, and your jeans are tailored for a girl. And the little bubbles with small pictures are showing variations of that girl you.”
“Yeah, that whole window-screen is going to look like what it would change me into if you pressed the green button now. Don’t do it yet, please. Is the girl you see just as overweight as I am now?”
“Uh, yeah, almost.”
“Okay, look for a picture that’s skinnier, but without being too different in the face, okay? Except I’d like to get rid of the acne if you can do that without making me unrecognizable.”
“All right...”
She touched one bubble and then studied the new ones that replaced it. “Hmm. This one looks better, but... is shorter okay? And you’re gonna have different clothes.”
“As long as it’s not, like, dwarfism? A few inches shorter would be fine.”
She touched another bubble and another, and then said, “I think this one looks good. You ready?”
“I trust your judgment,” I said, and an instant later I felt different.
Better.
Wonderful.
The green button on my side started disappearing, waning like the moon going from full to new over the course of about a minute, until it finally vanished and the doors opened. I was bouncing in place while I waited, looking down at myself and wanting to touch myself but knowing Sophia was right there looking through the window at me in awe. I did run my fingers over my face, not finding any pimples or blackheads.
I rushed out, grabbing Sophia as she emerged in the biggest hug I’d given anybody since I was a little kid. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” I squeed. I realized I was crying, and wiped the tears away as I let her go and stepped back.
“Wow,” she said, looking at me. “I think you’re shorter than me now?”
I’d been short for my age as a boy, barely taller than Sophia despite being a year older. “Yeah, I think so. You didn’t give me heels, did you?” I looked down. Sneakers, similar to the ones I’d been wearing but in pastel green and yellow. My outfit was not that different from what I’d worn before, jeans and a T-shirt, but my old, ratty church camp T-shirt had been replaced by a light green shirt with swirling abstract designs in a range of purples and pinks. The neckline was lower than on a boy’s shirt, though not enough to show cleavage.
“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe we can go again, and you can just pick ones that look the same physically but with different clothes until you find a nice outfit?”
“I’d like to,” she said, “but we need to get home.”
“Yeah, you’re right.”
Walking home as a girl was simultaneously wonderful and nerve-wracking. It was wonderful to feel the way my body moved, the way my hips swung and my breasts wobbled slightly in the bra the machine had outfitted me with. It fit perfectly, but I knew it wouldn’t have any kind of tag indicating its size. Everything felt so right.
And yet I knew I might be facing the worst hours of my life when Mom and Dad came home. Dad was going to freak out, and Mom would be more reasonable only by comparison. Caleb wouldn’t like it, either, I was pretty sure, but I thought I could handle Caleb okay if it were just him.
Tomorrow at school probably wouldn’t be much fun, either...
Sophia thankfully distracted me from the dark turn my thoughts were taking by saying, “So, um, have you decided on a girl name yet?”
“Meredith,” I said, savoring the sound of it. I’d never said it out loud before.
Sophia smiled. “That’s a pretty name. But... don’t take it the wrong way if I only call you Meredith when Mom and Dad aren’t around, okay?”
That hurt a little, but I understood. “Yeah, that makes sense. No sense in both of us getting grounded for months, if we can help it.”
“They’re gonna figure out I helped you,” she pointed out.
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Do you want me to cover for you?”
“How?”
“I’ll tell them I got somebody else to change me... I don’t know... somebody from school, somebody they don’t know.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I’m not gonna ask you to lie for me. They’re gonna find out I’m using the machine if I manage to do this science project like I want to, anyway.”
Before long, we were home. Neither the van nor Caleb’s car were in the driveway, only Dad’s car, which had been there when we got home.
“I’m hungry,” Sophia said. “I’m going to start fixing supper. But if you want to go to the bathroom and check out your new body, go ahead.”
“I won’t be long,” I promised. I went into the hall bathroom that I shared with Caleb and Sophia and looked at myself in the mirror.
I could still recognize myself easily enough; my eyes, skin and hair were the same colors and my facial features looked kind of like my old ones, though without the acne or acne scars, but I was a lot slenderer, and that was definitely a girl’s face. My breasts were modest, but they were the right size for that girlish torso. I took off my T-shirt and got a better look for a few moments, but didn’t take off my bra or jeans just then. When I did, it was going to take a while, and I needed to help Sophia with supper.
We were about halfway through eating when Caleb came home from football practice.
“Hi, Sophia,” he said. “Who’s your friend?”
She looked a question at me, and I said: “Hi, Caleb. I’m Tyler, but I’m going by Meredith now.”
“What the fuck?” he blurted. He’d picked up the habit of swearing from his buddies on the football team, and he tried not to swear at home because Mom and Dad always tore into him for it, but I didn’t blame him just then. “You used that machine, didn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Huh. Do you —” He glanced at Sophia and seemed to think twice about what he was going to say. “Never mind. I... this is just too weird. I’m gonna go to my room.”
He didn’t come out of his room again for a good while.
We’d finished supper, put away the leftovers, and almost finished loading the dishwasher when Mom and Dad came home.
“Did you find anything cool?” Sophia said, walking into the living room as soon as we heard the front door open. I stayed in the kitchen and kept loading the dishwasher, but I could hear them talking.
“Yeah, we got a first edition Dr. Seuss and several mid-seventies issues of Life,” Dad said. Mom and Dad run a home business where they buy underpriced books and antiques at thrift stores, estate sales, yard sales and so forth and sell them on eBay or Amazon. “And we bought groceries on the way home. Tell Tyler and Caleb to help bring them in. Did you get all your homework done?”
“Yeah,” Sophia said. “Tyler helped me with the participles.”
I put the last plate in the dishwasher, then straightened my shoulders and turned around. Time to face the music.
Going into the living room was a momentary anticlimax, because Mom and Dad weren’t there; they must have gone on into the spare bedroom where they kept most of the stuff they had for sale. I continued through the front door to the van and grabbed two bags of groceries.
Coming back toward the front door, I passed Caleb and Sophia coming out to get a load. “Good luck, bro,” Caleb muttered. “You’re gonna need it,” which was better than the way he’d reacted earlier. Maybe I’d misjudged him? And then I walked in the door and was face to face with Mom and Dad.
“Excuse me,” Mom said. “I don’t think we’ve met. I appreciate you helping us with the groceries, but Sophia’s not supposed to invite friends over when we’re not here —”
“Hi, Mom and Dad. It’s me, Tyler.”
Both of them stared at me wordlessly for a long moment, and I broke the silence by saying: “What about if I go put this stuff in the freezer before it melts?”
“What did you — you used that machine, didn’t you?” Mom said. “I thought they’d fenced it off.”
“There’s a —” I began, but Dad finally found his missing words, and roared:
“Why would you do such a thing? Even using that thing at all, but much less — was that deliberate, or an accident? After it killed that poor idiot —”
“She’s not dead,” I started, and he yelled “Don’t interrupt!”
“Justin,” Mom said, “let’s finish putting the groceries away and then have a family council.”
Dad took a deep breath and then another, and said: “Fine.”
When I started heading for the kitchen, I realized that Caleb and Sophia had come in behind me and heard most of my exchange with Mom and Dad. I put the frozen okra and Lima beans in the freezer and the other stuff in the pantry, and went back for another load. Less than five minutes later, we were all sitting around the living room, and Dad said: “All right. Explain what happened and why.”
I nerved myself and said, “I went to the library after Sophia and I had finished our homework, and used the new machine to change into a girl. And I —”
“How did you get past the fence?” Dad interrupted.
“There’s a new machine, about ten feet from the one they fenced off. It’s still accessible, but they put up a camera, I guess so people couldn’t use it to pretend to be somebody else and take all the money out of their bank account or something.”
“Who else changed with you?” Mom asked. “Andrew said you can only use it in pairs, right?”
“It takes two people to use it,” Sophia put in, “but they don’t both have to change. One person can change one other person or two people can change each other, and Tyler didn’t change me. And we tested it on a worm, but —”
“Never mind the worm,” Dad said. “Tyler, why would you do such a thing?”
This was it. Back before the machines appeared, when I’d thought about maybe telling Mom and Dad and Caleb and Sophia about this someday, probably after I was eighteen and not living at home anymore, I’d figured I would lead up to it gradually, reminding them about incidents from my childhood that I later looked back on and realized were clues I might be trans, and then telling them how I found out being transgender was a thing, and how I gradually suspected I might be, and figured out I probably was... but at this point, when they’d already seen me as a girl, there was no point in that. “I’m transgender,” I said, and waited for the inevitable explosion.
Dad started to bluster something incoherent, but Mom put a hand on his knee and managed to calm him down enough for her to say, “What makes you think that?”
So then I went into the childhood incidents and all the other stuff I’d originally planned to lead into it with. I couldn’t get very far without Mom or Dad commenting on those incidents, in some cases saying they didn’t remember them, in others saying they didn’t see why that proved I was really a girl.
For instance: “Your father probably overreacted to you playing dolls with Sophia,” Mom said, “but it’s normal and okay for you to humor your little sister when she asked you to play with her. You were just being a good brother.”
“He was almost ten!” Dad said — it wasn’t quite loud enough for me to say “yelled.”
So that went on for a while, and the tea I’d drunk with supper caught up with me, and I said, “I need to use the restroom.”
“Come right back,” Dad said.
I got up to go and Sophia called: “Wait!”
“What is it?” I asked, turning.
She got up and came over to me, whispering in my ear: “Wipe front to back.”
“Thanks,” I said.
When I got back, Mom and Dad had been looking stuff up on his laptop and her tablet, and Mom said: “It says here that a lot of people who think they’re transgender are really suffering from depression or some other mental problem. Are you feeling depressed, Tyler? You know you can talk to us about that.”
Yeah, Mom, you’re really making me glad I told you. “I was,” I said. “Not as bad as a lot of trans kids, but sometimes, off and on... not anymore, though. Not since I got the right body.”
“You can’t assume this has fixed your depression,” Mom pointed out, “especially when it’s just been a couple of hours and you said your depression was intermittent.” She was right for once, but I wanted to argue with her anyway. “I think the machine causes some kind of temporary euphoria — at least I hope it’s temporary. The way Andrew and Evan were acting Saturday...”
“I’ve hardly found anything reliable about that machine,” Dad said, sounding even more frustrated than he’d been all evening. “I keep turning up obvious pieces of fiction — most of them indecent —” (I could tell he was trying to avoid saying “porn”) “— that don’t match what you’ve said about it, and some things that might be reports of people using a machine like the ones at our library, but might be stories written in a more journalistic style.”
“What search terms are you using? I haven’t seen any general agreement on what to call them, but a lot of people are calling them ‘Venn machines,’ or ‘transformation booths,’ or ‘trust booths.’”
“I get ‘transformation booth,’” Mom said, “but why ‘Venn machine’ or ‘trust booth’?”
“Because it’s got a big Venn diagram on the front,” Sophia said, and I added: “And because you have to trust the other person to turn you into what you asked them to, and they have to trust you to change them how they want, or not change them if they don’t want it.”
“I wonder if the intersecting circles mean the same thing to the people that built them as they do to us,” Sophia mused, “and if so, what are the three sets?”
People will tell you that the three sets are people you trust, people who trust you, and people who are trustworthy, as if that’s Gospel truth. But nobody really knows. That’s a plausible theory, but there are others; my favorite is that they’re people who are mature and in their right mind (people the machine will allow to use it), people with the courage to change, and people with at least one friend they trust. And maybe, for the machine’s creators, interlocking circles symbolize something completely unrelated to set theory.
“We don’t know anything about those machines,” Dad said as he typed in some of those search terms, “who made them, or how they put them up where they did without anybody noticing, or how they work. But we do know they’re not safe — that sometimes they turn people into inanimate objects instead of giving them a different human body! That could have happened to you, Tyler! We could have lost you!”
“It’s not that bad,” I said. “The changes wear off after a while —”
“When is this going to wear off?” Mom asked.
“Three years. I pressed the sun button three times.”
“Three years!” Dad exclaimed in horror, and Sophia added: “We don’t know for sure. We just know that people who pressed the Earth button once changed back after a day, and most people figure the moon and sun buttons mean a month or a year.”
“And it wears off even if you change into something inanimate?” Mom asked skeptically, and I told them about the guy in Iowa who’d turned into a gaming minifig for a day and was none the worse for wear when he changed back.
Dad added “Fort Dodge, Iowa” to his search terms, and I think Mom did too, because they were soon engrossed in reading. Us kids didn’t say anything. Sophia reached over and squeezed my hand, and I squeezed hers back.
Finally Dad looked up from his laptop and said, “Not only do transformations into inanimate objects wear off after a certain time, but you can turn someone back immediately just by putting them back in the machine by themselves. So since the main risk we were worried about isn’t an issue... I think we should use the machine to change Tyler back. What do you think, Erin?”
My heart sank.
“I’d like to do a little more research,” Mom said. “But probably so. Tomorrow before school, or more likely later tonight.”
“Please,” I said, horror-struck. “Don’t make me change back!”
“You can’t,” Sophia suddenly spoke up. “Remember that sign outside the booth, Tyler? It said it was illegal to force somebody to go in the booth and change.”
“Not for a parent to undo a change their child made without permission,” Dad said. “That wouldn’t make sense. Besides, the city or county couldn’t have passed an ordinance about it that fast, right?”
“The city council meets on Tuesdays,” Mom said, “but they have to announce a proposed new ordinance at least two weeks before the meeting where it’s voted on to let members of the public comment on it. The county commission has similar rules. When did the new machine appear?”
“Sometime Monday,” Caleb volunteered. That was the first thing he’d said. “Some seniors I know got changed Monday after school and came to school with new bodies Tuesday. Some of them were back to normal today, others were still looking different.”
“So whatever they’re proposing, it can’t be in effect yet,” Dad said. “I’ll check if there’s a proposed ordinance on the city or county website. Erin, what about if you keep looking up stuff about people who changed into inanimate objects. I’m going to the city’s website...”
He couldn’t find anything relevant there, or on the county or local newspaper’s site. Eventually, from some documents that were leaked a few years later, we found out that the Federal government had quietly advised local and state governments not to pass special laws relating to the Venn machines yet, not until more was known about them, but to prosecute crimes involving them under ordinary statutes of assault (forcing someone into a booth) or fraud (impersonating someone or disguising yourself to escape prosecution for a crime). The public process of debating new laws would just draw more attention to the machines and get more people to use them, so the theory went.
After Mom and Dad had been silently reading for a couple of minutes, Caleb said, “May I be excused? I hadn’t finished my homework — I only got home from practice less than an hour ago.”
“Sure,” Dad said, “go ahead. Tyler and Sophia, you stay here,” he added as I opened my mouth but before I could say anything.
So we sat there waiting for them to do their research and decide if it was safe to force me to change back, and also what our punishment should be. After what seemed like a long time, Mom said: “Justin, let’s talk about this in private. Tyler and Sophia, stay here.”
“Good idea,” Dad said, and they went down the hall to their bedroom.
“What do you think they’re going to do?” Sophia asked.
“Probably ground us both for a while,” I said, “and force me to change back. Do you really think the sheriff’s deputies are going to arrest Dad for forcing me to change back? It would be nice, but it’s not going to happen, not around here. I should have thought this through.” I slumped back into the sofa, and Sophia squeezed my hand again.
“Do you regret it?”
“No. Yes... I don’t know. I thought I was probably trans before, but now I’m absolutely sure, and being a boy again is going to hurt worse than it ever did before. I might have to go back to being a boy until I’m eighteen, but I know where I’m going at the crack of dawn on my eighteenth birthday.”
We fell silent again until Mom and Dad came back.
“Tyler,” Mom said, “remember how when you were little, and misbehaved in public, we wouldn’t punish you much until we came home?”
“Yeah...” I wasn’t quite sure where she was going with that.
“We’re not going to make a public spectacle of dragging you into that machine,” Dad said. “But if you don’t agree to go in quietly and let it change you back, you will experience consequences.
“Sophia, you’re grounded for one month. Tyler, you’re grounded for one month plus one day for every day you keep that body. You know the rules: no video games, no TV or movies, no Internet except for school research, no having friends over or going over to their houses. There’s another rule that’s going to apply to both of you well after you’re not grounded anymore — you can’t go to the library without one of us or Caleb accompanying you.”
I was mentally working through that. I could stay a girl as long as I liked if I was willing to stay grounded for that long — plus a month after I broke down and agreed to change back into a boy, if I ever did. I could live without video games or movies if I got to be a girl. Not having contact with Andrew outside of school, or my online friends basically ever... that would be harder, but I was determined to put up with it as long as necessary. Until I was eighteen, probably.
“In addition, Tyler,” Mom added, “we’re going to be finding you a counselor to help you with your depression. I wish you’d told us about that sooner. We want to help you.”
But you don’t understand me well enough to do it, I thought. I just nodded. “I understand.”
“So are you ready to go over there now and change back?” Dad asked. “You’ll only be grounded for a month that way.”
“No, sir,” I said. “I’m willing to stay grounded until I’m eighteen. That’s how strongly I feel about being a girl.”
I thought he’d get angry, but he looked... devastated.
“You can change your mind any time,” Mom said. “We’ll run you over to the library whenever you say the word. Please, Tyler, think about what you’re doing.”
“I will,” I said, biting back my instinctive response.
I went to bed a little later, brushing my teeth (even that felt a little different; the shape of my teeth and mouth had changed in subtle ways), peeing again, changing from my jeans and T-shirt into sweat pants and a different T-shirt. I wanted to get a proper girly nightgown at some point, but this would do for now. Just before I left the bathroom, I wondered if the machine had given me a layer of makeup or something along with those clothes (and the bra, which had no equivalent in the items of clothing I was wearing before); I rubbed at my cheeks and lips and didn’t smear anything, so I guessed I didn’t need to clean anything off before bed. I’d have to get Sophia to teach me about that sometime.
Soon I was in bed, but my thoughts were racing too much to sleep for a while. I was alternating between being overjoyed at how right my body felt now, and moping over Mom and Dad’s reactions. I groaned when I realized that with all the interruptions and arguments, I’d never gotten around to telling them my new name — not that they’d agree to call me by it any time soon. But I firmly reminded myself that it could be a lot worse. They might have kicked me out at the first mention of my being transgender, or beaten me up, or sent me to a military boarding school or a conversion camp. I’d met people online who’d had all those things happen to them. I wasn’t 100% sure the last couple weren’t still on the table, but somehow I didn’t think it was very likely. They’d want to deal with this “problem” in-house.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
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Ms. Novacek gave me a sympathetic glance when Mom ignored what I’d said about my name and pronouns.
part 4 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
It had taken me so long to fall asleep that I had trouble getting moving in the morning when my alarm went off, and wound up not having time to ask Sophia for help with makeup. I did manage to quickly ask her before my shower which hair products I should use.
When I’d dried off and gone to my room, towel wrapped around me girlwise, I realized I had a very feminine problem. I didn’t have a thing to wear. All of my old clothes would look baggy on me, and I only had one bra and pair of panties, the latter of which I’d slept in. I knocked on Sophia’s door after my shower and asked her if I could borrow something, and she said sure, but her stuff didn’t fit that great, either. It was better than my boy clothes, though, so I tried on several of her dresses and wore the one that fit best, a pastel green sundress that went well with my transformed sneakers. I was reluctantly wearing jockey shorts under it, after taking a sniff of my only pair of panties and deciding I couldn’t wear them again without washing them, though the bra seemed passable.
But when we went to the kitchen for breakfast, Dad took one look at me and said, “That’s Sophia’s dress, right?”
“Yes, she loaned —”
“Sophia, you are not to lend clothes to your brother. Tyler, go change clothes.”
I thought for a moment about arguing, but knew from the look on Dad’s face that it wouldn’t do any good. I went to my room and changed into a baggy T-shirt and jeans, hitching the belt up several notches more than I was used to. I still wore my only bra under the shirt, though.
“That’s better, Tyler,” Dad said when I came back and sat down to eat.
“I kind of forgot to mention it,, what with everything going on last night,” I said carefully, “but I’d like to go by Meredith now.”
Mom and Dad looked at each other and didn’t say anything directly in response to that.
“I’ll drive you to school today,” Mom said to me a few minutes later, “and talk to the administration. Sophia, you’re riding the bus, as usual when grounded.”
She nodded sulkily. Caleb shot us a sympathetic glance, but didn’t say anything.
Not long after we finished eating, Mom and I were on the way to school. We wound up sitting in the office for a good fifteen minutes before the secretary called us back to see the assistant principal, Ms. Novacek.
“Good morning,” she said. I’d kept my head down and never gotten in serious trouble, at least since I reached high school age, so I’d never had to deal with her or the principal much; she was a little younger than Mom, with short black hair in a bob cut. “How can I help you?”
“I’m Erin Ramsey,” Mom said. “This is my son Tyler... He used that machine at the library and changed himself into a girl, and I wanted to be here in person to tell you that’s him. I understand you had some problems earlier in the week with verifying that some changed students were who they said they were.”
(It hurt a little to hear Mom continue to use ‘he’ pronouns for me, but what with everything, we hadn’t even gotten into the pronoun issue last night, so I couldn’t really fault her for that specifically.)
“I’ll send a note to Tyler’s teachers,” Ms. Novacek said. “And... how long is this change going to last? If it’s going to be more than a day, I’ll need to get a new photo for his files... or should I say her files?” To give her credit, she looked at me when she said that, not Mom, and I said:
“I’d like to use ‘she’ pronouns and be called ‘Meredith,’ please. And we set the machine for three years.” Ms. Novacek started typing something on her computer, probably updating my database entry.
Mom frowned and said, “Tyler and his sister set the machine for three years, that is. This was a surprise to me and their father.” She didn’t say anything about grounding us or getting me a counselor, and I remembered what she’d said about not punishing us in public.
Ms. Novacek gave me a sympathetic glance when Mom ignored what I’d said about my name and pronouns, and kept typing for a few seconds more. Then she asked: “Your daughter Sophia, also a student here? Or another sister I don’t know about?”
“Sophia,” I said.
“I’ll need a photo of her new appearance, too.”
“She didn’t change,” Mom said. “At least, not that I could tell?”
“I didn’t program in any change for her at all,” I said.
“All right. I’ll send a note to all of Meredith’s teachers, and I’ll print out a copy for Meredith to carry with her. I should warn you that Mr. Moffett” (the principal) “is talking with the school board about setting a policy for the use of those machines by students and staff, and they’re leaning toward forbidding their use entirely, but I’m sure there will be an exception for transgender students.” She didn’t sound as confident of that as I would have liked.
She took a photo of me with her phone and then plugged her phone into her computer, saying: “I’ll have the note ready for you in a couple of minutes.”
“Do you need anything more from me?” Mom asked.
“Not just yet. We’re working on a form for parents and guardians to fill out when their child changes their appearance long-term, but it’s not finished. Shall I mail it to your home address, or email it to you when it’s ready?”
“Email would be fine.”
“And of course, whenever the court processes Meredith’s name or gender change or both, let us have a copy of the documentation.”
Mom pursed her lips for a moment before saying: “I don’t know that we’ll be doing that. We’ll be consulting a counselor for ourselves and for Tyler.”
From the rapidly changing expressions on Ms. Novacek’s face, I guessed that she was weighing her principles against the political trouble she could get in for telling Mom what she thought. If so, her principles lost. She simply said, after a silent minute of typing and mouse-clicking, “There. I’ll go to the printer and get your note, Meredith, and then you may go on to homeroom.”
We left Ms. Novacek’s office. “I’ll see you tonight, Tyler,” Mom said, giving me a hug. “Please be careful. Some of what I read last night, about the bullying that... ‘transgender’ children experience... It was terrifying.” I could hear the scare-quotes, but I was also touched by her concern for me.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “I love you, too.” Even though you don’t understand me.
After going to my locker and getting my textbooks for my first couple of classes, I showed the note Ms. Novacek had given me to my homeroom teacher, Ms. Buckley, who raised her eyebrows but didn’t say much. The note had side-by-side photos of my old and new faces, a sentence or two about my change, and a short paragraph reminding the teachers of the school district’s policy on transgender kids, which sounded pretty good, if they enforced it.
I found a seat and looked around. With Mom and I coming in early to do administrative stuff, several of the buses hadn’t arrived yet, but of the people who were already there, nobody else in my homeroom had used the machine yesterday. Most of the kids who’d transformed in the last few days were juniors and seniors, and I found out later on that a lot of kids my age, and even more Sophia’s age, couldn’t get the machines to work for them. The going theory is that they judge how mature you are, similar to the way they won’t work for someone who’s drunk or high, or someone with a severe learning disability.
Ms. Buckley didn’t have assigned seating, which made it a little easier to slip under the radar at first — I didn’t sit in the same place I’d usually sat this year, and at first people didn’t connect me with Tyler. I took out my Biology textbook and started reviewing the chapter we were supposed to cover today. But of course, once more kids showed up, it wasn’t long before one of the girls sitting near me asked, “Hey, are you new here, or did you transform with that machine at the library?”
“I’m Meredith Ramsey,” I said. “I used to go by Tyler.”
Her eyes bugged out. “Tyler? The, uh —” I could tell she was trying to find a description that didn’t sound too insulting.
“Yeah, that Tyler.”
“So you’re finding out what it’s like to be a girl?” she asked, looking both fascinated and creeped out.
Another girl, whose name I thought was probably Emma or Emily, chimed in: “My sister is trying to talk her boyfriend into swapping sexes this weekend, but he’s not having it.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “I’m transgender, and I set the machine for three years — as far as I know that’s the longest you can set it.”
“Cool,” said Lily Bannister, a girl whose sense of style I’d noticed and envied. Having her notice me, I felt even more ashamed of my ill-fitting boy clothes. “My cousin’s best friend is trans. She and my cousin spent a couple of nights with us while they were on a road trip last summer.”
“Who did you get to change you? And what did you change them into?” Emily or Emma asked.
“My sister Sophia. And I didn’t change her, I just let her change me.”
“You can do that?”
All in all, the rest of homeroom went better than I could have expected. Fewer kids than I expected had a problem with me being trans, and they mostly muttered about me behind my back rather than getting in my face. But despite my hope that I might have made some new friends, I was tied up in knots over the thought of seeing Andrew. Inevitably, the bell rang, and I hauled myself out of my seat to go on to Biology and face him.
He was already sitting in his usual spot when I arrived, and I had a couple of minutes yet until the second bell rang and class would start, so as soon as I showed the note to Mr. Collins, I worked up my courage and went up to Andrew’s desk.
“Hi,” he said with a devastating smile. “I don’t think we’ve met? I’m Andrew Patton; are you new here, or did you change with that machine?”
“Just transformed,” I said, smiling nervously. “I’m Tyler, but I’m going by Meredith now.”
He was gobsmacked, and didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then: “Whoa.” Then more silence. Other kids sitting nearby were looking at us and whispering now.
I filled the awkward silence. “So I was going to wait until the weekend and go over there with you, but then Sophia and I got to talking yesterday while I was helping her with English homework, and one thing led to another...” I realized I was wringing my hands and forced myself to stop and drop them to my sides, all nonchalant-like.
“And she changed you into a girl? Did you change her into a boy, or what?”
“No! No, it wasn’t like that. I, uh, I asked her to change me, and she said she didn’t want to change, so I didn’t push any buttons on my side, and it just timed out after a minute or so and opened the doors...”
His eyebrows raised a little more, if that was even possible, and a moment after I trailed off, he said: “Cool... I’d ask what it’s like, but I’m guessing you want to have that conversation with fewer people listening.” He looked around — several more students had come into the room while we were talking.
“Oh, yeah. Good idea. Let’s talk after class.” I scooted over to my assigned seat, a couple of rows back from Andrew (Gabriel Peters and Kaitlyn Pratt were between us in alphabetical order).
All through the first part of class, I berated myself for losing my cool and babbling about irrelevant details instead of getting to the point. Andrew probably thought I’d made a short-term change out of curiosity. But Andrew was so hot now that I couldn’t seem to think straight or talk sense around him. I’d felt tongue-tied like that several times earlier in the week, and had responded by letting Andrew and Evan (who’d been eating with us almost every lunchtime since he and Andrew transformed each other) do most of the talking. Now there was another complicating factor: did he think I was pretty? And could he possibly have any interest in a girl who was born with boy bits, somebody he’d known for years as a boy? In a way, it had been easier and less complicated when I knew it was hopeless.
Finally, I managed to get my mind focused on the lesson, thinking only occasionally about what I was going to say to Andrew after class and how. When the bell rang, Andrew glanced over his shoulder and waited for me while the people sitting between us got up and hurried past him. I came up to his desk and he stood up, towering over me even more than the day before.
“Wow,” he said, just standing there for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about changing into something a little offbeat this weekend... something with a sharper sense of smell or that can see in the dark, maybe... but I wouldn’t have had the guts to try being a girl. Way to go, Tyler. How long did you set the machine for?”
“Um, yeah, about that...” I glanced around and saw a couple of people listening to us. “Let’s walk and I’ll tell you.”
Once we were out in the hall, surrounded by a crowd, I raised my voice a little to be heard over the buzz of conversations but hopefully not so much that anybody besides Andrew could hear me. “I set the machine for three years. I’m transgender, and I’m going by Meredith now.”
He was quiet for two or three seconds, long enough for my heart to sink as I thought I’d lost my best friend, and then he said: “Huh. I never would have guessed. But aren’t your parents... kind of... I bet they freaked out, right?”
“Yeah. Dad wanted to drag me down to the library and force me to change back, but they talked it over, and they said they’re going to ground me until I’m willing to change back. So I guess I’m grounded until I’m eighteen, because I’m not gonna change back.”
“Bummer. Well... congratulations on coming out, I guess? Is that what you’re supposed to say?”
He looked a little uncomfortable, but he was being more supportive than Mom or Dad or Caleb, so I’d take it. “Yeah. Thanks. I don’t know if I could make it through the next three years if I lost you.”
“Well, your parents aren’t going to listen to me and un-ground you, but if there’s anything else I can do, let me know.”
Ask me on a date. But we couldn’t go anywhere while I was grounded.
“Thanks. I can’t think of anything specific right now, just... keep being my friend, please?”
“Of course. I’m not going anywhere.”
We had to go our separate ways to different classes, but I had a lighter heart and a more focused mind when I walked into American Literature.
The next couple of classes went pretty well. A few people pointed at me and whispered, and some more people (mostly girls) asked me if I was new in town or just transformed, but most of them seemed reasonably okay with me being trans. In some of my classes I wasn’t the only person who’d transformed since yesterday, but all in all I think only three or four other sophomores besides me, Andrew and Evan transformed that first week, and I was the only one who’d changed sex.
I was looking forward to seeing Andrew again at lunch, but kind of dreading talking to Evan and his friends. I served a tray of unidentifiable gloop and went to our usual table, where Evan and a couple of his friends were already sitting, but Andrew wasn’t there yet.
Evan’s buddy Wyatt was talking as I sat down: “...thing wouldn’t work, man. We did everything you said, but when we went inside, the doors didn’t close and — Hey, nice to meet you. I’m Wyatt.” He waved to me and Evan nodded, swallowed a mouthful of food, and added:
“I’m Evan.”
“I know,” I said, bracing myself. “You know me as Tyler. I’m going by Meredith now.”
Evan and Wyatt were still spluttering when Andrew walked up with his tray and sat down next to me. Evan’s other buddy Ian said, “Who’d you get to change you into a girl?”
“My sister.”
“Maybe you can help me and Wyatt figure out what we did wrong? We pushed the button in the middle of the logo, put a quarter in the slot, and then pushed the button that had a one-third pie slice of the Earth, and the other button again, and the doors opened... but when we went inside, the doors didn’t close and we didn’t see any alternate pictures of each other like Evan and Andrew talked about or anything.”
“Huh,” I said, furrowing my brow. “It sounds like you did everything right. Oh, wait. Maybe there was an ant crawling on your shoe or something?” I told them about how the door wouldn’t close on the jar with the earthworm.
“It can’t be too sensitive to that,” Andrew pointed out, “or the skin mites we’ve all got on us would stop it from working. I read where some people online are saying it doesn’t work for a lot of kids — the younger you are, the less likely it is to work.” He shrugged. “Maybe try again every couple of months until it starts working for you?”
“Hang on,” Evan said. “I get that it sucks for Wyatt and Ian not to be able to buff each other up with the machine, but everybody realizes that the real news here is that Tyler’s a girl now, right?”
Ian shrugged. “People have been changing each other into way weirder things than the opposite sex. Me and Wyatt were gonna try being centaurs or some shit for an hour or two before we turned into hotter versions of ourselves, but — oh, well. I’d like to know what it’s like to turn into a girl, but I know better than to just ask her straight out.”
Andrew looked at me. “How much did you tell them before I got here?”
“Just my new name,” I said, and then, looking back at Evan and his buddies, “I told Andrew earlier, after Biology — I’m transgender. I’m not changing back.”
Wyatt said something incredibly crude that I’m not going to repeat. Ian and Andrew verbally dogpiled him and tore him a new one, and even Evan belatedly added, “Dude, not cool.” I was so shocked and hurt by what Wyatt had said, and then so giddy with delight at Andrew coming to my defense, that I couldn’t say anything for a while. Finally, Wyatt gave me a grudging apology, and I stammered out an acceptance — trying to keep the peace, since I knew Andrew was becoming closer friends with Evan, and Evan wasn’t likely to drop Wyatt’s acquaintance just because he’d insulted me. That may have been a mistake.
“So,” Ian said, trying to change to a less volatile subject, “have y’all seen or heard about any other kids changing since yesterday?”
“There’s a guy in my Trig class that still looks recognizable, but he got his acne cleared up and he has cat ears now, and I think he’s a little taller,” Andrew said. “And I saw somebody in the halls that seemed to have scales, though I didn’t get a good look at them.”
Evan and Wyatt mentioned some other obviously transformed people they’d seen, mostly in the halls or around the cafeteria rather than in their classes, and soon the conversation turned to what we’d read on the Internet about things people were using the machines for. That reminded me painfully that I was grounded from using the Internet for anything except researching school projects, and I asked if I could borrow someone’s phone to post on a couple of forums and tell my online friends that I’d be offline indefinitely while grounded.
Andrew and Evan said they still hadn’t replaced their phones after getting them turned into incomprehensible alien devices by the machine. “My mom’s taking me into Greensboro this Saturday to get a new one,” Evan said, but Andrew’s parents were making him pay for his out of pocket, and he didn’t quite have enough money saved to afford the one he wanted yet. Ian pulled his phone out and slid it across the table at me.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling gratefully at him. I started the browser and logged into Discord and then Reddit, posting a brief message on a couple of forums for trans teens about what had happened:
“...I’m doing pretty okay — great, in some ways — but I’m grounded from using the Internet because of using the machine without permission, and I don’t know when I’ll be online again. I’m borrowing a friend’s phone to post this, but I can’t make a habit of that. I love you guys so much and I hope I can talk to you again before too long, but it’s probably gonna be a while. hugs”
If I’d had regular Internet access, I would have gone into more detail about how Mom and Dad and the staff and kids at school were treating me, but since I was about to disappear from those forums for weeks, months, or years, I didn’t want to leave them worrying. I was pretty sure the upcoming months would be full of inconveniences and annoyances, but I could handle them.
I cleared the browser history and cache and then gave Ian his phone back, thanking him again. While I’d been posting that, the conversation had turned to the way new machines were still appearing in more small towns, and how nobody had ever seen one appearing or caught it on camera, even in areas with constant surveillance. One guy had said he worked as a night security guard at a mall, and when they did their hourly patrol and found the new machine right next to the ATM, he’d looked at the security camera footage and found it had appeared between frames.
Soon lunch was over, and I said goodbye to Andrew and the others and headed to my next class, which I was dreading more than most: P.E.
I found Coach Wilcox and showed her the note; she glanced at it and said she’d seen it in her email that morning.
“I’ve seen a few kids that’ve used that machine,” she said. “Did it make you all girl? I know that might sound like a rude question, but I need to know if I can put you in the girls' locker room or if I need to arrange something private.”
“I’m all girl,” I said, “at least as far as I can tell. I haven’t had a doctor look at me.”
“You look like you haven’t got a new wardrobe yet,” she said. “Do you have gym clothes that fit you?”
“No,” I said, embarrassed. She was the first teacher who’d commented on my baggy clothes. “I was going to borrow stuff from my sister, but my dad said she wasn’t allowed to lend me stuff — Mom and Dad aren’t okay with me being trans, though they aren’t being abusive or anything, they’re just... unhelpful.”
“Let me see what we can scrounge up in the lost and found. And I guess I’ll need to send one of the male coaches to the boys' locker room to get your stuff out of there?”
“Yes, please, but I don’t guess I’ll need it until I shower after gym. I can’t wear my boy gym clothes, but I’ll need the towel and shampoo and stuff.”
We went back to the coaches' office and looked through the box. I found a couple of things that looked like they might be about the right size, but they weren’t enough to make a complete outfit.
“Go try on the sports bra and the shorts, and wear this T-shirt, even though it’s obviously too big. If the bra and shorts fit well enough, you can participate today. But you need to get things that fit by Monday. I’ll send your parents a note, if you think it would help.”
“Yes, please.”
I gave her my locker number and combination to give to one of the male coaches, and, armed with the items from the lost and found, I headed for the girls' locker room. Coach Wilcox caught up with me just before I walked in, jogging after me and calling out “Hang on a second.” I paused and turned.
“I’d better talk to them,” she said. “Tell them what’s up.”
“Thanks,” I said. None of the other teachers had made an open announcement about me being trans, or my new name or pronouns, but this was a special case.
So we walked in together.
“Listen up, girls,” she said. “This is Meredith Ramsey. She’ll be changing and showering with you, and I won’t hear any argument, or anybody calling her by her old name, or there will be consequences. Understood?”
Most of the girls just looked bewildered, but some who’d been in my homeroom or earlier classes and knew who I was either nodded sympathetically, or glared at me hard enough to light me on fire. Nobody said anything while the coach was there, though. She left, and I looked around for an unused locker to stash my jeans, T-shirt, and regular bra in.
“What did she mean about your ‘old name’?” one girl asked me, and another, who was also in my Geometry class, said:
“She was a boy until yesterday. I guess I’m not supposed to say who she was, but she’s Caleb Ramsey’s geeky little brother — you can see a resemblance if you squint.”
“Wow,” another girl said as I took off my T-shirt, “it looks like that machine did a pretty thorough job. It must have, or the coach wouldn’t have put you in here with us, would she?”
“Yeah, I’m all girl,” I said, “but I don’t have any girl clothes yet except what the machine gave me when I transformed, and what I just pulled out of the lost and found.” I took off my bra and tried on the sports bra I’d taken out of the lost and found. It wasn’t exactly loose, but it wasn’t as secure and supportive as a sports bra was supposed to be; it was made for a bigger girl. I might be better off with my regular bra.
“What do you think?” I asked the girls near me. “Should I wear this sports bra that’s too big for me, or my regular bra?”
“You won’t want to go around the rest of the day in a bra that’s sweaty from exercise,” one girl said, and another added: “The sports bra is probably better for exercising in even if it’s not quite the right size.”
“Thanks,” I said, and put on the other T-shirt. Then I unbuckled my belt and took off my jeans.
Several of the girls were staring now, looking at my boy jockey shorts that clearly didn’t have the thing in them they were designed to have room for. I blushed hotly. “I said I didn’t have any girl clothes yet,” I mumbled in a small voice. “It was this or wear yesterday’s panties again...”
“You going to buy clothes after school today?” someone asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling on the gym shorts from the lost and found. “I hope so, but...”
The gym shorts were a little too tight on me, and the jockey shorts bunched up uncomfortably under them even worse than they had under my baggy jeans.
Most of the girls had already finished changing clothes and left the locker room. I put my sneakers back on and headed out to join them, and the girls who’d been giving me advice (or staring at me) followed moments later. I joined the other girls where they were doing warm-up stretches, and despite the discomfort from the tight shorts over the loose underwear, I was delighted to discover how limber my new body was. I had pretty decent stamina, too, as I found when we started running, although the sports bra was definitely too loose for strenuous exercise, and my breasts were a little sore by the time we got done. I’d run more laps in the twenty minutes than I could before, and I didn’t feel nearly as tired as I would have before.
The kids who were seriously running didn’t have breath for chatting and gossiping, but there were some who were walking or jogging pretty slow and chatting with their friends as they did, and I overheard snatches of conversations as I passed people. Most weren’t about me, of course, or the machine at the library or other people who’d used it — but some were.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that the majority of students who didn’t care about me being transgender were the type to say something like: “You hear about Caleb Ramsey’s little brother? She’s transgender; her new name’s Meredith.” — “Oh, good for her,” — and move on to another topic. Whereas the few who did have a problem with me would go on talking (or ranting) for much longer, and I would be much more likely to overhear them. So, despite the mostly favorable or neutral reactions I’d gotten from the girls in homeroom, or in the locker room, or the guys I ate lunch with, I got pretty upset about the things I overheard during that run. I was brooding over that as we did our cool-down exercises after the run. Coach Wilcox gave me my padlock, toiletries, towel, and gym clothes from my boy locker after we finished, and I followed the other girls to the showers.
Our high school was built in the sixties, and hadn’t been renovated much since the late eighties, so it had communal showers with no separating walls or curtains. I was more than a little apprehensive as I stripped off and walked into the shower, extremely aware of the looks from the other girls, especially the ones I’d seen glaring at me when Coach Wilcox introduced me, or gossiping about me during gym. But nobody got in my face about it, or played any nasty pranks on me or anything. I made my shower a quick one and got dressed again, hurrying off to my next class.
The rest of the day was less stressful than that, but I still had a few bad moments when I overheard mean gossip about me. I got on the bus and sat down next to Sophia with a feeling of relief that the day hadn’t gone any worse.
“How was it?” she asked.
“Not too bad,” I said. “Some people said mean things, but only one of them to my face, and nobody actually did anything bad.”
She hugged me from the side. “How did Andrew take it?”
I smiled. “He was pretty cool about it. He tore into another guy who said something rude to me.”
“Go, Andrew!”
“So how was your day?”
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
She went to her room and came back with one of her sports bras, and I tried it on. It was definitely a lot tighter than the one I’d borrowed from the lost and found, but I thought I could live with it for an hour at a time until I got something that fit me.
part 5 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
First order of business when I got home was to wash my sole girl outfit and underwear so I could wear it Friday. Only after they were in the washing machine (with some other stuff of mine and Sophia’s) did I start doing homework.
Dad was out somewhere when we got home, and Mom was busy packing books and antiques to ship to people who’d bought them. I did what I could do without my laptop, then went to where Mom was working in the spare room and said, “I need to use my laptop for the rest of my homework, Mom.”
“I’ll get it out,” she said, getting up and coming with me into the living room. “Stay in the living room while you work on it.” So she could look over my shoulder and make sure I wasn’t playing games or doing recreational websurfing.
“Also,” I said, “I need new clothes. Especially gym clothes, but really everything. I got a sports bra out of the lost and found for today, but it didn’t fit right and my breasts hurt while I was running and for a while afterward.” I handed her the note Coach Wilcox had given me.
She got my laptop out of the cabinet in the living room and handed it to me. “There is a very easy way to solve that problem, Tyler.”
“You mean changing back? No, thank you, ma’am. Also, I prefer to be called ‘Meredith.’”
She sighed. “Do your homework and we’ll talk about it later. I’m going to finish getting these orders ready to take to the post office in the morning, and then start supper.”
So I sat down at the dining table and did the rest of my homework. A little later Sophia joined me, having asked Mom for her own laptop, and we worked together mostly in silence, with her asking me for help with a grammar question now and then.
Caleb got home just after I put my girl clothes in the dryer, and Dad a few minutes after that, just before supper. Sophia and I put away our laptops and textbooks and set the table, and minutes later we all sat down to supper.
Mom and Dad didn’t bring up my change right away, and I didn’t press them for girl clothes right away, either. Mom asked Dad how his shopping trip had gone, and he told us he hadn’t found much, just a few limited edition Coke bottles that would bring around ten or fifteen dollars each. Then they asked Caleb how his day had gone, and he didn’t have much to say; at one point he looked at me in a way that made me think he must have heard rumors about me at school, but he didn’t say anything about them to Mom and Dad. And finally, Mom asked me how my day had gone.
“You told me a little bit about your troubles with gym,” she said, “but we didn’t have time to talk much then. Has anyone been bullying you?”
“Not physically,” I said, “not like it was a few years ago. But there were some mean girls gossiping about me, and one guy said something really rude to my face. It wasn’t too bad, though. Most of the kids I talked to were cool with me being transgender.”
“What’s that about trouble with gym?” Dad said.
I hesitated, not wanting to talk about my sore breasts in front of Caleb and Dad, but then I decided it might actually help. “I didn’t have the right gym clothes,” I explained. “Coach Wilcox let me get some stuff out of the lost and found, but it didn’t fit right; the sports bra was too loose, so I didn’t have the right support for running, and the shorts were too tight.” As I’d expected, Dad and Caleb were both blushing and neither met my eyes. “She said I need new gym clothes by Monday, and she sent a note for y’all. So I asked Mom if I could get some stuff that fits me, and she said we’d talk about it later. You don’t even have to pay for it if you don’t want to,” I added desperately. “Just take me to a store and let me use my savings to buy a few sets of underwear, if nothing else?”
“Have you reconsidered?” Dad said. “We could take you over to the library this evening, or early tomorrow before school.”
“No, thank you. If I had the right athletic support, I think I would enjoy gym class a lot more than before. I’m more limber now and I have more stamina.”
“You think you might try out for one of the girls' teams?” Caleb asked.
“Maybe...?” I’d never considered it before, between my un-athletic old body and my intermittent depression. But now it had possibilities.
“No,” Dad said. “It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Yeah,” Caleb added, “come to think of it, the coaches will probably think making yourself more athletic with that machine is cheating.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Dad said, “though it’s also true. It wouldn’t be appropriate for a boy to compete with girls.”
“But I’m not a boy,” I said, trying and failing to keep the frustration out of my voice.
“I talked to a couple of counselors today,” Mom put in. “But the earliest appointment I could get was Monday of the week after next.”
Knowing Mom and Dad, probably this counselor was someone who’d never heard of gender dysphoria or didn’t believe in it.
“Let’s wait and see what the counselor says,” Dad said. “If he can talk you out of this, there’s no need —”
“She,” Mom put in. “The one I could get the earliest appointment with was Cheryl Hewitt.”
“All right,” Dad said. “We’ll revisit this after your appointment with her.”
A week and a half of wearing boy clothes, at least. Great.
It was Caleb’s turn to do the dishes, so after supper, I went to my room and looked for some comfort reading. I pulled Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonsong down from the shelf and started reading it again, but I hadn’t gotten more than two or three pages in when Sophia knocked on my door.
“Come in,” I said, and she did. I sat up in bed. “Hey.”
“I’m sorry Mom and Dad are being so... so...”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Maybe I could bring a change of clothes to school for you in my bag, and you could change into it in the restroom before homeroom?”
“That might work. I’d have to change back after my last class, but... yeah. Still won’t solve my sports bra problem, though.”
“Yeah, mine would be too tight on you. But I can lend you one, anyway, and we can see if it’s better than the one that was too loose?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
She went to her room and came back with one of her sports bras, and I tried it on. It was definitely a lot tighter than the one I’d borrowed from the lost and found, but I thought I could live with it for an hour at a time until I got something that fit me. It probably wasn’t anywhere near as uncomfortable as the binders that trans guys used to wear before the Venn machines showed up. So I slipped it into the bottom of my bookbag, and we talked about girl stuff for a while, me asking her questions about makeup and hair care and clothes — stuff I’d gotten scattered hints about from online research, or from stories I’d read, but didn’t really have reliable first-hand information about.
The next morning, I got dressed in baggy boy jeans and a T-shirt, but packed the clothes the machine had created for me in my backpack. When we got to school, I went to the nearest restroom and changed clothes, then went to homeroom. Lily and Emma or Emily were already there, and I sat down next to them.
“Hi, Meredith,” Lily said. “You look great today. Did you get some other new clothes besides just jeans and T-shirts?”
“I wish,” I said. “No, this is the outfit the trust booth made for me when it changed me Wednesday. I washed them last night; it’s all I’ve got for my new body right now.”
“Going shopping tomorrow, then?”
I sighed, and told her what Mom had said about maybe getting me girl clothes after we talked with the counselor. “And that’s not until Monday after next.”
“That sucks.”
“What’s her problem?” Emily or Emma wanted to know. (I had to discreetly find out what her name was without letting on that I didn’t already know.)
“She thinks being transgender is a symptom of depression instead of the other way around, apparently?”
“Are you depressed, then?”
“I was — not all the time, but pretty often. But not anymore. I’m frustrated sometimes with how stubborn Mom and Dad are being, but...” I shivered happily and hugged myself. “Having the right body is so great, I can put up with anything.”
Lily beamed at me, and Emma or Emily gave me an uncertain smile. “I’m so happy for you,” Lily said. “I talked to my cousin last night, and told her about you and the other people here that changed, and she said she and her friend Brooke are going to drive to the nearest machine this weekend to use it.”
“How far do they have to drive?”
“Around two hundred miles, I think? They live in Philadelphia, and I think the machine they’re going to use is in a small town about this size in western Pennsylvania.”
“Maybe one will pop up closer before then. There’s new ones being reported every day.”
I wound up chatting with Lily for a little too long, and walking into Biology barely on time. Andrew raised his eyebrows when he saw me.
“Did you get — oh, I bet the machine made that shirt, didn’t it? It’s kind of like the shirts it made for me and Evan.”
“Yeah, this is the stuff I was wearing when I transformed. I washed them last night —” I was going to say more, but the last bell rang and I hurried into my seat.
After class, Andrew and I talked for a couple of minutes before we left the classroom.
“You look really nice today,” he said, “wearing stuff that fits you.” I blushed and squirmed a little: he did think I was pretty! Maybe he hadn’t noticed as much when I was wearing baggy clothes that mostly hid my figure, but now...
“I’m probably gonna wear these things out, washing them so often, but Mom and Dad still won’t buy me girl clothes or even let me go shopping with my own money.”
“What? I don’t get it... I mean, they’re the kind of people that wouldn’t want you to change into a girl, I can see that. But now that you are one, I’d think they would want you to dress in girl clothes.”
“I think they’re trying to pretend I haven’t changed.”
He shook his head. “I wonder how long they can keep that up?”
“I don’t know. They’re betting I’ll cave in soon and decide it’s less hassle to change back, and I’m betting that even if they never cave, I can stand not having the right clothes better than not having the right body.”
“I hope they get it through their thick skulls soon. Keep your chin up, uh, Meredith.”
I smiled as I always did in those early days when somebody called me by my name. But then he went on:
“Oh, and I’ve got some news, too... it happened yesterday afternoon after World History. I’ve got a date this weekend with Emilia Read.”
“Oh,” I stammered, “that’s great.” I couldn’t place her; either she wasn’t in any of my classes, or I just couldn’t put her name to her face.
“Yeah,” he went on, oblivious, “she seems pretty great. We’re going to see the new Chrestomanci movie and then out to eat afterward, Saturday afternoon.”
“Which theater are you going to?” I asked, trying to appear like I didn’t care that the boy I was crushing on was going on a date with someone else.
“Regal 16 in Catesville.”
I nodded. “We’d better get to class. Good luck with your date.”
“Thanks.”
I wasn’t exactly depressed for the next couple of hours, nothing like I’d suffered from gender dysphoria in the past few years, but I wasn’t happy either. I knew it was irrational; Andrew had probably already been talking with this Emilia for several days, since his transformation into an incredible stud, if not before, and I hadn’t given him any hint that I was interested in him that way. So there was no way he could have known, or if he had, would have had any obligation toward me. But knowing that didn’t keep me from feeling resentful and jealous.
By lunchtime I thought I’d gotten a better handle on those ungenerous feelings, and was looking forward to hanging out with Andrew as friends even if we couldn’t date. I was a little frustrated, when I sat down, to hear Andrew telling Evan and his buddies about his upcoming date with Emilia Read. (Apparently she had a different lunch period, so I didn’t have to endure her sitting with us, at least.) I told myself to be happy for him. Even if he liked me that way, we couldn’t go out and do anything fun together until I was un-grounded, which probably wouldn’t be until I turned eighteen.
Evan and Wyatt asked Andrew some questions about her, and Ian nodded and said he had a class with her, too. I didn’t say much for a while, just focused on eating, and when the others had exhausted that subject, Andrew said to me:
“So how are people treating you since you came out?”
“Mostly pretty okay,” I said. “I’ve overheard some mean gossip, but there hasn’t been any outright bullying...” I gave him a little more detail about how the kids in different classes were treating me, and the situation in gym, and he commiserated with me, as did Ian.
After lunch, I headed to P.E. and walked into the locker room. I attracted less attention than I had on Thursday as I changed into the sports bra Sophia had loaned me and the gym shorts I’d gotten out of the lost and found. Though still too tight, the shorts weren’t as bad over my Venn-machine panties as they were over jockey shorts. We were playing volleyball that day, and I found that Sophia’s bra kept my girls from bouncing much at all.
After I showered, I put on clean socks and the T-shirt, bra and jeans the machine had made for me, but I didn’t have a change of clean panties, so I kept wearing them, sweaty as they were, the rest of the day.
After the last bell, I went to the restroom before going to the bus and changed back into the boy clothes Mom and Dad had seen me leave the house in. I sat with Sophia on the way home, as usual — I wasn’t close friends with anybody else who rode our bus regularly.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Better than yesterday,” I lied. “The girls in gym are getting used to me changing and showering with them. And the sports bra I borrowed from you helped a lot.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “I hope Mom lets you buy some of your own soon.”
“Yeah. I can’t believe she ignored that note from Coach Wilcox.”
“I can.”
When I went to my room, I changed out of the clothes I’d worn home, set aside the panties and bra to wash, put on a clean pair of jockey shorts and a pair of sweat pants. I hesitated before putting on one of my usual T-shirts. I dug through my drawers and found a T-shirt that I’d outgrown, but kept because it had sentimental value — it was a Guardians of the Galaxy shirt that Grandma Ramsey had given me the Christmas before she died, the image taken from the poster for their second movie. Would it fit my new body? I tried it on, and it was a bit snug, but not uncomfortably tight like it was when I’d reluctantly quit wearing it a few years ago. I went across the hall to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I wouldn’t go to school like this for obvious reasons, but it might be what I needed to convince Mom and Dad. I went back to my room and did homework until Mom called me to help her fix supper.
“Sure,” I said, walking into the kitchen. “What are we having?”
“Omelets,” she said, rummaging through the pantry and not turning to look at me yet. “I need you to chop the onions and peppers.” She backed out of the pantry holding a couple of spice bottles and did a double take when she saw me.
“Go put on —” she began, and paused.
“What?”
“That shirt’s too small to be decent on you.”
“I know I outgrew it a couple of years ago, but I’m smaller now —”
“Not in certain places, you’re not. Go change into a looser shirt.”
I did as she said, putting on a shirt that was comfortable before my change, and baggy now. When I came back, she said: “That’s better. Wash the peppers and onions and start chopping them.”
I got a few peppers out of the produce drawer and a colander and a couple of onions out of the pantry, and washed them. “You know,” I said, “if I had a bra on under it, that shirt would be fine.”
“If you changed back, you wouldn’t need a bra.”
“I’m not going to change back, Mom. I’ve got exactly one bra, the one the machine made for me, and unless you let me spend my money on more, I’ll have to make it last until I’m eighteen.” I set the clean vegetables aside and got out a chopping board and knife. “I think it’ll fall apart from being worn every day and being washed several times a week. And that’s assuming I don’t outgrow it —”
“If you wear loose shirts like that one, you don’t —” She paused. “What am I saying?” Finally. “I suppose if you’re stubborn enough to stay that way for more than a few days, you’re going to need at least a few more bras so you only have to wash them about once a week.”
“And a sports bra for gym,” I added quickly. “And gym shorts.”
“All right,” she said. “Tomorrow. But don’t push your luck, Tyler. We’re not getting any skirts or dresses. Or anything but underwear. And we’re only getting a little of that, enough to last until you see the counselor Monday after next.”
“Thanks, Mom!” I was so happy about her concession that I didn’t complain about her using my deadname.
During supper, Mom didn’t mention our talk to Dad. I told Sophia about it after supper, while she was washing dishes and I was sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop, working on an essay on Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” for American Literature.
“That’s great!” she said. “Wow, that was devious. I wish I could have seen the look on Mom’s face.”
“Thanks.”
“I’m sure you’ll wear them down eventually,” she said. “Tomorrow, underwear. Next weekend, skirts. The weekend after that —”
“Makeup,” I supplied, getting into it. “And then dresses and getting my ears pierced —”
“And the weekend after that I won’t be grounded and I can help you shop.”
Of course, we didn’t expect it would happen anywhere near that fast. But after Mom’s concession, I was hopeful it would happen eventually, maybe a lot sooner than my eighteenth birthday.
I'm posting this chapter early because I'll be busy this Monday and Tuesday. The next chapter should be posted on Tuesday of next week, as usual.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
It was just a Walmart, not a Belk or something, and I was probably just getting basic underwear, not anything I could show off at school like a skirt or dress. But it was my first time shopping for girl clothes and I was determined to enjoy it. I’d read a million scenes like this in various stories since I first got past the nanny software a couple of years ago, and now I was going to live it.
part 6 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
By eleven-thirty on Saturday, I had the rest of my weekend homework done. I told Mom, and she said we’d go shopping right after she ate lunch. (I’d had a banana sandwich while I was finishing up my Geometry homework.)
“And I guess I need to tell your dad where we’re going,” she added with a put-upon sigh.
I heard raised voices from the garage a little while later, but I didn’t try to get close enough to hear. Some minutes later, Mom came and told me we were going, and we went out to Mom’s van.
“So where are we going to buy stuff?” I asked as we pulled out the driveway and down the street. I was wearing old boy clothes, baggy sweats and a T-shirt, saving my Venn machine outfit for school.
“I was thinking about the Walmart on the west side of Greensboro,” she said. “Nobody we know is likely to be shopping there. And...” She was quiet for a few moments. “I don’t want to have to explain things to the staff. We’re not going to mention that machine at the library, or the fact that you’re really a boy, or anything — we’ll just say you’ve had a growth spurt and need new things.”
“Or we could say I just lost a lot of weight. That’s true, it just leaves out stuff that’s none of their business.”
“Yes, that’s better.”
“So you’re going to tell them I’m your daughter?” I asked, smiling hopefully.
“Yes... it’s simpler with people who don’t know us, not having to explain.”
“Maybe you could practice calling me ‘Meredith’ now, so you don’t slip up?”
That was a step too far, I guess. She glanced at me with a furrowed brow before returning her attention to the road. “I’m worried about you, Tyler. Some of the things I’ve been reading online about transgender... There was a man who was mis-diagnosed as transgender when he really had multiple personalities, and he went through these irreversible surgeries before they figured out what was really going on with him, but it was too late. I’m terrified to think you might have multiple personalities or something, but after all that’s happened lately, I don’t know. Does this ‘Meredith’ feel like another part of you?”
“No, Mom. I’m Meredith. That’s the name I chose for myself, like you chose Tyler for me. But they’re just different names for the same me. A Tyler or a Meredith by any other name would be just as sweet.”
She couldn’t help smiling at that — just for a moment. Then her worried look returned, and she said, “I wish we could have gotten you an appointment with the counselor sooner.”
Given what I expected from the kind of counselor Mom and Dad would probably look for, I was glad of the temporary reprieve. But I knew better than to say so.
It was a forty minute drive to Greensboro — Mom really wanted to make sure we didn’t run into anyone we knew. After talking for a few minutes near the start of the drive, we lapsed into silence, and I pulled Dragonsong out of my bag and read several chapters. When we finally pulled into the Walmart parking lot, I felt like bursting into song. It was just a Walmart, not a Belk or something, and I was probably just getting basic underwear, not anything I could show off at school like a skirt or dress. But it was my first time shopping for girl clothes and I was determined to enjoy it. I’d read a million scenes like this in various stories since I first got past the nanny software a couple of years ago, and now I was going to live it.
So we went in, found the girls' clothing department, and asked one of the staff if she could take my measurements. “My daughter’s lost a lot of weight recently,” Mom said, and that word “daughter” gave me such a thrill I did a little happy dance right there. I’m guessing the woman thought I was just proud of having lost so much weight.
She escorted me into one of the dressing rooms and wrapped the measuring tape around my breasts, just under them, and so on and wrote various numbers down. I’d thought she’d ask me why I was wearing boy clothes, but she didn’t.
“Let me know if you need any more help finding things,” she said.
“Thanks,” I said, beaming.
So Mom and I picked up a couple of packages of panties that should be the right size, which didn’t take too long, and some socks, and then started trying on bras, which was a much longer process; the labels of the bras that wound up fitting me well only loosely related to the sizes the woman had written down for me. I wanted to get at least one that was lacy and decorative, but Mom only wanted to get plain ones.
“I’m spending my own money on it,” I pointed out. “And it’s not that much more expensive than the plain ones, not even $15.”
“No,” Mom said, surprising me. “If you spent most or all of your savings on girl clothes, you’d feel even more invested in this... questionable decision, and less willing to consider changing back because you might feel you don’t want to waste all that money. So I’m paying for them. Besides, who is going to see it?”
“Nobody,” I insisted. “But I’ll know I’m wearing it.” Supposedly, from the stories I’d read — mostly online fiction about trans girls, but also some real accounts from trans women — that would make me feel a lot more confident in social situations. Not that I wasn’t already a lot more confident than I was a week ago, but a little more couldn’t hurt.
“No,” she said again, and that was that. I wound up getting six regular bras, all fairly plain, and two sports bras, and then we started looking for gym clothes. I managed to talk Mom into buying a couple of better-fitting tops as well as a pair of shorts. I was going to get a pair of sweat pants for when it got colder, but she said: “That will give you a reason to put off changing back until after you’ve gotten some use out of them,” and I had to be satisfied with that.
Then I suggested the possibility of getting something nice to wear to church, and Mom shut that down fast; I didn’t push it.
So we checked out and headed home. I picked up Dragonsong where I’d left off and started reading, but after a few pages, something reminded me about Andrew, which reminded me that his date with Emilia would be starting about now. I felt a pang that didn’t go away no matter how much I tried to tell myself that Emilia, whoever she was, was probably better for him in several ways, that I didn’t have any claim on him, and so forth. But eventually I managed to focus my attention on the story again, and that helped more than all the reasonable, reassuring things I tried to tell myself.
When we got home, Sophia wanted to see everything we’d bought, and I showed her. Dad seemed pretty grumpy about our shopping trip, but didn’t say anything; I avoided him for most of the day, except at supper.
Sunday morning after my shower, I looked disgustedly at the boy dress clothes in my closet. Baggy jeans and T-shirts weren’t that bad by comparison; they were sort of androgynous in overall type, if not in cut and style. But I was going to look silly no matter which of those white or blue button-up shirts I wore, or which of those black or grey dress slacks. Not to mention the fact that my boy dress shoes would be too big for me, but I wasn’t sure if Mom and Dad would let me wear my Venn machine sneakers to church. I should have mentioned shoes to Mom while we were at Walmart yesterday. I sighed; no point in putting it off.
A little later I was in the kitchen, holding up my dress pants with one hand and carrying a belt with too few holes in it with another. “I need the ice pick to put another hole in this,” I told Mom. “And before you say anything about my shoes, I tried on my usual dress shoes and they’re way too big.”
She sighed. “Let me get something to mark the place we need to poke the hole. Wrap the belt around your waist...”
Dad stared at us in silence while we figured that out and cut a new hole, morosely sipping his second cup of coffee. He finally said: “It’s not too late. We could run by the library before church.”
“No, thank you, sir.”
He gave a long-suffering sigh and took another sip of his coffee. I got my belt on and tightened it up, then sat down to eat breakfast.
We didn’t leave for church at the usual time; when we’d finished breakfast and loaded the dishwasher, Dad said he had something to do before we left, and disappeared into his bedroom. That gave me more time to stew about what was going to happen before it happened. I was pretty nervous; I knew a lot of the people at church would be even worse about trans people than Mom or Dad. By the time Dad emerged and said he was ready to leave, we were going to be just a couple of minutes early, or barely on time, instead of our usual ten to fifteen minutes early.
The trouble started the moment we walked into the vestibule; Mr. Colton greeted us, and then did a double take at me. He was in his early fifties, but had retired several years earlier because of a workplace injury, and did a lot of volunteer work for the church and a couple of other local charities, including ushering and greeting on Sundays.
“Good morning! Where’s — Tyler, is that you?”
I started to say “I’m going by Meredith now,” but Dad talked over me and spoke a little louder than me:
“Tyler used that machine at the library,” he said. “He’s grounded until he agrees to change back.”
Mr. Colton narrowed his eyes. “You do it your way, I guess,” he said. “I wouldn’t wait on that. Tyler, what possessed you to do a thing like that?”
The cowardly part of me that had put off coming out for so long was frantically trying to come up with some plausible-sounding reason that wouldn’t set Mr. Colton off, but I pushed that aside and said, “I’m transgender. I’ve wanted this since well before that machine showed up.”
Mr. Colton stared at me for a moment longer, then looked back at Mom and Dad. “Do you think —” he started, but Mom said, “Look at the time! We’d better find a seat.” I shot her a grateful look as we hurried into the sanctuary and sat down in our usual area.
Our church usually had the lights dimmed by that point, so the PowerPoint slide show with the words to the songs and scripture readings would be clearly visible. So I hoped in the dim light, nobody would notice me. But it wasn’t so close to the start of the service that I was immune to further socializing at the last minute. A couple of Mom and Dad’s friends, Mr. and Mrs. Dirksen, spotted us and came over to say hi, and no sooner got close enough to see me well than Mrs. Dirksen said: “Tyler, what happened to you?”
“I’m going by Meredith,” I said, a little louder and faster than I had when Mr. Colton greeted us.
Mom said, “Please pray for all of us. We’re still figuring out what to do as a family.”
Mr. Dirksen said, “Did he use that machine at the library?”
“Yes. He’s being disciplined.”
“Seems like you’re overlooking something obvious —”
The band started the opening song then and the lights got dimmer, so Mr. Dirksen interrupted himself, saying “Let’s talk later,” and they went back to their seats, murmuring to each other. I started singing along with the band; I’d been looking forward to trying out my new singing voice, though not as much as I’d dreaded dealing with transphobes, and I found that I could sing better than before, or at least had a prettier voice — it might take me a while to get as good at hitting the right notes as before. But I remembered all the posts on trans forums I’d read where people were talking about how they hated their voices, and how distressed I’d been a few years ago when my voice started changing, though I didn’t understand why until later, and I started crying for joy.
Then a few minutes later the first song was over, and the band switched to a quieter instrumental version of “Here I Am to Worship” while Mr. Clarkson, the worship leader, said it was time to greet people. So everybody turned around and said hi to everyone in the pews in front of and behind them, and I had to confront some more people who hadn’t noticed my change until then.
Then things were pretty okay for a while; after a prayer, we started singing again. Even in the dim light, I could see people glancing aside at me here and there for the next while, but nobody was disrupting the service to whisper gossip about me.
One of the prayers involved thanks for the sudden recovery of several sick people we’d been praying for every Sunday — in some cases for as long as I could remember. And then another song, and then the sermon.
Dr. Debenham started off with reading a good chunk of the story about Jesus healing the man born blind in John’s gospel, and then talked about several people in our church who had just been healed of chronic illness, some of whom were able to get out and attend the service today for the first time in months. Then he talked about the Venn machine at our library (I think he called it a “trust booth”), which they and their friends had apparently used for healing, and the others around the country and around the world.
“We don’t know where they come from or who made them,” he said. “But we can’t reject something out of hand that God has used to do so much good, even if others are using the trust booths in questionable or outright terrible ways. I think it’s possible that God put them here — directly, or through some mortal intermediary who hasn’t openly taken credit for them — to teach us as lesson about trust. Psalms 146:3 says, ‘Do not trust in princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation.’ We’re reminded several times in Scripture that we can’t fully trust any human being; only God will never let us down. But in practice, we have to trust each other most of the time about a lot of things. We trust that the other drivers on the road are not drunk or insane. We trust that the staff at a restaurant or grocery store are not planning to poison us. We trust the skill of our doctors, the honesty of our bankers, and the courage of our firemen. And, to get the benefits of the trust booths' amazing healing powers, we have to trust some friend to operate the machine for us. No one can heal himself with a trust booth; you can only heal someone else, while trusting that person to heal you — if you need it — and not to transform you in some undesirable way. Yes, you’re taking a risk when you do that. But you take similar risks every day. You take a similar risk when you ask a friend to pray about the problems you’re going through, hoping that they will simply pray about it and not gossip.”
So far, so good. But then he talked about the way other people were abusing the machines, with passing jabs at trans people and furries, though he reserved most of his indignation for people who deliberately changed others into inanimate objects, and then about how it was less obviously wrong, but still wrong, to use them to change someone into a completely different person rather than simply a healthier or younger version of themselves. He actually had some good points to make about how some users of the machine were pushing each other toward a Hollywood-manufactured ideal of beauty which would erase the individual differences God made us with.
He knew more about the machines than I would have expected, but there were enough little inaccuracies and gaps in his knowledge that I was sure he hadn’t been in the Venn machine himself. He’d probably just heard second-hand accounts from church members who’d used it to heal or rejuvenate their relatives or each other.
He segued from there into asking us to reflect on times when we’d trusted people we shouldn’t, or distrusted people we should trust, or betrayed other people’s trust, and then into an invitation to trust Jesus as your savior if you hadn’t already — the same way every sermon always ended. Not the smoothest segue ever, but I’d heard plenty worse.
And then the band played the final song, and I braced myself to talk at greater length to a bunch of people. But I was surprised when Dad said, before the closing song was half over, “Let’s go,” and Mom nodded and we all filed out. We didn’t get away without talking to anybody, but we didn’t have the extended conversations I was dreading with people trying to talk me out of being trans, either.
Instead of eating at one of the restaurants near the church with friends, we drove halfway across town to a restaurant where Dad probably figured we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew, and we didn’t. Within minutes after we left, Mom, Dad and Caleb’s cellphones started ringing and pinging with calls and texts from people at church who’d seen me but hadn’t had a chance to talk with us — or not as much as they wanted — and people who’d heard about me from those who had talked with us. Mom answered the first call, and I heard half of the conversation:
“Hi... Yes, sorry we couldn’t stop to chat... Yes, Tyler and Sophia used a trust booth to change Tyler into a girl... Thank you, that will help a lot... We’re working on that. I made an appointment for next Monday — no, not tomorrow, the following Monday... Yes, we’ll see how it goes... I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone else that... Let’s talk later in the week, okay? We’re almost there and I can’t talk any longer. Bye.”
That could have been any of a dozen of Mom’s friends and acquaintances from church. Partway through that conversation, Caleb answered his phone, and I figured from what he said that it was one of his friends who home-schooled or went to the Everett Academy. “Yeah, Tyler’s a girl now. She’s going by Meredith at school, but Mom and Dad won’t call her that... Oh, sure, at least a dozen people at school have used that thing. Mostly just making themselves look better, but some are a lot weirder than Meredith... No, she’s the only one I know of that’s come to school as the opposite sex, but I hear some other people tried it out overnight and it wore off before they came to school. Probably more this weekend... Yeah, it can do some crazy stuff, there’s a guy with what-do-you-call-'em, those extra eyelids like a lizard has —”
“(Nictitating membranes,)” Sophia whispered to him.
“— nictitating membranes, yeah, it’s pretty cool, and a girl with extra arms and a couple of kids with purple or green skin... Nah, Coach says the athletic association hasn’t ruled yet, but until and unless it says the machine’s okay, he’s not going to allow his players to use it...”
“Hang up, Caleb,” Dad said.
“Got to go, bye.” By this point we were out of the van, in the restaurant and already being led to our table by our waitress, who seemed to be listening with interest to Caleb’s conversation.
“Let’s silence our phones until after lunch,” Dad said, and Mom and Caleb silently complied. After the waitress had taken our drink orders and left, Caleb said:
“So why were we in such a hurry we had to leave early?”
“We didn’t leave early,” Dad insisted. “The service was already over.”
“You know what I mean. We always hang out and talk with friends after church. I can barely remember the last time we didn’t. And what was it you had to do before church that made us barely on time?”
“Caleb...” Mom began, but seemed at a loss for words, and when she’d paused for a second or two, Dad took over:
“I’m trying to strike a balance here. I don’t want us to stop going to church, and I don’t want to leave Tyler at home. We all need it — Tyler maybe more than usual. But...”
“I know you wanted to try to minimize the gossip,” Mom said, putting a hand on his arm, “but it’s obviously not working. I think next Sunday we should arrive early and hang out with friends afterward as usual. Deal with all the questions and get them over with.”
“Tyler, you could change back anytime in the next week and make this decision a lot easier.”
“No, thank you, Dad.”
The waitress came back with our drinks, and I sipped gratefully at my tea. I had deliberately not drunk much with breakfast because I didn’t want to have to use the restroom at church, so I was pretty thirsty. I hadn’t had any problems with using the girls' rooms at school, but I was pretty sure somebody at church would complain no matter which restroom I used.
“Are you ready to order?”
“Give us another few minutes,” Dad said, and she left.
So we studied our menus in silence for a bit. Now that I had a body that felt right, I was pretty motivated to eat healthy and keep off the weight the Venn machine had instantly removed along with other unwanted baggage. Before, there hadn’t seemed to be much point — even if I got some weight off and kept it off, I’d still hate my body. After looking over most of the options, I decided on a chef salad.
By the time I made up my mind, everyone else had already decided and put their menus down, but no one was talking. Sophia and Caleb were looking back and forth between me and Mom and Dad. Mom was looking at me with a sad, worried expression. Dad was looking off into a corner of the ceiling.
Finally Dad said, “You’re right, Erin. Next Sunday we’ll arrive and leave at the usual time. And I guess we can talk to people on the phone in the meantime. I didn’t want to tell anybody before today because, well, I was hoping Tyler would change his mind before this morning.”
I was feeling weirdly conflicted, simultaneously annoyed at Dad for his passive-aggressive attempts at manipulation and irrationally guilty about embarrassing him in front of his friends even though I recognized that manipulation for what it was.
“Mom, Dad, I know you don’t understand why I did this, but please try to understand that it wasn’t on a whim. I didn’t know it was possible to do it this fast and this perfectly until a week ago, but I’d been thinking for months about doing it the slow, painful, expensive way once I was old enough.”
“I’ve been reading about that the last few days,” Mom said. “About all the health risks of hormone therapy and sex change surgery. In a way, I’m glad you can do this reversibly with the machine and get it out of your system —” She glanced at Dad, who was looking at her, appalled, and hurried on: “— before you started doing something so dangerous. Crystal was telling me on the phone how Mrs. Taggart was cured of cancer and made thirty years younger by the machine, and that’s great; she would have been dead in a few months without it. But we don’t know anything about the long-term effects of those things. For her it’s okay, there would be no long term otherwise. But for you, with your whole life ahead of you?”
“Why only thirty years younger?” Sophia asked.
Mom couldn’t help smiling even as she reproved her. “Sophia! That’s not the point. Tyler, that thing could have even worse long-term health effects than hormone therapy.”
“We don’t have any proof yet,” I admitted. “But I don’t think it’s very likely. The trust booths are obviously way ahead of our medical technology. Like a hundred years, or a thousand. Whoever built them can do things we have no idea how to even start doing — they would have figured out how to eliminate side effects a long time ago.”
“That raises the question,” Dad pointed out; “why did they put them on the lawn at our library? And have them accept any amount of money, however small? What are they getting out of it?”
Nobody had an answer to that.
Posting early again because tomorrow is going to be super-busy. I think next week's chapter will be on Tuesday 8 October.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
As embarrassing as it was, that incident pretty much put a stop to the girls in P.E. grumbling about me changing and showering with them.
part 7 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
We went straight home after lunch and changed clothes; I wore old sweats and a T-shirt, saving my one girl outfit to wear on a school day, and lay around finishing Dragonsong and starting Dragonsinger for most of the day.
Monday morning when I arrived at homeroom, I found Lily and some other girls listening to Emma or Emily talk about her date the past weekend. I sat down near them and half-listened while I skimmed over the current chapter in my biology textbook, but then I caught a name: “— so Andrew pulled up in front of my house and said he’d had a great time, and I thought he was about to kiss me, but he didn’t, and so I said —”
Was this girl whose name I couldn’t quite remember the “Emilia” that Andrew had had a date with Saturday? Or had she dated some other Andrew? There were at least a couple of other Andrews in our grade, and probably more if you counted juniors and seniors. I thought about asking, but she didn’t pause for breath until the bell rang, so I didn’t interrupt. I was about to ask her then, but she was out of her seat and out of the door before I had my book back in my bag, and out of sight by the time I got out the door.
“Sorry we didn’t have time to talk,” Lily said as she followed me out. “How are you doing?”
“Pretty okay, considering,” I said. “I finally talked Mom into getting me gym clothes that fit, after I showed her Coach Wilcox’s note. And a week’s worth of underwear. But nothing else.”
“That’s progress, I guess. See you tomorrow.”
I needed to use the restroom before I went on to Biology, so I got there too late to chat with Andrew before class started; I just said hi to him as I walked in and found my seat. After class, I asked him how his date went.
“It went pretty well,” he said, blushing adorably. “I picked her up at her house around three, and drove to the theater for the last show at the matinee price. It was a little awkward finding something to talk about at first, but after about ten minutes we were chatting like old friends about all kinds of things... she’s pretty easy to talk to. The movie wasn’t as good we’d heard, but it gave us something to talk about during supper. We ate at that Chinese place near the mall in Catesville, the Happy Family.”
“That’s great,” I said, hoping my face wasn’t showing my distress. Andrew was always better at making friends easily than me, and that skill apparently carried over to dating now that he looked so... dateable.
“And she asked me about the machine and how Evan and I used it — we’d talked about that some at school last week, but during supper we talked about it some more. So I said, what about if we go by the library before I take you home? And we did, but the door on her side wouldn’t close. I don’t know why; the same reason it won’t close for most kids our age, I guess.”
“Yeah. I hear people speculating it’s because the machine can tell somehow whether you’re mature enough to make a decision about transforming like that?” Hint, she’s not mature enough for you. And I am.
“Maybe. In homeroom I heard some people talking about how they or their older brothers or parents or somebody went to use the machine, and Ethan Becker said the machine wouldn’t work for his uncle and his uncle’s girlfriend when they went over there half drunk. But I think I’d notice if Emilia was drunk or something... Oh, look at the time.”
“Yeah, gotta go. See you at lunch!”
At lunch, I had to endure Andrew telling Evan, Wyatt and Ian about his date with Emilia again. I won’t trouble you with the crude questions Wyatt asked him about how far they went on the first date. But eventually, that topic was exhausted, and we started talking about the people who’d used the Venn machine that weekend. A couple dozen seniors and juniors and a few sophomores had shown up to school transformed, and there were all kinds of rumors about weirder things that people had turned into temporarily for a few hours or a day or two. There was also talk about people with illnesses or injuries being cured by the machine, transformed for three years into healthy bodies; there was a junior I barely knew with muscular dystrophy who’d been spindly as a rail and dependent on a wheelchair, and was now walking, looking as healthy and fit (not to mention smoking hot) as Andrew, plus any number of kids' parents and grandparents who’d gotten young again as word about the machine spread.
P.E. was, as I expected, much more pleasant when not only my body but my gym clothes fit me. There was still a little grumbling from a few of the girls about me changing with them, but less than there had been last week.
Tuesday during homeroom, I heard a rumor about the woman who’d been turned into a doll that first day — she’d been in an evidence locker for over a week, but yesterday her relatives had gotten her back and put her in the machine to reverse the change. During lunch, Andrew showed me a Facebook post that Emilia’s mom had shared with Andrew’s mom — a photo of Andrew and Emilia just before they went out last Saturday. Yes, that was Lily’s friend, the “Emma or Emily” I sat with in homeroom. I didn’t tell him I sort of knew her; I suspected if I did, he’d want to know what she was saying about him to her girl friends. And I didn’t plan to tell Emilia that Andrew was my best friend.
Things went pretty routinely for a couple more days. Thursday morning, I woke up with belly cramps. At first, it was just aggravating, but as I woke up more and thought more clearly, I was suddenly excited. I mentioned it to Mom after I showered, and asked, “Do you think I might be starting my period?”
She pursed her lips and looked skeptical. “I’ll believe you’re having a period when I see it,” she said. “There are other things that could be — most likely a stomach bug. But I guess you’d better wear a pad for the next couple of days just in case. If it gets worse in the course of the day, have the school office call me and I’ll bring you home.”
Despite what she said, I was pretty sure I was having my period, and I was determined to tough it out (unless I started having obvious stomach bug symptoms like diarrhea). I didn’t expect it to be fun, but it was validating to have my body remind me that I was a real girl, despite Dad and to some extent Mom still treating me like a boy.
She gave me a pad and explained how to use it, so I put it in my panties and finished getting dressed. The cramps came and went throughout the day, and when I used the toilet after Geometry, there were a few spots of blood on the pad. I started crying. It was too amazing for words. Until a couple of weeks ago, I’d been resigned to paying through the nose for a rough approximation of the body I should have had, one that couldn’t have babies and might not even pass a casual inspection. Now I had everything I’d thought was impossible... except for Mom and Dad calling me “Meredith” and letting me wear skirts.
I should have asked Mom for a couple more pads, I thought. Hopefully I wouldn’t soak that pad completely before I got home.
But when I undressed to get in the shower after gym, I realized I was really going to need another pad.
“Hey,” I said to the girls changing clothes near me, feeling my face get hot, “does anybody have a pad I could borrow?”
“Sorry, no.” — “I’ve got some extra tampons.” — “You’re on your period? I didn’t know you could...”
“Thanks,” I said to Ellen, the girl who’d offered me a tampon. “Could you, um, tell me how to use it? I’ve only used a pad, and Mom didn’t really believe me when I said I might be starting my period, so she only gave me one...”
As embarrassing as it was, that incident pretty much put a stop to the girls in P.E. grumbling about me changing and showering with them. A couple of the girls who’d been gossiping about me actually came up to me and apologized after we’d showered and were getting dressed, or the next day, though most of them just shut up about how I wasn’t a real girl and pretended they’d never said anything bad about me.
When I got on the bus and sat next to Sophia, she asked me in a low voice, “So?”
“Yeah,” I whispered back, “it was my period. I started bleeding before lunch and by the time gym was over I needed to borrow a tampon from one of the other girls.”
“Now maybe Mom will believe you’re a real girl,” she murmured hopefully, and gave me a hug. “Or at least let you have some Midol.”
When we got home, we found a note saying Mom had gone to the post office and Dad was out shopping. Twenty minutes later, when I heard the front door open and close, I got up and walked out of my bedroom, and was glad to see it was Mom who’d just gotten home rather than Dad.
“Mom, could I talk to you privately for a minute?”
“Sure.”
We went in her and Dad’s bedroom and she said, “What’s up?”
“Those cramps this morning — it was my period starting. By the time I changed after gym, the pad was pretty bloody and I had to borrow a tampon from one of the other girls. And I checked it when I got home and had to borrow another pad from Sophia.”
She looked gobsmacked; I think she had assumed that the Venn machine’s transformations were just skin-deep. “You’re sure?”
“Do you want to see the tampon I threw away? It should still be on top of the bathroom trash can.”
“...N-no, that’s okay... I was just... oh. You’re really all girl, aren’t you?”
“Even if I didn’t have a period, I’d still be a girl in my head. But yeah.”
“I need to make an appointment for you with Dr. Chaudhari.” She glanced at the clock. “It’s not too late... hang on and we’ll talk more after I get off the phone, okay?”
So she called her OB/GYN clinic and made an appointment for me. I sat on the edge of her bed and listened, shivering with pleasure when she described me to the receptionist as “my daughter.” When she hung up, she sat down beside me and hugged me.
“Are you still sure this is what you want, Tyler? A boy shouldn’t have to go through this.”
“I’m sure,” I said. “When I saw the blood on the pad and realized I could have babies someday, I was so happy... I figured it might be possible after I saw what the machine could do for Andrew and Evan, and read about it changing people into animals and stuff, but finding out for sure was super exciting even though it hurts and it’s gross.”
“I guess I need to give you the Talk, don’t I?”
“Yes, please!”
I’d already picked up a lot of little factoids about menstruation and feminine hygiene from the stories I’d read where boys got magically transformed into girls, but I wasn’t sure how reliable they were. I was pretty sure most of the authors were either trans girls like me, or dudes with a transformation fetish, and had never had a period themselves. So I listened and asked a couple of questions here and there as Mom gave me the female version of the Talk that Dad had given me a few years earlier. It made me feel good, the fact that Mom was treating me as her daughter now, even if some of the stuff she was talking about was pretty icky.
We were still talking when Dad got home. Mom looked up at the sound of the door opening and said, “We’ll talk more later.”
“Okay, Mom,” I said, and hugged her again.
We walked out of the bedroom and found Dad going into the spare room to put away a couple of things he’d bought. “Hi, Dad. Is there more stuff to bring in from the car?” I asked.
“No, this is it,” Dad said. “Thanks for asking.”
“Then I’m going to go finish my homework.”
As I went to my bedroom, I heard Mom say: “We need to talk, Justin —” Then their bedroom door closed.
I thought about what Mom had said. I was a little disappointed with her gender essentialism. Even though I was glad she finally accepted me as a girl, the fact that she initially did so because I had a period when she didn’t accept other trans women who’d transitioned the old-fashioned way stuck in my craw a little and made me feel vaguely guilty. But thinking about it more, I realized that she had shifted to thinking of me as a girl, not just because I had a period, but because I was happy about it, about being able to have babies someday, and thought that finally proved that I was a girl mentally. That made me feel better. And even if she wasn’t perfect, she was still a zillion times better than a lot of trans people’s parents.
I finished up my homework and asked Sophia if she wanted any help with her English homework. She asked me to check her work, so I did, and then we helped set the table for supper. (It was Caleb’s turn to cook.)
At supper, I half expected Dad to say something about my period, but I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t. I figured, even if he wanted to talk to me about it, rather than delegating it all to Mom, he’d rather not do it at the supper table, or in front of Caleb. But from the way Dad looked at me and didn’t say much, letting Mom and Caleb do most of the talking, I was sure Mom had told him a lot, if not everything. Probably not the squicky details of how many pads and tampons I’d already gone through, but the basic facts.
Afterward, Dad and I cleared the table and loaded the dishwasher. “So,” he said when everyone else had left the kitchen and dining room. “Your mom tells me that you started your period today.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that hasn’t changed your mind? You still don’t want to change back?”
“No, sir. If anything, this makes me even more sure. I already felt better, just having a body that looks and feels right, but knowing I can have babies someday makes it even better.”
He was quiet for a while. “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Why would you — I don’t get why a boy would want to have a period. Even women and girls don’t like their periods, they just put up with them because they can’t do anything about them.”
“I’m not a boy. And we don’t like periods because we enjoy bleeding and cramping, but if you said you could stop them but we wouldn’t ever be able to have babies, how many women would say yes? Some, sure, but mostly women like Mom who’ve already had as many kids as they want. I think most girls my age want to have at least one baby someday; I sure do.”
He grimaced, maybe thinking about what I’d have to do to have a baby. What he said next surprised me. “That’s a lot like what your mom said. She talked about that old Connie Willis story, ‘Even the Queen,’ and said if she could have turned off her periods until she was ready to have kids, she would have, but she wouldn’t have turned into a man if that were the only way to make them stop.”
“Neither would I.”
I was hoping for some epiphany on his part next, that he’d say something that showed he finally realized what I had been going through and why I needed this. But he didn’t say anything else that didn’t relate to cleaning up.
Friday, I went to school with a little bottle of Midol and several spare pads in my backpack, and went to the restroom in between every couple of classes to check if I needed to change my pad. Other than that, things were pretty normal except for one thing. After lunch, when I was busing my tray, an older girl came up to me and said, “Could we talk?”
“For a couple of minutes, sure,” I said. The gym was practically next to the cafeteria, so I didn’t have far to get to my next class.
“You’re Meredith Ramsey, right? You used to be a guy and you changed into a girl with that machine?”
“Kind of,” I said cautiously. “I’m transgender, so I wasn’t really a guy before except biologically.”
“Yeah, sorry, I don’t know all the terminology. But the thing is, my boyfriend and I are talking about maybe switching places this weekend — me turning into a guy and him into a girl, right? And I’ve read about people on the Internet that tried it, but I wanted to talk to somebody real if I could, to see how much of what those people on the Internet said is true. I heard you have actual periods now; is that just a rumor?”
“No, it’s true. My mom’s made me an appointment with her OB/GYN, but I haven’t seen her yet.”
“Okay,” she said thoughtfully. “Then I guess we’d better assume we’re fertile when he’s a girl and I’m a guy, and he could get pregnant if we don’t take precautions.”
“Yeah, you’d better,” I said, squirming uncomfortably. “I don’t know what would happen then. If he’d have a miscarriage when the time limit expired or would just stay a girl until the baby’s born or what. Better safe than sorry.”
“Okay, cool. Thanks!”
“You’re welcome, I guess.” She walked off, still not having told me her name.
Caleb’s team had an away game that night, and Mom went to see it, but Sophia and I weren’t allowed to go because of being grounded. We didn’t necessarily go to every single game, but we generally went as a family several times per season.
I recently started working on a sequel/spinoff of this novel, which is over 18,000 words so far. When it's further along, or finished in first draft, I'll ask for beta readers.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Was he into me? It kind of looked that way. Not that we could do anything about it; I was grounded indefinitely, and his parents would never let him date a trans girl.
part 8 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Saturday, Mom and Dad left early to go to an estate sale and some yard sales. “We’ll call home at random intervals,” Dad said, “and you or Sophia need to answer, and then hand the phone to the other one.” Standard procedure when they had to go out somewhere while we were grounded, to make sure we stayed home. Caleb left for football practice an hour or two later.
I finished my weekend homework in the next couple of hours, then had Sophia check my biology homework while I checked her English homework, and we hung out and talked until and after lunch. We decided to take advantage of everyone else being gone for me to try on more of her clothes. None of them fit me perfectly, but some were reasonably close, and I got a better feel for the sort of things that would suit me when and if I was finally able to shop for girly clothes.
By the time Caleb came home from football practice and Mom and Dad came home from shopping, I’d regretfully changed back into sweats and a T-shirt and we’d put away Sophia’s clothes. I spent most of the day reading Dragondrums, finishing it not long before bedtime.
Sunday morning, we got going earlier than last week and got to church around fifteen minutes before the service would start, as usual. Several times during the week, I’d overheard fragments of phone calls in the evening where Mom or Dad were clearly talking to friends about me, about my coming out and transition. More often than not, if we were both in the living room or dining room when they answered the phone, they’d leave the room to continue the conversation. So I wasn’t absolutely sure what their friends were saying about me. But I could guess.
It started, as it had last week, with Mr. Colton greeting us. “Good morning, Justin, Erin, Caleb. Tyler... Sophia.”
“Good morning, Mr. Colton,” I said as sweetly as possible. “Maybe you didn’t hear clearly when I said it last Sunday, with all the background noise, but I’m going by Meredith now.”
“That was a boy’s name when my Uncle Meredith was born,” he said, “but it’s pretty much a girl’s name now.”
“That suits, because I’m not a boy.” I hadn’t realized there were guys named Meredith, and later on I did some research and saw it was about equally popular for both sexes a hundred plus years ago, and then briefly more popular for boys than girls; from the 1930s onward there were more and more girls and fewer and fewer boys with the name. But that was later, at the school library where the academic relevance of my Internet research wasn’t as tightly controlled.
“That’s enough,” Dad said to me, and then to Mr. Colton, “We’re dealing with it as a family. I hope you’ll keep praying for us, and try to quash any gossip you hear.”
“That’d be easier if I knew what was actually going on,” he said, “but I won’t pry further.”
“Thanks,” Mom said.
We moved another three yards before being accosted by Mom’s friend Crystal Southers, who stared at me for a couple of moments before saying, “I heard about it but I can hardly believe it. You’re really a girl?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Glancing around to see who was close enough to hear, I said in a lower voice, “I started my period Thursday.”
Sophia elbowed me. “Say it’s your time of the month,” she whispered, “if there are guys in earshot.”
I figured I was okay because Dad and Caleb already knew I was having my period, but I chalked it up as one more piece of girl wisdom to learn.
“But why are you wearing that?” Crystal asked.
“We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on girl clothes until we were sure it wasn’t just a phase,” Mom said. “I’m pretty nearly convinced, but Justin isn’t.”
“Have you tried borrowing things from Sophia?” Crystal asked me. “That might be better than what you’re wearing, even if it isn’t an exact fit.”
“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” Dad put in. He’d been talking to someone else, but was apparently close enough to hear most of what we were saying. “It doesn’t suit for Tyler to wear girl clothes.”
“Why not?” Crystal asked. “You can tell, even with those unflattering clothes, that she’s a girl. It’s kind of the opposite of those transgenders who still look like men no matter how they gussy themselves up.”
I was dumbfounded. She was transphobic and shallow and arguing from superficial appearances, but she was on my side. I’d take it for now, and hope it had some influence on Dad.
“By the way, I’m going by Meredith now,” I said to her.
“That’s a pretty name,” she said with a smile.
“She’s definitely a girl physically,” Mom said, “there’s no doubt about that, Justin just isn’t sure she should be.”
Dad nodded, and Crystal said:
“But the reason the old kind of sex change was wrong was that it didn’t work. It didn’t really change a man into a woman, it just made him sort of look like one, but not really able to have babies or anything. With the trust booth, I don’t see why someone shouldn’t change sex if they want to. And if they do,” she continued quickly, as Dad started to open his mouth, “shouldn’t they wear clothes that fit their new body?”
“We’ve talked about it,” Mom said, “and we’ll be reevaluating that decision again soon. But not today.”
“It was good to talk to you,” I said (more or less honestly) to Crystal as we moved on toward the sanctuary. I hadn’t expected that kind of support here.
Moments after we walked into the sanctuary, before we found seats, Nathan and Joseph Wallace came over to talk to us. Nathan was a little younger than Caleb, and Joseph was between my age and Sophia’s; we used to hang out with them more often when we went to Sunday School or youth group regularly, and still talked with them some before or after worship on Sundays, or when we went out to lunch with them and their parents after church. Their parents sent them to the Everett Academy, so we didn’t see them at school.
“Hey, is that Tyler?” Nathan asked Caleb, not talking to me directly for some reason.
“I’m going by Meredith now,” I said for the fiftieth time.
Joseph just gawked at me, seemingly unable or unwilling to speak. Caleb said, “Yeah, she can talk for herself, as you might notice.”
Mom and Dad had moved on to talk to someone else while Caleb, Sophia and I stood there with Nathan and Joseph. Nathan said again, “Sorry, uh... Meredith. It’s just kind of hard to believe. We were out of town last weekend, and I heard about you from some people at school.”
So the kids at the Everett Academy were gossiping about me, too. Great.
“Good things, I hope?” I asked.
“Uh...” Nathan said. Joseph blushed and looked away from me for a few moments before looking back.
“Apparently not,” I concluded.
“There were some kids that showed up to our school after being transformed by the trust booth, too,” Nathan said, “but the headmaster suspended them until they changed back. I never saw any of them, just heard about it. I hear lots of kids at your school have changed?”
“A couple of of dozen, at least,” Caleb said. “There might be more that changed only a little bit, so it’s not obvious.”
“And then there’s the ones who tried out temporary changes overnight or over the weekend,” Sophia said.
Just then the lights dimmed further and the music started up, so we hurried to find seats. Caleb went to sit with Nathan and Joseph, but since Sophia and I were grounded, we sat with Mom and Dad as usual.
Dr. Debenham’s sermon that Sunday didn’t say much if anything about the “trust booths,” it just moved on to the next chapter of John’s gospel, the Good Shepherd discourse. Some of the prayers thanked God for a lot more people who’d been healed by the machine, though; I don’t know how many, as I lost count, but it was at least eight or nine. There were several people at the service that morning I didn’t recognize at first until I realized they were decades younger than I knew them.
After the service, we hung around talking with various people, including the Wallaces and the Dirksens, and wound up going out to lunch with them at the Fisherman’s Cove. Andrew’s older brother Nick was our waiter, as it happened. He was super professional with us until he’d taken all the adults' drink orders; then, after he’d taken the orders from us kids at the end of the table, he greeted Caleb, then looked at me and said, “Meredith, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Andrew told you about me, I guess?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Nice work, Sophia. I’ll go get your drinks.”
After he left, Joseph finally found his tongue. “So, uh, what did he mean by saying ‘Nice work, Sophia’?”
“The Venn machine takes two people to work it,” Sophia said. “They go in the booths and either they can both tell the machine what to transform the other person into, or one of them changes the other person and the other one does nothing. That’s what we did; I asked Meredith not to change me.”
“Does it have, like, a menu where you can select ‘change sex’ or ‘cure cancer’ or whatever?”
“No,” she explained, “it shows these pictures, and you touch the picture that’s closest to what you want and new variations pop up...” I tuned out her explanation and studied my menu for a while. When I decided what I wanted and looked up, Joseph was looking at me, but quickly looked back at Sophia when I caught his eye. Caleb and Nathan were talking about football, apparently, and Mom and Mrs. Wallace were talking about me, to judge from the fragments of their conversation I overheard; I couldn’t make out anything of the conversations further up the table.
“...so they wouldn’t let Meredith borrow any of my clothes, or buy girl clothes either,” Sophia concluded.
“I’m sorry about that,” Joseph said, turning back to me. “Y-you look nice, even wearing boy clothes,” he said, and blushed, looking down at his menu.
“Thanks,” I said, smiling. Was he into me? It kind of looked that way. Not that we could do anything about it; I was grounded indefinitely, and his parents would never let him date a trans girl. But it felt nice to have a boy look at me that way, the way I wished Andrew would look at me. He was kind of cute, though not super hot like Andrew.
Nick came back with the tray of drinks, distributed them, then started taking our meal orders. After he left, Joseph asked, “So I guess you haven’t gone to a movie or played any games since you’ve been grounded, but have you read anything good?”
I told him about re-reading the Harper Hall trilogy, and he told me he was reading Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley; then Sophia pitched in with what she’d been reading, and that topic lasted until our food came and for a while afterward. But after a while, something Sophia had said about genetic engineering from one of the nonfiction books she’d read recently reminded me of something from the Dragonriders books (the later ones more so than the Harper Hall trilogy) about genetically engineering the dragons from little winged lizards, and somehow that led us back to the Venn machines.
“Do you think someone could use the machine to turn a lizard into a dragon?” he asked.
“No,” Sophia said. “We tested it on a worm, and it doesn’t seem to work on animals. I haven’t tested it on lizards, but some people on the Internet said they couldn’t get it to work on cats or dogs, so probably it doesn’t work on anything but humans. I want to do more testing someday, but probably somebody will beat me to it before I’m ungrounded.”
“But maybe you could turn a person into a dragon,” I said. “Something kind of like a dragon, anyway. Back before we were grounded, we read on the Internet about people who turned into cats or dogs and were still able to think like people. And we’ve seen people at school with mixed and matched parts, mostly human but with cat ears or a tail or something. So I figure the machine could put together parts from a lizard or alligator and a bat and make it look fairly dragony, even if it couldn’t breathe fire or teleport like the ones in the Dragonriders books.”
“It couldn’t turn you into a big dragon, or you wouldn’t fit in the booth,” Sophia pointed out.
I remembered some stories I’d read about an alien transformation booth that could stretch space inside like a TARDIS as needed to turn you into something bigger than its exterior size, but I dismissed the thought. Just because the Venn machines were way beyond our known technology didn’t mean they could do anything. And it turned out Sophia was right. But we didn’t find out for sure until much later.
After that, our conversation lulled for a few moments, though the conversations further up the table were still going. Joseph’s mom got up and left the table, presumably to go to the restroom. Joseph gave his dad a nervous glance and then asked, what I figure he’d been wanting to ask for a while, “What did it feel like when you changed?” He pitched his voice low, so I figure my parents and his dad couldn’t hear him over Caleb and Nathan’s friendly argument about whose team was going to win the Eastern Mynatt High vs. Everett Academy game in a couple of weeks.
“I couldn’t feel the change — it was instantaneous,” I said in the same low voice. “And suddenly being a girl probably wouldn’t feel like this for you, or most guys, but for me it felt wonderful. Like I’d been wearing clothes that were too tight all my life and I finally had an outfit that fit me. Or I’d been carrying a heavy backpack for a long time and finally was able to take it off.” That was kind of on the nose, given my former weight problem, but I moved on. “I mean, losing the extra weight was nice too,” (I gave Sophia a grateful glance), “but even becoming a girl as overweight as I used to be would have been a big improvement.”
Joseph was speechless.
Most of us were pretty much finished eating by then, and Nick came back with the checks for our dads and Mr. Dirksen. A few minutes later we went our separate ways. When we got home, I had no sooner changed into casual at-home clothes than Sophia knocked on my door.
“Come in, I’m decent,” I called out. She slipped in and closed the door behind her.
“I think Joseph likes you,” she said.
“Yeah, it looked like it to me too. But you know nothing’s going to come of it. I’m grounded until I’m eighteen and his parents wouldn’t let him date me anyway.”
“Who knows what might happen in the next few months? But you know something else?”
“What?”
“I think he wants to be a girl, too.”
I thought back over the conversation. “...You could be right,” I said slowly, mulling it over. “Or he might just be the kind of guy who gets off on the idea of transforming, rather than wanting to be a girl per se. He was pretty interested when we talked about the possibility of turning into a dragon, too.”
“I hope he gets the chance to try sometime. After what we did, you can bet his parents aren’t going to let their boys go to the library by themselves.”
“Yeah.”
We chatted for a while longer, and then I started re-reading Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones until it was time to help fix supper.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“Congratulations on your new body. I’m pretty happy about mine, but I’m sure you must be absolutely ecstatic.”
part 9 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
When I walked into homeroom Monday morning, Ms. Buckley said, “Meredith, Ms. Novacek wants to talk to you before first period. You’re not in trouble,” she added hastily. “I think she wanted to ask if you’d volunteer for something.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, and a few minutes later I was sitting down in Ms. Novacek’s office.
“I suppose you might have heard something about the school board’s discussion of the new policy on the transformation booths?” she asked.
“No, not really. What are they leaning toward?” I felt apprehensive, wondering if they might punish me, Andrew, and a lot of other kids for coming to school in the “wrong” bodies.
“They’re leaning toward some pretty strong restrictions,” she said, “but they’re willing to consider reasonable exceptions. They meet on Thursday nights, and this Thursday they’ll be taking public comment on the policy before finalizing it. I thought you and certain other students who’ve benefited from them a lot would like to know about it so you can tell the school board about your experiences.”
“I’d like to,” I said, “but I don’t know if Mom and Dad will let me go.”
“If they’ll let you go, but aren’t willing or able to give you a ride, I can put you in touch with some people who are carpooling to the meeting. Do you know Ms. Hodge?”
“I’ve heard of her — my brother Caleb had her for Geometry.”
“Well, she’s going to the meeting — she and her husband used the transformation booth to make each other younger and cure her diabetes and his lower back pain. And she’s offered transportation for students or other staff that might need rides — I know of at least one other student who’s taken her up on it, whose mother works evening shift.”
“Thanks. Should I go talk to her in person, then? Where’s her classroom?”
“Room 187 — and here’s her phone number and email address, as I expect your parents will want to talk to her, as well.”
“Thanks.”
I went by room 187 later in the morning; it was conveniently on the way from Biology to American Literature. There was a woman who looked like she was in her mid-twenties sitting at the desk, working on a laptop; she glanced up as I entered.
“Hi, are you Ms. Hodge?”
“Yes. Are you a new student, or...?”
“No. I’m Meredith Ramsey — Ms. Novacek said to talk to you about a ride to the school board meeting. I don’t know yet if Mom and Dad will let me go, or if they’ll be willing to drive me there themselves, yet, but I’ll talk to them this afternoon and let you know tomorrow if I’ll be riding with you.”
“Okay. Did Ms. Novacek give you my phone number and so forth?”
“Yeah, I’ve got it.”
“All right. Have your parents call me if they’ve got any questions. May I ask what you used the Venn machine for?”
“I’m transgender.”
“Ah, I see. Congratulations on your new body. I’m pretty happy about mine, but I’m sure you must be absolutely ecstatic.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome,” I said, breaking out into a grin. “Well, I need to get to my next class. Thanks.”
Just after American Literature, I went to the office and waited for Mom to pick me up, which she did about fifteen minutes later. On the way to the counselor’s office, I told Mom what Ms. Novacek and Ms. Hodge had said about the school board meeting and the new Venn machine policy.
She was quiet for a few moments, and then said: “I’m glad you’re getting engaged politically, even if I may not agree with the political views you’re planning to express to the school board. I... your dad and I haven’t been as politically active since Caleb was born as we used to be, and I’ve worried sometimes that we’re not setting a good example for you.”
“You’re still more aware of what’s going on than most people,” I pointed out. I remembered them taking us with them to the polls when we were little, and explaining democracy and elections to us on a child’s level before we learned anything about it in school. “And you’ve made sure we are, too. So... can I go to the meeting?”
“I’ll talk with your dad, but I think so.”
“Thanks.”
It wasn’t much later that we got to the counselor’s office, which wasn’t far from the library or our house, in an area where some older houses had been turned into professional offices. We parked in front of one of these houses and went in. Mom signed in with the receptionist, and we sat down to wait; I’d brought Howl’s Moving Castle with me, but on a whim, I picked up a women’s magazine from one of the tables in the waiting room. Mom and Sophia didn’t subscribe to anything like that. I only got halfway through an article on makeup tips before a door opened and a woman with reddish-blonde hair a little older than Mom stepped out.
“Erin and Tyler Ramsey?” she asked, looking around. There were only a couple of other people in the waiting room.
Mom said, “That’s us.”
“I’ll see Tyler first, then you,” the woman said. “Then both of you together. Was your husband not able to make it?”
“He’ll be here soon.”
“Okay.”
So I followed her apprehensively back down a short corridor and into her office. There were an assortment of more or less comfortable pieces of furniture, but nothing like a stereotypical psychoanalyst’s couch — not that I’d expected one, since Mom had described her as a counselor, not a psychologist or psychiatrist.
“Have a seat,” she said. “I’m Cheryl Hewitt. Your mother told me a little about you on the phone, but why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
“First, I’m going by Meredith. Mom and Dad are the only people who still call me Tyler. Second — are you required to keep everything I say private, like a doctor or lawyer?”
“In general, but there are some exceptions because you’re a minor. If I hear something that makes me think you’re a danger to yourself or others, or that you are in danger from someone else, I may be required to inform someone. But barring that, I won’t share anything you tell me with your parents or anyone else without your permission. At the end of our session, I might ask permission to share some specific things when we meet with your parents later on.”
“Okay,” I said. I still wasn’t sure if I trusted her; she wasn’t working directly for me, since Mom and Dad were paying her fees. But I decided I’d trust her a little and see what happened. “Well, the reason I’m here is that I’m transgender. My sister and I used the Venn machine at the library — you’ve heard about it, right? — to change me from my old body to this. Mom and Dad grounded us both, and they haven’t been letting me borrow my sister’s clothes, or spend my savings on girl clothes of my own. After several days, Mom broke down and agreed to buy me a week’s worth of girl underwear, but I still don’t have any other girl clothes except for this outfit the Venn machine made for me when it transformed me. I’ve been washing it a lot and wearing it every two or three days.”
“When was it that you transformed?”
“Wednesday, the eleventh.”
“So why did you feel like you wanted to be a girl?”
“Um... you do know what ‘transgender’ means, right?” I’d been afraid that with the kind of friends Mom and Dad would be asking for recommendations for counselors from, I’d get someone who didn’t think gender dysphoria was a real thing or thought it would go away if you treated the person’s other problems like depression. It was starting to look like I was right.
“I know some of the things it means,” she said, “and I’m sure you know some of its meanings, but until you tell me what you want in your own words, without using labels or jargon, I won’t know for sure if we’re using it the same way.” Okay, that increased my respect for her a bit.
“Okay. Well, ever since I was little I’ve liked girly things. I learned pretty early on that I’d get in trouble, or make Mom and Dad upset, if I showed it too much, though. Like the times when I got in trouble for playing dolls with Sophia — that’s my younger sister, she’s fourteen now, and I guess she was eight or nine the last time that happened. I didn’t realize I wanted to be a girl until a couple of years ago. I just knew I was upset about what puberty was doing to my body, making my voice change and hair grow all over and stuff, and I didn’t know why at first. And I envied girls sometimes for the things they got to do and boys didn’t, like wearing dresses or having babies.”
I thought briefly about telling her how I’d tried researching those weird, ambiguous feelings on the Internet and eventually stumbled on information about gender dysphoria and then the support groups for trans teens that I’d been active on until I was grounded. I decided against it; I still didn’t fully trust her not to tell Mom and Dad things, and I figured I shouldn’t tell her about visiting websites that should have been blocked by the nanny software that I’d circumvented years ago. Or maybe anything that I wouldn’t tell Mom or Dad to their faces.
“So I gradually put things together, and by the time the first Venn machine popped up at the library, I was pretty sure I wanted to be a girl. After a few days, when there was more information available about the machines and how the changes wore off after a certain amount of time and could be reversed easily, I decided I should try it and see if it really was what I wanted, because I could change back easily if I was wrong. And it was so wonderful when Sophia changed me, everything felt so right for the first time!” I’d let excitement slip into my voice, and tried to regain some self-control so I wouldn’t accidentally say something that I wouldn’t want Ms. Hewitt telling Mom and Dad.
“And there’ve been some frustrations since then, like not having very many girl clothes, but I haven’t regretted it for a moment. When my period started, I was happy because it means I can have babies. I’d hoped so, because the machines have done some pretty amazing things, but I wasn’t sure until I saw the spots of blood on the pad... I’m sure after a few more periods, the novelty will wear off and I’ll grumble about it like other women, but not now.”
“When did you start your period?”
“Thursday — the cramps started early in the morning, and the bleeding started a few hours later, at school.”
“You mentioned feeling upset about the changes you went through at puberty. That’s normal, even for boys who don’t have any interest in being girls. Can you tell me more about how you felt then?”
I tried to remember what I’d felt years ago before I heard of the idea of being transgender, and considered how much I wanted to tell her. “At first, it felt like I wasn’t me anymore? And then, as I thought about it some more, I realized I’d never quite been me to begin with. I mean I’d never had body that felt right, even though it wasn’t so bad before puberty and I could live with it.
“Then I had some dreams that helped me figure some of it out. There was this dream where my — boy bits fell off. And I was so happy they were gone, and then when I woke up and realized it was a dream, I was super conflicted about it, because my first reaction was to be sad that it was all a dream, and then I wondered what that said about me, and I felt guilty and hated myself for yet another reason for a while there, until I found out that being transgender was a thing, and that I was probably transgender. And there were some other dreams where I was just a girl, doing normal stuff like going to school or hanging out with my sister, and I always felt sad when I woke up and realized they were just dreams.”
I might have been fudging the timeline; I honestly couldn’t remember when the dreams had happened relative to when I started feeling uncomfortable about puberty and when I’d found information about gender dysphoria online.
“I see.” She shifted in her chair and didn’t say anything for a few moments, but before I could think of anything else to add, she went on: “So you’ve felt better about your body after using the machine to change into a girl?”
“Yes, exactly. A lot better.”
“Do you get aroused when you see your new body in the mirror? Or while showering, for instance?”
“No! I’m not —” I cut myself off. I’d planned to not tell Mom and Dad I wasn’t attracted to girls until and unless they accepted that I was really a girl, and that meant I shouldn’t tell Ms. Hewitt, either. “I’m not like that.” I’d read stories where some guy gets unexpectedly turned into a girl, and the first thing he does (he still seems to think like a guy at this point in most of those stories) is to find some privacy so he can masturbate for hours, generally in front of a mirror. That sort of narcissism disgusted me, and I didn’t want to be like that.
“Let’s go back to how you felt before you changed. Did you have other bad feelings that didn’t relate to your body?”
“I’m not sure. Looking back, I think most of them were related to feeling my body was wrong. The persistent ones, I mean. I’d get upset for a little while about doing badly on a test or losing a game or a show I liked being canceled, but that would pass pretty quickly, but I’d still feel bad about my body changing further and further from what I wanted it to be.”
“Did you sometimes feel like it was hard to get going? Hard to motivate yourself to get ready for school or do homework or even do something you enjoy?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Not all the time, but fairly often. There were times when it took all weekend to do homework that should have taken two or three hours, tops. Or when I couldn’t get myself to do it at all. Times when I didn’t really enjoy playing games, but I’d do it because it would make Andrew or Sophia happy.” There were several stories I’d started writing and then abandoned when one of those spells of lethargy came on, sometimes writing a little more of them later, but more often starting something new when I finally started feeling more energetic. I didn’t mention them, though, because I was sure Ms. Hewitt would want to know what the stories were about.
“I don’t think you’ve mentioned Andrew before.”
“He’s my best friend; I’ve known him since we were kids. He used to live in my neighborhood, but his family moved to a bigger house a few miles outside of town when we were in middle school, so he wound up going to a different school for eighth grade, but we’re going to the same high school, and while we were going to different schools we’d still hang out together on the weekends.”
“All right. About how often did those lethargic feelings last? And how often did you feel that way?”
“I’m not sure. I never kept a diary consistently for very long. I think they usually didn’t last longer than a few days, and they’d probably come on once or twice a month? But sometimes they’d last longer or happen more often.”
“Have you felt that way at any time since you transformed?”
“No. I’ve been frustrated several times, like about people calling me ‘Tyler,’ and embarrassed a few times, mostly about having to go to school or church in baggy boy clothes, but usually just for a little while — probably a couple of hours, tops. Never sad and lethargic like I used to feel for days sometimes.”
“How do you think changing your body like this has affected your relationships? With your parents, your siblings, people at school?”
“Well, Mom and Dad are having a hard time with it. Dad more so than Mom. Mom was really supportive when she found out I was having my period, even though she was skeptical when I first started having cramps and thought it was probably a stomach bug and the machine couldn’t give someone who was born with boy bits a real female reproductive system. In the last couple of days, Mom’s even used female pronouns for me sometimes.
“Sophia was really great right from the start. She was the first one I told about being trans. Caleb was kind of weirded out at first, but after he had time to think it over, I guess, he’s been kind of quietly supportive, standing up for me a couple of times. Andrew and my other friends at school have been great about it,” (at least if I didn’t count Wyatt as a friend but as a friend of a friend); “some of the other kids not so much, but so far it’s just been gossip about me behind my back, not in-your-face bullying. The teachers have all been at least okay, and a couple of them are pretty supportive. Coach Wilcox gave the girls in my gym class a stern talking-to about not giving me a hard time for changing and showering with them, or calling me by my old name or anything, for instance.
“Some of the adults at church have been pretty judgmental, but not all of them, and the kids around my age are pretty okay, the ones I’ve talked to so far anyway. Some of them might have been avoiding me, though.”
“Have you tried thinking about this from your mother or father’s perspective?”
“Kind of? Maybe not as much as I should.”
“Try it. Imagine yourself in your father’s place, back when he first found out that you’d changed into a girl, and that you’d been wanting to do so for some time before the machine appeared.”
I was a little wary, as I suspected she was trying to guilt-trip me with how much I’d upset Mom and Dad by being transgender, but I tried it anyway. I remembered Dad’s reactions that night, and tried to imagine myself inside his skin, saying and doing those things. It was pretty hard to set aside everything I knew about gender issues and my own motivations and put myself in Dad’s place, knowing nothing about transgender issues except what Fox News commentators had said during the bathroom law controversy a few years ago, and not understanding why his “son” would want to be a girl... but I tried, and maybe by the time Ms. Hewitt spoke again, I understood him slightly better.
“Now try imagining yourself in your mother’s place when she first found out.”
I did. I thought about the differences between Dad “losing” a son and Mom “gaining” a daughter, and how that might be affecting the way they’d reacted to my coming out, and to the things that had happened since then. But I also knew Mom was generally more even-tempered than Dad, and just because she didn’t splutter and shout incoherent questions didn’t mean she wasn’t just as upset as Dad in her own way. I thought about the weirdly misleading information about gender dysphoria she’d apparently found shortly after I came out, wondering what sources she’d looked to, what search terms she’d used, or how Google’s search algorithm might have taken her previous search history into account to steer her toward the most conservative takes on gender issues, and how that had led her to wonder if my dysphoria was just a weird symptom of depression or dissociation.
“Do you think you’ve learned anything that will help you communicate better with them?” Ms. Hewitt asked after I’d been silently thinking for a while.
“Yeah, maybe so. Thanks,” I added grudgingly.
“I’d like you to do a couple of things between now and when I see you again. One is to start keeping a diary, like you mentioned you’ve done before sporadically. You don’t have to write much, just two or three sentences a day at least. Something about how you’re feeling and anything interesting that might have happened. And if you have any... emotionally intense interaction with your parents — or anyone else — try to write about that. And above all, don’t feel guilty if you feel too lethargic to write in it. If those depressive moods have generally happened about once or twice a month, it won’t be surprising if you have another one that keeps you from writing in the next few weeks.
“I won’t ask to read your diary, but I’ll ask you if you feel like sharing some things from it, and whether you’ve had a lethargic spell that kept you from writing in it. That will help us measure how long these spells last and get an idea of what we’re dealing with.”
“Okay,” I said. “I have to point out that back when I last tried to keep a diary, sometimes I’d miss some days because I was feeling too depressed to write, but sometimes it was because I was too busy doing fun things to write.”
“You can tell me about that at our next meeting. For now, I’m going to have a chat with your mother — and your father, if he’s here by now — and then we’ll talk again, all four of us. Do you mind if I share some of what you said about your depressed feelings with your parents?”
I thought about it for a moment. I’d already told Mom and Dad about how I used to feel depressed sometimes, though I hadn’t gone into as much detail with them as I had with Ms. Hewitt. “Yeah, that’s okay,” I said. “Nothing else, though. Not about my dreams or anything.”
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if she did tell them about my dreams, but that would be a small, safe test to see if she would really respect my wishes about what she could and couldn’t share with them.
“I won’t,” she promised. “While you’re in the waiting room, think about what you might like to say to your parents that you haven’t already said.” She stood up and I followed her to the waiting room. Dad was sitting there with Mom.
“Justin and Erin?” Ms. Hewitt said. “Come on back.”
I sat down as Mom and Dad got up, and did some school reading while I waited. I’d finished that and had just read a paragraph or two of Howl’s Moving Castle when the receptionist opened the door and said, “Tyler, come on back; Ms. Hewitt is ready to see you with your parents.”
Had Ms. Hewitt called her receptionist from her office and said “Call Tyler back”? She may not have wanted to use the name “Meredith” when Mom and Dad were listening and antagonize them. Or, most likely, she discounted my gender and had no plans to use the name “Meredith” at any time.
I followed the receptionist back to Ms. Hewitt’s office, where Mom and Dad were sitting together on the sofa. I sat in one of the easy chairs. Ms. Hewitt said, “I’d like to see you all about once a week for a while. You don’t necessarily all have to come in at the same time every week, but at least once a month I’d like to see all three of you together.
“Now, is there anything you would like to say to each other while I’m here to mediate?”
Mom said, “We love you, Meredith. We’re having a hard time understanding what you’re going through, but we’re trying.” I could see Dad wince when Mom used my new name. “Your dad and Ms. Hewitt aren’t as sure as I am that you’re a girl, but we all want what’s best for you.” She glanced at Dad, who cleared his throat and said:
“We talked about the clothing issue, and we decided on a compromise. Your mom is going to take you shopping later today for a few things, and more on the weekend... starting with things that fit your new body better than what you’re wearing, but aren’t too feminine. No skirts or dresses until Cheryl is convinced you’re not... well, that this whole girl thing isn’t just a symptom of some other problem.” Ms. Hewitt frowned slightly when he said that, like he’d either given away too much or misrepresented what she’d said. “But she and your mother have convinced me that making you wear the clothes that fit your old body is pointless and cruel, and I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.”
“Thanks,” I said, tearing up a little. I thought briefly about asking more questions about what clothes I would be allowed and what would be considered “too feminine”, but I figured I’d have better luck if I saved it for when Mom and I went shopping. “I love you both so much. You’re so much better than a lot of other trans kids' parents. So many...” I was about to say “so many of my online friends” and thought better of it. “...so many of them get disowned or abused when they come out, and I know you would never do something like that. Thank you.”
We hugged, and Ms. Hewitt showed us out, telling us to make an appointment next week with her receptionist. A few minutes later, we drove in separate cars over to a nearby Italian restaurant for lunch. Once we were seated and had placed our orders, Mom said, “I mentioned the school board meeting to your dad and Cheryl.”
“Is it okay if I go?” I asked Dad.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m not sure if one of us will drive you or if you’ll get a ride with that teacher. She’s Caleb’s Geometry teacher from a couple of years ago, right?”
“Yes, Ms. Hodge. I’ve got her phone number and email address in my notebook.”
“What did she use the machine for?”
“She and her husband fixed each other’s medical problems. I think she used to have diabetes, but I don’t remember what he had. And they’re younger now.”
Mom gave Dad a speculative look then, and I wondered if they’d been talking privately about maybe using the machine to make each other younger. That would be a little weird, seeing them like they looked in old photos from when Caleb was a baby — or even older ones from before they got married? — but I’d be happy for them if they did. Maybe they’d loosen up and let Sophia do a science project using the Venn machine after she wasn’t grounded.
“Well, it’s good to know she’s offering to help, but I think one or both of us will go with you. Maybe Caleb and Sophia, too. It’s been way too long since any of us went to a city council or county commission meeting — probably not since you and Sophia were too young to appreciate what was going on — and I don’t know if we’ve ever been to a school board meeting.”
I smiled broadly. Today had gone so much better than I’d expected, and it was only going to get better when I got to buy some things that fit me.
The rough draft of the sequel to Pioneers is now over 44,000 words long (compared to 55,000 for Pioneers). Even if I finish it in the next few weeks, I won't be posting it immediately after Pioneers; I'll get beta reader feedback and put it through a couple more drafts first.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Since my period had started, I’d convinced Mom to let me use the Internet to research menstruation, feminine hygiene, etc. And Sophia had given me a book about puberty for young teens that Mom had given her a couple of years earlier. Between those, and the TG fiction I’d read online (not the most reliable source), I sort of knew what to expect from a pelvic exam.
part 10 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Dad went to run some errands while Mom took me back to school for the last couple of classes of the day. She was back to pick me and Sophia up a couple of hours later, and we drove down to the nearest Walmart — not way over in Greensboro like before. I guess after so many people had seen me and talked with me at church, and after they’d decided to let me testify at the school board meeting, she didn’t mind having people we knew see us shopping; but as it happened, we didn’t run into anyone we knew. Sophia wanted to get some things for herself, too, but Mom told her not while she was grounded, and she was only getting a few things for me because I had almost nothing that fit.
“So,” I said, “did you and Dad hash out what exactly he meant by ‘not too feminine’? I know he said no skirts or dresses, but are Capri pants okay, for instance?”
“We didn’t define it,” Mom said with a wry smile. “But I think Capri pants would be fine...”
So we dove into the racks of teen girls' clothes and picked out a bunch of things for me to try on, both pants and tops. Mom wouldn’t let me get anything that bared my shoulders, and I didn’t want anything that bared my midriff, but that left a lot of room for things that Mom didn’t think would set Dad off too badly. She called a halt after just an hour and a half, though, when I’d only found three sets of things that fit me: one pair of jeans, two pairs of Capri pants, a girl’s T-shirt in solid light purple, a lace-up top, and a ruffle-sleeve top. “We’ll get more on Saturday,” she said. “We need to get home in plenty of time for homework and supper.”
I was ecstatic when I walked into school the next morning wearing my new aqua Capri pants and matching lace-up top. Dad had winced a little when he saw me in them at the breakfast table, but agreed that it wasn’t a skirt or dress. Lily beamed at me when I walked into homeroom.
“Meredith! You look awesome! So your parents finally got you something to wear?”
“Yeah, just a few things after school yesterday. Mom says I can get more this weekend...” I told her some of what had happened the day before, though not nearly all the details of what I’d talked with Ms. Hewitt about.
“That’s great!” Lily said, and Emilia and a couple of other girls agreed. Lily went on: “I mean, I know it’s still not ideal, but my cousin’s friend Brooke had it way worse. She didn’t dare come out until she was earning enough to live on her own, and when she did, her parents wouldn’t let her come home for Christmas or Thanksgiving or anything.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard about a lot of trans people that’s happened to,” I said. “My mom’s pretty much convinced I’m a girl now, and Dad seems like he’s starting to maybe consider it. The counselor they got me could be a lot worse, but I’m glad I don’t have to depend on her for permission to start hormones or get surgery.”
When I walked into Biology and said hi to Andrew, he said hi back, looking up from his textbook with an air of distraction, but then gave me a big smile as he saw how I was dressed.
“Your parents let you get new clothes?”
“Yes! Mom took me shopping yesterday after school. I think she wanted to earlier, but Dad talked her into waiting until we saw the counselor yesterday.”
We didn’t have much time to talk about it until lunch. After I told him a lot about the appointment with Ms. Hewitt and lunch with Mom and Dad afterward — about as much as I’d told Lily — he told me about his second date with Emilia on Saturday. They’d gone to a putt-putt course in Greensboro and then to dinner at a Mexican restaurant afterward.
“I wish we had the same lunch period,” he concluded. “But I’ll be seeing her again Friday or Saturday. She wasn’t sure if her family might have something going on next Saturday, so we might be going out Friday evening instead.”
“Cool,” I said, forcing a smile.
Evan and Ian had been half-listening earlier, but when Andrew started talking about his date, which they’d already heard about at lunch on Monday, they tuned us out and started talking about something else. When Andrew had finished telling me about his date, I realized they were talking about the school board meeting.
“I saw a poster about it in the hall between homeroom and first period,” Ian said, “but it was gone by the end of first period.”
“What did it say?”
“It was talking about how the school board’s making new rules and they’re probably going to say nobody can come to school when they’ve been changed by the machine, so people should turn up at the meeting and talk to them about allowing any kind of change that doesn’t disrupt classes.”
“That makes sense,” I said. “I’m going. Ms. Novacek told me about it yesterday and asked me to testify to the board about how it helped me, and Ms. Hodge offered me a ride to the meeting, but when I asked Mom and Dad for permission, Dad said they’d probably drive me themselves.”
“We should go, too,” Andrew said to Evan.
“I don’t know why they’d listen to somebody like me,” Evan said.
“When and where is it?” Andrew asked.
“It’s at the main county administration building in Catesville,” I said. “Thursday at seven p.m.”
“I’ll talk to Dad about it,” Evan said.
Wednesday afternoon after P.E., Mom picked me up again and took me to see Dr. Chaudhari, her OB/GYN. By then I’d seen several of the posters Ian had mentioned; they’d been stuck up in various places around the school, and at first they kept getting taken down because they weren’t authorized and the language used for the school board’s intended policy was kind of inflammatory, but then new ones appeared that were more moderate in their language although still just as unauthorized, and the staff stopped taking them down. I learned some of the behind the scenes info on that later, but at the time, I just knew I’d seen two copies of the new poster (describing the proposed policy as “overcautious” rather than “stupidly reactionary”) right on the doors to the gym.
I was a little excited and a lot nervous as I got into the van with Mom and we pulled out of the school parking lot. Since my period had started, I’d convinced Mom to let me use the Internet to research menstruation, feminine hygiene, etc. And Sophia had given me a book about puberty for young teens that Mom had given her a couple of years earlier. Between those, and the TG fiction I’d read online (not the most reliable source), I sort of knew what to expect from a pelvic exam, and wasn’t looking forward to it; but I knew it was something every girl went through (at least every girl lucky enough to have decent health care available), and was hoping in a vague way that it would bring me closer together with Mom, Sophia, Lily... maybe even Emilia.
And, on further reading, I realized, of course, that having periods is necessary for being fertile, but not sufficient. I hoped Dr. Chaudhari would confirm that yes, my girl bits were all in working order.
On the drive to the clinic, Mom talked to me about what to expect. I squirmed a little in embarrassment, but listened, hoping she’d have some insight or bit of information I hadn’t gleaned from my intense reading over the last week (and more casual reading over the past couple of years).
“Normally I wouldn’t think you need this so early,” she said. “I didn’t have my first gynecology appointment until just before I went off to college, and Sophia hasn’t needed one yet. Girls your age aren’t at much risk for cervical cancer, breast cancer, and so forth yet. But... we don’t understand what that machine did to you or how. Obviously, since you’ve had a period, the change is more than skin deep, but I’d like to know more about how thorough the changes are.”
“So would I,” I said.
Mom checked us in, and I sat doing homework for about fifteen minutes before a nurse called us back. She checked my vital signs and asked me some basic questions, like whether I was taking any medicines, when I’d had my first period and when my latest period had started and ended. She seemed shocked at first that a girl my age had only just had her first period, until I explained how I was trans and had just changed into a girl a couple of weeks earlier. I’d thought Mom had told Dr. Chaudhari about that, and she had, but apparently the nurse hadn’t gotten the memo.
After a bit, the nurse asked Mom to leave for a bit, and asked me if I wanted her to come back and be with me during the pelvic exam.
“Yes, please,” I said.
So Mom left, and the nurse started asking me more private questions — questions some girls wouldn’t want to answer honestly with their mom listening — like whether I’d ever had sex (no), whether I’d ever been sexually assaulted (no), whether I was planning to start having sex anytime soon, whether I’d ever drunk, smoked, used illegal drugs... Then she gave me a gown to change into and left me alone for a few minutes.
Mom came in a little later and sat with me while I tried to do a little more homework, and then Dr. Chaudhari joined us. She was a woman of Indian heritage a few years younger than Mom, with no accent — I found out later she was born in Atlanta, and her parents had come over from India in the early eighties.
“Hi, Meredith,” she said. “Your mother tells me you’re transgender, and you used the new machine at the library to change into a girl?”
“That’s right.”
“And you started your first period last Thursday?”
“Yes, and it ended Monday.”
She asked me a few more questions about how heavy my flow was, what my cramps were like, and other symptoms, and then started checking my breasts and armpits for tumors, and talking to me about how to check myself for them, “which is a good habit to get into early, though your risk for them is pretty low at your age.” The pelvic exam wasn’t as hellish as I’d expected, though it was far from comfortable; Mom held my hand all through it, and it occurred to me that after sharing this experience, she’d have an even harder time thinking of me as a boy. I think she was surprised by the little smile that came over my face at that thought, but she didn’t ask me what I was smiling about.
And then Dr. Chaudhari gave me the good news. “You’re in good health as far as I can tell, and I see no sign that you were ever anything but a girl. Of course we’ll send a couple of samples for testing, but the odds of any problems at your age are extremely low. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t had a patient a few days ago who entered menopause a few years back, and wanted me to check out her new body after she got rejuvenated by the machine.”
“It’s pretty amazing,” I agreed happily, giving myself a little hug.
“I went to see the machine for myself this past weekend,” Dr. Chaudhari said. “My husband was kind of leery about it, but we set it for the minimum period, eight hours, and tried out some small changes. It was an eye-opening experience, but I think I’ll need to collect some more data on how it’s affected my patients before I can talk my husband into doing a longer-term change.”
“Have you seen or heard about any serious problems resulting from people using the machine?” Mom asked.
“I only know of two of my patients who’ve used it, you and this other woman whose name I can’t mention. I’ve done some reading, but I haven’t run across any problems people have had that couldn’t be solved by going into the machine again and changing back to normal, or changing into another form without the problems of the first one they tried.”
“That’s good to hear.”
Then Dr. Chaudhari asked Mom to leave us alone for a few minutes, and said to me:
“I don’t see any reason you’d need to see me regularly at your age, Meredith. Come back if you have any unusual symptoms — a period where the bleeding lasts a lot longer than normal, unusual discharge, itching in your genitals... anything like that. Or when you start being sexually active and want to start using birth control. Otherwise, you can probably wait until you’re eighteen to start having these exams yearly.”
I blushed. “I... don’t want to have sex until I’m married. But if I’m ever un-grounded and able to start dating, I guess I’m going to be tempted sometimes, and maybe it would be safer to be on birth control just in case?”
“That’s a good idea, yes. Both waiting until you’re married, and recognizing that you might not have the strength to do that. What do you mean, ‘if you’re ever un-grounded’, though?”
I told her how Mom and Dad had grounded Sophia for a month and me for a month plus however long I stayed a girl. “And I think Mom’s changed her mind about it since then, but Dad still thinks I should turn back, and I don’t know if Mom can talk him into un-grounding me after a month or so.”
She frowned slightly. “I see. I’m sorry I can’t do much about that — except talk to your mother, and it sounds like she’s not the one we need to convince.”
So she sent me to the waiting room and had a brief, private talk with Mom, and then Mom and I went home, as it was too late to get back to school for Spanish.
I had a weird experience when Sophia got home from school a little while later: she asked me what it was like to have a pelvic exam. Back when I’d first transformed, I’d never expected her to be the one asking me about some feminine thing I’d experienced and she hadn’t. But then, the stories I’d read had given me the impression that all girls had gynecological exams every year or so from the start of puberty to menopause; Mom often took us to the doctor at different times, and I’d never felt comfortable asking Sophia about her doctor’s appointments, just assuming she must be having those weird girl exams I’d read vague mentions of. So I told her what it had felt like, and how Dr. Chaudhari had reported that my girl bits were all in working order, and the conversation drifted to the topic of babies and how many we wanted to have and when.
“I don’t want to have babies until I’m at least thirty,” Sophia declared. “And then probably just one, or maybe two.”
“It depends on how soon I find the right guy,” I said, “but I’d consider having my first baby just after college, if everything works out. I’d like to do something for a living you can do from home, like freelance editing or writing, so I can be with the kids all day until they’re in school, at least, and not start putting them in daycare as soon as I finish breast-feeding them.”
Sophia shook her head. “I’m going to be a scientist, and there’s not much science you can do at home. Not cutting-edge science, anyway. And I want to marry a guy who’s open-minded about using the Venn machines, so maybe I can have one baby and he can have the next one, if we want two. And we can both breast-feed them. Do you think the machine can make a guy have nursing breasts without losing his guy-parts or his ability to use them?”
I blushed and giggled. “I don’t know,” I said. “It can do a lot of weird stuff, but those parts might not work together for long. Like maybe the male hormones would make him stop lactating pretty soon after he came out of the machine, or the lactation hormones would make him impotent?”
She shrugged. “We’ll figure that out by then. Plenty of time. How soon do you think I ought to ask potential boyfriends if they’re willing to use the Venn machine and change into different things?”
“Second or third date, at least.”
Wings, the sequel to Pioneers, is now over 56,000 words -- longer than Pioneers (which is 55,000 words).
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“Statistically, there’s got to be at least a couple more trans kids at each of our schools, and another hundred-plus trans people in the county as a whole... but at our age, most of them are probably closeted or in denial. That might change once more people knew about the machines and how easy it is to transition now.”
part 11 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Thursday evening, Mom and Dad allowed me and Sophia to ride home with Caleb so we could have an early supper and get to the school board meeting in plenty of time. We got there about half an hour before the meeting began, and I recognized a few people from school sitting in the room where the school board met — the same one the county commissioners, election board, and so forth used at different times. Ms. Hodge was there, and the junior who’d been cured of muscular dystrophy, and a couple of other older kids I had seen at school but didn’t know, including a girl with four arms, as well as Principal Moffett. Mom, Dad, Caleb, Sophia and I sat down near Ms. Hodge and the guy who used to have MD, and we introduced ourselves.
“I’m Hunter Gorman,” said the kid who used to have MD. “You’re Meredith Ramsey, right? I’ve heard people talking about you.”
“Good things?” I wondered nervously. He was seriously good-looking, not as tall as Andrew or Evan, but still a lot taller than me, and ripped.
“Eh, mostly good. Don’t mind the assholes. You’ve got guts, I can tell that from the little bit I’ve heard.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Congratulations on getting your MD fixed.”
“It’s pretty awesome,” he said with a grin, flexing his biceps. “Who knows what’s going to happen when it wears off, whether I’ll go back to the exact same body as before, or if it’ll be three years older with the MD three years worse... I’m going to make the most of it while it lasts.”
Andrew and his mom arrived a little later and sat down near us, along with a number of other people, some from our school and some I didn’t know. Finally, the school board members came in and the chairman called the meeting to order. It was about fifteen minutes before they got to the “Transformation Booth Policy” and asked for public comment. Ms. Hodge, Andrew, Hunter and I all stood up then, along with a lot of other people, and they started calling us up one by one to a standing microphone to give a brief statement of no more than one minute. I was the fifth one to speak, and the first trans kid, though not, I found, the last. Most of the ones who spoke before me had been rejuvenated or healed of some serious illness or disability by the Venn machine, including Ms. Hodge, Hunter, and a boy from the other high school that served the western half of the county, who’d been cured of hemophilia.
When it was my turn, I said: “I’m Meredith Ramsey, a sophomore at Eastern Mynatt High. I’m transgender; I was born with a boy body, and it always felt wrong. I was able to use the Venn machine to change into this body that fits me just right, and I’d like to thank Assistant Principal Novacek, Coach Wilcox, and all my other teachers for making sure everything went smoothly for me at school. I hope you’ll take the needs of transgender students and staff into account when you decide on the new policy. Thank you.”
I’d been thinking about what to say since Ms. Novacek told me about the meeting, and I’d written out several drafts of what to say over the course of the week. But wouldn’t you know it, just as soon as I sat down again, I was second-guessing myself. Should I have tried to say something about the needs of non-binary trans kids? A lot of people had a gender identity more complicated than mine and might need a lot of trial and error with the machine to find a body that suited them. What about gender-fluid kids who might need to use the machine over and over, to keep their body matching their gender? I’d considered all that earlier, but decided it was too complicated to try to explain to the school board, and I should just focus on my own experience.
But a few minutes later, after a couple more teachers and students who’d been healed of different illnesses and injuries, a couple who’d just used it to improve their looks like Andrew, and several parents who wanted the use of the Venn machines banned for everything except chronic illness, a slender Hispanic person who looked a little older than me got up and said:
“I’m Carmen Olmedo, a senior at Western Mynatt High. I’m transgender, like the girl who spoke earlier, but unlike her, I’m neither a boy or a girl — I’m non-binary. I used the trust booth last weekend to get a body that is neither male nor female, and to clear up the headaches I’ve had ever since I got a concussion falling out of a tree when I was nine. Some people suggested allowing the use of the machines only if your new body is a normal human body, and I wonder if they’d consider me normal enough to count. I think any body shape that doesn’t inherently disrupt classes should be okay — and if bigoted students or staff don’t like someone’s new body, it’s the bigots who are causing the disruption, not the transformed person.”
They were so awesome and I wanted to be their best friend. They’d spoken so calmly and clearly yet so forcefully, not stammering or hesitating like a lot of the other people who’d spoken (probably including me), and they’d explained the stuff I’d decided was too hard to explain without getting near the time limit. (The clerk had a stopwatch and was holding up a big “FIVE SECONDS” sign when someone got close to the limit, and she hadn’t done so before Carmen finished talking.)
As Carmen went back to their seat and the next person started talking, I whispered to Mom, “I want to talk with them afterward.”
“Sure,” she whispered back.
After a middle school teacher and an elementary school bus driver who’d been rejuvenated and healed of different ailments, we got another kid who’d made more adventurous changes. It was the girl with four arms from Eastern Mynatt High, a senior named Melanie Endicott. “I agree with what Carmen said earlier; if you look weird and people gossip about you, it’s them who are disrupting class, not you. As long as you’re not shedding fur that people might be allergic to or something, and you’re capable of participating in classes, you should be allowed to attend school without penalty.”
After about half an hour and thirty or so people telling the school board what they thought, the chairman said they would consider the public comment and decide on the new policy at the next meeting. A lot of people started leaving then; I looked at where Carmen was sitting and said to Mom, “I’m going to go talk to Carmen.”
“Okay. We’ll meet you out in the lobby.”
Carmen had apparently had the same idea, and was heading toward me. But before we met up, the chairman of the school board — who had started talking about a school bus that was going to cost a lot to repair — called out for people to be quiet or get out. So when Carmen and I got close enough to talk, I whispered, “We’d better go out in the lobby.”
“Yeah,” they whispered back, and we went.
Once we were out in the lobby, I said “Your speech was awesome. I’d thought about trying to explain about non-binary and gender-fluid people and what they would need the policy to do, but I figured it was too complicated to explain in under a minute, and you nailed it.”
“You were pretty good too,” they said. “Concise. Who knows if they’ll pay either of us any attention; I have a feeling half of them have already made up their minds and are just waiting for public comment so they can look honest.”
“Who did you get to design your new body and change you?”
“My best friend Zoe. What about you?”
“My little sister Sophia — there she is, over there,” I added, pointing to where Mom, Dad, Sophia and Caleb had just come out of the meeting room. “It’s so cool to meet another trans person who lives locally — well, not in the same town, but at least in the same county.”
“Statistically, there’s got to be at least a couple more trans kids at each of our schools, and another hundred-plus trans people in the county as a whole... but at our age, most of them are probably closeted or in denial. That might change once more people knew about the machines and how easy it is to transition now.”
“Eh,” I said, “physically changing is easy now, but some other parts of transitioning can still be pretty hard.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. It looks like your parents are pretty supportive, though?”
“They’re coming around. At least Mom is. She was finally able to talk Dad into letting me get some girl clothes earlier this week, but I’m still not allowed to wear skirts or dresses yet. What about your parents?”
“It’s just me and my older sister; our mom died a few years ago and our dad left us years before that. My sister was a little puzzled by it at first, but she’s never been as conservative or strict as Mom used to be, and she went to bat for me with the school administration.”
“Oh, and I guess I should have asked earlier — what pronouns do you prefer?”
“They/them, please.”
Nearby, I could see Andrew chatting with Caleb, Melanie, and a couple of other kids from our school. Ms. Hodge was talking with one of the other teachers who’d gotten rejuvenated and Hunter was talking with the guy who used to have hemophilia.
Carmen and I talked for a few minutes longer and exchanged contact information. I was heading back toward Mom and Dad when Hunter came over to talk to me.
“Hey,” he said, “it was nice meeting you. Ms. Hodge says we need to go, so I wanted to say bye real quick. When do you have lunch and free period?
“Fourth and sixth periods. I usually eat with Andrew,” I said, pointing where he was still talking with some other kids from school, “and a couple of other friends, in the corner of the cafeteria nearest the gym.”
“Cool. Maybe I’ll see you at school sometime.”
On the way home from the meeting, Mom told me how proud she was of me for standing up in front of the school board and everybody and making that short speech. It was only twenty-nine seconds (Caleb had timed me with his phone’s stopwatch app), so I’m not sure why it was worth such a fuss, but after Mom said that, Dad said he was proud of me, too, even though he still didn’t get this transgender thing.
Caleb had an away football game the next night, way over on the other side of Greensboro; Dad went, but Mom stayed home with me and Sophia.
Saturday, after Mom and Dad got home from their estate sale and yard sale shopping and long after I’d finished my homework, I asked Mom if I could call Carmen. (I hadn’t wanted to call them while Mom and Dad were away in case Mom and Dad called while we were talking, and normally we weren’t allowed to talk on the phone with friends when we were grounded.)
“Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, tapping the tabletop with her nails. “I guess it’s all right. But don’t tie up the phone all afternoon.”
They answered after a couple of rings. “Hey, this is Carmen.”
“Hi, Carmen, this is Meredith Ramsey — we met at the school board meeting...”
“Oh, hi, Meredith. How are you doing?”
“Pretty okay. I just got done with my weekend homework.”
“I’ve got some more homework to do before I go to work, but I can afford to chat for a little while. Anything in particular you want to talk about?”
“Well... how did you figure out you were non-binary? It seems like that might be harder to figure out than it was for me, and that was plenty hard enough.”
“Hmm... I usually say ‘genderqueer,’ but I figured ‘non-binary’ would be less confrontational when I was talking to the school board. It didn’t take me long to realize I didn’t like what puberty was doing to my body, but it was several years before I figured out what I really wanted and why. I thought I might be a trans guy for a while, but that didn’t seem quite right either. I talked about it with my friend Zoe and some online friends and eventually figured it out, after I met a couple of other people kind of like me online.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it was kind of like that for me — getting kind of depressed about what puberty was doing to me, and not understanding why until I found out being transgender was a thing, and then I thought I might be a trans girl but I wasn’t sure for a while, even after I met some other trans people online. But I didn’t come out to anybody I knew in person until a couple of weeks ago when I told my sister and we went to the library to use the machine.”
“How’d you find out about the trust booth?”
“My best friend Andrew was one of the first people to see it...” I told them how Andrew had called me with a mysterious exhortation to get my butt over to the library, and everything else that had happened that first Saturday after the machines appeared. They told me how they’d heard about the machines on a trans forum, and made plans with their friend Zoe to take a weekend trip to the one in Lebanon, Tennessee until they heard rumors at school that there was one right here in Mynatt County, so it was just a twenty-minute trip instead of over six hours. (I’m not sure when the first website that tracked the locations of every known Venn machine appeared, but it was sometime while I was grounded.)
“So what did you ask your sister to do, exactly?” they asked. “Did you just ask her to make you a girl, or give her more specific requests?”
“I said I wanted to be obviously a girl, but still with enough of my old face that people could recognize me, at least once I pointed out who I was. And I wanted to lose some weight. I’m pretty much exactly at the ideal weight for my height now.”
“Yeah, I was a little overweight too. And a lot of it was in places I didn’t even want to have. I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, except I didn’t want my body to be so feminine that I couldn’t look androgynous no matter what I wore. So Zoe and I tried out several different things, and unless I knew right away that I didn’t like a particular body, we’d go out and walk around downtown for a few minutes, or browse in the library, before going back to the trust booth and trying again.
“The first thing I asked Zoe to do was make me like I was before puberty hit, except taller. And she literally did what I asked, because I was taller than I was when I was nine, but not by much. It felt really nice and comfortable being nine again, and I was about to tell Zoe she’d messed up but I decided I wanted to try that for a little while. So I changed her into a little girl, too, and we had some fun running around and pretending to be kids. But it wasn’t long before having people treat me like a little kid — even my sister Alejandra, even though she knew I was eighteen — well, that got old fast. Although I might have encouraged that by running and jumping like I hadn’t done since I grew boobs big enough to make any kind of athletic activity painful.
“So after a few minutes of that, we went back to the machine and Zoe made me a scaled-up version of my nine-year-old body, like I’d asked for at first. And it felt nice, but it wasn’t quite right; part of it was that I still looked really baby-faced, and Alejandra said I’d still be getting carded when I was thirty, and even now I might get pulled over a lot by cops who thought I was too young to have a driver’s license. And that got me thinking about whether a adult-size nine-year-old body might go through puberty again and grow seven feet tall or something. I didn’t want to go through all that again.
“So when we went back to the machine, I asked Zoe to make me intersex, with a mix of boy and girl parts, and modest boobs I could hide under a loose top or emphasize with a tight one. And I made her older, around Alejandra’s age but with long blonde hair — she’s got reddish-brown hair naturally. We browsed in the library for a while, and I went to the ladies' room and inspected my new bits, which were kind of... well, some aspects of that just didn’t appeal to me, on further thought.
“That got Zoe curious, and she asked me to make her a guy next time, while I asked her to give me a slender androgynous figure, but with something like a small penis without testicles, so I could pee standing up, but it would stay soft and could be tucked into panties easily —”
I giggled uncontrollably, and apologized.
“Sorry, TMI, I know. Anyway, that didn’t turn out so great, either; I’m not gonna go into detail, but it seems like when you’re looking at pictures of bodies with clothes on, you can’t really tell what their genitals look like, and what you get is potluck. So the next time we went back, I took off my pants while Zoe tried again. And after a little while in that body, I decided I didn’t want a penis of any kind. Standing up was convenient and I might use that body again for a camping trip or something, but... eh, it’s not worth it for everyday.
“So finally I took my pants down again while Zoe changed me into this — an androgynous figure and no reproductive organs, just a little taller than I used to be.”
“Neat,” I said, though honestly, the idea of being sexless was almost as alien to me as it is to most of my readers. And I had some of the same prurient questions you probably have about their new body, but I had better sense than to ask. “I guess the machine didn’t give you a new set of clothes like it did me, then?”
“Not exactly, but when I pulled my pants back up, I found out the machine had adjusted them to fit my narrower hips, and adjusted my top for the flat chest. And it adjusted my bra, for some reason, instead of getting rid of it. Anyway, that last time I made some little improvements on Zoe, too, but made sure she still looked like herself. Zoe, Alejandra and I did some shopping that afternoon, and some more the next day. Underwear and pants, mostly — my hips are a lot narrower, but I can still wear a lot of the same blouses and shirts.”
“Did you have any trouble proving who you were to the school?”
“Some, yeah. But Alejandra took before and after pictures of us so she could testify we were still the same people. We still wound up arguing with the principal for almost an hour Monday morning, so she was late to work.”
“She sounds like a great sister,” I said. “I feel like I’ve gotten a lot closer to Sophia since I came out and transformed, but have you felt like your relationship with your sister’s changed?”
“She’s known for a long time I wasn’t the girly girl Mom tried to make us. I came out to her as non-binary a while before I transformed, and she was a little puzzled, but she was okay with it. She teases me sometimes about just wanting to save money on bras and tampons — the bras I used to need were pretty expensive.”
“The ones Mom’s got for me so far didn’t seem that expensive, but they’re also pretty plain.”
“You’re — what, fifteen, sixteen?”
“I’ll be sixteen in November.”
“She’s probably worried about you growing up too fast, and still getting used to the whole trans thing.”
“Yeah.”
We talked for a few minutes longer, and then they asked if I wanted to hang out sometime. I realized there was something I hadn’t told them.
“I’d like to,” I said, “but Sophia and I are both grounded because we used the Venn machine without permission.”
“Bummer. How long?”
I hesitated. “Originally, it was a month plus however many days I stayed a girl. Dad was trying to pressure me into changing back. I think Mom’s trying to talk him into making it just a month flat, same as for Sophia, but I don’t know how long that will take.”
“Well, let me know how it goes. Let’s talk again next weekend, okay?”
“Yeah, let’s do that. Bye.”
(Edited 2019/11/8 to fix a typo pointed out by Sthelen on TGStorytime.)
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Mrs. Dirksen said to Mom, after we’d given the waiter our drink orders, “Erin, I don’t think you should be letting Tyler use the ladies' room.”
“Do you seriously think she should use the men’s room?” Mom asked incredulously. “The machine changed her completely into a girl.”
part 12 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Later that day, Mom and I went out and got some more girl clothes, including a couple of pant suits for church, as well as a purse.
Sunday, we got to church at the usual time. We were less inundated with questions than the previous Sunday, but still had a few people asking about my new girl clothes. Sophia and I hung out with some of Sophia’s girl friends after the service while our parents were talking with other people, and Joseph Wallace sort of orbited at the edge of the group of girls; I tried to include him in the conversation some, thinking about Sophia’s speculation about him, but he was too shy to say much. We went out to eat with the Eberhardts, another couple near Mom and Dad’s age whose kids were in college. They gave me some disapproving looks, but didn’t say much about me where I could hear them.
Monday at lunch, I was patiently listening to Andrew and Evan telling us about their dates over the weekend when Hunter Gorman came over to our table.
“Hi, Meredith,” he said. “And, uh... Andrew, right? Am I interrupting something?”
“Have a seat,” Andrew said. “Guys, this is Hunter Gorman — we met him at the school board meeting.”
Evan, Wyatt and Ian all said hi and introduced themselves. Hunter sat down on the other side of me from Andrew.
“So,” he said, “have any of you guys used the trust machine to change, besides Andrew and Meredith?”
“Me and Andrew used it on each other,” Evan said.
“Cool,” Hunter said. “How long did you set the machine for?”
Andrew and Evan glanced at each other. “We don’t know,” Andrew admitted. “You’ve gotta understand, this was maybe half an hour after the first librarian who got to work discovered the machine. Nobody knew what those buttons meant yet, and we’ve tried to remember which buttons we pushed to get the booths to open, and we can’t. But it was obviously more than three days.”
“Oh! So you were some of the first people to see it?” Hunter glanced at me. “You too?”
“Not exactly. Andrew called me as soon as he saw it, and I got over there as soon as I could finish my homework, but by the time I got there, the deputies had already cordoned it off. I didn’t get to change until after the new machine popped up.”
We talked about the Venn machines and the stranger changes people had made for a while, and then started speculating about how things would change as more machines kept popping up in more and more small towns. “I figure if they keep appearing only in small towns and not in big cities,” Hunter said, “in another twenty years, it will be the big cities that are considered backwards and conservative while the small towns will be more accepting of people who are weird in some way.”
“Yeah, that could happen, but I’m not holding my breath,” I said. “I think it’ll take more than twenty years. And maybe the towns where the machines have appeared will have a boom in population while the big cities shrink a little?”
I thought about the implications of that; if the neighborhood around the library became extremely desirable with a lot of new people moving in, the value of our house would go up, along with our property taxes. I wasn’t sure if our mortgage would be affected. We might have to sell if they went up too much, but we’d get more out of the house than we expected. Of course, with the number of machines that have appeared since then, with still more appearing all the time, the boost in property values in the vicinity of Venn machines hasn’t been as great as some people expected early on. Mom and Dad still live in the same house even now.
Tuesday after school, Mom picked me up and we went to Cheryl Hewitt’s office. She asked me how I’d been feeling, and what I’d written in my diary about. I’d written in it every day for the past week, though most days I didn’t have a lot to talk about, so it was just a paragraph about how I was feeling, except Thursday-Friday when I wrote a lot about the school board meeting and Carmen. (I’d started that entry Thursday night after we came home from the meeting, and had so much to say I didn’t finish it until Friday during free period.)
Telling Ms. Hewitt about Carmen might have been a mistake, because she had a lot of questions about them and my conversations with them. From the tone of her questions, I got the impression she thought Carmen was a bad influence, though she didn’t come out and say it.
I also told her about getting new girl clothes Monday and Saturday, and about the OB/GYN appointment, and how validating all that had felt. She nodded noncommittally and asked a few more questions about those events.
Hunter started eating lunch with Andrew, Evan, and me as often as not. I gathered that he hadn’t had any close friends at school before his transformation. He’d made some other new friends besides us, and ate with them about half the time; toward the end of that week he introduced me to some of them. They were mostly juniors who’d venned each other into hotter bodies, some of them with unusual features. One of them was Melanie Endicott’s little sister Hanna, who had three breasts.
“How do you get bras to fit you?” I asked her as we bused our trays after lunch. “For that matter, how did Melanie get all those tops with four arm-holes? Did y’all sew them yourselves?”
“No,” Hanna explained. “Once we got each other’s bodies the way we wanted them, we just kept changing clothes in the library restroom and then going to the trust machine and changing each other’s clothes so they fit, without changing each other’s bodies.”
“Huh. I didn’t realize you could do that. Maybe I can turn all my old boy clothes into girl clothes that way?”
“Yeah, it would probably work.”
“If Mom and Dad let me near the machine again.”
“Point out how much money they can save that way,” she suggested.
“I will, thanks.”
Friday morning during homeroom, there was an announcement over the PA that the school board had decided on a new policy for the use of transformation booths by students, faculty and staff, and people should look at the school website for details. At lunch, Andrew and other people with cellphones were looking up the new policy and reading bits of it aloud to those without them. Apparently, you weren’t allowed to come to school with a short-term change, and for a long-term change, you had to file a form ahead of time telling the school administration you were going to change, and then get another form witnessed by a notary public who watched you go in the booth and come out different, and took photos and fingerprints before and after. (Somebody on the board had done their research and found out that people’s fingerprints would change even after a fairly minor transformation that didn’t obviously affect their hands.)
“That’s a lot of hassle,” Andrew said, frowning.
“It’s worth it for people like me and Hunter,” I said. “I guess it’s meant to discourage people from changing casually. I wonder if they’re going to require us to file those forms retroactively? Does it say anything about that?”
“No... I don’t see anything about that yet, but it’s long and a lot of it is kind of legal-jargony.”
“I guess I should ask somebody.”
After school, I told Mom and Dad about the new policy, and we looked it up and read it. At last, buried near the end, we found something about how changes people had already made were grandfathered in, but that we would have to file a form within two weeks of the policy coming into effect.
Saturday, after Sophia and I had finished our homework and Mom and Dad had gotten back from their yard-saling, I told them what Hanna had told me about using the machine to transform old clothes to fit your new body.
“I think she was just adjusting her old bras and her sister’s old tops to fit, but I bet we could make bigger changes. Like jeans into a skirt or a T-shirt into a blouse.”
“No skirts until Ms. Hewitt says it’s okay,” Dad insisted. “But... transforming your old clothes might make sense. At some point. We’ll do some research.”
I let it drop for the moment, and neither Dad nor Mom brought it up again until after our appointment with Ms. Hewitt the following week.
I talked to Carmen on the phone for a little while that evening, but they didn’t have a lot of time to talk; they were fixing to go meet their friend Zoe to see a movie.
Sunday after the service, Joseph Wallace came over to me and Sophia and said, “Um, hi, Meredith,” glancing at his parents, who were talking with the Eberhardts a few yards away, and then back at us. “Hi, Sophia.”
“Hi, Joseph. How have you been doing this week?”
“Pretty okay, I guess. I, um, didn’t get a chance to talk to you last Sunday, you were kind of busy, but I wanted to say...” His face got red and he stammered for a few moments before mumbling something inaudible and hurrying away.
“He’s definitely got a crush on you,” Sophia whispered in my ear.
“I think you’re probably right,” I replied in a low voice. “Do you think I should go talk to him?”
“Can’t hurt.”
Joseph had been heading toward the vestibule, so I went out there, but didn’t see him. I found Nathan talking with Caleb and Christopher, another guy who went to the Everett Academy.
“Hey, have y’all seen Joseph?” I asked.
“I think he went to the restroom,” Nathan said. So I camped out near the restrooms for a few minutes until Joseph came out.
He looked startled, then guilty, then looked away from me. “S-sorry,” he said, “I, um...”
“It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “It’s just that I didn’t hear what you said earlier.”
“Um, yeah...” His face got redder. “I just wanted to say that Ireallylikeyouroutfit.” He looked away again.
“Thanks,” I said. “Mom took me shopping last week. I mean, Saturday before last. We finally talked Dad into letting me get some girl clothes.”
“That’s cool,” he said, meeting my eyes again briefly. “What all, um, kinds of things did you get?”
“Well, Dad said no skirts or dresses yet, and Mom said no sleeveless or cold shoulder tops, but I got some casual pants and tops for school and a couple of pant suits like this for church. I hope Dad will relent on the dresses before next Sunday, but I’m not holding my breath — he’s already being more reasonable than I expected.”
I wasn’t sure how much detail Joseph really wanted. If Sophia was right in her guess that Joseph was a trans girl, she’d probably want juicy details about the specific cuts, fits and colors, but if he was just expressing polite interest because he had a crush on me and was willing to listen to me talk about anything at all, I might be boring him already.
“That’s good to hear,” he said. “I mean,” he went on hastily, “that they’re being, uh, more reasonable than you expected. I guess it could be a lot worse.”
“Yeah, definitely.”
We were both quiet for a few moments before Joseph glanced past me and said, “I guess I’d better go.”
I turned and saw that his parents had come out into the vestibule, and his mom was giving me — or Joseph, or both of us — a scowl. “It was nice to talk to you,” I said hastily. “I’m sorry if I’ve gotten you into trouble,” and ducked into the ladies' room as if I’d been on my way there and had just passed by Joseph for a moment on the way.
I’d avoided going to the restroom at church as long as possible, waiting till we went out to eat afterward when I could hold it that long, but now that I was there, though I could wait a few minutes till we got to whatever restaurant we were eating at this Sunday, I figured I might as well. Nobody was washing their hands or checking their makeup when I entered, so I slipped into a stall and did my business.
By the time I came out to wash my hands, though, Mrs. Dirksen had flushed and exited her stall, and she glared at me in the mirror as I approached the sink.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s not right.”
“Do you want me to hurry out without washing my hands?” I asked, feigning surprise. I’d been lucky enough not to get this kind of treatment at school — or not much — but I’d figured it would happen sooner or later at church, and I was right. “That wouldn’t be sanitary.”
“You know what I mean, young man.”
That hurt worse than the “You shouldn’t be here;” I’m not sure why. I wavered between bursting into tears and bursting into a rant. I tried to keep cool and said, as I turned on the hot faucet and started washing my hands, “I have every right to be here. It would be indecent for me to go to the men’s room, and they don’t have enough stalls there, and I c-can’t...” I was going to say “can’t pee standing up,” but I burst into sobs that were only partly drowned out by the water faucets.
Mrs. Dirksen gave me a disapproving look and punched the big button of the hand dryer, which drowned out my sobs entirely. I stayed there as she left, and washed my face, too, then realized there weren’t any paper towels to dry it with. I went back into one of the stalls and dried off with toilet paper, then stood in front of the mirror picking bits of wet toilet paper off my face, hoping no one would come in and see me in that ridiculous position.
Fortunately, nobody but Sophia saw me as I was picking off the last couple of pieces. “What are you doing?” she asked as she came in and saw me leaning close to the mirror.
“It’s a long story.”
“Mom and Dad are saying it’s time to go.”
“Just a second.” I picked off the last bit of toilet paper, and was about to go, but asked Sophia, “Do you see anything stuck to my face?”
She examined me. “No, you got it all. What was it?”
“...I’ll tell you later.”
Of course, who would we be going to lunch with but the Dirksens.
We went to a local steakhouse a couple of miles from the church; the Dirksens had already arrived and gotten a table for us, and we joined them. Mom sat down next to Mrs. Dirksen, and Dad next to Mr. Dirksen, with Sophia and I next to the women and Caleb on the other side of the table with the men.
So I was sitting right next to Mom when Mrs. Dirksen said to her, after we’d given the waiter our drink orders, “Erin, I don’t think you should be letting Tyler use the ladies' room.”
“Do you seriously think she should use the men’s room?” Mom asked incredulously. “The machine changed her completely into a girl.”
Dad said: “It’s not obvious what would be best, but there are certainly potential problems with Tyler using the men’s room, too.”
“I’m still not sure why you’re letting him stay like that,” Mr. Dirksen said.
“I’ve told you why we’re not forcing the issue,” Dad said. “That’s not open to debate.”
I was furiously studying my menu, without understanding a word I was reading. I wanted to jump into the conversation and defend myself, but I had a feeling it would be a bad idea. If I forced Mom and Dad to choose between me and their transphobic friends they’d known since before I was born... well, I was pretty sure they’d side with me, but they’d resent the necessity and maybe take it out on me unconsciously. And it looked like the Dirksens were going to make them choose between us without my help.
“All right,” Mr. Dirksen said, holding up his hands. “All I’m saying is, back when Tori wanted to wear something to school that hardly covered more than a swimsuit, we didn’t ground her until she agreed to wear something decent, we just made her wear something else and threw out the outfit.” Tori was their daughter, a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill.
“This is more complicated than that,” Mom said. “Please, just pray for us and trust that we’re trying our best to figure it out.”
Sophia reached over and squeezed my hand, and I realized I was gripping my menu so hard my knuckles were white. I forced myself to relax and take a couple of deep breaths.
“This doesn’t affect just you,” Mrs. Dirksen said. “It affects everyone you and Tyler interact with, at church or at school or wherever. By buying him those clothes and letting him use the ladies' room —”
“Stop,” Mom said, leaning forward a little. “Please, Tamara, let’s talk about something else.” After a brief pause, she continued: “What have you heard from Tori lately?”
Mrs. Dirksen didn’t say anything for a few moments, but she relented and started telling us about Tori’s volunteer work with a student organization that visited people in the hospital. I sighed with relief and returned to studying the menu.
Wings, the sequel to Pioneers, is now over 83,000 words. I'm about two and a half years into a story that's probably going to cover about five years of internal chronology. (There are a lot of timeskips and montages; it's not paced like Pioneers.)
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“So, Meredith,” Julianna said, plopping down on Sophia’s bed, “dish! Sophia’s told me about you, and I heard some stuff from girls at school, but I want to hear it from you. What do you like best about being a girl? Is there anything you miss about being a boy? Is there a boy you like? Or a girl? Are there girly things you haven’t tried yet that we can initiate you into tonight?” Her eyes gleamed with joy and enthusiasm, and even though I found her prying questions a little uncomfortable, I couldn’t resent her.
part 13 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
When I walked into Biology Monday morning, I saw that Andrew was back to his old self, just a few inches taller than me and almost as overweight and pimply as I used to be.
“Good morning,” I said. “I guess you and Evan must have pushed the month button, then?”
“I guess. It wasn’t quite a whole month, though — I woke up like this around three in the morning, but it was around nine-thirty or so that Saturday when Evan and me transformed each other.”
“Huh, that’s weird. Are you going back to the machine sometime soon?”
“As soon as I can. I went by the office and got one of those forms to fill out before homeroom, and I’ve got to get Mom or Dad to sign it, and then find a notary to witness the transformation.”
I nodded. “Do you want to change into the same form again, or...?”
Before he could answer, the bell rang and I hurried into my seat as Mr. Collins started calling the roll. After class, we walked together to the end of the hall where we’d go different ways to our next classes.
“I figure I’ll ask Nick or Evan or whoever to make me look as much like I did before as he can,” he explained. “Trying out something weirder sometime for a day or two might be nice, but I don’t want to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops to tell the school I’m going to have four arms or green skin or something for the rest of the school year and then decide I don’t like it.”
It was several months before anybody discovered the history feature, where you could get a display of all the forms your partner in the other booth had ever transformed into and pick one to turn them into again. Until then, getting back to a form you’d changed into before was a matter of trial and error and you could never get it exactly the same.
I mulled over my feelings toward Andrew during odd moments of Literature and Geometry. I hadn’t ever thought about Andrew sexually or romantically until he and Evan had transformed each other; my previous silent crushes had mostly been on tall, athletic guys, and none of them very serious. But now that Andrew was back to his old familiar self, I still felt pretty warmly toward him. I wasn’t having to suppress the urge to grab him and kiss him, but I still wished I wasn’t grounded and he wasn’t dating Emilia so we could maybe start dating and see where things went.
When I arrived at our table for lunch, Andrew and Evan were talking about when and how they could change back, looking over the forms they’d picked up from the office and trying to decide what to put in some of the blanks.
“‘Reason for change’?” Evan wondered. “How about ‘Be hot and get girls’?” He’d dated three different girls on the four weekends since his transformation.
“I don’t know if they care why, at least I don’t think they’ll say you can’t because they think you don’t have a good enough reason,” Andrew said. “There wasn’t anything in the policy about only certain reasons being allowed. But I think I’m gonna put ‘Cure obesity and acne’ in that blank.”
“Probably a good idea,” I said. “I need to go by the office during free period and pick up one of those forms, too. I’m gonna put ‘gender dysphoria’ in that field, I guess.”
“You want to look at it?” Andrew asked.
“Sure.”
He handed it to me. He’d filled in his name, date of birth, address, and parents' names, but hadn’t filled in the description of the new body he wanted or the reason why or the date he intended to change. There were places at the bottom for him and one or both of his parents to sign.
“What about the notary?”
“There’s another form to fill out that the notary would sign,” Andrew said. “Hang on a minute, it’s in my backpack.”
We talked about those forms for a while in between mouthfuls of extruded food product and figured out how to describe our changes. Later in the day, during my free period, I went by the office and picked up the forms to fill out.
“Since you’ve already changed, check this box here,” the secretary said. That checkbox was labeled: “Long-term change was made before adoption of new policy.”
Tuesday morning during homeroom, Emilia was talking about how Andrew had changed back and was planning to get himself re-venned into a hotter body later in the week, once the paperwork was out of the way. “I don’t think I ever would have noticed him in the first place if he hadn’t gotten that new body,” she said, “but now that I’ve gotten to know him, he still seems kind of cute with his original body. He asked me if I had any preferences about his new body when he goes back to the Venn machine later in the week.”
“What did you tell him?” Lily asked. I thought about how my own reaction to Andrew’s transformations had been pretty much the same as hers — I’d never been attracted to him before his first transformation, but I still wanted him now that he’d changed back.
“I kind of wanted to ask him to have darker hair next time,” she said, “and not be quite as tall as last time — kissing is kind of hard with such a big height difference — but I told him I wanted to think about it and talk to him again after class today. I’m not sure if I should ask him to change himself for me like that.”
So maybe Emilia was more mature, and a better fit for Andrew, than I’d thought. That hurt, but I managed not to show it.
At lunch, Andrew told me he’d found out why he and Evan had changed back early in the morning instead of at the same time of day they’d originally changed. “Somebody on the Venn machines subreddit figured it out,” he said. “If you do a month-long change, you change back when the moon returns to the exact same phase it was at the moment you changed.”
“Oh, I guess that makes sense,” I said. “The moon’s orbit isn’t an exact number of days, right? Something like twenty-nine and a half...”
“It varies from one month to another,” Ian said, “but about that.”
After school, Mom took me to Cheryl Hewitt’s office again. I didn’t tell her that I’d talked to Carmen on the phone again; I told her about getting to know Hunter, Hanna, and their friends, and about the incident with Mrs. Dirksen in the ladies' room at church, and lunch with the Dirksens afterward. As I should have expected, but hadn’t, she asked me to go through the same empathy exercise we’d done for Mom and Dad, putting myself in Mrs. Dirksen’s place.
“What?” I asked incredulously. “Okay, you had me do that with Mom and Dad, and it made sense; they really care about me, even if they don’t get gender issues, and they’re making an effort to understand me back. But Mrs. Dirksen is just a rude, hateful bigot. Why should I go through mental gymnastics to put myself in her shoes?”
“If you understand her better, maybe you can deal with her more effectively,” Ms. Hewitt said.
“I think I understand well enough. The only thing I could ever do to satisfy her is change back into a male body, and I’m not gonna make myself miserable to satisfy a few people like her. Even that probably wouldn’t be enough, because to those people I’d always be ‘that pervert boy who changed into a girl for a month’.”
“I can’t force you to think about what it’s like to be her,” she said with a slight shrug. “But keep it in mind, and maybe consider doing it sometime before you have to interact with her again. Everyone is the hero of their own story; she has reasons for acting and talking like she does, and to her those reasons seem like good ones. What do you suppose they might be?”
I set my mouth in a hard line and didn’t answer, and after a few moments, Ms. Hewitt changed the subject, asking me more about Hunter and my other new friends.
With the vagaries of his parents' schedules, Andrew didn’t get to change back until Wednesday afternoon; he came to school Thursday morning with a body and face a lot like the one he’d worn for the previous month, but different enough that I wouldn’t have known it was him if he hadn’t been sitting in his usual spot in Mr. Collins’s Biology class.
“It was a hassle,” he told me at lunch when we had more time to talk. “Apparently notaries normally expect you to bring documents to them to be notarized. They’re only allowed to charge five dollars per signature, so they make their living doing something else, and it’s not worth their time to go meet you somewhere unless they’re also getting paid for some other service. We tried a couple of notaries near the library, a tax accountant and a manager at the bank, and they didn’t want to leave their business unattended and go to the library with us to watch Dad change me. Somebody at the school board didn’t think this through. We finally got Dad’s lawyer to do it, but we had to pay way more than the five dollars a notary would normally charge.”
“I talked to my dad again after you called last night,” Evan said morosely, “and he balked at the idea of paying that much. I guess I’m stuck like this for a while.”
“We’ve got an appointment Friday afternoon to have my forms notarized,” I said. “I think it’s with the same tax accountant you mentioned. Fortunately, since my change is grandfathered in, we don’t have to pay extra to have somebody meet us at the library.” The accountant’s office was a couple of blocks from the library, not too far from our house.
Friday was the last day of the month that Sophia was grounded for. Mom picked us both up after school, and we went to the accountant’s office to get my long-term transformation form notarized. I wasn’t sure why it had to be notarized when the notary hadn’t actually witnessed my transformation, but that’s bureaucracy for you. Since Sophia was the one who’d transformed me, she had to sign the form too.
From there, we drove home and ate a quick supper, then we (including Dad) went back to the school to watch the EMHS-Everett Academy football game. The Everett Academy won by a small margin, but Caleb did pretty well, scoring once and helping other players score a couple of times. It was the first game I’d seen since the season began, what with being grounded pretty soon after that. I was still technically grounded, but I hoped that, with them relenting on girl clothes to some extent, they’d soon decide I’d been grounded long enough, too.
Sophia and her friend Julianna Keller had planned a sleepover to celebrate her not being grounded anymore; her mom was going to drop her off Saturday afternoon, at an hour that should give both of them plenty of time to do their weekend homework beforehand and for Mom and Dad to get home from their regular yard-saling. I hadn’t seen Julianna since before we were grounded; both she and Sophia had a different lunch period, and most of their freshman classes were on a different hall than the ones where most of my classes were. But Sophia said that she’d told Julianna about me and she was cool with me being trans.
When Mom and Dad got home from their yard-saling, a couple of hours before Julianna’s mom was supposed to drop her off, I asked: “Is it okay if I hang out with them some?”
“You’ve finished your homework, right?” Mom asked, but even as I nodded, Dad interjected:
“You’re still grounded for now. You can’t watch movies with them or play games... but I suppose you can hang out with them when they’re just talking. You’ll sleep in your own room, though.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” That wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but it was more than I’d expected.
When Julianna arrived, I hung back a little and let her greet Sophia without me butting in; I just waved to her and continued reading. (I’d been reading on the sofa in the living room since I finished my homework.) But Julianna turned to me moments later and squeed: “Meredith? Oh my God, I can’t believe it! You look amazing!”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling my face getting hot. “Sophia’s the one who designed my new body.”
“Yeah, she told me. Wow, I want her to design my new body when I turn sixteen. Mom and Dad said I’m not allowed to use the transformation booth until then.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to that soon,” Sophia said sourly. “I’m not grounded anymore, but I’m still not allowed to go to the library without Mom or Dad or Caleb watching to make sure I don’t try to use the machine.”
“A lot can happen in a year and a half,” Mom said, coming back in from the porch, where she’d been talking with Julianna’s mom. “We’ll know more about those machines and the risks involved in using them by then, and we can make a more informed decision.”
Sophia looked hopeful, but obviously knew better than to press the issue. It was nice to think that they might let her use the machine well before she turned eighteen, but it still probably wasn’t going to be anytime soon. As for me, even if I wasn’t grounded and was allowed to use it, I wouldn’t be in any particular hurry to. I was a little curious about what it would be like to have four arms like Melanie, or to be a bird for a few hours and fly around, but after seeing how Andrew hadn’t been able to get back to the same appearance he’d had for the first month after that first transformation wore off, I was unwilling to experiment with it if it might make it hard or impossible to get this exact body again. As it happened, I didn’t get the chance to use the machine again until after the history feature had been discovered.
Sophia and Julianna went off to Sophia’s bedroom, and dragged me (quite willingly) along. “So, Meredith,” Julianna said, plopping down on Sophia’s bed, “dish! Sophia’s told me about you, and I heard some stuff from girls at school, but I want to hear it from you. What do you like best about being a girl? Is there anything you miss about being a boy? Is there a boy you like? Or a girl? Are there girly things you haven’t tried yet that we can initiate you into tonight?” Her eyes gleamed with joy and enthusiasm, and even though I found her prying questions a little uncomfortable, I couldn’t resent her.
I sat down in Sophia’s desk chair and Sophia sat down beside Julianna. “Well,” I said, “what I like best about being a girl is finally being comfortable with my body. And I’m not sure if I miss anything about... pretending to be a boy. Except not getting hassled by people who think I’m using the wrong restroom.” I paused a moment, thinking about her torrent of questions and deciding to skip the next couple. “And Sophia and I have spent a few hours trying on clothes and stuff while Mom and Dad were out shopping or something, but we haven’t done anything with makeup or nail polish yet.”
“Oh! I know we were planning to do some other stuff, Sophia, but could we do Meredith’s makeup first?”
“Sure,” Sophia said with a big smile.
They explained things to me as they went along, but they went fast enough that, even though I’d read a bunch about makeup, I couldn’t absorb all the explanations. A few minutes later, I was thoroughly made up.
“You look great!” Julianna said. “Not that you didn’t look pretty good before, but we’ve improved on perfection.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m not sure you didn’t go a little too heavy on the — I think it’s the mascara? And the blush?”
“You wouldn’t want to wear that much makeup just any time,” Sophia said, “but this would be good for a special occasion.”
“Okay,” I said uncertainly, wondering if Andrew would like seeing me this way. “How about we do it again, but more of a normal schoolday kind of makeup, and take it slower so I can understand everything you’re doing?”
“Deal,” said Sophia, and started cleaning the heavy makeup off.
When they finished, I looked a little nicer than usual, but it wasn’t obvious, looking in the mirror, that I was wearing makeup. I could still feel it on my face, though not as heavily as before. After that, I tried putting it on myself the way they’d done it the second time, and it looked ridiculous — I’d applied it unevenly, and in the heavier spots it was worse than the first time. But after a couple more practice tries, I was doing sort of okay.
“So what do you want to do next?” Julianna asked me. “Nails?”
“If you want,” I said. “But you’re the guest. Didn’t you say you and Sophia had plans?”
“We were gonna watch Wonder Woman and Walking with Dinosaurs and play Mario Kart. But you’re the one who’s having her first sleepover, so I think you should decide!”
I smiled. It was nice to feel accepted. “Then yeah, if you don’t mind, teach me your nail wisdom. I’m still grounded, so I can’t watch the movies or play with you.”
“What?”
Apparently Sophia hadn’t explained, or Julianna had forgotten. I explained how I was theoretically grounded for one month plus however long I spent as a girl, “but the way Mom and Dad have been acting lately, I’m pretty sure they’ll back off on that sometime soon. Not today, though.”
“That sucks,” Julianna said. “Why would they do that?”
That led into a long discussion of Mom’s and particularly Dad’s attitudes toward gender issues, and how they’d softened up a bit over the last few weeks, which I won’t rehash here. Even before we’d discussed that topic to death, we started doing each other’s nails; Julianna did my fingernails, explaining what she was doing, and then let me practice on Sophia’s fingernails while she did my toenails. I made a mental note to clean them off before I left Sophia’s room, so Dad wouldn’t see them; he hadn’t explicitly forbidden me to use nail polish, but I didn’t want to set him off.
The conversation drifted at some point to some freshman and sophomore boys Sophia and Julianna were interested in. Neither of them were allowed to date until they were fifteen; Sophia would be fifteen in February, and was hoping Chase Niles would ask her out soon after that. “I told him when I was allowed to start dating,” she said, “but I don’t know if he took the hint.”
“Boys can be pretty clueless,” I said. “Maybe you should give him more hints when it’s getting closer to your birthday?”
“Wow,” Julianna said. “I should have thought of that. You can tell us how boys think and stuff.”
“Kind of, not really?” I said uncomfortably. “I mean, I guess I know about how boys talk and act when they don’t think there are any girls around, because I’ve spent time hanging out with them when everyone thought I was a boy. But I don’t know how they think any better than you do.”
Sophia swatted Julianna’s arm lightly. “Meredith was always a girl,” she said, “she just looked like a boy until a month ago.”
“Oh,” Julianna said. “Sorry. I still don’t understand this.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re trying.”
There was silence for a few moments after that, and Julianna broke it by asking: “So do you like boys or girls or both?”
I glanced at the closed door. “Promise you won’t tell my parents?”
“Cross my heart,” Julianna promised.
“I like boys. The machine didn’t do that, I already liked boys before. But I don’t want Dad to know that until he figures out I’m a girl.”
Sophia nodded. “I sort of figured, from when we talked about Joseph.”
“Joseph who?” Julianna asked.
“Joseph Wallace, a guy at our church. I think he’s got a crush on Meredith. And when we talked about it, Meredith said it couldn’t go anywhere because she was grounded and his parents wouldn’t let him date a trans girl. She didn’t say anything about her not being interested in him.”
“Sophia!” I protested, blushing. “He’s kind of cute, but way too shy. When I’m not grounded anymore, I’d want to date somebody with more confidence than him.”
I didn’t tell them about my hopeless crush on Andrew when they pressed further, and neither Sophia nor I said anything about our vague suspicion that Joseph might be trans. The conversation drifted back to the boys Sophia and Julianna were interested in, and then to other subjects, and after a while, I excused myself so they could watch movies and play games.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“M-meredith,” Dad said, and my heart skipped a beat. Even with the little stutter, it made me feel so wonderful to hear Dad use my real name for the first time.
part 14 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
I lay in bed reading Updraft by Fran Wilde for a couple of hours until Dad called me to help fix supper. When I came into the kitchen, he said: “Get out an onion and a couple of tomatoes and start —” He fell silent, looking at my hands, and I realized I’d forgotten something. “You painted your nails,” he said after an awkward pause.
“Actually, Julianna did — she was kind of showing me how, and then I practiced on Sophia.”
“I see.”
I more than half expected him to tell me to go clean the nail polish off, but after another long pause, he said: “Like I said, chop up an onion and a couple of tomatoes.” He’d been peeling and chopping potatoes when I came in, and he went back to work on that without another word on the subject of my cute glittery purplish-pink nails.
After all the ingredients were mixed and the stew was simmering, I sat at the kitchen table reading for a while, getting up to stir the stew every few minutes. When it was ready, I went to tell people supper was ready, starting in the living room, where Sophia and Julianna were playing Mario Kart. “Supper’s ready,” I told them.
“This round is nearly over,” Sophia said, not taking her eyes off the screen.
“Sure, it’ll take that long to get everybody else.”
I knocked on Caleb’s door and hollered that supper was ready, and he called out that he’d be there in a minute, so I went down the hall to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. The door was open and Mom was working on her computer; at a glance, it looked like she was checking on the progress of some of the auctions they had going. “Supper’s ready,” I said.
“I’ve been smelling it for a while,” she said, standing up without a pause. Then she took in my nails. “I see you’re enjoying the sleepover already,” she added with a faint smile.
“Yeah, Julianna painted them and explained how and stuff. Do you like them?”
“Yes. Did your father say anything about it?”
“...Not really.”
She hugged me. “He’ll come around, Meredith. Just be patient.”
We hugged for a few more seconds and then went to eat supper.
I hung out with Julianna and Sophia for a little while after supper until they started to watch Walking with Dinosaurs. (Mom and Caleb were washing dishes.) The next morning, Mrs. Keller came by to pick up Julianna just before the rest of us were about to leave for church. I still had the same nail polish on, though I wondered if the glitter might be too informal for church, and asked Mom what she thought.
“It should be fine,” she said after glancing at Dad, who looked resigned, and didn’t say anything.
Almost nobody at church noticed my nails, as far as I could tell; at least only a couple of people commented on them, both near my age — Hadley Pryor, one of Sophia’s friends, who complimented me before the service, and Joseph Wallace. We went out to lunch after church with the Wallaces, Crystal Southers, and her boyfriend Mark. He was visiting our church with her, though he usually, he said, went to the non-denominational storefront church in the Food Lion shopping center. I was kind of hoping that Crystal’s blasé attitude toward gender transitioning with the Venn machines would rub off more on Dad and on Joseph’s parents, but as far as I could tell, the adults weren’t talking about me or venning or gender dysphoria or anything related. That suited me fine, too.
Joseph shyly offered, “I like your fingernails. I’m glad your parents are letting you use nail polish now.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Sophia’s friend Julianna did them.”
That led to Sophia telling him more about the sleepover, which led to Sophia not being grounded anymore and me still being grounded.
“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry. When are they...?”
“A month plus however long I stay a girl,” I said, glancing down the table past Caleb at Mom and Dad. “But I think they might back off on that.”
“Huh,” he said. “Somehow I had the impression they’d un-grounded you when they started letting you wear girl clothes. — Have they bought you any dresses?”
“No, not yet.” I had just two pant suits for church, and I’d alternated between them the last few Sundays. Part of me wanted to ask for more variety, but I figured if I played my cards right, I could get actual dresses before long; it wasn’t like I really wanted more pant suits for their own sake. Tuesday after my next appointment with Cheryl Hewitt would be a good time to ask, I figured.
There was a brief awkward silence, and then I started telling him about Updraft, and that led to Joseph and Sophia talking about books they’d been reading for a while. After the waiter brought our drinks and took our meal orders, I went to the restroom, and when I came out, Joseph was standing there.
“Hey,” he said, not meeting my eyes for more than a moment. “I, uh, wanted to talk to you for a minute without other people around... if it’s okay...?”
“Sure,” I said. We were shielded from view of the table where our parents and siblings were sitting by a couple of walls separating the restroom area from the dining area and different dining areas from each another. “What is it?” I asked, thinking I probably already knew.
“I, um, well... Nathan and I went to the library to do some research for school, and we tried out the trust booth. He turned me into a little dragon, about the size of a squirrel, I guess? And flying was really awesome, but we didn’t stay changed for very long because we had to get home, but I want to do it again, and change into a more humanoid dragon next time, but... like, a girl dragon?” He was blushing bright red, and I nodded sympathetically. “But I don’t think I can ask him.”
“You know him better than I do,” I said, “but he seems pretty okay with me being trans, so maybe he would be find with you wanting to be a girl? Whether it’s just trying it out for a while, or for good,” I hastened to add. “Is that a form you think you’d like to live with if your school would allow it and all?”
“I don’t know... maybe not. Ideally...” He looked down at his feet. “I guess I could be a human girl on weekdays and a dragon-girl on weekends? But there’s no way I can do that until I’m grown up and living somewhere else.” I started to say something, but she kept talking after just a moment’s pause — she was still looking down and probably hadn’t seen my mouth open. “And Nathan is nice to you in person, but you haven’t heard him talking about you behind your back.” My stomach sank. “The way he and Dad were talking a few weeks ago, on the way home from lunch...”
I hugged her. “It’s going to be okay,” I said. “You might have to wait until you’re eighteen, or even a little longer, but then you can get exactly the body you want without saving up thousands of dollars, begging a psychologist for permission, or risking heart problems. We’ve got it a lot better than trans people used to, even if it’s still a long way from perfect.”
“I guess.”
“We’d better get back to the table. Just remember I’ve got your back. Whatever I can do...”
“Thanks. Uh, maybe we’d better go back separately?”
“Yeah, you go ahead first.”
I waited a minute or so before returning to the table, brainstorming ways to find private occasions to talk with her, and not coming up with much.
I didn’t tell Sophia what Joseph had told me, even though she’d been the first to figure out that Joseph might be trans. Joseph had told me in confidence, and maybe the next time we could speak privately, I’d ask her if I could tell Sophia, but I wasn’t going to say anything without her permission. I’d also try to remember to ask her if she’d come up with a girl name yet, something for me to use when we were alone — which couldn’t be very often, not anytime soon.
I talked to Carmen on the phone for a little while that Sunday afternoon, as I’d forgotten to call them on Saturday with Julianna visiting. I wanted to talk to them about Joseph, though obviously not mentioning any identifying details, but I decided against it, since Mom was nearby and overhearing my end of the conversation.
Monday morning during homeroom, I told Lily and Emilia about the sleepover with Juliana and Sophia. Lily took pity on me and said the glittery nails were a little too juvenile for someone my age, and offered to lend me a bottle of some nail polish that would suit me better. (Later on, when I wasn’t grounded and could use the Internet more freely, I found differing opinions about the merits of glittery nail polish, but I won’t bore you with that.) Emilia told us about her date with Andrew that Saturday; he’d taken her to the wildlife preserve over on the other side of Greensboro. I was getting used to that, and it didn’t bother me as much as it had a few weeks earlier; I could tell from what both Andrew and Emilia said that they were getting pretty close.
Tuesday, Lily brought a bottle of peach coral nail polish and let me borrow it. I hadn’t had a chance to use it yet, of course, when Mom picked me up after school (Sophia was riding home with Caleb again) to take me to Ms. Hewitt’s office.
“So,” Ms. Hewitt asked me when we were alone, “how has your week been?”
I read a couple of bits aloud to her from my diary, one about doing the paperwork to register my transformation with the school, and one about hanging out with Julianna and Sophia during part of their sleepover. “And I haven’t missed a day,” I pointed out. “I haven’t had an episode of depression in over six weeks — since more than a week before Sophia and I used the Venn machine.”
“That’s good to hear,” she said.
“So I think you have enough evidence by now that being a girl is good for me, mental-health-wise, right? I mean, I can’t remember when was the last time I went a whole month without having at least one episode of depression. Probably before puberty hit.”
“I can see a lot of evidence that doing feminine things has been making you happier, like when you told me about clothes shopping a few weeks ago, or about your makeup and nail polish lessons this past weekend. And I remember how you told me that having your femininity questioned, like in the ladies' room last week, upset you a lot. You wouldn’t consider that an episode of depression?”
“I mean, you’re the mental health expert, but I don’t think so? It didn’t last anywhere near as long as those used to last, and it didn’t really feel the same.”
We went into the differences in how my old depressive episodes used to feel and how I’d felt when Wyatt insulted me or the girls in gym gossiped about me or Mrs. Dirksen said I “didn’t belong” in the ladies‘ room. “Back when I’d feel depressed, it was mostly like nothing was worth the energy it took to do it, and there wasn’t always any obvious reason why I’d feel like that sometimes and not others. I mean, I had the wrong body all the time, so wouldn’t that mean I’d feel bad about it all the time? I never cried like I did in the ladies’ room last Sunday. I’m not happy all the time now, I get frustrated and sad and angry sometimes, but there’s an obvious reason why I’m feeling that way, and the feeling passes when the reason goes away, or sometimes sooner.”
Ms. Hewitt nodded. “That does sound very different. I think you’re right; being a girl has been good for you.”
“Can you convince Dad of that?” I asked. “I mean, I’m pretty sure Mom is already on board with me being a girl, but Dad still seems to think I’ll grow out of this.”
“We’ll discuss it when I meet with your parents in a little while,” she said. “Is there anything else you’d like to talk about?”
I thought about it, and I decided it was okay to say, “Well, someone else came out to me as trans. I don’t want to say anything specific about them, but... well, I’m worried about them, because their parents are even more conservative than mine, and I figure it’s gonna be a long time before they have a chance to venn into a body that suits them better.”
“Hmm. I’m not sure how much advice I can give you without asking for more details that might involve violating confidentiality on your part, and I won’t ask you to do that. I’ll speak in generalities, I suppose, and you can use whatever bits of advice apply to their situation and ignore the rest.
“Keep being a friend to them, and encourage them to be patient. If they don’t feel safe telling their parents that they’re transgender, it’s possible that they could talk to a counselor at school, or some other sympathetic adult about it. Or they may have some related issue, like your depression, that they would feel more comfortable telling their parents about; in that case, they could potentially get help for their gender issue indirectly.
“Perhaps at some point, you or another friend can transform them into an opposite-sex body for a short time, an hour or so, and change them back before they need to get home. That could allow them to get a better idea of whether they’re transgender or have some other, superficially similar issue. An hour or two of transformation might not give them a definitive answer, but it could point in the right direction. Of course, if they are too young to use the machine, or their parents are too strict to allow them to meet up with friends without adult supervision, that won’t work now, but you and they could reconsider it later on.
“Do you think some of that might help?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”
When I returned to the lobby, Dad had arrived and was sitting with Mom. I sat and waited while they went back to talk to Ms. Hewitt; I did some reading and homework for Spanish, which led me to wonder what pronouns Carmen used in Spanish. The textbook didn’t say anything about gender-neutral or non-binary pronouns in Spanish, but I figured somebody must have come up with some.
Eventually, the receptionist called me back and I joined Mom and Dad and Ms. Hewitt.
“M-meredith,” Dad said, and my heart skipped a beat. Even with the little stutter, it made me feel so wonderful to hear Dad use my real name for the first time. “...We’ve been talking, and... I can’t deny that you’ve been happier, more energetic and outgoing since you transformed. Even with all the... What I’m trying to say is, we’ve decided it doesn’t make sense to stick to the original punishment we meted out after you used the trust booth without permission, a month plus however long you spend as a girl.”
“So I’m un-grounded?” I asked hopefully.
“You and Sophia both used the machine without permission,” Mom said. “But you are older, and you were the instigator. So it makes sense that you should be grounded a little longer than she was... but not that long, because it’s clear you’re going to be a girl for a long time. Your grounding will end this Friday night, a week after Sophia’s.”
“Thank you thank you thank you thank you...” I burbled, and hugged them both. But they had another wonderful surprise for me a few moments later: Mom would take me shopping for some skirts and dresses Saturday!
Ms. Hewitt said we didn’t need to keep seeing her every week, but she thought it would be good for us to come in once a month or so for a while longer. We made an appointment for a month later and went home.
All my friends were happy for me when they heard about my impending freedom. During homeroom, Lily invited me to come over to her house and hang out with her and a couple of other friends the following weekend, after Mom took me shopping, and I said I’d like to and would talk to Mom and Dad about it. Between Biology and American Literature, Andrew and I made tentative plans to hang out sometime when I wasn’t busy shopping or hanging out with Lily and her friends and Andrew wasn’t on a date with Emilia; we talked about Sunday afternoon after lunch, and promised to ask our parents about it.
Lunch rolled around, and Hunter sat with me, Andrew, Evan and Ian — Wyatt was out sick, I think. I told everyone the good news, and they all congratulated me. For some reason, Hunter looked especially happy to hear about it. Then, when we bused our trays, Hunter said, “Meredith, do you have time to talk for a minute before you go to P.E.?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Now that you’re not grounded... will you go out with me sometime? I know you’ve got plans for this weekend, but...”
I was speechless. I’d somehow completely missed the signs that Hunter was interested in me that way, probably because I was obsessing over Andrew. Hopelessly obsessing, as my conversations with Andrew and Emilia had made increasingly clear over the last few days. I spent a few frantic moments thinking about Hunter and whether I had any feelings for him in return... he’d become a good friend over the last few weeks, and he was at least as good-looking as Andrew or any other boy I’d ever crushed on, but did I...?
Did I need to? It was just one date. And maybe it would help me get over my hopeless crush on Andrew, and even if it didn’t go anywhere, it could still be a nice evening. Now that Dad had pretty much accepted my girlhood as a fait accompli, he and Mom would probably be ready to accept the further revelation that I liked boys. And had accepted an invitation to go on a date with one particular boy.
“Yes,” I finally said. “I’d like that.”
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
“Too much pillow-fighting?” he asked with a grin as we walked back toward our van.
I swatted him on the arm. “I’ve been to two girl sleepovers so far, and neither involved a pillow-fight.”
“Man, you got cheated.”
part 15 of 15
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.
Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Of course, it wasn’t that simple. For one thing, I only had a limited learner permit, so I couldn’t drive without an adult driver in the passenger seat, and Hunter, because he’d been disabled until a few weeks ago, didn’t even have that; he’d signed up for the next driver’s education course, but it wouldn’t start for another week and he couldn’t apply for his learner’s permit until he completed it. So we’d need my mom or dad, or Hunter’s mom (his dad was deployed in Afghanistan) to drive us somewhere if we were going to go on a date before my sixteenth birthday.
The other, possibly bigger obstacle was telling Mom and Dad that Hunter had asked me out and I’d said yes, and the corollary: telling them I liked boys. When I’d been hurriedly thinking through whether to accept Hunter’s invitation, I’d still been riding the high from Mom and Dad telling me I’d be un-grounded after Friday and could buy skirts and dresses Saturday; I was pretty confident that they accepted me as a girl and wouldn’t mind my dating, either. But by the time I got home, I’d twisted my stomach in knots again, worrying about how they’d react.
I started with the easy stuff, Lily and Andrew inviting me to come over and hang out the weekend after I was ungrounded. To my surprise, Dad scrutinized the invitation from Andrew and asked if it was a date.
“No,” I said. “Andrew’s dating somebody else. We’re just friends, same as always.”
“Is he dating anyone we know?” Mom asked. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it... but I suppose we haven’t seen much of him since you were grounded.”
“Emilia Read,” I said, worried that my face might be showing a hint of jealousy. “She’s in my homeroom; I haven’t known her that long, but she seems nice.”
“Good for them,” Mom said. “Don’t take this wrong, but I’m kind of glad... I’m still getting used to having a daughter, and you’re still getting used to being a girl, and even though we said a while ago that you could start dating when you turned fifteen, I think maybe this might be too soon.”
I had just opened my mouth to say “Well, actually...” when Dad said: “What about this Lily Bannister? Do we know her?”
“I don’t think so. She’s in my homeroom, too; I didn’t really get to know her well until a few weeks ago.”
“Let us talk to her parents and figure out when and whether it suits for you to go over to her house, or invite her over here. And Andrew’s parents too, I suppose.”
“Um, there’s one other thing...”
“Yes?” Dad asked.
I took a deep breath and said: “You remember Hunter Gorman? He testified at the school board meeting — he had muscular dystrophy until he and his mom used the Venn machine.”
“Yes, he seemed like a nice — wait. Are you saying...?”
“He asked me out on a date,” I put in. “After I told him I wasn’t going to be grounded anymore as of Saturday. We haven’t figured out when or how yet, because of the driving situation, but...”
“Driving situation?” Mom asked. Dad was speechless for the moment.
“I’ve only got a learner’s permit and he doesn’t have a license at all. He’s signed up for the next driver education course, but...”
“Oh, of course. Hmm.” She glanced at Dad, who had opened his mouth but hadn’t said anything yet. “I suppose we could give you a ride... but like I said, we’re still getting used to this, and I’m not sure you’re ready for it either.”
“You want to go on a date? With a boy?” Dad asked.
“Yes,” I said patiently, trying to hide how scared I was. This might be a bridge too far for him. “You told me and Sophia we could start dating when we were fifteen, and I’m almost sixteen now. And I’m a girl, so dating boys is... typical.” I didn’t quite like the way that sounded, but I wanted even less to say “normal.”
“I don’t want to be unfair or go back on what we said,” Mom said, after giving Dad a few moments to see if he’d say anything, “but... I get that you’ve felt like you wanted to be a girl for a long time, but we didn’t know that until recently, and we haven’t taught you much of what you need to know to be a girl out in the world. So far you haven’t gone anywhere without us except school. It’s just... I worry about you.”
I smiled a little. The overprotectiveness was a little annoying in itself, but as a form of validation that she thought of me as a girl now, it was totally welcome. “So is the problem that you don’t trust Hunter? Or are you not sure he can protect me if some other guy is a problem, because he’s not used to having a strong healthy body yet, or what?”
“I don’t know Hunter very well yet. He seems like a nice boy, like I said, but we only talked with him for a couple of minutes. And... give us some time to think about it, okay? And to get to know Hunter and his parents a little better. Do you have a phone number for them?”
I gave them his mom’s number, and told them about his dad being deployed, and almost everything else I’d learned about him in the last few weeks. And then I was on pins and needles for a couple of days while they talked it over privately and talked with Hunter’s mom and I don’t know what else.
Then, Saturday morning at breakfast, Dad said: “Meredith,” (it still gave me a thrill to hear him use my name), “we’ve discussed it with Hunter’s mother, and given our respective work schedules, it makes more sense for one of us to pick up Hunter and drop the two of you off at a mall or something for a couple of hours than it does for her.”
“Thank you!” I exclaimed. “You’re such awesome parents. Would next Saturday be okay?” Hunter and I had been talking the last couple of days, and we’d decided that if my parents were cool with it, we’d go hang out at the mall in Catesville the following Saturday, watch a movie, eat at the Italian place, and do some shopping.
“Sure,” Dad said.
A few hours later, after Mom and Dad got home from their yard-saling, Mom, Sophia and I went to the library with a big bag of my old boy clothes, and some of Sophia’s clothes that were getting a little too small or wearing out, and figured out how to change each other’s clothes without changing the person’s body. We had to take breaks to let other people use the machine, but after a couple of hours, I had a bunch of cute dresses, skirts, and blouses in different styles, as well as new bras and panties. I found out later that I’d also extended my own three-year change by a few weeks.
(A few months later, someone discovered that you could just bring a bag of clothes into the machine with you and press the green button, and they’d all change to fit you; you don’t need to put them on and then have your partner tweak the images so they fit. That would have saved us a lot of time on the casual clothes, but it wouldn’t turn pants into skirts or dresses, just baggy boy pants into girl-tailored pants of the same style and materials.)
Afterward, Mom dropped me off at Lily’s house for my first girl sleepover away from home. I had a weird surprise when I met her older sister Alyssa; Lily had mentioned her, but never shown me a picture of her. She was the girl who’d asked me if her boyfriend could get pregnant if they had sex while venned into opposite-sex bodies. She didn’t spend a lot of time hanging out with us younger girls during the sleepover, though she did watch a movie with us. I didn’t ask her how things were going with her boyfriend, though I kind of wanted to. She’d done a two-day Venn on Friday evening, getting a set of cat ears and a tail.
Lily’s parents looked really young, like in their mid-twenties. Both of them were taller than Caleb and had matching red hair that neither of their kids had. Lily had told me they’d started experimenting with the Venn machine recently, though so far only on weekends.
Jada, a girl I sort of knew from my Geometry class, was also there when I arrived; once Lily showed me where to put my stuff, we sat around in Lily’s bedroom and started talking. Emilia arrived a little late, as she and Andrew had had a date that afternoon; I saw him briefly as he dropped her off.
“Oh, hey, Meredith, I didn’t know you were gonna be here,” he said, waving at me.
“Hi, Andrew. Yeah, I told you Lily’d invited me over, right?”
“I remembered you told me a girl you knew had invited you for a sleepover, but I didn’t realize it was the same girl Emilia asked me to drop her off with.”
“I didn’t realize you knew each other that well,” Emilia said.
“Yeah, we’ve known each other since grade school,” Andrew said. “We used to be neighbors. Are we still on for tomorrow, Meredith?”
“Sure — my dad said we’d go by and pick you up after church.”
Emilia looked curious and maybe a little jealous. I wasn’t sure what do to about that except to tell her about my date with Hunter the following weekend, and right this moment wasn’t the time for that. Andrew said, “Looking forward to it,” then said to Emilia, “And I’m really looking forward to our next date,” kissed her, and turned to go.
Lily and Jada giggled, and when Andrew was gone, said: “Tell us about the date!” I forced myself to smile. I wasn’t completely over Andrew, and probably wouldn’t be for a while, but I was determined not to mess things up between him and Emilia.
Of course, Emilia telling us about her date with Andrew led to Lily talking about her last date with her boyfriend Sebastian, and that gave me an opening to tell them how Mom and Dad had said I could go out with Hunter (I’d already told Lily and Emilia about him asking me out), and about our plans for next weekend. I thought Emilia looked reassured after that, though she asked me more about Andrew later in the evening, and why I’d never told her how well I knew him when she’d talked about him in homeroom. I didn’t have a good answer. “...I kind of didn’t want you two using me as a go-between,” I said, “asking me questions about each other and all.” That was partly true, but it didn’t really satisfy her.
After supper, we watched a couple of movies and set up sleeping bags in the living room (there wasn’t room for all four of us in Lily’s room), though we kept talking for a while before we finally dropped off to sleep. In the morning, I woke to find Mrs. Bannister nudging me gently, trying to wake me without waking the other girls. I thanked her quietly, went to get my stuff from Lily’s bedroom, showered, got dressed for church, and ate breakfast with her and Mr. Bannister.
“So I understand you’re one of the youngest people in town who can use the transformation booth,” she said. “It won’t work for Lily.”
Lily had never told me she’d tried it and it didn’t work; she’d just said she was satisfied with her body (I sure would have been, if I’d had it). I didn’t let on, though. I just said, “My sister’s sixteen months younger than me, and she can use it. I don’t know of anybody younger it works for in person, but I’ve heard of a thirteen-year-old who can use it.”
“Did you just use it the once, or have you tried other things?”
“Just once. I was grounded until yesterday, remember.”
“Oh, right, Lily mentioned that...” Mr. Bannister shot her a glance and she seemed to change her mind about whatever she was going to say. “I’m glad you’ll be able to explore more options now.”
I didn’t tell them that Sophia and I still weren’t allowed to use the Venn machine for anything except adjusting clothes to fit. I just said, “I’m happy the way I am for now. And I’m afraid if I try out a nifty semi-human form for the weekend, I might not be able to get back to this body afterward, and nobody would recognize me and I’d have to file all that paperwork with the school again.”
“Yes, that’s an annoyance,” Mr. Bannister said. “Our employers both have a similar policy. That’s why we’re only changing on weekends, so far. Once Valerie and I find a couple of bodies we’re really satisfied with, we’ll inform our employers and make a long-term change.”
Just then Alyssa came in, looking bleary, and helped herself to some of the grits and scrambled eggs, but not the bacon. “Morning, Meredith. You’re up early.”
“Yeah, my family’s picking me up for church in a little while. I didn’t want to make them wait while I finish getting ready.”
“What church do y’all go to?” Mr. Bannister asked, and I told him a little about it.
He raised his eyebrows. “I’m pleasantly surprised that they’re okay with you being transgender.”
I internally debated how much to say, and contented myself with “Not everybody is, but Mom and Dad have stood up for me.”
Not long after we finished eating, the doorbell rang, and I followed Mrs. Bannister to the door. Mom was there, and our van was in the driveway with Dad, Caleb and Sophia in it.
“You about ready?” Mom asked me.
“My bag’s right here,” I said. I’d set it by the front door after I got dressed.
Mom surveyed the girls still sleeping in the living room floor. “How late did y’all stay up?”
“Um... maybe one in the morning? Or it could have been later. It was too dark to see the clock after we turned the lights off.” The reminder of how little sleep I’d gotten made me yawn, and Mom laughed.
“Thanks, Mrs. Bannister,” I said. “Tell Lily I’ll see her tomorrow.”
“Bye, Meredith.”
At church, I looked for a chance to talk with Joseph privately, but didn’t even get a chance to talk with her with other people around. The Wallaces were a few minutes late to church, and we left pretty soon after the service ourselves. We drove over to Andrew’s house, and I went up the door and rang the bell.
“Hi, Meredith,” he said, opening the door. “You have fun at the sleepover?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Didn’t get enough sleep, though.”
“Too much pillow-fighting?” he asked with a grin as we walked back toward our van.
I swatted him on the arm. “I’ve been to two girl sleepovers so far, and neither involved a pillow-fight.”
“Man, you got cheated.”
We got in, and Dad drove us all to the Mellow Mushroom. After lunch, Andrew hung out at our house for a few hours until his mom came and picked him up just after supper. We played a lot of video games; I hadn’t played many games since my grounding ended, what with one thing and another, so I still wasn’t used to using the controllers with girl-size hands, but after a while I got used to it and started beating Andrew around half the time. We didn’t talk a lot about Andrew’s relationship with Emilia, though Andrew wanted to know about my plans with Hunter, and congratulated me. “He seems like a pretty great guy,” he commented.
The lack of sleep was catching up with me, and by the time we ate supper, I was yawning and drifting into a fugue between one bite of food and the next. I managed to stay awake until Andrew’s mom showed up, and said goodbye to him, then went to bed early.
That week at school was fairly routine except for some tests on Friday. I sat with Hunter at lunch every day, whether at Andrew’s table, or with Hunter’s other friends. At the sleepover, I’d found out that I had the same free period as Jada, and I met up with her at the library a couple of times. Since I’d been too busy to talk on the phone with Carmen all weekend, I talked with them for a little while after school Monday evening.
Thursday night, Mom took me aside after supper and gave me a talk about dating. “Hunter seems like a nice boy, from what I can tell,” she said. “And you two will be in a public place all through this date. So some of these precautions might sound paranoid. But he probably won’t be the last boy you’ll date — hardly anyone marries the first person they ever go out with — and I want you to make them a consistent habit long before you’re off on your own, dating boys that your dad and I have never met.” Then she gave me the usual advice about not being alone with a boy in a secluded area until I knew and trusted him really well, not drinking anything that had been out of my sight since it left the waiter’s hands, having cash hidden in my shoe in case I got stranded and lost my purse, and so on.
Saturday, after Mom and Dad got home from visiting several yard sales in the Winston-Salem area, Mom and I went over to Hunter’s house and picked him up. Mom let me drive to Hunter’s house, but when he got in the van, she suggested, “Why don’t you get in the back seat and I’ll drive you two to the mall?”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and got out and got in the back seat next to Hunter, while Mom went around and got in the driver’s seat.
On the way to the mall, our conversation was a little subdued; Hunter was more shy and diffident than I’d usually seen him, and I was more than a little nervous, too. But after a few minutes of awkward small talk about school with longish silences, we started talking about we’d heard about Red Moon and Black Mountain, the movie we were going to see, and by the time we arrived, we were talking as freely as we did at lunch with other friends and acquaintances to buffer and bounce ideas off of.
Mom let us off at the entrance nearest the movie theater and told us she’d be back in about four hours. She made sure Hunter had Dad’s cellphone number and our landline number, and she loaned me her cellphone. “Let it go to voicemail if anybody calls but Dad, Caleb, or the house landline. You probably won’t need it, but...”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and Hunter and I disappeared into the mall. We got in line at the theater and bought our tickets, and then sodas and a big tub of popcorn to share, and found our seats. Red Moon and Black Mountain had been out for several weeks, so the theater wasn’t crowded. It was the first movie I’d seen in a theater since July, when Caleb, Andrew, Nick and I had gone to see Oblivion’s Flight. And it was the first time I’d been alone with Hunter for more than a few moments. Not alone-alone, but with nobody around who cared who we were or what we were talking about — or, within broad limits, what we were doing. It was exciting and a little bit scary.
We chatted in low voices until the previews started, making fun of the pretentious advertisements disguised as pre-show entertainment and nibbling on popcorn. When the previews started, we didn’t talk again until after the movie was over, although after we finished off the popcorn, we held hands for a while. That felt good.
Hunter had checked ahead of time and found that there wasn’t an extra scene after the credits, so we left as soon as the credits started and, after using the restrooms, walked over to the Italian place on the other side of the mall. As we left the theater, he took my hand again, and I squeezed his a little and smiled at him.
We talked about the movie in between studying the menu and ordering. Then talking about the backstory of one of the characters led to Hunter talking about his his family.
“Back when we lived at Fort Benning,” he said, “and my MD wasn’t as bad, Mom used to work, too, and let Dad or Aunt Carolyn take care of me when she was at work. But then Dad was deployed to Afghanistan — not the first time he’d been sent overseas, but the first time we couldn’t go with him — and then my MD got worse, and Mom had to quit work to take care of me whenever I wasn’t in school. We moved here and lived with Grandma until she died, and then Mom inherited the house. Grandma and Grandpa had paid off the mortgage before he died, so we’ve been getting by okay. Still, since I got fixed up and Mom was able to start working again, things have been better. I’ve been trying to find a weekend job, too, but with only one car and driver’s license it’s gonna be hard to find one where the schedule fits Mom’s schedule so she can drive me to and from work.”
“Mom and Dad don’t want me working during the school year,” I said, “at least not unless I get my grades up a lot. The last few years before I transitioned, I was depressed often enough that it was hard to get all my schoolwork done. Hard to care about it, sometimes. Things have been a lot better lately, but I guess it’ll be the end of the semester before I know how much it’s impacted my grades.”
That got us to talking about how we’d both been depressed a lot, from my gender dysphoria and his disability, and I told him things I’d never told Andrew. Mostly because we’d never been alone with no likely eavesdroppers since I came out. I’d never heard Hunter say any of this at school, either, probably because we were always around either Andrew and Evan or Hunter’s other friends. By the time we finished eating and started wandering from store to store, looking at a lot of stuff and buying very little, I felt a lot closer to him than I’d felt when he asked me out — enough to think this might work long-term.
After a while, Dad called and said he’d be there to pick us up in twenty minutes. We got sourdough pretzels at the food court and sat eating them on the bench outside the entrance where Dad was going to pick us up.
“I had fun today,” Hunter said.
“So did I.” I smiled at him and squeezed his hand, wondering if he was planning to kiss me, if I should kiss him, if I should hint that I wanted him to kiss me...
“I hope we can do it again sometime soon?” he asked. “Probably not next Saturday, because I’m planning to spend most of the morning job-hunting, and after all that walking, I might be too tired to do much in the evening.”
“Walking?”
“My mom’s going to drop me off downtown before she goes to work, and I’m going to walk around looking into every business that might be hiring, and then Mom’s going to drive me home during her lunch break.”
“Hmm... you know, if you’re downtown, you won’t be far from our house. We’re eight blocks south of Main Street. Maybe you and your mom could join us for lunch, and Mom or Dad or Caleb could give you a ride home after your mom goes back to work?”
“That would be great... if your parents are okay with it.”
“I’ll try to talk them into it.” I squeezed his hand. “Speaking of which...”
Dad pulled up to the curb and honked — unnecessarily, because I was already standing up and starting toward him. Hunter followed me to the car and we got in the back seat. I was pretty sure Hunter wasn’t going to kiss me now, with Dad watching us through the rear-view mirror, so the opportunity had passed for now. But I knew there would be a next time.
A couple of Saturdays later, Hunter and I went on a double date with Andrew and Emilia. Emilia had come up with the idea; she mentioned it to me in homeroom, and Andrew suggested it to me and Hunter at lunch. I was a little reluctant for reasons that will be obvious to you, but a lot more reluctant to tell them why, so when Hunter thought it was a good idea, I agreed. The car situation was just as tricky to deal with as before, though, because at sixteen, with his provisional license, Andrew couldn’t drive with more than one non-family passenger. So Hunter and I wound up getting a ride from Caleb to the Thai restaurant where we were meeting them; it was in easy walking distance of a bowling alley. Spending the evening with all three of them went a long way toward me getting over my jealousy of Emilia and Andrew’s relationship, and another one-on-one date with Hunter a week later deepened our own.
The Sunday after that, Joseph and I finally managed to get a moment to talk somewhat privately, with nobody close enough to overhear us. I slipped her a flash drive with Tor Browser on it, which she could use to surf the web privately and get past the nanny software. Not long after that, she got a new email account and we started corresponding, though she was only able to get enough privacy to read and write emails, or search for information about trans issues, at long intervals. It was quite a while before — but she tells me she’s working on writing her own story, so I’ll let her tell it in her own way.
It was a good thing we’d found a way to privately communicate, because not long after that, we stopped going to church with the Wallaces, and after a few weeks of visiting other churches in the area, started going to one that was more open to trans people. I didn’t see Joseph again in person until — but no, she’ll tell you all about that.
A few months later, after the history feature was discovered and we could safely go back to previous forms after trying out something else, Andrew and Hunter (and a lot of other people who’d done long-term venns) started trying out alternate forms sometimes on the weekends or at night. Mom and Dad didn’t start letting me and Sophia do that for several more months, until a full year had passed since the Venn machines appeared and we knew a lot more about their effects. They strictly warned us not to let anyone but family members or old, trusted friends transform us — nobody we’d known for less than five years, and certainly not our boyfriends. By then, we’d learned about some of the possible abuses of the Venn machines, and how skilled users could induce certain mental effects that, if one stayed in the altered form long enough, could have permanent effects on someone’s personality after the physical transformation wore off. I trusted Hunter not to do anything like that, but I understood why Mom and Dad wanted me to be cautious.
I loved being a hummingbird, a cat, a centaur, a griffin... and when Sophia finally got to do her science fair project on certain uses of the Venn machines, I volunteered as one of her guinea pigs, fulfilling the promise I’d made that day she’d given me my ideal body. But though I tried out many alternate girl bodies, mostly human but sometimes elves or other species, and enjoyed most of them for a few hours or a day or two, I didn’t find any that suited me as well as the form that Sophia had designed that Wednesday after the Venn machines first appeared. Maybe someday, when I’m almost as old as Mom and Dad are now, I’ll shift back to a younger version of this body, but at least five days a week and usually seven, I’m perfectly happy being me.
Wings, the sequel to Pioneers, is now over 125,000 words. If you would like to beta-read it when it's finished, send me a private message via this site.
My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here: