Wings

part 1 of 62

This story is set in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe and is a sort of sequel to my Pioneers, though I think it stands alone tolerably well. Thanks to dkfenger for opening up his fascinating universe for other authors to write in.

Thanks to ChiriVulpes, clancy688, dkfenger, Nicole, and Rellawing for feedback on early unfinished drafts.

Thanks to clancy688, dkfenger and Fiona for research help.

Thanks to Aemetta, Alexiaheart, Arra, ChiriVulpes, dkfenger, Gabi, styn246, Mélanie, Rellawing, SaffronDragon, and Skadia for feedback on the second draft.

Brocksboro (the small town the main characters live in), Catesville, and Mynatt County are fictitious; all other places mentioned are real. Brocksboro is roughly where Madison, North Carolina is in real life; Catesville is a few miles south of there.

The story is completed in final draft and I will be posting chapters once a week until they're all up.

Content warnings: transphobia, misgendering, mention of conversion therapy, anxiety attacks, outing, temporary detransition, life-threatening illness, bodily functions, brief consensual inanimate transformation (still able to see and hear), brief mentions of sex (not explicit), consensual transformations of main, secondary, and incidental characters into forms including gender affirmation, scaly, furry, feathery, insectoid, robotic, cyborg, multiple bodies (with and without split consciousness), taur forms, animals (including temporary loss of control to animal instincts), animate dolls and plushies, food, tools and apparel.

---

“Hey, I’m going to the library to do some research for my term papers. You want to come?” my brother Nathan asked one Saturday morning in October.

“Yeah,” I said, “I need to do some research too. Give me a second to grab my notebooks and stuff.”

A couple of minutes later, after telling Mom where we were going, we headed to the library in Nathan’s car. My mind should have been on my term papers and the references I needed to find to flesh them out, but I couldn’t help thinking about the weird machine that had appeared on the lawn at the library a few weeks ago, and how a bunch of people had been using it to transform each other. I desperately wanted to try it myself, to be something other and better than this uncomfortable wrong-fitting shape I’d worn for my first fifteen years, but Mom and Dad had forbidden me and Nathan from using the machine as soon as they heard about it.

I hoped I could at least see some people using it on the way into or out of the library.

We got there in just a few minutes, parked, and walked past a queue of people waiting to use the machine. It was about eight feet wide and tall and four deep, the same dark brown as the stones the library was built of, with a glowing Venn diagram in the center. Nobody happened to go in the machine or come out during the thirty seconds or so it took us to walk from Nathan’s car to the front door of the library, much to my disappointment, and I resigned myself to study and research for the next couple of hours.

When we’d found what we needed and were about to leave, Nathan surprised me.

“Hey. Do you want to check out that machine before we go? Mom and Dad don’t have to know.”

“Sure,” I said.

It didn’t surprise me that Nathan would disobey Mom and Dad when they weren’t around. Not at all. What surprised me a little was that he wanted to try being something else. He’d given me the impression of being completely at home in his body. He was a football player, a pretty good one, in great shape, and had never had a significant amount of acne, unlike me (or Dad, judging from his high school pictures). He was between girlfriends at the moment, but he’d gotten attention from girls starting from when Mom and Dad thought he was too young to date.

So we checked out our books, and I said, “We’d better put the books in the car. If we transform while holding them, they’re gonna turn into unintelligible nonsense.” I’d overheard rumors about the machine from people at school, though for some reason the news wasn’t saying anything about it.

“Yeah, although if you want any visible change, we’ve got to change back before we go home anyway. But I don’t want to spend the next hour or whatever hauling a stack of books around.”

So we put our books and notebooks in Nathan’s car, and our wallets and Nathan’s phone in the glove compartment. (I wasn’t allowed to have a cellphone yet.) Then we got in line behind an old black couple, in their seventies or eighties, who seemed to be accompanied by their son, judging from what I overheard of their conversation while we waited. The son looked young enough to be their grandson, and I guessed he’d already gotten a friend to rejuvenate him with the machine. The woman was using a walker, the type with a seat you can rest on while it’s parked.

“So what do you want me to turn you into?” I asked, stalling on telling Nathan what I wanted. I figured Nathan would hate me if I told him what I really wanted, but there were other things I wanted to try that would be more socially acceptable and maybe almost as enjoyable.

“I’ll tell you when we’re inside the booth,” he said.

Huh. Nathan wanted something he was ashamed to talk about in front of the other people waiting in line? My mind immediately jumped to several wrong conclusions, and I immediately hated myself assuming bad things about my brother when I knew I was at least as messed up in (probably) a different way. He didn’t press me for what I wanted, probably figuring I’d tell him once we were inside, too. And for a minute or two, I thought about doing just that; it seemed easier to put it off... but I found myself thinking more about the kind of thing I really wanted, and feeling disgusted with myself. And then I worried that if I put off telling Nathan until he put me on the spot, I might blurt out something that I’d regret. So I carefully rehearsed my words a couple of times and said:

“I want to try being a dragon.”

“Huh, I wouldn’t have figured. That seems pretty cool, but I don’t think a dragon will fit in that booth, will it?”

“Well, obviously not a huge dragon like Smaug. More like me-sized. Or a little bigger.” I didn’t really want to be bigger, but I thought Nathan might respect me more if I said that.

“You want to be able to fly?” the old couple’s son asked.

“Yeah, it would be nice.”

“You’d probably better be pretty small, then. I read about this guy who got his friend to change him into a person-sized griffin, but he couldn’t get off the ground — his wings weren’t strong enough for his weight. About the size of a bat or a songbird might work.”

“Thanks!” I said. “Yeah, that makes sense. As much as anything about these machines makes sense.”

The line moved erratically. Some people took just a minute or so in the Venn machine, some as much as ten minutes. The majority of them were just making each other younger, prettier, and healthier, but there were a couple of more interesting changes, like the couple who changed each other into otter-people or the girl who changed her husband or boyfriend into a baby tapir. When the people ahead of us reached the machine, the younger man put a coin in the slot and pressed the sun icon three times. A three-year change, according to what I’d heard — the longest the machine would allow.

“You want me to change you one at a time?” he asked his parents as the doors popped open. “Or do you feel comfortable changing each other?”

“I think I could learn to use it,” his mother said, “but I don’t want to be practicing on your father while he’s practicing on me. We might both wind up being animals or some such. You ought to do it, Luther.”

“All right. Ladies first.” His mother went in one booth and Luther went in the other, and they came out again less than two minutes later with her looking at least fifty years younger. I didn’t know what had happened to her walker, but it didn’t come out of the machine with her. Then another couple of minutes for him to rejuvenate his father, and it was mine and Nathan’s turn. While Nathan was putting a quarter in the machine and pressing the one-third slice of Earth icon, to program an eight-hour change, the young-old couple kissed and the people in line behind us applauded. I smiled at them and joined in.

“Come on,” Nathan said, and walked into the booth on the left. I hurried into the booth on the right, and the door closed behind me as soon as I was over the threshold. I saw Nathan through what seemed like a transparent wall between the booths — or a huge screen with better resolution than anything humans have got. Scattered around him were little bubbles with images of him changed in various ways: darker, lighter, skinnier, chubbier, more muscular, wearing different clothes. In a few of the smallest bubbles, he looked more radically different, more androgynous or with nonhuman features.

“Okay,” I said, “what was it you didn’t want to tell me out there?”

“I didn’t want somebody overhearing part of it and misunderstanding,” he said. “I want to know if it’s possible to cheat at football with this thing, and if so — hey! When I said ‘football’, most of the pictures of you vanished; I see some regular footballs, some versions of you beefed up in football uniforms, footballs with your face — stuff like that.”

“Don’t touch anything yet!” I said, alarmed. “You remember we talked about what I wanted. I won’t say it in case it starts bringing up versions of you that look like that. Anyway, you were saying?”

“Well, if it’s possible to cheat, I need to let Coach Duncan know so he can figure out a way to detect it and stop it.”

“I mean, I’m sure it must be. You just ask the machine to make your partner stronger and faster.” As I said “stronger and faster,” the slenderer, shorter, and chubbier versions of Nathan vanished, replaced by more of the extra-athletic ones, some like bodybuilders, some with leaner runner’s builds, most some balance between the two.

“Yeah, but can you do that while making me look the same, so nobody can tell there’s anything different except my performance? If so, I need to tell somebody so we can start looking for players who are doing that.”

“I don’t know how.” I didn’t know yet that your fingerprints and retina prints changed whenever somebody venned you into another human shape, even a very similar one. “I’ll try, though. Um — keep his appearance the same, but make him a little stronger and faster?”

The bubbles vanished and were replaced by a new set with a lot less variation from Nathan’s basic appearance. In most, though, I could see some slight difference. I finally found one that looked identical, as far as I could tell, and touched that bubble. Nathan’s appearance in the window or giant screen changed slightly, but I couldn’t quite tell how; it was very subtle.

Meanwhile, Nathan was saying, “A little dragon, about the size of a bat or a robin, with hollow bones,” and studying the screen in front of him. He finally reached out and touched one of the bubbles (which I couldn’t see from where I was) and said, “Are you ready?”

“Yeah, I think so. I should push my green button before you push yours — I don’t know if I’ll be able to push mine with my snout or claws after I change.”

“Right, go ahead.”

So I pushed the button, and then he reached out to push his, and everything changed. The booth expanded around me in an instant, seeming to get around thirty or forty times bigger. I was looking way up at Nathan, and at the now-open door, and my whole body felt different.

“Come on,” Nathan said, and exited his side of the machine. I was still taking stock of my new complement of limbs, flapping my wings gently and wiggling this leg, then that one, all four in turn. After a few seconds of that, I tried flapping my wings more vigorously, but though that got me off the ground for a moment, I plopped down again a moment later, bumping my snout. It didn’t hurt much. To free up the booth for the next person, I started walking toward the big open door, and after a first few clumsy steps, I got my stride and was across the threshold a few moments later.

Nathan was looking down at me, and so were the people who’d gotten in line behind us a few minutes earlier, a white couple in their mid-twenties and a couple of girls around my age, one Hispanic and one black. The black girl and the mid-twenties woman squeed over how cute I was, which made me feel good inside, and the black girl asked Nathan, “Can I pet him?”

“Ask him yourself, I guess. I hear when you turn people into animals they can still think like people.”

I tried to talk and made a kind of gurgling-hissing sound, which the girl thought was also extremely cute. I expressed my consent by walking toward her and nodding, then rubbing my snout against the side of her shoe. She bent down and rubbed my snout and then my back between my wings, which felt nice, though it wasn’t arousing or anything.

“You look like you’re having fun,” Nathan said with a bemused smile.

The mid-twenties guy was putting a coin in the slot and pressing some buttons, and the doors, which had closed behind me and Nathan as we emerged, opened again.

“Ready, Connie?” he asked.

“Just a minute,” his wife or girlfriend said. “I want to pet the dragon first.”

The black girl stood up and backed away, and I walked toward the other woman. The Hispanic girl was being standoffish — maybe she had a snake phobia or something. I let Connie pet me for a few seconds, then wiggled out from under her hand and started flapping my wings, trying to get off the ground. She stood there watching for a bit longer before going into the machine with her husband or boyfriend.

It took me several tries, under the watchful eyes of Nathan and the girls, but I finally managed to get up and stay aloft. My flight was pretty erratic at first, and I crashed a few times before I really got the hang of it, but fortunately from relatively low heights and into grass, shrubbery or flowerbeds rather than asphalt or concrete.

The first time that happened, I picked myself up and spluttered the dirt out of my face to find the black girl kneeling over me, looking concerned; Nathan was just a step behind her.

“Are you all right?” she asked. I experimentally flapped my wings and wiggled all my limbs, then nodded my head and gurgled. I was apparently pretty durable, and having a low mass meant that a fall from a moderate height would have low kinetic energy. After that, I tried to stay over the landscaped areas and away from the pavement until I got a little more experience and confidence.

Once he saw I was flying pretty consistently, Nathan called out to me: “I’m gonna go for a jog. Be back in a few.”

I landed in front of him, nodded my head and gurgled. He jogged over toward where he’d parked the car, and I took off again, following him as far as the car, where he got his phone and wallet out of the glove compartment before jogging off down the street. I didn’t follow further, but headed back toward where the girls were standing by the Venn machine. I kept practicing flying, overhearing some of the girls’ conversation but not a lot because of the wind rushing in my ears.

The couple that had gone in the machine took their sweet time figuring out what to change each other into, or finding the forms they wanted in the mazy interface, but eventually they came out looking like cyborgs, with one organic eye and one electronic eye each, and other metal or plastic parts showing here and there. The guy had no hair except for a half-goatee (he’d had no facial hair before) and the woman had hair (longer than before) only on the left side of her scalp, where her organic eye was; the right side seemed to be a curved LED screen with strange symbols and patterns constantly moving and shifting on it. I swooped down from the tree branch where I’d been resting to get a closer look at them, and the woman, Connie, said: “Oh, he’s flying!”

The black girl, whose name I’d learned was Jada, said, “Yeah, it took him a while to get the hang of having wings, but he’s doing all sorts of tricks now. — Oooh, look!”

Encouraged by her praise, I was doing a series of tight loops and barrel rolls over their heads. Cristina, Jada’s friend, said, “Hey, are you ready to go in the booth or do you want to let somebody else go first?” A few more people had arrived while the cyborgs were transforming each other and I was learning to fly.

“Yeah, let’s go,” Jada said, and they started setting up the machine. I flew a little further afield at that point, out of the library parking lot and over the yards of some houses near the library. I tried to avoid flying over the streets for more than a moment at a time — if I fell, I didn’t want to get run over by a car before I could take off again — or over the roofs of buildings, because if I fell there and got hurt, I could get stuck until the eight hours ran out and I turned back with no way to get down. There was a church not far south of the library that had a playground in the back yard, and there were kids playing there — they seemed to be around kindergarten or first grade. I buzzed them and enjoyed their exclamations of wonder. Some reached up and grabbed at me, but I stayed just out of reach. When the adults supervising them came over to see what the commotion was about, I took off again and flew back to the library; I didn’t want to miss meeting up with Nathan.

He came jogging back into the library parking lot while I was sitting and resting on the branch of an oak, and after looking at something on his phone — I later realized he’d been timing himself with the stopwatch app — he looked around. “Hey,” he said to some of the people in line, “anybody seen a little dragon, about this big?” He held his hands a few inches apart. I swooped down to land on his shoulder.

“You mean the one sitting on your shoulder?” one guy asked as Nathan startled and twisted his head to look at me.

“You about ready to change back?” Nathan asked.

I nodded. I’d have liked to stay that way a lot longer, but I knew we needed to get home before long. So Nathan got in line for the Venn machine, and I continued doing loops and barrel rolls until he got to the head of the line. He was doing something on his phone while he waited. I perched on his shoulder again while he set up them machine.

When I flew into the right-hand booth, I saw that the red and green buttons and the bubbles showing alternate versions of Nathan were down near the floor. I landed near them, but before I could push the red button with my claw, to cancel our transformations, Nathan must have pushed his red button. Suddenly I was back to my original human boy body, the buttons had vanished, and the doors had opened.

In the car on the way home, I asked Nathan, “So what did you figure out?”

“I timed myself on several one-block sprints and a longer jog, around ten blocks,” he said. “I was definitely faster on average, though not by much. I’m gonna talk to the coach about it. How about you? You were flying pretty well by the time I got back.”

I smiled at the memory. “Yeah, it took a while to get the hang of it, but it was really fun. I’d like to do it again sometime.”

“Maybe I’ll try it. A falcon, maybe. Not for a while, though. I don’t want to make Mom and Dad suspicious by going to the library more often than we normally would.”

“Oh, yeah, definitely not.” I laughed nervously.

I’d enjoyed flying, but I’d especially enjoyed the attention from Jada and Connie, and the other people who’d come to use the Venn machine while I was flying around the parking lot. Being squeed over as a cute little fabulous animal was markedly better than being ignored as an acne-scarred, scrawny boy. That raised the question of why I didn’t want to be a taller, more muscular guy, like most normal guys would. I couldn’t explain it, but it just didn’t appeal to me. Then I remembered the little kids I’d buzzed at the church playground and I thought of being a little girl, a toddler or preschooler, maybe with dragon-wings, and girls like Jada and Connie awwww’ing over me and getting all motherly, and that made me feel warm inside too, for just a moment before I remembered that I wouldn’t get a chance to use the Venn machine again for a good while, and when I did, I wouldn’t dare ask Nathan for anything like that.

When my friend Meredith Ramsey had come out as transgender, a few weeks earlier, and gotten her sister to use the machine to give her a girl body, both Dad and Nathan had said mean things about her. Mom, too, although not as bad. I’d known Meredith and her siblings for years, since we went to the same church and our parents were longtime friends. We went to different schools and lived in different neighborhoods, though, so we hadn’t been all that close until around the time I’m telling you about.

And Meredith’s change, and the revelation that the machine at the library could not only make old people young and turn people into animals, but could change people’s sex, had put a worm in my brain; I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I didn’t think I was trans, not like Meredith, but I couldn’t stop obsessing over what it would be like to have someone change me into a girl using the machine. Preferably a humanoid dragon-girl, but I’d take a human girl body too, just to see what it was like. Fat chance of getting Nathan to do it, or my parents letting me go to the library with anyone else, though.

That wasn’t the only thing I daydreamed about turning into, of course. My imagination ran wild in the weeks after the strange machine showed up. But I kept coming back to the possibility of being a girl, and hating myself for being gross and perverse.

Now I had a label, and Meredith’s permission to use it. I wasn’t sure if I liked the fit of it, but it certainly sounded a lot nicer than what Nathan had called her last time he and Dad were gossiping about her.

---

That evening, we had a family movie night; we were watching You Can’t Take it With You. Dad was really into old movies, and Mom liked them too although she wasn’t as obsessed with trivia about long-dead actors and defunct studios. Mom was getting a headache, and she asked Dad to pause the movie, then asked me, “Could you go bring me the Tylenol out of my purse? It should be sitting on my chest of drawers.”

“Sure,” I said, and went to Mom and Dad’s bedroom. Mom’s purse was easy to spot, so it shouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. But I noticed the framed photo hanging over the chest of drawers, and paused for a moment.

It was a little girl, four years old, wearing a simple yellow dress with cartoon kittens on it. She was grinning broadly, and holding her little brother in her lap — Nathan was about a year and a half old in that picture. I hadn’t seen that picture since the last time I’d had occasion to go in Mom and Dad’s bedroom, however many months ago that had been, or thought about my sister Courtney for a long time, either. Mom and Dad didn’t want visitors who hadn’t known them for decades asking painful questions about her, so they only displayed her photos in their bedroom, and it had been a long time since they’d talked about her where I could hear.

She had died of a heart defect not long after that picture was taken, before I was born. When I was little, I vaguely remembered that Mom and Dad had kept her bedroom the way it used to be — I remember being forbidden to go inside without one of them, but allowed to look at it sometimes. But not long after I started school, they’d cleaned it up, packed some of the things away in the attic and given away others. Her old room was now an office that Mom and Dad used when they had to bring work home.

I wasn’t sure why I lingered to look at her photo, and then the other, taken when she was a few months old. After a few moments, I grabbed Mom’s purse and dug through it for the bottle of Tylenol, returning with it to the living room. Nobody complained about me taking longer than necessary to find it, because Nathan had taken advantage of the pause to go to the restroom and he wasn’t back yet.

Courtney’s photos had almost reminded me of something, but I couldn’t figure out what. I thought about it off and on in between watching the movie and getting ready for bed. And when I finally turned off the light and tried to sleep, for once I didn’t have to focus on math or history to avoid fantasizing about turning into a dragon-girl. What was it I’d almost been reminded about? Some story Mom or Dad told me about Courtney, back when they’d talked about her more often? Something about her bedroom, back when it was preserved intact? Another photo I’d seen in an old photo album or in a PowerPoint slideshow Mom had made for our family at Christmas one year?

I thought, not for the first time but for the first time in a long while, about what it would have been like if she’d lived, if I’d had a big sister growing up as well as a big brother. Maybe not that much different; with the difference in our ages, as well as sexes, we might not have had that much to do with each other. Especially these days; she would have been a junior in college by now. Not to mention I had no idea what kind of person she’d have grown up to be. But I speculated baselessly for a while anyway. It was better than the other things that had occupied my thoughts in the last few weeks.

At some point, I decided to mentally reconstruct her bedroom from when I’d seen it as a kid. That wouldn’t give me all that many clues to her personality, since Mom would have made most of the decorating decisions for her at that age, but I didn’t have much else to go on — a few half-remembered anecdotes about cute things she’d done and said. I arranged things in my mental space: the low yellow chest of drawers there, the bed over there, with her favorite plushies lined up next to the pillows (otter, turtle, bear, pig — if Mom had ever told me what she’d called them, I didn’t remember), the little shelf full of dolls and picture books, the toybox, the closet —

I gasped and started hyperventilating as the memory rushed back.

I don’t know how old I was, but probably no older than Courtney was when she died — three or four, maybe five at most. I’d gone into her bedroom, though even then I must have known I wasn’t supposed to, and instead of playing with the toys, like any normal kid would have done, I had opened the closet door and stared enraptured at the dresses. Finally I’d picked one out, a peach-colored one with ruffles at the hem. I’d taken off my shirt and shorts and put the dress on, looking at myself in the mirror.

Now that the memories had come back, I remembered the way I’d looked in the mirror better than the spanking I got afterward and way better than anything Mom or Dad had said to me about it. I’d looked like a girl with short hair. I remembered liking the way I’d looked, for however long it lasted before I got caught.

I couldn’t remember what Mom or Dad had said, only their tone of voice and volume, but I could figure out what must have been the gist. Dresses are for girls, you’re a boy, don’t ever do that again, and so on. And also probably a lot of stuff about desecrating your poor sister’s memory.

But I thought it through, and wondered what it meant. Wanting to turn into a girl wasn’t some weird sexual perversion that I’d developed well into puberty. Or not only that. It was already there when I was little, something I’d suppressed for a long time after that terrifyingly prolonged spanking and the weepy tirades from both parents. And little kids couldn’t have sexual perversions. Back then, at least, my motive for wanting to wear Courtney’s dress — to be like the girls I played with at preschool or kindergarten — must have been as pure as Meredith’s motive for needing to be a girl, if not more so. It had gone wrong recently as it came back under these weird circumstances, but it was originally good.

I started crying, and fell asleep not long afterward.

 

* * *

 

The next day was Sunday, and after church, we went out to lunch with the Ramseys and with Crystal Southers, a lady probably six or seven years younger than Mom or Mrs. Ramsey, whose new boyfriend was attending church with her today. As usual, the kids ended up sitting at one end of the table and the adults at the other. Fortunately, Ms. Southers ended up sitting between me and Mom, with Dad even further up the table.

“I like your fingernails,” I said to Meredith once we’d placed our drink orders. “I’m glad your parents are letting you use nail polish now.” Her parents were fairly conservative, though not like mine, and had grounded her and her sister Sophia for using the machine without permission. But they were gradually starting to let up on Meredith and let her do feminine things.

“Thanks,” she replied. “Sophia’s friend Julianna did them.”

Sophia put in, “Yeah, we had a sleepover to celebrate me not being grounded anymore.”

“That’s great!” I said. “I thought y’all were gonna be grounded for months, at least.”

I had the fleeting thought that if Meredith’s parents were easing up on her after just a few weeks of her being a girl, maybe it would eventually rub off on my parents and they’d consider letting me be a girl, too... if it weren’t against policy at the Everett Academy to let kids come to school venned. But Meredith interrupted that thought, saying:

“No, I’m still grounded, it’s just Sophia that’s not grounded anymore. Mom and Dad let me hang out with Sophia and Julianna for a little while, but I couldn’t watch movies or play games with them.”

She went on to say she was was still grounded for a month plus however long she stayed a girl, but the way her parents were acting in the last couple of weeks, she thought they’d let her off a lot earlier than that. After a little more of that, we talked about books we’d been reading for a little while.

After the waiter had brought our drinks and taken our meal orders, Meredith excused herself to go to the restroom. I kept talking with Sophia for a minute longer, but then the idea occurred to me that if I wanted to talk with Meredith alone, with no chance of anyone overhearing us, now was the time. I said I needed to go to the restroom too, and waited just outside the ladies’ room. That restaurant had the restrooms separated from the dining area we were sitting in by a couple of partitions, so people at our table wouldn’t be able to see, and even if someone from our table came to use the restroom, they wouldn’t see me until they came around the corner into the restroom area, at which point it would probably look like I’d just come out of the men’s room. I thought about what I wanted to say and how, and second-guessed myself a lot, almost going back to the table or ducking into the men’s room to hide a couple of times. But finally Meredith came out of the ladies’ room and I worked up the courage to say:

“Hey... I, uh, wanted to talk to you for a minute without other people around... if it’s okay...?”

“Sure,” she said. “What is it?”

“I, um, well... Nathan and I went to the library to do some research for school, and I convinced him to try out the trust booth. He turned me into a little dragon, about the size of a robin, 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 to change into a more humanoid dragon next time, but... like, a girl dragon?” She nodded understandingly. “But I don’t think I can ask him.”

“You know him better than I do,” she said, “but he seems sort of okay with me being trans, so maybe he would be fine with you wanting to be a girl? Whether it’s just trying it out for a while, or for good. 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...” The ideal didn’t matter; what I could get away with was more important. “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... And Nathan is nice to you in person, but you haven’t heard him talking about you behind your back. The way he and Dad were talking a few weeks ago, after they saw you for the first time after...” Meredith looked stricken when I said that, and I berated myself for gossiping about Dad and Nathan behind their backs.

Then she surprised me by grabbing me in a hug. It was more of a surprise because by that point I wasn’t looking at her; I was barely able to get the words out, eye contact was too much to expect.

“It’s going to be okay,” she 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 spending thousands of dollars, begging a therapist 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.”

“Trans people.” That was what I was now, even though I hadn’t dared use the word for myself even in imagination. I’d just recently realized that I wanted to be a girl, or considered how much my motivations for wanting it might be similar to or different from Meredith’s. Now I had a label, and Meredith’s permission to use it. I wasn’t sure if I liked the fit of it, but it certainly sounded a lot nicer than what Nathan had called her last time he and Dad were gossiping about her.

“We’d better get back to the table,” she said, glancing toward the dining areas. “Just remember I’ve got your back. Whatever I can do...”

“Thanks. Uh, maybe we’d better go back separately?”

She let me go back first, and returned a minute or two later. We talked with Sophia some more about books we were reading and the topics we were doing term papers on, but I was pretty distracted and Meredith and Sophia had to hold up most of the conversation.

---

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Were some trans women lesbians, if that was the right word for it? The parental control software wouldn’t let me find out and I couldn’t ask anyone.

---

 

Things got better for Meredith soon after that: her dad finally accepted that she was really a girl, and let her start wearing skirts and dresses and un-grounded her. She started dating a boy at her school not long after that, though I didn’t learn about it until later — she didn’t mention it at church until she’d been on a few dates with him and they were steady girlfriend and boyfriend. And I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to chat with her for the next few weeks anyway; we didn’t go out to eat with the Ramseys for a while and there were a couple of Sundays when we or the Ramseys had to leave immediately after the service for some reason.

Meanwhile, I was brooding over that “trans” label Meredith had used for us. The only computer I was allowed to use, a desktop machine in the living room, was full of parental control software. I wasn’t sure if “transgender” was on the keyword list blocked by the parental control software, either built-in or things Mom or Dad had added, but if it was, they’d find out that I had searched for information about that and I’d get an interrogation about it within hours. Instead, after some thought, I searched indirectly using phrases made of common words that couldn’t be blocked, like “guys who turn into girls,” “why do some boys want to be girls” and things like that, and then mostly only read the capsule page summaries or the Google cache, only clicking on a search result if I was confident the site it was on wouldn’t be blocked.

What I learned was mostly either basic and oversimplified, or heavily biased against trans people. And without being able to talk privately with Meredith, or other trans people, I was left wondering if Meredith was wrong about me — about us — about thinking I was the same sort of person she was. I couldn’t find anything about people who wanted to be inhuman creatures of the opposite sex. If I was transgender, I was probably a weird fringe kind of transgender. An outsider even in a group of outsiders.

And when I learned that Meredith was dating a guy, I had further second thoughts; I couldn’t see myself doing that. I had been attracted to girls long before I realized I wanted to be one, and I still was. I was crushing on a girl in my homeroom, Elena, who probably didn’t even know I existed, and I was starting to develop a crush on Meredith, too. And a few weeks later, at the grocery store, I saw Jada, the girl who’d squeed over me when I was a cute little dragon, shopping with a girl who might be her little sister and a woman who might be her older sister — or maybe her mom, rejuvenated with the Venn machine. I recognized Jada at once, although she had gotten venned into a body with little pink snakes for hair that waved around sniffing with their forked tongues. Mom frowned at her in disapproval, and I had a hard time hiding my sudden erection from Mom and Jada both; I turned quickly aside so Jada wouldn’t recognize me, and told Mom I needed to go to the restroom.

Were some trans women lesbians, if that was the right word for it? The parental control software wouldn’t let me find out and I couldn’t ask anyone. Not then.

Tim, my only friend at school, seemed to notice I was distracted and more anxious than usual. But he didn’t have any better social skills than I did, and seemed helpless to know how to react. He responded by contributing more than his share of our lunchtime conversations, telling me endless plot summaries of the games he’d played and the anime he’d watched when he ran out of other things to say.

It was over a month after my talk with Meredith before we had another chance to talk privately, and then it was only for a minute or so. But she had a wonderful gift for me, which she slipped into my hand and said, “Use it when your parents aren’t looking.”

It was a USB flash drive which, when I had a chance to look at its contents without Mom or Dad around almost a week later, turned out to contain something called Tor Browser and a README file which was a note from Meredith. It was a tool for browsing the Internet privately and getting around local network censorship, such as Mom and Dad’s parental control software. And she’d suggested that I use it to set up a new, more private web email account as well as search for information about being transgender without parental control censorship. We could talk privately by email even if our conversations at church were closely chaperoned.

I had a near escape when Mom came home earlier than I expected, closing the Tor Browser window just in time and switching over to the word processor where I was working on a term paper, then ejecting and pocketing the flash drive. After that I got more cautious about it, using my limited freedom sparingly and allowing a large margin of error for when I needed to shut it down and hide the flash drive.

And so I learned that yes, some trans women were lesbians — a lot, in fact, probably more than half. And some wanted to be something other than ordinary human women, though they’d long since learned not to say that to the therapists whose approval they used to need for hormone therapy and surgery. That wasn’t an issue anymore with more and more Venn machines popping up all over, though school and employer approval were still a constraint for a lot of people. Trans catgirls and other “furries” seemed to be a lot more common than “scalies” like me, and regular human trans people more common still, but I wasn’t alone.

The more I read, both on the websites I found and in Meredith’s long, patient emails answering my nervous, naive questions, the more cut off I felt from my family. I was wrestling with new ideas, that for instance I’d always been a girl even if I hadn’t realized it until quite recently, and that led to other related ideas and systems of ideas. I didn’t have anyone I could talk to about that except Meredith, and the only way I could talk privately with her was via email.

And before long, email was my only connection with Meredith.

 

* * *

 

It was not long before final exams and Christmas break when we went out to eat with the Ramseys after church again. I knew something was wrong when Dad said to me and Nathan on the way to the restaurant, “Boys, I want you two to sit at the end of the table next to your mother and me. Not with the Ramsey kids.”

We got to the steakhouse a few minutes before the Ramseys and arranged ourselves with me and Nathan at one end of the table and Mom and Dad next to us, so when the Ramseys arrived, after looking at the setup in puzzlement for a moment, they sat down with the parents next to Mom and Dad and their kids on the other side. I looked down the table at Meredith and Sophia, wanting to talk to them and not daring to say anything.

“This isn’t how we usually sit,” Mr. Ramsey said. “Why not let the kids sit next to each other, like usual?”

“I want them to listen to us,” Dad said, “not get engrossed in conversation with each other this time. Justin, back in September we expressed our concern about how you were dealing with [deadname]'s... acting out. You explained your reasons for not forcing him to change back —”

(I’m going to use [deadname] to represent Meredith’s deadname, and when I can’t avoid it any more, I’ll use it to represent my own deadname. I gave Meredith permission to use a fake deadname for me when she wrote her memoir, since I didn’t come out to anyone but her and had barely started to figure out what name I wanted to use during the time she was writing about, but it doesn’t feel right to use fake deadnames here.)

“Her,” Mrs. Ramsey interrupted quietly. Dad went on as if he hadn’t heard:

“— and we figured we’d give you a chance to see if it worked. But it’s clearly getting worse, not better. You’ve let him talk you into letting him wear dresses and makeup and jewelry, and now I hear he’s even gone on a date with a boy.”

“Four dates,” Meredith said defiantly.

“Meredith,” her mom said, “I’ll let you have the floor. You deserve a chance to respond to that. But let your father and me answer when you’re done. He’s attacking our parenting here, too.”

Meredith, encouraged, continued while I listened in awe and terror. “Hunter is a great boyfriend. He’s fun to talk with, and affectionate but respectful — he’s never pushed me to do anything I’m not comfortable with or anything Mom and Dad wouldn’t approve of. Mom and Dad have met his mom, and talked with his dad on Skype — he’s stationed in Afghanistan — and I’m sure if you had a daughter, you’d be fine with her dating him.” At that, Mom and Dad winced, and so did Meredith’s parents a moment later, and so did I, for different reasons. And I realized that Meredith probably didn’t know about my sister Courtney, who’d died as a toddler before I was born — we never talked about her with people outside the family, so only people who’d known Mom and Dad for decades like Meredith’s parents knew about her.

Meredith went on, seemingly oblivious: “So why shouldn’t I date him? You don’t think I’m really a girl, but Mom and Dad and my therapist all know me way better than you, and they all eventually figured it out. Not to mention all the people it was obvious to as soon as I pointed it out, like Sophia.” She nodded at her mom and dad, and her dad said:

“I didn’t get it at first, but Meredith has shown me I was wrong. I’m so glad we gave her the chance to show us who she is, instead of forcing her back into a boy shell. She’s so much happier since her change, not to mention doing much better in school. Erin and I wholeheartedly approve of her choice of a boyfriend. Please, Peter. Let this drop, for the sake of our friendship.”

Just then a waitress approached the table with a stack of menus, but she backed away slowly when Dad spoke up, raising his voice:

“I can’t be silent and watch you make a terrible mistake like this. You’re endangering your son’s immortal soul by indulging him like this, and other children, too, by setting such a bad example.”

“I don’t think so,” Mr. Ramsey said, louder than before but not as loud as Dad had just been. “God has shown me how miserable my daughter was before, and how blind Erin and I were to it, but even I can see she’s far happier now. I understand where you’re coming from — I was there a few months ago — but you need to let this rest. If you want to bring it up with me and Erin later, privately, and talk about what the Scriptures mean by ‘God created them male and female’, we can do that — but please don’t do this in front of the kids or in a public place. You’re embarrassing all of us.”

When he said that, I noticed that some of the diners at the nearby tables were staring at us, too. I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear, but I knew rationally that if people were staring, it was mostly at Dad and Mr. Ramsey, and maybe at Meredith.

“Can we have a conversation about something else now?” Mrs. Ramsey asked. “And please, let’s move around so the kids can sit next to each other. This is absurd.”

“I don’t think so,” Dad said, and got up. “Let’s go, Kathy, boys.” Mom, Nathan and I all jumped up and followed him; when Dad, Mom, and Nathan all had their backs to me, I risked an apologetic glance back at Meredith.

---

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I’d pretty much given up on trying to convince myself I wasn’t trans by that point. I was still trying to convince myself that a girl body, whether human or dragon, was a “nice to have” rather than the burning need it had soon become once I’d started thinking about it.

---

 

We went to a different restaurant for lunch, just the four of us, but it was tense and nobody said anything except Dad and Mom, and they didn’t say much. A few minutes after we ordered, but before our food arrived, Dad said in a low voice, “Maybe we shouldn’t have walked out like that. I should have tried harder... I hate to end a friendship of twenty years like that, but they just weren’t listening! At all!” He was raising his voice some near the end of that, though not yelling like he’d done at the steakhouse, and Mom put her hand on his.

“Since they weren’t listening, there’s probably not much more we could do,” she said. “But we could send them a letter with the other stuff we were going to talk about.”

“Yeah,” Dad said. “I didn’t even get a chance to offer our help to pay his tuition to a boarding school, or for conversion therapy.”

I didn’t know what conversion therapy was, but I looked it up the next time I had some private Internet time, and I was horrified. It seemed to be focused on “curing” gay kids — by giving them electric shocks while they looked at sexy pictures, apparently, so gay boys would associate sexy images of men with pain and misery, and similar for lesbian girls. I wasn’t sure how they would try to cure being trans, but it was probably just as bad. If Dad felt strongly enough to pay for Meredith’s tuition to a conversion camp, if the Ramseys couldn’t afford it, he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to pack me off to one if he had the slightest suspicion I was trans, too. After that, I became even more paranoid about not letting Mom, Dad or Nathan see me reading anything gender-related.

When we finally got home, Mom said she had a headache and was going to take a nap, and Dad and Nathan started playing a basketball game on the console; I studied for finals for a while.

I’d figured out a way to spend more time corresponding with Meredith and studying gender issues and the Venn machines without spending too much time with incriminating displays on the monitor. I would copy Meredith’s longer emails, and the contents of the crunchier web pages, into Word, reduce the font size to where it wouldn’t be easy for Mom or Dad to read it unless they got right up next to me, and hide them at the ends of documents like school essays and term paper drafts. Sometimes I’d change the text color to match the background, so I could read it only when I selected the text and could unselect it to make it unreadable in a moment.

That afternoon, after trying to study for my history final and failing to concentrate, I went to the end of my term paper document and started drafting a letter to Meredith, which I’d email later — perhaps only having the flash drive plugged in and Tor Browser running for a few critical minutes. I apologized abjectly for what had happened that day; I felt guilty about not saying anything in Meredith’s defense when Dad had gone on that tirade, and even though I knew that would almost certainly have made things worse for me and no better for Meredith, the guilty feeling still influenced the tone of that email.

 

“I’m so sorry for what Dad did. If I’d known he was planning that, I would have tried to warn you, but I don’t think I could have done anything to stop him. While he was talking, part of me felt like I should say something, but I was too terrified to think of what to say, much less to say anything, and now, looking back, I guess it probably wouldn’t have done any good anyway. You were great, and your parents are”

 

I got interrupted before I finished it, quickly Ctrl-Home’d to the part of the document with history notes, and didn’t get a chance to finish or send it until a day or two later. A few days later, I got a reply from Meredith; I copied it into a French notes document and read it later in snatches between study.

 

“Don’t beat yourself up over it, there was nothing you could do. I’m okay, and your dad going on a rant isn’t going to hurt me. You just need to keep your head down and stay safe until you can get out from under his thumb. I’m always here for you, but be careful and don’t check this email more often than you’re sure it’s safe.

 

“This isn’t the first time something like that’s happened, and your parents aren’t the only people at church that have talked to Mom and Dad or me like that, though your dad is probably the worst. So it’s been building up for a while, but I just found out for sure: we’re not going to Crossroads anymore. We left and went home for lunch, since Dad didn’t want to talk about stuff with all the waiters and customers having had their attention drawn to us, and then we talked about where else we might start going to church. I guess we’ll be visiting other churches for the next few weeks before we pick one. I’ve been looking into which churches are okay with trans people for a while, thinking long-term for after I turn eighteen and move out, but it’s suddenly become relevant right now.

 

“I hope you’re okay. Please be safe and take care of yourself.”

 

 

* * *

 

Things got worse after that. Mom and Dad hardly mentioned the Ramseys again, though I heard some other people at church gossiping about them occasionally. Nathan told me, one morning when he was giving me a ride to school the following semester, that he’d talked with Meredith’s older brother Caleb at the coffee shop, but didn’t plan to make a regular habit of it in case one of Mom or Dad’s friends might see them and report him. I wanted to ask him if Caleb had said anything about Meredith or Sophia, but I couldn’t get the words out, and after a few moments of me stammering, he took pity on me and said that Caleb said his sisters were doing pretty okay. “And they’re visiting a different church every Sunday, some of them in Catesville and one way down in Greensboro. Some of them are kind of screwy, it sounds like. He said the one they visited last Sunday had a lesbian pastor and ten or twenty people in the congregation were venned into something weird.”

I’d pretty much given up on trying to convince myself I wasn’t trans by that point. I was still trying to convince myself that a girl body, whether human or dragon, was a “nice to have” rather than the burning need it had soon become once I’d started thinking about it. I debated for a while about telling my friend Tim, whom I saw every day at school, but I scratched that idea after a conversation we had one day in January.

He was telling me about an anime he’d been watching — I don’t remember which one. I had a hard time remembering Japanese titles, and I didn’t get a chance to see much anime myself until later. Mom and Dad didn’t approve of it, and when I went over to Tim’s house, his mom respected my mom’s wishes on the subject. Anyway, there was a character in this show that, reading between the lines of what Tim was saying, seemed to me to be trans — they were under a curse where they turned into a girl at the most inconvenient times, and put on an unconvincing show of being upset about it but at times seemed to really enjoy it. In the process of giving me a rambling, confusing plot summary, Tim tossed in a few bigoted remarks about trans people. I made the mistake (or so it seemed at the time) of objecting to that kind of language, and we got into an argument. I hadn’t said very much before I realized it was really stupid to give any hint that I was interested in this stuff, lest it get back to my parents somehow, and I backed down after just a few minutes. “Never mind,” I said. “You were telling me about that show...?”

That was the beginning of the end of our friendship, though I tried to keep treating him the same, especially since his mom was giving me rides home from school on days when Nathan had football practice. But I couldn’t forget what he’d said and by the end of February, we weren’t really friends anymore.

I tried to participate in the trans teens’ chatroom that Meredith recommended, but my chances to use the Internet privately were so infrequent and so brief that it was hard to participate in conversations or make friends when you could only pop up in those social media for an hour or two a week at most. But through the chatroom I acquired a few email pen-pals, particularly Tatiana, a sixteen-year-old who’d already started getting HRT with her parents’ help before the Venn machines showed up. I also exchanged a few emails with Meredith’s non-binary friend Carmen, the only other local trans person she knew; they were a senior at the other public high school in the western end of Mynatt County, and Meredith had met them when they both testified at a school board hearing on the Venn machines. Between them, Meredith, Carmen and Tatiana kept me sane during the long, dry months that followed.

Nathan and I found a chance to use the Venn machine exactly once in the next six months. One Saturday in March, Nathan turned me into a little dragon again, and I turned Nathan into a falcon. It was fun at first, flying around together, but then Nathan started flying faster and farther afield, letting his falcon instincts take over, and despite trying to follow him, I lost him, and headed back to the library. I found a lost penny in the parking lot, fortunately, and picked it up in my claws (which took several tries), then got in line for the machine.

Once I was in my usual body again, I hung out in the library parking lot, hoping and hoping that Nathan would show up again so I could get him into the machine and change him back. I tried to think of some way to find Nathan and capture him or talk some sense into him, but if I couldn’t keep up with him in my tiny dragon body, my human boy body had no chance. Even if I illegally drove Nathan’s car around with my limited learner permit, how could I tell if I’d found him and not some random falcon? And how could I catch him?

Nathan didn’t show up, and didn’t show up, and didn’t show up. Finally, more than an hour after we were supposed to be home, I came up with an idea that would maybe salvage something from the situation. I went inside and asked the librarians for permission to use their phone to call my parents.

“What do you mean, Nathan went off and left you there?” Dad roared. “Stay put, I’ll be right there.”

I hated to hang Nathan out to dry, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. With Nathan lost for the next six hours, and probably needing to beg a ride home from wherever he was when he turned back, at least one of us was going to be in enormous trouble. And I guessed that Nathan would be in somewhat less trouble for going off and leaving me alone at the library than for using the Venn machine with me. I was going to be in enough trouble for covering for him and not calling until well after we were supposed to be home rather than right after he “ran off and left me alone.”

That evening, Nathan ended up having to climb down from the tree he found himself in and hike a mile or so until he got to an area with better cell phone reception. He called his friend Christopher and got a ride back to the library, from which he drove home to face the music. While I was waiting for Dad, I’d borrowed a cell phone from one of the people waiting in line to send Nathan a text, telling him about my plan, so he would know what story to stick to. He was a little mad at me, but later said he couldn’t figure out what else I could have done, and he mostly blamed the unknown makers of the Venn machines for making that falcon body so confusingly immersive.

“You’re stronger-willed than I thought, turning into an animal like that and not succumbing to its instincts. Didn’t think you had it in you, bro. I didn’t realize how impressive an accomplishment that was. But don’t push your luck again.”

Later on, I found out that people changing into new types of bodies — not natural creatures — had more trouble getting the hang of their new limbs and senses at first, like I had the first time, but were in little or no danger of losing control to their animal instincts, because they usually didn’t have any. Whereas people who changed into naturally-occurring animals didn’t have as much trouble learning to fly, for instance, or navigate by bat sonar or track things by scent, but tended to succumb to instinct, especially the first time they changed into a particular kind of animal.

Mom and Dad grounded me for a week, for not tattling on Nathan sooner, and Nathan for a month and a half — right up until his eighteenth birthday. And I didn’t get a chance to use a Venn machine again for months.

“I know this is only going to be for a couple of hours, but it’ll be a taste of what you can have all the time, later on.”

 

---

 

Finally, in April, I turned sixteen and got my provisional driver’s license. Mom and Dad gave me a used Corolla and a cellphone for my birthday. Possibilities opened up of going off on my own to meet someone at the library and venn into what I wanted to be, or something close to it. But the next few weeks were busy with studying for finals and finishing term papers, and then, once the school year ended, Mom and Dad wanted me to get a job, so I was busy with job-hunting for a while, online and in person. I ended up getting a job at Subway a few weeks later.

I asked Meredith if she could meet up with me at the library sometime, and she was willing, but figuring out when was tricky. She was also looking for a summer job, and unlike me, her parents hadn’t gotten her a car when she turned sixteen, so she was limited to times when she could borrow a car or get a ride from Caleb or one of her parents. She hoped to save enough over the summer to buy a cheap used car, but it wound up being several weeks later when our work schedules, Meredith’s dates with Hunter, and her opportunities to borrow her mom’s car all lined up. More than once, she emailed me with a proposed date and time, and I didn’t get a chance to check my private email until after it had passed.

But finally, early one evening in July, we met up at the library. I had just gotten off work, and was still wearing my work uniform; Meredith hadn’t been off work for long either. She was standing near the people who were lined up to use the Venn machine, stunningly pretty in a yellow sundress and sandals. I had been corresponding with her once or twice a week for months, but I hadn’t seen her in way too long, and the sight of her hurt in a good way.

“Hi!” she called out. “I was afraid you might not make it.”

“My manager kept me a few minutes late,” I said. “I would have texted you, but...”

Of course my new cellphone had parental control software on it too. I wasn’t sure exactly what all it could do, but I was pretty sure Mom and Dad got copies of all my texts and a list of the numbers I called or got calls from.

We got in line with the others. “It’s been so long,” Meredith said. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m doing a lot better today than for the last few months.” Part of me was saying I should tell her plainly how bad my anxiety had been lately, and another part, of course, was saying (as it had every time I’d written an email since December) that I shouldn’t burden Meredith with my problems. A public-facing job was not a great fit for me, though it wasn’t like this job at Subway had been my first, second, or tenth choice. I hoped my anxiety might go away, or diminish a lot, after I was able to live as a girl full-time. Some people said once your dysphoria was treated, your other mental problems often got better too.

She smiled, despite looking a little worried. “Yeah. I know this is only going to be for a couple of hours, but it’ll be a taste of what you can have all the time, later on. You just have to be patient.”

“Yeah,” I said.

The line wasn’t all that long on a weekday evening, and less than ten minutes later, I was sticking a dime in the slot and pushing the eight hours icon. We’d discussed this and done research ahead of time, and Meredith had confirmed that as long as I didn’t push any buttons on my side of the interface, Meredith’s three-year countdown for her venned transition wouldn’t be affected by my eight-hour change.

I handed Meredith my wallet, phone and keys to keep in her purse, and we went into the booths. Once we were out of earshot of the people who’d gotten in line behind us, Meredith took her phone out of her purse, brought up my last email, and read aloud the latest description of my dragon-girl body.

“A female humanoid dragon with leaf-green scales, five feet six inches high, with a seven-foot wingspan with wings unfolded, but more like two feet when folded up. Also normal human color vision.”

She paused and studied the images that had popped up as she’d spoken.

“Okay, several of these look good... some aren’t wearing clothes, but probably should... only a few have breasts, or maybe pseudo-breasts because some of them don’t have nipples... some have more human hands and some are more claw-y.”

“Do you see one that’s wearing a nice dress or a blouse and skirt, and has breasts or at least a feminine figure, and more humanoid hands? The feminine figure is the most important part.”

She scanned over the display. “Not all at once. This one’s closest.” She picked one and then studied the variations on it that appeared in place of the other bubbles. A minute later, after she asked me some more questions to decide between options, I felt the change.

I raised my new scaly arms and hands to look at them. The nails were longer than most women’s, and sharper, but they were definitely hands with an opposable thumb and a generally human shape. I twisted my head to get a look at my wings, and couldn’t really see much. In the process, I unfolded them without meaning to, and they immediately ran into the space limits of the booth, which hurt a little. “Ow,” I said, but the joy I felt at the feminine sound of my voice drowned out the little bit of physical pain from my wingtips.

“You look awesome,” Meredith said. “But maybe try folding them up again? The door will open in less than a minute.”

“Sure,” I said as I tried to do so, but when the door opened, I was still trying to get the hang of it. Meredith came around to my booth and came in to help me guide my wings into position, which helped, and I was finally able to walk out of the booth, letting the next people in line have their turn.

I didn’t have any trouble walking, unlike when I’d first turned into a little quadrupedal dragon, only with controlling my wings. Meredith and I walked over to the edge of the library parking lot, away from the other people, and I practiced folding and unfolding my wings until I could do it consistently, and avoid unfolding them when I didn’t mean to.

After that, we went into the library and to the ladies’ room. Meredith led the way in and I hesitated before following her, then reminded myself that I was obviously a girl now, and if anybody objected it would be because I was a dragon, not because I was “really” a boy. And I’d seen people with weird inhuman-looking bodies in the library before, though rarely as extreme as mine.

Once inside, I looked in the mirror. The green scales I’d seen on my hands and arms covered every part of me that wasn’t concealed by the light purple dress I was wearing, including my head, whose mouth and nose were more like a snout than a human face. I had no hair, but there were two rows of spines on my scalp, darker green than the rest of me. My dress seemed to hide a pair of modest-sized breasts, but I found out later that they had no nipples, which was fine with me. I had a hard time rationalizing why I thought my dragon-girl form should have breasts, but having vaguely breast-like protrusions with no nipples seemed, at the time, like a good compromise between what I wanted and what I could make sense of. The dress was backless, giving plenty of room for the enormous wings, dark green like my head-spines, currently folded up into a small width — though they protruded vertically above my head and below my knees.

“You’re really pretty,” Meredith said admiringly. “Is that what you wanted?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty close, anyway. Certainly a lot better than what I used to look like.”

“Do you want to go out and do some things?”

“Sure.”

We tried getting into Meredith’s mom’s car, but my wings, even folded, wouldn’t fit comfortably. So we ended up walking a couple of blocks to the coffee shop instead. They had a reputation for being friendly to venned customers, though at the moment I was the only obviously venned customer there. By sitting on the edge of my seat to give my folded wings room, I managed to get comfortable enough to relax and talk, trying to figure out how to drink my hot chocolate with this unfamiliar snout.

“So have you thought any more about a new name?” Meredith asked.

“Um, yeah... that doesn’t mean I’ve decided, though.”

Since not long after I’d realized I was transgender, I’d been thinking about what kind of name I’d want once I was able to live as a girl, human or dragon. I’d spent some time on baby name websites, looking up the meanings and origins of names, but that hadn’t helped as much as I’d expected, though it had ruled out a few.

“Yeah... I guess there’s no big hurry on making a final decision. Unless things change drastically, you’ve got a lot more time to decide before you need to file the name change paperwork and all. But... it would be kind of convenient if you would maybe pick a name just for today? I could call you something else later if you decide you don’t like it and want to try something else.”

I stared at her, stunned. “Yeah! That’s probably just what I need. Hearing somebody else say the name — call me by it — to really figure out if I want to use it. Um — okay, let’s try Natalie.” That was one of four or five names I’d been leaning toward lately.

“Pleased to meet you, Natalie.”

I felt a warm glow in my cheeks and, oddly enough, my wingtips. Did that mean I’d stumbled onto the right name the first time? Or — no, I decided, it was just because I was being called by a girl name for the first time.

By a girl I still had a crush on, even though she had a steady boyfriend she’d been dating for months. And had never been attracted to girls in the first place.

After a few seconds, I got enough control of my emotional roller-coaster to reply, “Thanks.” I took another sip of my chocolate to give myself more time to think of something else to say. Oh, right. “I like it when you call me that, but I’m not sure how much of it is because it’s the first time anybody’s called me by a girl name, or how well that particular name fits.”

“Do you want to try on some more now?”

“...No, maybe next time. I hope we can get together like this several times a year, at least, and that will let us try out several names and probably figure out which one fits best. I guess I want to hear you use it in several different contexts?”

“Hmm,” she said. “That brings up something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

“What?”

“Is it okay if I tell Sophia about you? Maybe bring her along next time we meet?”

I knew Sophia pretty well, though not as well as I knew Meredith by this point, and I knew that she’d accepted Meredith as trans from the moment she came out. I knew Sophia would treat me like a girl, if anybody would. But I still had an instinctive terror at the idea of revealing myself to anyone else.

“...Maybe? I mean, yeah, I know she’ll be okay with me being a girl, and probably with me being a dragon-girl, but... are you sure she can keep the secret? You came out to everybody right after you came out to her, so her ability to keep her mouth shut wasn’t exactly tested then.”

“Well... she actually suspected you were trans before I did, several weeks before you came out to me.”

“What.”

“I think it was the first time our families went out to eat together after I transitioned? I don’t remember all the details of that conversation, but Sophia heard you say something that made her think you might be trans, and she’s never told anyone about her suspicions except me. We haven’t talked about it in a while now.”

That was well before I’d realized I was trans, either.

“Let me think about it, okay? I can’t say why I’m reluctant for you to tell her, I just...”

“Sure, take as much time as you like. If you never want to tell her until you tell everyone, that’s fine too.”

“Thanks.”

We talked about other things for a while. I mentioned what Tatiana had told me about the transphobic bullying she’d experienced at school in the first year or so after she started transitioning, and asked Meredith if she’d experienced the same thing.

“Not nearly as much,” she said. “I guess the fact that the Venn machine made me pass perfectly headed off a lot of that. And once the girls at school found out I was having my period, well, most of the few who hadn’t started treating me as a girl already did after that.” She mused for a few moments and added: “And the fact that a bunch of other students were transforming in various ways helped me blend in, too. Even though nobody else was coming out as trans and venning long-term into an affirming body, everybody heard rumors about couples who’d swapped sexes for the weekend or just a few hours. Mostly juniors and seniors, but that just made me seem more mature.”

That reminded me of something I’d thought of earlier. “Some of the articles I read said that around one in three hundred people are trans. Doesn’t it seem odd that you’re the only one at Eastern Mynatt High?”

“Yeah, but those figures are for adults, or an average for people of all ages. At our age, most trans kids probably haven’t figured out yet that they’re trans. And there might be some who have parents like yours — or mine, before I spent some time educating them and wearing down their resistance — so they’ve decided not to come out until they’re older.” Her eyebrows rose. “I bet some of the kids who’ve swapped sexes for the weekend, ‘Just to see what it’s like,’ are trans and don’t know it or aren’t ready to tell people.”

“Yeah, probably.”

We finished our tea and hot chocolate and walked around downtown for a while, chatting about books and movies and our crappy entry-level service jobs. But my mind lingered on our earlier conversation, and I thought more about whether to trust Sophia and about whether any other kids at the Everett Academy hadn’t realized they were trans, or knew and were afraid to tell anyone. We were a lot smaller than Eastern Mynatt High — only around five hundred students total, and that included all twelve grades plus kindergarten, if I remembered right. So the odds were pretty small that there was more than one other trans student there, and most likely they were younger than me and hadn’t figured it out. Or it could easily be that I was the only one.

That made me feel even more alone when I thought about it again later, but at the time I was too happy to be a dragon-girl having a girls’ day out with Meredith to feel the emotional impact of that calculation.

Finally, after an hour and a half or so, we headed back to the library for me to change back. When Meredith finished telling me another “the customer is always right” anecdote about her job at the Fisherman’s Cove, I said, “I’ve made up my mind. You can tell Sophia about me, and if it suits, I guess she can come next time we get together. But make her promise not to tell anybody, and make sure nobody overhears you, okay?”

“I’ll be careful,” she promised.

I got a little nervous when we got near the head of the line for the Venn machine, which fortunately wasn’t very long, hoping nobody who knew me would see a dragon-girl go in and my wretched boy-self come out. I was ready to bail and come get in line again in half an hour if anybody who even resembled somebody from school or church walked toward or out of the library, much less got in line for the Venn machine. But nobody did, and a few minutes later I was on my way home, feeling more uncomfortable with my body than ever.

 

---

 

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Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

A couple in their forties went in the machine just as we got in line, and they came out again a few minutes later; the woman was younger and prettier, wearing a much more expensive-looking outfit, a dark blue dress that Meredith said looked like silk. The man was a wolf or wolfhound; the woman put a collar and leash on him and led him out toward the parking lot, probably to avoid trouble with the mall cops, police and animal control until they got home.

 

---

 

A few days after that outing with Meredith, I thought of something I should have asked her to do before we parted. Too late now; it would have to wait for next time.

The next time I checked my private email, I had messages not only from Meredith but Sophia as well. She commiserated with me about my unenviable situation and said she was looking forward to seeing me again sometime, and then recommended a few books she’d read since I saw her last — mostly about genetics and dinosaurs; she didn’t read as much fiction as Meredith or me.

It was several more weeks before I was able to get together with Meredith again, and Sophia as well — near the end of the summer. Nathan was making his final arrangements to go off to Mars Hill University in the western North Carolina mountains, and I’d registered for my junior year at the Everett Academy, confirming what I’d thought about my schedule for the fall semester and ensuring that my plan was feasible.

By this point, a Venn machine had appeared in the Catesville Mall, about ten miles from the Ramseys’ house and twelve miles from mine. Since we were a lot less likely to run into people who knew me there than in the parking lot of the Brocksboro public library, I suggested we meet there, and Meredith and Sophia enthusiastically agreed.

I got there a few minutes before them and sat down on a bench near the Venn machine. There were eight people in line, and in the time it took for Meredith and Sophia to arrive, four of them used the machine and left and seven more people got in line — an odd number. I figured the last three, two white women and a black man in their late twenties or early thirties, were going to have one of them change the other two one at a time, like the guy who’d rejuvenated his elderly parents the first day Nathan and I had used the machine. Or maybe one of them was just going to hold the other ones’ stuff while they transformed.

Of the people who used the machine while I was waiting, two were a middle-aged couple rejuvenating each other and the other two, a couple of women in their twenties, came out as centaurs of a sort, with four legs separated by a long lower torso. But the legs were all human; they wore knee-length skirts over their entire lower bodies and sandals on all four feet. They headed deeper into the mall rather than out toward the parking lot when they came out, shuffling and unsteady, holding on to each other or the walls. But by the time they turned the corner and were out of my sight, at least one of them was starting to get the hang of having four legs.

I thought about that, and I decided I’d like to try that sort of thing someday — a human-ish body with extra legs. Or maybe arms, or both. Probably not until I had more frequent chances to use the Venn machine, though. As long as my chances to use the machine were rare, I wanted to use every chance to figure out my identity. Did I really need to be a dragon-girl to be happy, or would being a human girl be just as good? What did I want my dragon-girl body to look like? Or my human girl body, for that matter?

When Meredith and Sophia walked in, I jumped up and walked over to greet them.

“Hi,” Sophia said. “It’s been way too long.”

“Yeah,” I said with a smile. “I missed you.”

“What do you want us to call you today?” Meredith asked. “Natalie again, or...?”

“Amber.”

“That’s a pretty name,” Sophia said. I blushed hard, and looked around to see if anyone was listening to us. Nobody seemed to be.

“Let’s get in line, okay?” Meredith said, and we did.

A couple in their forties went in the machine just as we got in line, and they came out again a few minutes later; the woman was younger and prettier, wearing a much more expensive-looking outfit, a dark blue dress that Meredith said looked like silk. The man was a wolf or wolfhound; the woman put a collar and leash on him and led him out toward the parking lot, probably to avoid trouble with the mall cops, police and animal control until they got home. At least I hoped that was the only reason.

The next couple that went in just rejuvenated each other, but then the two white women and the black man used the machine. The man and one of the women went in one booth and the other woman, who might have been her sister, went in the other; several minutes later, the couple came out in a single androgynous mixed-race body with two heads. They were jerking and staggering, like the women who’d venned each other into centauroids but worse. The other woman was now a little girl, who tried to steady them but wasn’t strong enough. Meredith and I helped them over to a bench while Sophia saved our place in line.

“Thanks,” said one of the identical heads, and “Thank you,” said the other, overlapping a bit. “What about if we just sit here and do a few exercises until we work this out?” the left one said, turning toward the right one.

“Sure, that works for me.”

“I guess we’ll go use the machine,” Meredith said, “if you don’t need any more help?”

“That’s fine, thank you,” said the left head.

Sophia’s eyes were gleaming as we returned. “That was so awesome! I’d read about that kind of venn but I’ve never seen one. I wonder how long it’ll take them to get the hang of sharing control of the body?”

“We might find out if they hang out around the mall and we run into them again,” Meredith said, putting a penny in the slot and turning to me. “How long do you want to change for, Amber?”

It felt nice to hear her call me Amber, but I still wasn’t sure that was the right name for me. “Eight hours, I guess? We need to turn me back well before then anyway.”

“Okay,” she said. I handed my wallet, phone and keys to Sophia for safekeeping, and Meredith and I were in the booths a few moments later.

Once the soundproof doors closed on us, I said, “I thought of something else I’d like to ask you for, and I didn’t want Sophia to overhear... it’s going to be embarrassing enough just talking with you about it.”

“What is it?”

I blushed in anticipation. “When you change me back later... could you not change me back all the way?”

She furrowed her brow for a moment and said, “Oh! Do you mean let you keep your girl bits but look like your old self otherwise?” Now she was blushing too.

“Y-yeah, that would be great. I’m not sure, but I think it would help me get through the next few weeks more easily.”

“I understand. I would want to do the same thing in your position. I just want to make sure you’ve thought it through... you’re sure there’s no way your mom or dad, or people at school, could find out?”

“As sure as I need to be. I don’t have to take P.E. as a junior, and Mom and Dad haven’t barged in on me in my bedroom without knocking in a long while. Not that I plan on changing clothes anywhere but the bathroom.”

“Okay, Amber,” she said. “I’ll try. It’s just... it’s a change that would be hidden by clothes, so how would I now if I’ve selected the right bubble?”

I won’t go into detail about how we figured it out; it was kind of an embarrassing, trial and error process. But after making those plans, she asked me if I’d decided what I wanted to be today.

I’d enjoyed being a dragon-girl, and wanted to try out different dragon-girl bodies until I found one that was just right. Different-colored scales, different-sized wings, hands more or less claw-y, etc. But being a dragon-girl had its drawbacks, too — people stared, and my wings got in the way sometimes, and a lot of stores and restaurants wouldn’t let drastically-venned customers in. There would probably be a civil rights case about that eventually, but I didn’t want to make waves that way until I was an adult, if then; my situation was too precarious. For today, I’d asked Meredith to make me a human girl, good-looking but not so pretty that I’d have everyone staring at me again, basically similar in appearance to my boy-body in height, skin and hair color. And wearing a cute outfit — I told her to use her judgment and surprise me.

It didn’t take her long. Between one moment and the next, I changed, and looked down to take in my new body. And outfit. I was wearing a lavender cold-shoulder top with bits of lace at the hems, matching capri pants and dark grey leather flats. I hugged myself and squeed.

“Thanks, Meredith. This is so great... different from being a dragon-girl, but I think I’ll like this too.”

She beamed at me across the screen and said, “You’re welcome.” A few seconds later, the doors opened.

“Ooh, nice!” Sophia said, and started to offer me my phone, keys and wallet. “Do those pants have pockets?”

Oops. “I should have thought of that after last time,” I said.

“So you’ll get the whole girl experience,” Meredith teased. “What about if we get you a purse?”

I hesitated. It would be kind of neat. More girly than venning an outfit with pockets, maybe? But... “I couldn’t take that home with me. It would be a lot harder to hide than a little flash drive.”

“I can keep it at my house and bring it for you to use whenever we get together. How’s that?”

“Okay.”

So Sophia kept my wallet, phone and keys in her purse for the moment, and we went purse shopping. We hadn’t been browsing long when Meredith pointed out a purse that was about the same color as my scales had been last time.

“It looks like it might be too big for me?” I said. “I mean, I think I’m only going to be carrying the things I usually keep in my pockets — keys, wallet, and phone. I won’t need to carry as much stuff as a — full-time girl, like you.” I was silently speculating about what all Meredith had in her purse, which was roughly the same size as the one she’d pointed out. Makeup, tampons, the book she was reading...?

“Yeah, I guess so. Let’s look at smaller ones, then.”

“And also I’m planning to try out several different scale colors before I settle on one. So I don’t know if that will suit me long-term...”

“Besides,” Sophia put in, “you don’t really want a purse the same color as your skin. You want something that will go reasonably well with a variety of outfits, unless you can afford to have a lot of purses for different outfits and occasions. And your outfits and purse should both complement your skin color — or scales — but that probably shouldn’t be the same color, and not necessarily the opposite color on the color wheel.”

So we kept shopping while Sophia gave us a lesson on color theory. I found a few that I liked, about the right size for my needs and in colors that Sophia said would go well with the range of scale colors that I was planning to try out. But even the cheapest of them seemed hard to justify given how rarely I would use it until I turned eighteen. “There are other things I need to be saving for,” I said. “Like being able to move out of my parents’ house permanently after I turn eighteen.”

“Yeah, that’s more important,” Meredith said. “What about if you note down the model numbers and descriptions of the purses you liked and look them up online?”

“Later, through Tor Browser, you mean?”

“No, I mean we can sit down at the food court and you can borrow my phone to look things up. You can probably find lower prices for the same or similar things online.”

“I don’t have a credit card to order things online. And I couldn’t have it shipped to my house.”

“Or we could go to some other stores in the mall that won’t be as expensive, or leave the mall and go to a Walmart or thrift store,” Sophia said. “I like browsing here, but I almost never buy anything at these prices.”

We ate at the food court while I did some comparison shopping on Meredith’s phone, and after briefly looking at a couple of less expensive stores in the mall, we left the mall, and I finally wound up getting a dark brown purse with yellow trim at the thrift store run by the Mynatt County Food Pantry. By then, I needed to get home soon, so we headed back to the mall for Meredith to venn me again. I was both dreading it and looking forward to it. Dreading not seeing my only close real-life friends for however many weeks; dreading losing this wonderful body, lacking only in scales and wings; dreading the dysphoria that had only gotten worse in the past few weeks since I’d first experienced a dragon-girl body. On the other hand, I was looking forward to secretly having my body be a lot closer to right than anyone around me knew. I hoped it would make the dysphoria a lot less frequent or intense, although Meredith had warned me that it might not make it go away entirely.

We returned to the mall and Meredith parked near the Venn machine. There were more people in line at this time of day, I think ten or twelve. But most of them were getting simple changes, or maybe more complex changes they’d already had in their histories, and the line moved quickly. Soon Meredith and I were in the machine again.

“Okay, Amber,” she said. “Let’s see if I can get this right.”

Again, I’m not going to go into technicalities. We had to do some trial and error and wait in line to use the machine more than once, and still couldn’t get it right before we ran out of time. But we resolved to try again next time we got together.

 

---

 

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“Cool. So do you want me to turn you into something today?”

 

“Yeah, Sophia and I talked it over and we thought: dragon sisters!”

---

The new school year began. In place of some of the teachers Nathan had told me about, and teachers I’d had before (I told you it was a really small school), there were several new teachers, and I eventually heard that almost a quarter of the teachers, including most of the older ones, had quit over the summer due to the school’s draconian Venn policy. The older teachers wanted to rejuvenate, and some of the younger ones wanted to make themselves more attractive, but the school wouldn’t let any staff come to work venned except for making minimal changes to fix a serious illness.

I pushed through my classes, decreased hours at Subway, and increasingly minimal interaction with my parents at home, thinking of how I’d go off to college and live as a girl, maybe even a dragon-girl if the college were tolerant enough, and thinking especially of my next visit with Meredith and Sophia. Nathan was off at college, three hours away — too far for Mom and Dad to drop in on him spontaneously, he’d told me privately. I was keeping that in mind as I researched colleges. The problem was that most of the colleges Mom and Dad would be willing to help with the tuition for were... well on the conservative side. Most of them had no posted Venn policy yet, as far as I could tell, but the ones that did were pretty restrictive: no venning except for medical reasons, or even none at all for any reason. And I suspected they wouldn’t consider gender dysphoria a “real” medical reason.

My other option was a state school; the tuition would be within reach of loans and grants I could manage on my own, and there was a decent chance, with my current grades, that I could get a scholarship that would pay for a lot. The state university system had a fairly liberal Venn policy, though they didn’t publicize it much and I couldn’t find it on my own — I had to find out from Meredith’s friend, Carmen, who had started at UNC Greensboro around the same time as Nathan went off to Mars Hill. And they had a reasonably trans-friendly policy, though how well it was enforced seemed to vary from one state school to another. Ideally, I’d go to a school where I could venn into a girl body, come out as trans, and get the university to move me into a girls’ (or co-ed) dorm before the first semester was well underway. Maybe between freshman orientation and the day classes started? And Mom and Dad would hate it, but I’d be over eighteen so they couldn’t stop me except by cutting me off from financial support. Then I’d have to be prepared to live on my own and find some sort of housing for the summers.

The more I thought about it, and did budget calculations, the more depressed I got. It was starting to look like I wouldn’t have enough savings to make a go of it on my own until the end of freshman year, in the best case scenario; more likely later. It would depend on how long it took me to get a job near the university, how much it paid, how many hours I could work while keeping my grades up, and other factors I couldn’t be sure of yet.

Of course, even if I couldn’t come out as trans and live as a girl full-time, I might have much more frequent opportunities to venn into a girl body for a few hours or even a weekend. It would depend on how far the university was from the nearest Venn machine and whether I had close friends at the university, people I could trust to turn me into what I wanted and not what they thought it would be funny to turn me into. I hadn’t made any more close friends at the Everett Academy since my falling out with Tim, though I’d gotten slightly closer to some casual acquaintances I’d started eating lunch with. And I wasn’t confident about my ability to make friends at college, either. But there was a chance I could end up going to the same school as Meredith, which would be great.

After weeks of brooding over all that, I was glad when Meredith and I were finally able to schedule a few hours together on a Saturday. But then Dad scotched it by telling me on the Friday before we were supposed to meet, “We’re going to see Nathan this weekend. We’ll leave early Saturday, hang out with him for a few hours, and stay at a hotel that night, then come home after going to church with him on Sunday.”

“Oh,” I said, “cool.”

I didn’t get a chance to use the computer privately and send Meredith an email canceling our hangout. She told me later she and Sophia were kind of worried when I didn’t show up, but they figured it was probably some family thing that came up at the last minute.

Going to church with Nathan was a bit awkward. He tried to convince Mom and Dad that he’d just started visiting this church we went to after trying some others in his first few weeks at school, which was why he didn’t know anybody and didn’t know his way around, but I could tell this was the first time he’d been to church since he left home. I was pretty sure Mom and Dad figured it out too, but they didn’t say anything right away. Later on, on the way home, I got an earful about it: they had figured it out and they weren’t happy with it.

It was another three weeks before Meredith, Sophia and I got together again. By then, just over a year had passed since a Venn machine had appeared on our library’s lawn and since Meredith had come out and transformed. Sophia looked different than the last time I’d seen her, and I soon learned that it wasn’t just a year’s growth; she’d gotten Meredith to venn her to clear up her complexion and make her a couple of inches taller. While we stood in line waiting for the Venn machine at the mall, Meredith told me all about the traniversary party her parents had thrown for her, and how, after the party was over and her friends had gone home, they’d told Meredith and Sophia that they were allowed to use the Venn machines now, under certain conditions.

“What, you mean you weren’t supposed to be venning me, either, these last few months?”

“Yeah... I figured it was okay because you weren’t venning me. And you needed a Venn partner so badly and I was the only person you had... But anyway, now that they’ve been around a year and we know more about them, Mom and Dad decided it was okay for us to use them, and they’re thinking about rejuvenating each other, too.”

“Cool. So do you want me to turn you into something today?”

“Yeah, Sophia and I talked it over and we thought: dragon sisters!”

“Dragon sisters...?”

“Yeah!” Sophia put in. “We’ll both be dragon-girls, not exactly like you — we all want to look unique — but similar enough we could be sisters. Is that okay with you?”

I couldn’t speak for a moment, and when I got out the words, I realized I was crying. “That would be great, yeah.”

“By the way, what name should we call you today?”

“Isabella.”

We talked about the designs of our dragon bodies until we reached the head of the line. Then Meredith and I venned each other, and then Meredith venned Sophia. After some discussion on how to coordinate our colors, we’d gone with magenta scales with a green dress for me, yellow scales with a blue dress for Meredith, and cyan scales with a red dress for Sophia. We had crests on our heads like a dimetrodon’s sail, rather than the spines I’d had last time — that was Sophia’s idea. Our wingspans were smaller than mine had been last time, so we didn’t have any trouble fitting through doors, but when we ate lunch, we still had to sit so that we had room for our folded wings, and couldn’t comfortably lean back against our chairs.

After we’d venned each other, we went shopping for a little while and ate lunch, talking about our plans for college. “I’m leaning toward East Carolina University,” I said. “It’s three hours away from home, and six hours from Mars Hill where Nathan went, so they aren’t gonna drop in on me unannounced. And it’s only fifteen minutes from the Venn machine in Winterville. My backup plan’s Appalachian State — also three hours from Mom and Dad, but an hour and a half from Nathan, which means they could see both of us on one trip. If they still want to see me after I come out. They’ll probably come at least once to try to browbeat me into changing back once they find out.”

“Do you think there’s any chance that Nathan might accept you at some point?” Meredith asked. “Or do you think he might try to talk you out of it, too?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s said some pretty disparaging things about trans people,” (and Meredith in particular, I didn’t say) “but he might have just been trying to stay on Dad’s good side when he was ranting about it. I don’t think I’ve heard him bring it up when Mom or Dad hadn’t already done so. And... he’s not going to church anymore since he left home, so maybe someday? He’s not likely to hear balanced views on trans people at a conservative religious school like Mars Hill, though. Anyway, the worst he’s likely to do is quit talking to me. I don’t think he’d try to talk me into changing back.”

Meredith sighed. “I’ve mainly been looking at UNC Greensboro and UNC Chapel Hill. The main advantage of Greensboro is how close it is to home — I mean, it’s an advantage for me, anyway, now that I’m getting on okay with my parents. And Caleb and Carmen are both going there, though they’ll graduate two years after I start, so it’s not a big factor. Chapel Hill has actually had a Venn machine for months now, and there’s an unofficial Venn club on campus. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to make friends I trust enough to venn with, though, if I’m not going somewhere I already know people.” She thought for a few moments. “I’ll put in an application at East Carolina, too.”

“Does Hunter know where he’s going yet?” Her boyfriend was a senior now, so he’d have to make up his mind pretty soon if he hadn’t yet.

“He’s going to Mynatt Community College for the first two years and then transferring to NC State, probably. Or maybe another state school, but he’s leaning toward NC State. If I go to Chapel Hill, we’d be pretty close.”

“I’m going to UNC Chapel Hill,” Sophia said. “Not just because they’ve got a Venn machine on campus, but because they’ve got the best genetics program in the state. One of the best in the country, and probably the only one of the top-ranked ones I can afford.”

“Do you have a backup plan?”

“NC State. As far as I can tell it’s the only other school in the state with a genetics program.”

After that, Sophia started telling me about her science fair project. She’d mentioned her hopes to do a project on the Venn machines back when we first talked about them, a week or two after Meredith came out, but at the time she was grounded and for a while after that her parents wouldn’t let her venn. Now that she was allowed to use the Venn machines, though, she’d been talking to her teacher and coming up with a plan.

“I’ve read about people who’ve venned their friends into semi-animate things,” she said. “Like a living doll or statue. They aren’t organic, or at least they seem to be mostly inorganic, but they can move around and some of them can see, hear and speak. It sounds like it can be hard to get the same results again, unless you use someone’s history, and that won’t work for other subjects. Anyway, I’m going to try to come up with a reproducible way of making animate dolls, and figure out what materials work best for reproducibility and the ability of the venned person to move, hear, see, talk and so on. Some of the things I read say they don’t need to eat or breathe; if so, can I figure out where they get their energy from?”

“She venned me into three different dolls last weekend,” Meredith said. “I could see sort of okay and hear pretty well in a couple of those shapes, but I couldn’t speak or move in any of them. I told her I’d let her use me as a subject for her science experiments last year when we used the Venn machine for the first time.”

“Oh,” I said. “Cool, I guess?” Being inanimate didn’t sound like fun, but at least it sounded like she’d only been inanimate for a few minutes at a time.

“She’s been a good sport about it,” Sophia said. “I’m going to use some friends from school for subjects too, if I can talk them into it and the Venn machine thinks they’re mature enough to use it. If I can’t figure out how to consistently turn people into animate dolls, I’ll go with my backup plan: bring a genetic sample of an animal into the machine with me, and see if I can consistently venn different people into genetically but not phenotypically identical clones of the animal the sample came from.”

“How can you tell?”

“The school has a DNA sequencer.”

“Neat. Have you heard of other people doing that?”

“No. People have turned their venn partners into twins or clones of themselves, though, and this should work by the same principle. I did a proof of concept last weekend and it seemed to work, but I need more tests.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“She turned me into a copy of her friend Julianna’s cat,” Meredith explained.

“I took a cheek swab from her cat last time I saw her,” Sophia added, “and brought it into the booth, and said ‘A genetic copy of the cat this swab came from.’ And she looked right, but I haven’t had a chance to sequence her cat-form DNA yet.”

I’ve written our conversation about college plans and Sophia’s science fair project as one continuous thing, but in fact there were several interruptions, especially during lunch. We paused to talk about merchandise we were looking at, and several people came up to us to ask us about our dragon bodies and venning. Or to flirt. Meredith and Sophia fielded most of the questions and gracefully fended off the flirtation, but I found that I wasn’t as anxious about talking with strangers as usual. Still to some degree, but the dragon-girl body gave me some confidence. I’m fearsome, not fearful, I repeated to myself once or twice when the anxiety got a little worse.

After lunch, we went to the bookstore. The manager was a little concerned at first.

“You don’t breathe fire, do you? Books are highly flammable.”

“We would never!” I said, shocked, and Sophia added “I don’t think we even can.”

“We’re bookwyrms,” Meredith punned. From his expression, I don’t think the manager got it. “We wish to add treasures of literature to our hoard.”

He smiled; he did get that one. “I suppose books wouldn’t be any more uncomfortable to sleep on than gold coins. Take a look around, and let me know if you have trouble finding anything.”

So we browsed and read for a while, sharing funny or interesting bits of what we were reading with the others, and all of us bought at least one book — I think Meredith got four, three of them from the remainder tables. I got a book about recent dinosaur discoveries that Sophia had recommended; maybe it would give me some ideas for features to use in my dragon-girl bodies.

After an hour or so of that, we went back to the Venn machine. Sophia restored Meredith to her usual girl body using the history feature, and Meredith did the same for her, and then I went in by myself and pressed the red button to change to my baseline body. Then Meredith and I started working on changing me as we’d planned to do last time.

Again, I’m not going to go into details, because it was a little squicky and embarrassing, but Meredith managed to change me so I had a feminine secret hidden under my boy clothes and general boy appearance, something to drive away the dysphoria whenever I felt my thighs touch with nothing between them. Then we all hugged, said goodbye and went home.

---

My 335,000-word short fiction collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

I felt like Mom had suddenly developed X-ray vision and was going to see through my pants at any moment.

---

I felt irrationally nervous when I got home and Mom, who was doing something on her laptop while she half-watched the news on TV, asked me, “How was your day?”

“Pretty okay,” I said. I felt like Mom had suddenly developed X-ray vision and was going to see through my pants at any moment. “After I got off work, I stopped at the Chinese place and saw some of the kids from church and ended up sitting with them and talking for a while.”

“That’s nice. How much more homework do you have to do?”

“Not a lot, I got most of it done yesterday evening. I’ll finish up the rest now.”

It seemed like a miracle that I got away without her spotting that I was a vaguely boy-shaped girl, even though I knew she shouldn’t be able to tell as long as I had clothes on. I had a similar experience later on with Dad, and to a lesser extent with people at church and school, but after a couple of days passed and nobody noticed anything different about me, I was able to relax, and I felt a lot better about life in general.

My dysphoria was a lot milder now and my anxiety was noticeably less bad, too, at least a lot of the time. I gradually figured out that I had not just the external genitals of a girl, but some or all of the internal organs, too. I found myself more easily emotionally affected by the stories I was reading, when I had time to read fiction — something Tatiana said had happened after she started on hormones. And a few weeks later, I started my period.

Fortunately, the first time I noticed blood was when I went to the toilet one morning at home. I stuffed a bunch of wadded-up toilet paper into my jockey shorts to take the place of a pad or tampon, and went back to my room to change my underwear, then back to the bathroom to spritz the bloody pair with peroxide before hiding them in my bedroom closet. I made sure to go to the restroom in between every couple of classes at school that day and change the toilet paper, and went to the bathroom every couple of hours at home that night to do the same. The peroxide hadn’t quite worked, so before I went to bed, I took out the trash with the incriminating bloody underwear and toilet paper. Since Nathan had gone off to college, taking out the trash was my responsibility anyway, and I tried to do it a little here and there throughout the week to avoid having to rush around emptying all the trash cans in the house right before the trash truck arrived, like Nathan used to do. So that didn’t raise any suspicion.

The toilet paper was kind of uncomfortable, though, and wasn’t perfectly effective — I got a little spot or two of blood on my jockey shorts a day or two later. I found out later, comparing notes with Meredith and Sophia, that I had a relatively light flow and a mild period overall — I hadn’t noticed any significant cramps before the bleeding came on.

I considered trying to steal some tampons from Mom and Dad’s bathroom, or buy some, but the risk of sneaking into the master bathroom was too high, and though I could explain my purchase to a pharmacy clerk by saying they were for my mom, I couldn’t explain having them if Mom or Dad looked through my stuff. They didn’t do it that often these days, but just often enough to make me paranoid.

I made do with toilet paper throughout that first period, and the next time I met up with Meredith and venned, I asked her to specify that my not-really-a-boy body would be infertile. It seemed to work at first — after that, it was about a month before I saw her again and I didn’t have a period. But then after our Venn meetup in early November, I started my period just two weeks later. I realized then that in picking a form from my history, Meredith probably couldn’t easily distinguish between the fertile body she’d venned me into the first time and the infertile body she’d designed the second time — they both looked the same. This time, I went by the pharmacy after school and bought some tampons. Before I went home, I took them out of the original packaging, threw the box in the trash can at the pharmacy, and put the tampons in my backpack. When I got home, I put most of the tampons under my mattress, keeping a couple hidden at the bottom of my backpack for use at school. I had some nervous moments, but neither Mom nor Dad found them.

The next time I met up with Meredith and Sophia, I had her redesign my infertile boyish-girl body with a distinguishing mark: a little mole near my belly-button. I could lift up my shirt before she pressed the green button to let her make sure she’d picked the right version from my history. After that, I didn’t have any more periods, and after a while I threw out the leftover tampons.

We met up four or five times in the last half of that year. One day, Sophia venned me and Meredith into little girls, around four or five years old, and Meredith venned her into a woman in her late twenties who could be our mom, and she took us to the indoor playground at the mall. “So you can get a little taste of what you missed out on, not growing up as little girls,” she explained. It was so much fun! Another time, Sophia and I venned into little flying creatures — I was similar to the tiny dragon form Nathan had first venned me into, and Sophia was an itty-bitty winged zebra — while Meredith chaperoned us and made sure we didn’t get into trouble we couldn’t handle. Then Meredith venned me into a teen girl body (similar to the one I’d worn as “Amber,” but taller and with darker hair), while I venned Meredith into a griffin-kitten and watched her fly around the mall parking lot with Sophia. The time after that, I tried out a six-inch-tall version of the purple-scaled dragon-girl I’d been the day we were dragon sisters, and got the hang of flying in that form, which was a little harder than when I was quadrupedal but not by much. I also tried a couple more human-size dragon-girl bodies with different heights, scale colors and patterns, and different crests, ridges, or spines on my head. And of course I tried on several girl names during those meetups, too.

Nathan came home from Mars Hill for Christmas a couple of days before the Everett Academy’s Christmas break started. I didn’t manage to get together with Meredith and Sophia during the break, as I found almost no time to use the computer privately; I found out later that they’d been pretty busy with family stuff, too. Mom took a week off around Christmas, and Dad took a lot of time off, which I didn’t understand the significance of until later.

Dad, Nathan and I went camping in a park up in Virginia during the first week of my Christmas break; we hadn’t done that in several years. When I found out what he had planned, I panicked and tried desperately to find a chance to get to the library or the Catesville mall and undo the venn that gave me girl bits. I doubted I could hide my nethers for almost a week of sharing a tent with them, and if I couldn’t... I would be off to conversion therapy as soon as Dad could fill out the paperwork. I finally managed to end the venn right after my last shift at Subway the day before the camping trip, terrified that someone I knew would see me using the Venn machine alone and wonder what unobvious change I was undoing.

So I was able to change clothes in the tent without worrying about Dad and Nathan seeing my girl crotch, although it turned out I might have worried needlessly. We all turned our backs on each other, at least, when changing clothes, and more often than not we took turns using the tent to change, because it was crowded in there with multiple people doing anything more complicated than sleeping.

The weather was beautiful for that time of year, brisk but not really cold except at night, and the park was a wonderful place that I might like to go back to someday as a dragon. But the increased dysphoria from having a thing between my legs again for the first time since September made it hard to wholeheartedly enjoy it.

Not long after we got back from the camping trip, we and Mom went to visit Mom’s parents down in Pensacola, Florida for several days. Grandma and Grandpa McNeill had rejuvenated each other not long before, and Dad didn’t approve, but he tried not to make it obvious. Then we went to stay a few days with Dad’s parents in Raleigh (where we spent Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) and my aunt and uncle and cousins in Knightdale, a suburb of Raleigh; we didn’t return home until New Year’s Day. Nathan left for Mars Hill the following morning, and a couple of days later, I started the spring semester of my junior year.

Dad didn’t go back to work, though, and it was only then that I found out he’d been laid off a few days before we went on that camping trip. He knew nobody would be hiring during Christmas, so he didn’t start trying to find a new job until after New Year’s Day, and he and Mom didn’t want me and Nathan to ruin our Christmas with worry. Having him around the house all day most days made it harder for me to find private time to use Tor Browser and exchange emails with Meredith and my trans penpals, and I was really getting desperate to be a girl again. Preferably an hour or two as a dragon-girl, but I’d settle for just a five-minute meetup for Meredith or Sophia to venn me into the “original me but with a secret” form from my history.

Finally, one Saturday in early February when Dad was at a job fair in Greensboro and Mom was out shopping, I had several hours to do email and websurf. Meredith and I exchanged several emails back and forth that day, and set up a meeting for the following Sunday afternoon, after church and before I had to be at work at Subway.

---

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“That girl I saw earlier was you?” Tim demanded, looking aghast.

---

---

It was a cold, overcast day, alternating between drizzling and pouring rain. Fortunately, it was just a drizzle when I ran across the parking lot from my car to the mall entrance. I got there before Meredith and Sophia, and sat watching people go in and out of the Venn machine for a few minutes before they arrived. Most of it was the usual, old and middle-aged people rejuvenating and plain or overweight people making each other leaner and prettier, plus a couple of catgirls, but there was one guy who became a hive-mind of little furry creatures I couldn’t identify. He seemed to have had some practice before at controlling multiple bodies, because right out of the Venn machine, they acted with perfect coordination to hold up the long train of his girlfriend’s new princess dress. I felt like applauding at the performance.

Just after they left, Meredith and Sophia arrived, and we got in line together.

“What do you want to be this time?” Meredith asked me.

My mind was still on the guy controlling a swarm of furry bodies. I’d heard that it was best to start with two and gradually work your way up, and I wasn’t sure I wanted more than two anyway, so I said, “I think I’d like to try controlling two bodies. If I’m too klutzy, I guess we can get back in line and you can re-venn me with just one, but...”

“Okay. Two of what?”

“Let’s say a human girl body, similar to the one I had back in August? And the second body can be a little dragon that can sit on the shoulder of the girl body when I’m not flying around with it.”

“What scale colors and stuff do you want on the little dragon?” Sophia asked.

“The same I had in my last dragon-girl body back before Christmas — matte purple with a scattering of iridescent scales. And with the same sort of ridge on my head and along my spine, but quadrupedal. What about you?” I asked Meredith.

“I’m going to be a centauroid again. Lower half like a deer today.” She’d done centaur bodies a few times before, although usually not when I was with her. I’d seen photos of her with lower halves like a pony, a jaguar, or an enormous rabbit, standing next to her boyfriend Hunter, who’d venned into a similar centauroid form.

“That’s cool. Same upper half as usual?”

“Yeah.”

“What about you?” I asked Sophia.

“That’ll be a surprise.”

I figured she and Meredith had talked over what body Sophia wanted earlier. They usually did.

A few minutes later, Meredith and Sophia went in the machine, leaving me holding their purses (and mine; I took the opportunity to empty my pockets into it). When they came out, Meredith was unchanged, but Sophia was transparent. Mostly. Her skin and muscles seemed to be nigh-invisible, letting me see her bones, veins and arteries — even some of her internal organs where her Venn-modified top now bared her midriff.

“Wow,” I said.

“I wasn’t sure we could pull this off, but Meredith found a way to make it work,” Sophia said. It was weird watching the insides of her mouth and throat move as she talked.

“Ready?” Meredith said.

“Sure,” I said, and put a gas station receipt in the slot. (A few months earlier, someone had discovered that you didn’t actually have to put money in the slot. Anything that would fit would activate the machine. We should have suspected something when it became obvious that any amount of money would activate the machine, and it never gave change.)

I spent a couple of minutes looking through deer-centaur forms for Meredith before picking one. Meredith, meanwhile, was muttering under her breath and tapping bubbles. “Ready?” she asked.

“Yeah, but I’d probably better go first in case I’m too uncoordinated to tap the button within a minute after you change me.”

“Go ahead.”

So I changed her into the deer-centaur form I’d selected, and she reached out to touch her green button. A moment later, I saw her with double vision. I could feel something small and lightweight resting on my shoulder, and under my feet I could feel both the hard surface of the Venn machine floor and the softer surface of my larger body’s shoulder. I tried closing my eyes for a moment to take in the overloaded sensations of touch and proprioception, then opening the eyes of one body at a time — that didn’t work at first, and I had to try again a couple of times before I reduced the visual input to a manageable level.

Sophia poked her head into the open door to see what was taking me so long. “Nice,” she said. “You need me to help you out? I think the people behind us are getting a little impatient.”

“No hurry,” one of the women in line behind Sophia called out.

“I think I can do this,” I said, while hissing with my little body’s mouth. I turned and walked toward the door, and promptly fell off my own shoulder as I unconsciously tried to do the same with the little body. In a panic, I opened the eyes of my little body and flapped my wings to avoid going plop on the floor, and pulled up again to land on Sophia’s shoulder. “Excuse me,” I said, and then closed that body’s eyes, gripping the fabric of her crop top tightly with my little claws while I carefully walked out of the booth with the larger body.

“Pleased to meet you,” Sophia said. “I’m Sophia, and you are...?”

“Amanda,” I said. I’d been planning on using that name today. “And the little squirt on your shoulder is Melissa,” I added spontaneously, and made my little body gurgle.

Meredith and Sophia stayed with me while I walked back and forth a few times near the Venn machine, getting the hang of separately controlling my larger body while the smaller one lay still. A bit later, I sat still with my larger body and walked back and forth on the bench next to myself, then took off and flew. By the time we were finished with lunch and ready to change back, I was freely flying around the mall in my small body, doing daring aerial maneuvers while my larger body walked around shopping and chatting with my best friends. It was a wonderful visit despite the miserable weather outside.

We returned to the Venn machine to change back. The line was shorter now, and the few people ahead of us had simple changes to make, so it wasn’t long before I revenned Meredith to her usual body and she revenned me to my usual “apparently a boy” body. We were practiced at pulling those forms out of each other’s histories, so we were only in the machine for a few moments.

Then, when we came out of the machine and headed over toward the bench where Sophia was waiting with our purses and shopping bags, I saw someone I knew and froze, hoping he hadn’t seen me. But he had, and was staring at me too. Before I knew it, he was right up in my face, looking furious and betrayed.

“That girl I saw earlier was you?” Tim demanded, looking aghast.

“Hi, Tim,” I said weakly. “Could you please not tell anyone you saw that?”

“Why?” he asked. “I can get why someone would want to change into something cool like a tiger or a pegasus or something — I wouldn’t do it myself, I don’t trust those aliens’ motivation for giving us those things, but I see the temptation. But a girl? What the actual fuck, [deadname]?”

(At this point, as you can guess, [deadname] now represents my deadname. I’ve managed to work around it until now, but...)

I tried to deflect. “I don’t think it’s aliens,” I said; “probably humans from a more advanced timeline.” I could feel a panic attack coming on and it was a struggle not to start hyperventilating, or curl up on the floor sobbing.

“Or from the future,” Meredith put in. “But you need to leave [deadname] alone. What people venn into in their free time is their business. If someone trusts the people who made the machines, and the friend they go into the machine with, there’s no reason they should just change into a couple of ‘respectable’ shapes like a more attractive version of themselves or a cool animal like a tiger. The changes wear off and they’re easily reversible, so there’s no reason not to try a lot of different things. You can be something silly or weird. Or something perfectly normal, like a disabled person or a different skin color or the opposite sex. You might learn something from it.”

Meredith had mentioned during one of our visits that she’d venned into a body with muscular dystrophy for eight hours a while ago, to get an idea of what her boyfriend Hunter used to live with for the first sixteen years of his life. I admired her courage; I could never do that. It seemed like a more effective deflection than mine, anyway, because Tim engaged with her.

“You think that’s what they gave us the machines for? To learn about each other? Best case, they might hope we’ll do that. Probably they just want to learn whether we’re worthy to join the galactic federation by watching what we do with those things. And they’re probably laughing their asses off, or wiggling their cilia off or whatever. Because we’re using it for stupid shit like this.” I winced. “Being a girl is normal, but wanting to change into one?”

“Please don’t,” I gasped, “tell anyone...” I couldn’t muster arguments anymore. Tim’s venom was bringing back all my original guilt and shame from when I’d first realized I wanted to be a girl. I wasn’t a real trans girl like Meredith, I was a pervert who got off on the contrast between my real body and the other ones I tried out... At the same time my rational mind, getting smaller and weaker every moment, was pointing out how stupid this was, but I couldn’t stop thinking it.

Meredith saw how messed up I was getting, and took my arm and guided me toward the bench. Sophia had finally looked up from her book and noticed what was happening, and she jumped up and headed toward us at the same time.

“Even if you think what [deadname] did was wrong,” Meredith said, “do you want to ruin his life?” I would have flinched at the “his” if I hadn’t already been shaking and hyperventilating. But I was grateful to her later for trying not to give away more than Tim already knew. “Because you know how his parents are going to freak out if word gets back to them because you told people at school. Best case, they’ll ground him until he’s eighteen; more likely send him off to a military academy or worse.” Sophia took hold of my other arm and in a few more moments they had me on the bench, where I buried my face in my hands and only half-heard the rest of the conversation.

Early in our email correspondence, I’d told Meredith about how Mom and Dad had talked about how her parents should have sent her to conversion therapy. I was pretty sure that was what she had in mind by “or worse.”

“No skin off my nose if his parents knock some sense into him,” Tim scoffed. “It’s not like we’re friends. Huh — I bet this is why you got so mad about me talking shit about those transgenders? It was because you wanted to be a girl, too. Shit...”

I didn’t hear everything he said, or what Meredith or Sophia said in reply, but everything that got through my fog of panic made it worse. When I finally managed to calm down a little, Tim was gone.

“It’s over,” I said miserably. “I can’t go home after this.”

“You can’t stay with your parents,” Meredith agreed. “But what’s the earliest your parents could find out through the rumor mill after that asshole tells people at school tomorrow?”

“You don’t understand. His parents are friends with mine — not close friends like your parents and mine used to be, but they talk once in a while. Worst case, his mom could call my mom this afternoon and she’d know by the time I get off work.”

“What if you don’t go to work? Go straight home, maybe, tell your parents Subway closed early because of a gas leak or something and you’re going to grab a few things before you meet up with a friend...? Then grab your most important things and meet us somewhere. Back here, or at the library. Do you think that would be safe?”

“...Maybe?”

“She shouldn’t risk it,” Sophia said. “What if her parents want her to do chores at home since she can’t go to her job, and she’s stuck there until that creep’s parents call her parents? And she probably shouldn’t drive in this condition anyway.”

“I have to,” I said. “I’ve got to get away. Venn me into an older woman — bigger, stronger, maybe with dragon scales I can hide under my clothes. I’ll go off to a big city where I can find work under the table, washing dishes or hauling heavy boxes or whatever. Maybe Atlanta or Miami? Until I’m eighteen and I can reclaim my identity without Mom and Dad being able to...” I shuddered, unable to articulate what I feared they’d do.

“You shouldn’t drive there,” Sophia said, looking something up on her phone. “Your car title’s in your parents’ name, right? And they can have the police track you by the license plate. Let us give you a ride to the Greyhound station in Greensboro...”

“No,” Meredith said. “You’d be safer with a big, strong adult body than as a teen girl, but you’d still be in danger. You should come home with us.”

“Our house is going to be one of the first places the police look once her parents report her missing,” Sophia said slowly. “Think about it. There’s police cameras watching every Venn machine. And Tim can tell the police exactly which Venn machine she used, so they’ll get pictures of us from the mall security cameras and show them to her parents and they’ll tell the police who we are. And whatever we venn her into, they’ll know from the camera footage what she looks like, so we can’t claim she’s our cousin who’s come to visit even if Mom and Dad cooperate.”

I sobbed. It was hopeless. “Your parents probably won’t want me there, either,” I said.

“So we have to use another Venn machine,” Meredith said. “One that’s a good distance away so they won’t think of checking its cameras. And maybe lay a decoy trail. We can shuttle her car to the Greyhound station and leave it there, and then go to another Venn machine the police won’t think to check camera footage for.” She pulled out her phone and brought up vennlocator.com. “Then it’s your turn, Sophia. Turn her into a small animate statue like the ones you’ve been making for your science fair project. A little dragon that can hide on my desk in plain sight and not move a muscle — well, they don’t have muscles but you know what I mean — if Mom or Dad come into my room. But she can talk to us, and read or use my laptop when we’re at school or work, and continue her education that way until she’s eighteen.”

“And she won’t need to eat or poop, so it’ll be a lot easier to hide her,” Sophia said. “But the bus station parking lot would have a lot of cameras, too. They might spot her going from her car to ours if the camera coverage is good enough. We should leave the mall separately — visibly going off in different directions when they check the camera footage — and meet up somewhere with few or no cameras for her to get in our car.”

“Yeah, that makes more sense,” Meredith said. She looked at the map on her phone, zooming in here and there. “Okay. Amanda, what about if you park your car here, at this Waffle House in Greensboro, and then walk a little way south and meet us in the Wendy’s parking lot? That way the police will probably figure you left your parents’ highly traceable car and walked to the I-40 ramp to hitch a ride. Or hitched a ride with one of the customers at Waffle House.”

“Um...” I said. I was still a little out of it, but I was glad to have them figuring things out. I could barely think at all. “I think that works? But can you explain it again...?”

They patiently explained, and Sophia added, “Would you be okay with being an animate statue for a while? Until it’s safe for you to have an organic body again?”

It took me a few moments to gather my wits enough to say, “Anything’s better than going home.”

---

---

I have scheduled all remaining chapters to appear weekly on Scribblehub for the next year. If something happens to me and I stop posting on TGS and BigCloset, you can finish reading the story on Scribblehub.

Instead of plugging one of my books and briefly mentioning the others, this week I'm doing something I should have done a while ago: talking about the extent to which my older stories (particularly my ebook novels and the stories in my ebook collections) are likely to appeal to my newer readers who discovered me through stories like Pioneers or Wings.

I started writing gender-bender fiction a long time ago, way before I figured out I was non-binary or knew any trans people (well, I knew one egg besides myself who hatched long afterward, but that's beyond the scope of this essay). Thus, despite consciously rebelling against some of the annoying tropes of early Internet TG ficton, I baked a lot of its assumptions into my stories. In particular, what's now called "comphet" -- compulsory heterosexuality, where when a character is transformed to the opposite gender, their orientation changes so they're still straight. (I didn't write any gay characters until years later.)

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes was the first long novel I finished, back in 2010. And though I like a lot of it still, the social maneuvering and intrigue particularly, the comphet is baked into the worldbuilding, the way the transformation magic works. I tried to fudge that some with its first sequel, When Wasps Make Honey, having different characters affected differently by the same magic, but I couldn't really fix the fundamental problem without being massively inconsistent with the first book. That's the main reason I've never finished the final draft of Like Bees in Springtime, the third book, and I don't know if I ever will.

A Notional Treason is set in the same universe, many years later and thousands of miles away; again, there's a lot I still like about it, but it's got comphet baked into the magic system.

The Bailiff and the Mermaid is in the same setting as The Mural and the Cabinet, about a century earlier, and an immersive fantasy instead of portal fantasy. It doesn't quite have the same problems as the earlier books, but that's mainly because we don't meet the tranformed character until after she's been a mermaid for a while; I don't think her sexual orientation before she became a mermaid is ever mentioned in the story, though it's alluded to in the dramatis personae. I think this one holds up pretty well. It's really two novellas in a trenchcoat, rather than one novel, but there is an ongoing romance plot that links the two courtroom dramas into something moderately unified.

My short story collections are a mixed bag, as you might expect. The Weight of Silence and Other Stories is older, from 2014, and mostly contains stories from years before that. The title story has a trans character, and is one of my favorite stories from that period. The others are mostly free of comphet, except for "The Manumission Game," but that's mostly because I don't think any of them have romance or sex except for "Rodric and Melisande". Some of them do have moderately questionable notions about gender baked in, though.

Unforgotten and Other Stories is newer, from 2019, and includes most of my short fiction from between 2014 and 2019, plus a few older non-gendery stories. I think most of the stories in this one are better about gender than the older ones, with the exception of "Like a Butterfly, from Flower to Flower" which is a prequel to Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, and "Contagion", which is my take on the infectious feminization trope. A lot of the stories have explicitly trans characters; I think the best are probably "Succession" and Listening to Jekyllase.

I had trouble at first holding the pages of the trade paperback open with my little hands, but after a few minutes of trial and error, I managed to get the hang of it, and started reading.

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Once I’d abandoned my car — partly Mom and Dad’s car and mostly the bank’s — and met up with Meredith and Sophia again, we headed southeast to Siler City, way on the other side of Greensboro. Sophia had still been transparent when I left the mall, but she was back to her usual body now, though she was wearing a different outfit. They’d stopped at a couple of places to buy the things we needed.

Meredith parked a couple of blocks away from the Venn machine and stayed with the car. Sophia put on a bulky raincoat with a stocking cap, and handed me another of each, along with four sticks of gum.

“Chew up the gum,” she told me, “and when we get close to the machine, have a couple of lumps of gum in each cheek. That will change the shape of your face a bit and hopefully fool facial recognition software. Pulling the cap down low and keeping your head down will help, too. It’s cold and wet, so nobody will think that’s suspicious.”

We walked to the machine, which was sitting on the sidewalk in front of a hardware store. With it being outdoors and the day being rainy, nobody was waiting in line to use it. We set it up for a two-year change, which would take me past my eighteenth birthday.

Once we were inside, Sophia said, “So have you made up your mind?” We’d been talking about what form my little statuette body would take on the way down there, although most of our focus had been on crisis management — what story Meredith and Sophia would tell their parents and the police when they were questioned about my disappearance, and how they’d keep life interesting for me while I was more or less a prisoner in Meredith’s room for over a year. “I know you wanted purple scales, but we don’t want the statue on Meredith’s desk to look too much like the dragon-girls they’ll see in the camera footage if they dig back a few months. Or the dragon you had on your shoulder today.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You said you could make the statues out of all kinds of materials, right?”

“Yeah. I even got some made of a bluish-silver metal so tough I couldn’t chip off a piece for chemical analysis with the tools in the school lab or workshop. But we should probably use a readily identifiable material, or it might be obvious that you’re venned.”

“Some kind of hard ceramic, maybe? A Chinese dragon. Red with a white ruff? Not very humanoid, but with something like opposable thumbs, hands I can use to turn pages or type. I don’t think the police would connect that with the dragon-girls I’ve turned into before.”

“All right. Scrunch yourself up in the front corner there, so when the door opens you’ll be hidden from the camera.” Sophia went to work, and a few minutes later the booth expanded vastly around me, like when I’d turned into a little dragon or a dragon-girl small enough to fly. And I felt different from ever before. Even as a squirrel-sized dragon, there had still been basic commonalities — I breathed, I smelled things, I subconsciously felt my heart beating, I felt a temperature difference between me and my surroundings. All that was gone. At first I thought Sophia might have messed up and made me an inanimate statue, but then I moved, wiggling one leg at a time until I felt confident about walking. Moving felt natural, but staying still even more so; I felt like I could stay still for hours and never get cramped.

By the time I had tested all my limbs, Sophia had come into the booth and scooped me up to put me in her purse. She didn’t talk until we were back at the car.

“What did she decide on?” I heard Meredith ask.

“Take a look,” Sophia said, and opened up her purse. I looked up at Meredith and waved.

“Wow, you’re beautiful. Are you sure you’ll be okay like that until you’re eighteen, though? It’s really different from any of the bodies you’ve worn.”

Internally, I was having some second thoughts. I liked this body so far about as well as the tiny quadrupedal dragons I’d changed into. But how comfortable would I be long-term being semi-animate, or this tiny? I really couldn’t think of any better option, though — not just better for me, but better for Meredith and Sophia, who could get in big trouble for helping me if I venned into something that was harder to hide, like a tiny scaled-down human or dragon-girl, or a dragon-girl statue that looked like my dragon-girl bodies the police would find on the security camera footage. I didn’t want to worry Meredith and Sophia, or make them go through the Venn machine again and look odd to whoever might glance at the security footage from the Siler City machine. So I said, “I think so. Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

“I would do anything to help my sisters.”

I might have cried then if I’d had tear ducts. Happy tears. As it was, I wiggled for joy and then went still again, as was so easy now.

 

* * *

 

When we got back to Meredith and Sophia’s house, Sophia transferred me from her purse to one of the shopping bags Meredith had acquired during the mall trip; I shared it with a pair of earrings, a scarf, and a receipt, which her parents hopefully wouldn’t look at to see that no dragon statuette was listed. I went rigid and stayed that way as they carried their things, including me, into the house.

“Supper’s in the refrigerator,” I heard Mrs. Ramsey say. Something was slightly off about her voice, but I wasn’t sure what. “Did y’all find some good stuff?”

“Several neat things,” Sophia said, and she and Meredith listed several of the things they’d bought, including me in the middle of the list where I wouldn’t stand out particularly.

“I’m gonna go put this stuff away before I eat,” Meredith added.

“Sure.”

A few moments later, a hand plucked me out of the shopping bag and set me on a broad, flat surface. I looked around and saw I was on Meredith’s desk, which was neatly arranged: a stack of papers and notebooks, a stack of books (both textbooks and novels), and her laptop. I stayed still and quiet, waiting to make sure no adult was around.

“I’m gonna go eat in a minute,” Meredith said in a low voice. “Make yourself at home. Are there any books you want me to set on the desk where you can reach them?”

“Maybe Dreadnought?” She’d told me about it, a novel about a trans superhero, but I’d never dared to borrow it from her to take home.

“Of course. Just a minute.” She pulled the book down from the shelf and set it next to me, then put away the rest of the things she’d bought and left the room, closing the door behind her.

I had trouble at first holding the pages of the trade paperback open with my little hands, but after a few minutes of trial and error, I managed to get the hang of it, and started reading. I read most of the first two chapters by the time Meredith returned from supper.

“Um, can you close your eyes while I change for bed?” she asked. “I don’t want Mom and Dad to wonder why I’ve suddenly started changing clothes in the bathroom.”

“I don’t think I can close my eyes,” I said after trying for a few moments. “But I can turn my back.”

“Thanks.”

When she said I could look again, she was wearing a lacy lavender nightgown. Then she opened a drawer of her desk, took out some makeup supplies, and started removing her makeup before bed.

“I want to learn how to do that,” I said.

“I guess you can watch me put it on and take it off a few hundred times in the next year or so,” she said. “And I can explain what I’m doing. You’ll need to be organic again before you can practice what you’ve seen, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you feeling okay, being like that? Sophia’s turned me into animate dolls or statues several times, but rarely for more than a couple of hours.”

“Yeah. It’s weird and different, but I can live with it. I feel safe here. I’ve never felt safe at home since I started figuring out who I am.”

She took on a fiercely protective look and stroked my back with a couple of fingers. “I’ll keep you safe. They can’t hurt you here.”

My ceramic body was still room temperature, but I felt warm and fuzzy inside.

 

* * *

 

After Meredith fell asleep, I realized I wasn’t sleepy and wasn’t going to get sleepy. This could have some disadvantages. I didn’t want to turn the light back on to read and maybe wake her up. But I had a lot to think about, a lot to process from the very full day, and my thoughts kept me company. Eventually, somewhere during the night, I fell into a fugue state like I’ve heard people experience when they turn into inanimate objects and nobody is using or wearing them, and I wasn’t consciously aware of my surroundings again until Meredith’s alarm went off at six.

Then there was a flurry of activity as Meredith got ready for school. She only had time to exchange a few words with me before she left, leaving the light on so I could read. I started to read more of Dreadnought, but after a little, I decided I needed to study, too. She’d taken some of her textbooks with her to school, but not all, and I found one of those within my reach and turned pages until I found roughly where we’d left off in my American History course at the Everett Academy.

Then Meredith’s mom came into the room a few hours later. I quickly crawled off the textbook when I heard the doorknob turn and froze in my standard position as she opened the door. At first glance, I barely recognized her: she was fifteen or twenty years younger than when I’d seen her at the steakhouse over a year earlier, and I realized that was what had felt off about her voice. Meredith and Sophia had told me about their parents rejuvenating each other, but seeing it was another thing altogether. She glanced around briefly and turned off the light. After she left, I found I still had enough sunlight from the window to read.

That evening, when Meredith was doing her homework and I was looking over it with her, her mom knocked at the door. I froze in position as Meredith called out, “Come on in.”

“I just heard from Crystal Southers,” her mom said. “[Deadname] Wallace is missing.”

“What happened?” Meredith asked, doing a good job of looking concerned.

“He left for work yesterday after church and never came home. His parents called the restaurant he works at and his manager said he never showed up.”

Meredith hesitated for a moment and said, “I guess I should tell you what I know, and you can decide if it’s worth telling his parents.”

“You know something about it? Where is he?”

“I don’t know where he is now,” she lied, “but Sophia and I saw him yesterday at the mall.”

“When?”

“Early afternoon. Ever since we both got our driver’s licenses, we’ve been getting together and hanging out once a month or so. We didn’t say anything because his parents wouldn’t approve of it and we figured the fewer people who knew, the less likely his parents would find out.”

Mrs. Ramsey was quiet for a moment. Then: “I understand. It’s not fair that you should lose contact with your friend just because your parents had a fight with his parents. But if you saw him yesterday — did he seem okay?”

“At first. Then, just when we were about to go our separate ways, for him to go to work and Sophia and me to do some more shopping, we ran into a bully from his school.”

“Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that he’s being bullied.”

“I’m not sure of the details, but...” She hesitated, even though we’d gone over the cover story in the car yesterday: Tell as much of the truth as the police could figure out from talking to Tim and looking at the mall security cameras. “Well, we’ve been using the Venn machine at the mall, and the bully saw [deadname] using it, and said he was gonna tell everybody at school. [Deadname] was sure his parents would find out pretty soon and said he was gonna run away to a big city instead of going home.”

“Oh no! Why didn’t you —?”

“I thought we’d talked him out of it,” Meredith went on. “But I guess maybe not?”

“You should have told someone as soon as you got home! You should have called from the mall before he got out of your sight! Meredith, I thought you were more mature than this.”

“Mom,” Meredith said, “I don’t want to give away secrets that aren’t mine to share, but I think [deadname] might be safer on the streets of a big city than in his parents’ house once they find out what he’s been venning into. I tried to talk him out of it, like I said, Sophia and I both did, but... if he changed his mind and ran away anyway, he might have had a good reason.”

“Has...” Mrs. Ramsey swallowed. “Have his parents been abusive?”

“He hasn’t told me everything, but... maybe?”

“Oh my God. If you hear from him, tell him he’ll be safe here, okay? We’ll find a way to keep him safe. Do you have any idea what city he was thinking of running away to?”

“He mentioned Atlanta and Miami. He was probably thinking in terms of warmer weather.”

“I’ve got to tell someone. The police, but maybe not the Wallaces...? I don’t know — maybe Child Protective Services —”

She left the room. That was uncomfortable to listen to (although it felt nice when she said she would keep me safe from my parents), but it was necessary. Sooner or later the police would talk to Tim, who would tell them he’d seen us using the Venn machine at the mall, and then they’d show the camera footage to my parents and ask them if they recognized the girls I was venning with. Then they’d question Meredith and Sophia. It would look a lot better for them if they spoke up before the police came calling.

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My 335,000-word short fiction collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“Can we talk without the police listening?”

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The following day, Meredith and Sophia came home late, and they told me that their parents had met them at school, where they’d been pulled out of classes and questioned separately by a couple of police detectives and a woman from Child Protective Services. Their mom, dad, and their parents’ lawyer were present.

“If the police find him, would you take him back to his parents or put him in a foster home or what?” Meredith had asked them.

“Honestly, it’s going to have to depend on what [deadname] tells us,” the lady from CPS had said. “You still haven’t said why you think he would be unsafe at home. But the police tell me you used the Venn machine to transform him into a girl. Is he transgender, like you?”

“Why [deadname] wanted to be a girl for a couple of hours and whether he wants to do it again is not my business to tell. If you find him, you can ask him yourself. I just know he was terrified of going home.”

“The more you tell me,” the social worker said, “the more likely I can protect [deadname] effectively, if his parents are abusive as you imply.”

“Can we talk without the police listening?”

So after some argument, the police left, and Meredith told the social worker that she wouldn’t out me if I were trans or gay or anything, but that my parents were the sort who would send a kid like that to conversion therapy, maybe the kind involving electroshock torture.

The social worker kneaded her brows and sighed.

“I wish I could act on this. Unfortunately, however unscientific and inhumane it is, conversion therapy isn’t illegal in this state, and I don’t know if I can convince my supervisor to act on a vague suspicion that [deadname]'s parents might use it once he returns home. Has [deadname] ever talked about his parents doing something specific that I can point to as evidence that he would be unsafe at home? It doesn’t have to be physical abuse, verbal or emotional abuse might be enough.”

“He never said anything about them being physically abusive. But he told me that he hasn’t felt safe at home for a while, and I’ve seen evidence of his dad’s short temper back when Mom and Dad used to be friends with them. I think he was safe as long as he kept up the appearance of being the obedient kid they wanted, but he didn’t think he would be once they found out he’d been venning into a girl.”

 

* * *

 

I had to be extremely quiet when Meredith was away and her parents were around, which, as they worked from home, could be any time. They spent a fair amount of time scouring garage sales and thrift stores for things they could sell online, or at the post office shipping packages, but they were still at home during the day a lot at unpredictable intervals. I would sometimes have to quickly get into position and freeze when I accidentally made a noise that caused them to come investigate; for instance, when I was trying to get at a book that was under another one and the top one fell off Meredith’s desk. After one of those incidents, Meredith told me that her parents were calling an exterminator to check for mice and rats.

Sophia hung out in Meredith’s room in the evening a lot, partly under the pretext of checking each other’s homework — apparently they actually did that a lot, with Meredith checking Sophia’s Literature homework and Sophia checking Meredith’s Chemistry homework. But she also kept me company, and after the first couple of days, she interviewed me about my experience of being a tiny animate statue.

“I can’t use this as part of my science fair project, obviously,” she said. “But I hope I can find a use for it someday after you turn eighteen and I can talk about it. None of my other subjects have stayed venned like that longer than two days, most of them eight hours or less. I’d like to interview you about once a month until you change back. Just a few questions about how you feel about your situation and your body.”

“Sure,” I said.

The following Saturday morning, Meredith was reading her Psychology textbook and I was using her laptop to check my email when her phone buzzed. She checked it.

“Oh, hey, Carmen is in town,” she said. “They want to get together. Do you want to meet them?”

“That would be great,” I said.

They texted back and forth and decided where to meet and when. Then, after Meredith finished her homework, I crawled into her purse while she got dressed to go, told Sophia where she was going, and texted her parents (they were at an estate sale).

We met Carmen at a small diner on the outskirts of Catesville, which was roughly halfway between Carmen’s sister’s house and Meredith’s. After their waitress took their orders, Meredith set her purse on the table.

“I’d like you to meet someone,” she said. “Last year I gave you an email address for a trans friend who wasn’t out to her family yet and wanted some pen-pals, remember?”

“Yeah, we exchanged emails for a few months,” Carmen said. “It’s been a while since I heard from her... I seem to remember she hadn’t figured out a girl name yet?”

“Yeah, she’s going by Amanda with the few people who know she’s trans lately, but she’s not sure it fits for the long term. Well, for the last few months, since she got her driver’s license, we’ve been meeting up once a month or so and I’ve been venning her into a girl body for a little while before she changes back and goes home. But then last Sunday...” She told Carmen the basics of what had happened. I listened for my cue.

“So she’s a runaway, basically,” Carmen replied in an even lower voice (not that Meredith had been particularly loud) “and you’re hiding her at home? I think we need to go over the events of last Sunday more carefully and make sure there’s no way the police could figure out she could be hiding at your house in a tiny venned body.”

“Yeah, we should. Um, first, though, I’d like you to meet her. Amanda?”

I poked my head gingerly out of the purse and looked around. Carmen was a Hispanic person several inches taller than Meredith; they had short black hair with a lock of electric blue hair over their right ear. They spoke like me or Meredith or anybody else that had grown up in Mynatt County, and I vaguely remembered them saying in one of their emails that they’d been born here. “Hi,” I whispered.

“This wasn’t a great idea,” Carmen said in a low voice, looking around. “You should have invited me to your house for this, Meredith. Hide, Amanda, and we’ll go somewhere safer after lunch.”

So I squirmed back down into Meredith’s purse and waited. The waitress brought their food and they ate. I couldn’t smell it, and didn’t feel hungry, but I felt a little bit wistful about not being able to share the meal with friends.

Then they went out and got into Carmen’s car, and she started driving. Once we were in the car, Carmen said, “Okay, Amanda, you can come out now.” I crawled out of the purse into Meredith’s lap and then onto the cup holder between the front seats.

“So tell me everything in detail,” Carmen said. “Start with when you two met up on Sunday and tell me everything you did, especially after you ran into that bully from Amanda’s school.”

So Meredith and I told her everything we could remember. Carmen asked a few questions, like whether we were in sight of a camera when Tim confronted me, what my parents were like and how they were likely to react to me being trans, and so forth, and then proposed a plan.

“There’s a decent chance the police will look at the security footage from the Siler City machine at some point in their investigation. They’d probably check all the Venn machines within forty or fifty miles of the point where you left your car. And the chewing gum might fool facial recognition or not, I don’t know, but it’s not going to fool a human who’s probably already interviewed Meredith and Sophia after they saw the footage from the mall. And then they’ll search Meredith’s house, looking for anything that could be a venned person.”

“That could be almost anything,” Meredith pointed out. “Anything small enough, I mean.”

“Yeah, this is new territory, I’m just guessing about how they’ll investigate. But a missing white kid with well-off parents, they’ll pull out all the stops.

“So I suggest that Amanda not stay in your house for a while. She can come back to stay with you until she’s eighteen once enough time passes that the police will have already searched your house if they’re going to do it at all.”

I was reluctant to leave Meredith and Sophia, my only real-life friends. For a moment I thought of asking Meredith to mail me to Tatiana — but I didn’t know exactly where she lived. She’d had mentioned that she lived in California, but she hadn’t told me the name of her town, much less her address.

Meredith was furrowing her brow, probably trying to think of where else I could go. “Most of the people I would trust to let her go live with are friends the police would question if they started getting suspicious about me and Sophia. They’d certainly talk to Hunter, and probably Lily and Andrew...”

“Me?” Carmen asked.

“Maybe not. Probably not. We don’t hang out that often anymore, and even before you went off to college we talked on the phone more often than we hung out.”

“I know you don’t know me as well as you do Meredith, Amanda. But you’d be welcome to stay with me for the rest of the semester. I’ve got a single dorm room, because of being genderqueer. And mostly because I venned into a neuter body,” they added with a smirk; “the housing administration was so confused. They’d barely gotten used to giving trans students single dorm rooms when most of them started venning into cisnormative bodies, and then I come along.”

If my glass eyes could have gotten wider, they would have. “That would be great! I mean, not to say anything against Hunter, Lily or Andrew, but I’ve never met them, just heard about them from Meredith. And I’d rather stay with a fellow trans person, anyway.”

“That would be good,” Meredith said. “We’ve been planning to have her study along with me through the last three semesters of high school so she’ll be ready to take the GED after she turns eighteen.”

Carmen frowned. “That’s not ideal. A GED’s not going to get you into a great school, and you’re probably going to have to take remedial classes in college you wouldn’t need if you’d finished high school... but I guess that’s not an option. I’ll help you with that as much as I can while studying for my own classes.”

“Thank you!”

“Well,” she said, “what about just stay in the car when Meredith gets out back at the diner, then? You can read in my bedroom while I’m visiting with my sister tonight and tomorrow. We’ll be at my dorm tomorrow night.”

“That sounds great. Thank you again!” I turned to Meredith and said, “I’ll miss you, but I guess we can still email.”

“Better not,” Carmen put in. “If the police get suspicious, they could subpoena your email archives from your ISP or Google or whoever. It would be safer to send handwritten letters. And in case the cops are opening your mail, we’ll send our letters to you in care of somebody else.”

“Hunter, then,” Meredith said, and wrote down his address for Carmen. “And I might come down to UNC Greensboro to see you both. I should do a campus tour at some point anyway.”

We got back to the diner a little later, and Meredith got out. Before she did, she picked me up and hugged me, and I put my little arms around her as far as they would go, which was... not around her at all, just across about five inches of her chest.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, just as she opened the door. “Sophia’s going to be disappointed about those interviews.”

“What?” Carmen asked.

“I’ll explain later,” I said.

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I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you'd get more value for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.

“I should be able to make up my mind by now, I’ve tried out like ten different girl names either online or in person.”

 

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The next day or so was fairly uneventful, but not boring. I overheard a good deal of Carmen and her sister Alejandra’s conversation from inside Carmen’s messenger bag later that evening, until Carmen seemed to remember I was there and took the bag to their bedroom. But it was in Spanish, and because a counselor had told me a more difficult language would look better on college applications, I’d studied French in school. I amused myself by listening and trying to pick out common recurring words and match them to French or English cognates.

Back in Carmen’s bedroom, I found an anthology on the bottom shelf and read short stories until they went to bed. I thought about the sudden change in my circumstances for a while until I fell into a fugue state. I didn’t know Carmen all that well yet, but they seemed pretty smart and cool, and I was looking forward to hanging out with them at college. I’d been afraid my next fourteen months as a little statue would be boring, but maybe not as much as I thought?

The next day, while Carmen and their sister were out, I spent the day alternately reading and thinking about where my life was now. I didn’t feel dysphoric in this semi-animate body, no more than I had in the little quadruped dragon body, but this wasn’t exactly what I wanted, either. And even though I didn’t want to risk Mom and Dad sending me to conversation therapy, and Nathan was just as transphobic if not as potentially dangerous, I was still starting to miss them after not seeing them for a week. I missed our classic movie nights and Dad telling us cool stories about the how movies used to be made, I missed playing video games with Nathan, I missed working in the kitchen with Mom. I was missing the routine of school, too; even though I no longer had any friends at school, I got along well with my teachers. Would I have the stick-to-it-iveness to keep studying on my own without the structure of classes, homework and exams? Carmen and Meredith had said they’d help me study, but they had plenty of work to do for their own classes and I didn’t want to distract them and make them get bad grades.

Then Carmen came in and told me to hop in the messenger bag, we were fixing to go, and my excitement about hanging out with her at college came back with a rush.

“You can climb out of the bag now, we’re on the road,” Carmen said a few minutes later. “We’ll be at my dorm in a little over half an hour. So how about tell me more about yourself? I remember some of our email conversations from a while back, but a lot’s happened since then.”

So I told them what my family was like, and what my life had been like before the Venn machines came along and Meredith transitioned, and how it had changed since then. I hesitated when I got to the part about venning into a boy-like body with girl parts, not sure how much detail to go into, but she got the hint from my stuttering euphemisms.

“Huh, cool. That’s one way to beat dysphoria. I’m glad I never had to be that sneaky about it — my sister’s been pretty supportive, if not exactly from the beginning, from pretty early on. It took her a while to get it, but she was trying to understand as soon as she got over her shock.”

“How long were you out as non-binary before the Venn machines came along?”

They’d told me before, but I wasn’t sure I was remembering right — I’d read a lot of coming-out stories from different people around that time.

“About two years ago to my best friend Zoe and my sister, and at the beginning of my senior year to everybody at school. It didn’t really affect much at school, actually — a couple of teachers tried to use ‘they’ pronouns, and my friends made a real effort to use ‘they’ and got used to it after a couple of months, but most people didn’t bother. I was already the weird girl, but the mean girls were kind of scared of me, so I wasn’t bullied, at least not in ways I cared about. The staff had me keep using the girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, both before and after I venned into this body.”

“Was that okay?”

They shrugged. “I guess? It’s not like it would be practical to build a whole new set of non-binary restrooms. Even if all of us were out, there’d probably only be a couple of us in a middling-size school like Western Mynatt High. It would make more sense to abolish gendered restrooms and let everyone use common restrooms with both toilets and urinals in private stalls, like in some European countries, but we’re not civilized enough for that yet.”

I tried to wrap my brain around that idea and couldn’t.

“Of course, once I got Zoe to venn me into this neuter body, the assistant principal had a bunch of nosy questions to ask about how my plumbing worked, and finally decided I was basically a girl with no boobs, so I could keep using the girls’ restrooms.”

That topic led to the issue of how I’d come out as trans once I turned eighteen, and what I’d do and where I’d stay at that point.

“You’ll need to establish your identity,” they pointed out, “which means changing back into your baseline body in front of some witnesses who know you, and then venning into whatever girl body you want to live in long-term. I guess one of your witnesses would have to be Meredith... I’m not sure who else. Sophia’s not going to be eighteen yet at that point, will she?”

“No. She’s ten months younger than me.”

“Well, you’ll need more adult witnesses besides Meredith. Maybe she can talk her brother or parents into helping you? And I seem to remember she said there were a few people at her old church who were okay with trans people. Do you think they might help?”

I thought about it. “Yeah, maybe Ms. Southers would help. She was cool with Meredith’s transition.”

“Anyway, then you’ll need to get someone to venn you into your preferred body and have the witnesses attest that Deadname Wallace went into the machine and Amanda Wallace came out. And they’ll have to sign a form for the DMV and a form for the county court, where you’d have to file your name change.”

“I’m... not sure I want to keep using Amanda? I mean, I was just trying it out for the day when Tim saw me change back and everything went wrong. And then Meredith and Sophia kept using it for me after I came home with them.”

“Is it okay if I keep using it until you figure out what name you really want?”

I would have sighed if I’d had lungs. “Yeah, that’s fine. I should be able to make up my mind by now, I’ve tried out like ten different girl names either online or in person.”

“As long as you’re only out to a few friends, you don’t need to rush it,” Carmen said. “I talked a lot with Zoe and Alejandra and some online friends about what to do about my name when I came out, and finally decided to stick with the name Mama gave me. ‘Carmen’ is kind of a gender-neutral name in Spanish, though there’s hardly any Anglo dudes named Carmen.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that.”

“And Meredith told me one time that she’d thought about her name for months before she settled on that one. So don’t worry about it. You’ll know the right name when you find it.”

 

* * *

 

Once we had parked, some considerable distance from their dorm, I crawled back into the messenger bag and rode along as they carried it and their duffel bag of clothes and toiletries to the dorm and up to their room.

It would have seemed small to me if I were human-size; it was barely big enough for a single bed, a desk with a built-in bookshelf, a wardrobe, and a chest of drawers. But even a closet would have seemed cavernously spacious to me at that size. Carmen took me out and set me on their desk, then unpacked their duffel bag. The desk was a lot more cluttered than Meredith’s. I crawled around exploring it, finding assignments, handouts, and notes for at least seven different classes, five or six books, most with multiple bookmarks, several flash drives, pens, pencils, highlighters, and index cards. From the dates on some of the assignments, they were from the previous semester, so I figured Carmen wasn’t taking seven classes at once.

“Okay,” they said. “I don’t have a class until ten tomorrow, so I might sleep later than you’re used to. After class, I’ll be back here for an hour or so before I have to leave for work. Tuesdays and Thursdays I’ve got classes at twelve-thirty and four. Wednesday and Friday I’ve got the same schedule as Monday, except for a lab session on Wednesdays. When I’m not too busy, I sometimes go to the Queer Student Union meetings on Thursday evenings or to Defend our Future events. And I hang out with friends sometimes, usually at the student center or at their dorm rooms or mine. If you want to trust some of my friends with your secret, I can introduce you to them. When they come over here, it’s up to you if you want to stay still and pretend you’re inanimate or introduce yourself.”

“Okay,” I said, looking around and wondering where a visiting friend would sit. I guessed one person could sit in the desk chair and another one or two on the bed, but it would be hard for three people to sit side by side on the bed without one of them’s legs getting in the way of the desk chair. “Is it okay if I stay quiet for a while and see what people are like before I introduce myself?”

“Sure, of course.”

We talked for a while longer and then I read quietly while Carmen studied for tomorrow’s American Politics class. When Carmen finally went to bed and I was left alone with my thoughts, I suddenly realized that Sunday had passed, and for the first time since I was eleven and my whole family was down with the flu, I hadn’t gone to church.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Since I’d started figuring out my gender identity over a year ago, I’d started questioning other things my parents and church had taught me, too, but I hadn’t come to any conclusions. I still believed in God, but I didn’t trust the church I grew up in to reliably tell me everything I needed to know about morals and ethics, and I wasn’t sure how much else. Did I want to start going to a different church that was cool with trans people, like Meredith’s family? Or just pray privately and not go to church? Or... there wasn’t any hurry about figuring this out, I decided. It wasn’t like I could go to church again before I turned eighteen, anyway.

 

* * *

 

The next morning, Carmen dragged themselves out of bed about eight forty-five and mumbled a good morning to me before putting on a bathrobe, grabbing their toiletries and a more or less clean towel, and going down the hall to shower. When they got back, they were more awake.

“I’m gonna go eat breakfast and then go to class,” they said as they started getting dressed, pulling pants on under their bathrobe and then tossing the bathrobe across the door of the wardrobe and rummaging through it for a shirt. “See you in about three or four hours.”

“Could I come with you?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking — I’d like to audit your classes if it’s okay. At least the ones that aren’t too far over my head, what with not having finished high school yet.”

“Sure,” they said, pulling on a white T-shirt and then a red flannel shirt over it. “I’m not sure how much you’ll get out of them from inside my messenger bag, not being able to see the whiteboard or projector, but we’ll see what we can figure out.”

I crawled into their messenger bag while they got their socks and shoes on, and then they stuffed a notebook into the bag after me and picked it up. I was getting used to the swinging motion of the bag as they walked, and it was kind of nice, though I wished I could maybe ride on their shoulder, or in their shirt pocket with my head sticking out. I listened to the sounds of the busy campus as Carmen walked from their dorm to the dining hall, pausing to say hi to a couple of friends and acquaintances on the way, and seeming to join up with someone with a feminine voice who stayed with them and kept talking in Spanish most of the way to the dining hall, with Carmen making an occasional contribution. They went through the line together and sat together, and another friendly voice joined them a little later.

“Hey, Carmen and Guadalupe, how’s it going?”

Carmen and Guadalupe, as the other Spanish speaker was apparently called, switched to English as this other girl joined them. They talked about a protest Guadalupe was organizing about a bill in the state legislature that would weaken the protections for the wetlands in the eastern part of the state, until Carmen said they had to run to class and left.

Auditing Carmen’s American Politics class was not easy. Carmen unzipped the messenger bag so I could hear better, and I heard the professor’s voice pretty clearly most of the time. I couldn’t always hear the students asking questions or answering the professor’s questions as well. But she used enough terminology I wasn’t familiar with, presumably terms she’d introduced and defined earlier in the semester, that I couldn’t follow everything. And she seemed to be using the projector a lot to show graphs, diagrams, and maps. Later on, Carmen showed me where they’d copied down some of the diagrams in their notebook, or where the graph or map the professor had shown on the projector had come from in the textbook or the supplemental readings, and that helped.

After class, Carmen came back to their room. Once we were alone, they asked me how much I’d gotten out of the class.

“Not a lot,” I admitted. “I’d like to try to catch up, though, so I’ll understand more Wednesday or at least Friday. Could I read your textbook and your lecture notes while you’re at work?”

“Sure,” they said. “Here you go.” They pulled the notebook they’d been using from the messenger bag and opened it up on the desk, then extricated the American Politics textbook from the precarious stack on the desk and set that next to it, opening it to chapter one. “I’ll be reading for tomorrow’s Human Rights in History class,” they said, picking up another couple of books from the desk. “If you’ve got questions about what you’re reading, maybe save them for after work?”

“Sure,” I replied. “Thanks.”

They took the books over to the bed and laid down, reading, and I started reading the American Politics textbook. After the first couple of pages, I started skimming more, then going back and forth between Carmen’s lecture notes and the textbook to get a better idea of which parts were most important, and going back to some of the parts I’d skimmed to re-read them more carefully. After a while, an alarm on Carmen’s phone went off and they got up.

“I’m going to work now. Be back after supper. I might have a friend with me.”

“Okay, cool. Could you set the books you were reading on the desk, too? I might look at them later to try to be ready for tomorrow’s classes.”

They smiled at me. “Sure.”

 

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I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.

One of the trans guys at the meeting announced that he’d finally figured out his permanent name (he’d been trying out different ones, like me). That reminded me again that I needed to think more about my name. Amanda was nice, but it wasn’t quite right, any more than Natalie, Amber, Isabella or any of the others I’d tried on for a few hours.

 

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After several hours of reading, I had at least skimmed everything in the American Politics textbook up to the chapters the professor had said she would cover in Wednesday and Friday’s lectures, and made a start on the human rights textbook and the supplemental reading for tomorrow’s class. This body with no endocrine system or fatigue poisons made it easier to concentrate on something for a long time, as well as easy to fugue out and not think at all. I’d been a fast reader before, but I was faster now — at least mentally. The physical chore of turning pages was no longer trivial, but I still had a net gain in reading speed. The light outside Carmen’s window got dimmer and then dark, and I kept reading. I was startled when I heard the key in the lock, and I turned around and froze in my usual position. The door opened and Carmen came in, followed a moment later by a white girl with short reddish-brown hair.

“You left the light on,” the girl said.

“Apparently,” Carmen said, throwing me a glance as they set their messenger bag down on the floor next to the desk and moved some clutter around so they could move their laptop. “I was pretty sleepy when I left this morning.”

“The great environmentalist, leaving a light on for who knows how many hours? The horror! Gasp!” the girl teased. I liked her already. She looked around as Carmen pulled the laptop’s power cord out from under the stack of papers so it could stretch over to the bed. “Whatever will you do to offset the — oh, neat. When did you get that dragon?”

“Last weekend.”

“It’s really cool. Looks like the sculptor was looking at theropod models, as well as Chinese art, but those claws are almost like human hands... does it have a name?”

“She hasn’t told me her real name yet. I’m calling her Amanda for now.”

The girl gave me an exaggerated curtsy, which looked silly with her in jeans. “Pleased to meet you, Amanda. I’m Serena.” I was strongly tempted to curtsy back and speak up, but I figured I should listen and get to know Serena a little better, and talk with Carmen about her, before I did that.

While Serena was being intentionally silly and unintentionally polite, Carmen finally got the laptop free of the mess on the desk and set it on the bed, then started messing with it. They plugged an external speaker into it and said, “Okay, we can start whenever.”

“Cool.” Serena turned off the lamp I’d been reading by, pulled a bag of cheddar popcorn out of the tote bag she’d brought with her, and sat down on the bed, on the other side of the laptop from Carmen. The glow of the screen illuminated their faces. Carmen looked at me again. I later realized they were wondering if they could figure out a way for me to watch the movie with them without blatantly telling Serena I was a venned runaway they were illegally hiding from my parents and law enforcement. They didn’t, though, and a moment later they started the movie.

I thought about trying to sneak around in the dark until I had a vantage point where I could see the laptop screen, but decided against it. Unable to follow the plot of the movie when I could only hear the soundtrack and see Carmen and Serena’s reactions, I tried to think about the stuff I’d been reading, and mostly succeeded until the movie came to a funny scene and Serena’s cackle yanked me out of my musing on the Brazilian abolition movement. She had such a cute laugh. Not a girly giggle, but still feminine. After that point, I was paying more attention to Serena’s reactions than to the movie’s dialogue or music. Carmen’s laugh wasn’t on such a hair trigger; they smiled a lot, but laughed only about half as often as Serena did.

The movie was a short one, and after it was over, Serena and Carmen turned on the light and talked about the movie for a little while. It turned out it was a new indie movie that Carmen had supported the Kickstarter for. The conversation drifted from the movie to their plans for the coming week.

“Are you coming to the meeting on Thursday evening?” Serena asked.

“Probably, yeah.”

“What about the Venn trip on Saturday?”

I would have perked up my ears if I’d had any.

“I’d like to, but I don’t think so. After spending last weekend with my sister, I need to spend more time studying. I might work extra, too, if I can get the hours.”

Serena nodded. “Well, I’ll swing by afterward and show you what I’ve venned into. It’ll be a surprise.”

“Sure, just text me before you come.”

“Well, I should go pretty soon,” Serena said.

“Good night,” Carmen said, standing up and picking up the laptop off the bed.

Carmen set the laptop down next to the open book I was sitting on, and then Serena hugged them, and left.

“Well,” Carmen said once she was gone, “what did you think?”

“I like her. How did you meet?”

“At a Queer Student Union meeting. She’s more active in the club than I am. And she organized the Venn trips and goes almost every Saturday.”

“How does that work? I guess a bunch of people carpool to the nearest Venn machine and change each other?”

“Yeah, pretty much. It started last semester with a few people from the Queer Student Union, but it’s grown beyond that. We usually carpool over to the Venn machine in downtown Burlington, although on rainy days we go to the one in Catesville, because it’s the closest one that’s indoors. Most people do short venns, eight hours or a day; maybe two, if their first class on Monday is more than forty-eight hours away. I go about a third of the time.”

“Neat. But do you ever have people getting changed into things they don’t want to be? I mean, if it’s a big group where not everybody is close friends with everybody else... How do you make sure you can trust whoever you pair off with?”

“Well, the group keeps everyone honest. You hear people talking with their partners ahead of time about what they want to be venned into, and if what they get is too different, and they can’t speak in their new form, somebody’s gonna call shenanigans. Probably Serena. Of course, accidents happen, but they generally get changed back pretty fast.”

“Cool.” I wished I could participate. I wondered if it might be safe for me to venn into a girl, human or dragon, and then have Carmen venn me back into this body using my history? “What time do you go and come back?”

“Usually we leave around ten and get back around noon or one after eating lunch. People with long-term venns like me or Serena go back on Sunday evening to have someone call up our preferred form from the history.”

“Do you think I could go with you sometime?”

“No. Think about it; I’d have to tell everybody in that group, a lot of who I don’t know at all well, that this dragon statuette is a venned person. That doesn’t mean we can’t go to a Venn machine, but it’ll have to be just the two of us. I could venn you into something else and change you back into your statue form a while later.”

“That would be nice. I know you’re gonna be busy next weekend, but maybe later on?”

“Sure.”

 

* * *

 

I got a lot more out of the lecture in Human Rights in History than I had from American Politics. And even though I hadn’t had time to look at Carmen’s Biology textbook before Tuesday’s lecture, I had a halfway decent background from my biology course in high school and the books Sophia had been recommending, so I wasn’t totally lost in that class either. And at least in Human Rights, the professor didn’t rely as much on the whiteboard and projector as the other two.

Thursday after we got back to Carmen’s room, they asked me, “So are you still determined to audit all these classes with me?”

“I think I’ll stay here tomorrow when you go to American Politics,” I said. “I’m not getting as much out of that one. But I’d like to keep going to the Human Rights lectures, and I guess I’ll hang out in your bag during Biology too, since you don’t have time to come back here between classes.”

“You and Meredith were talking about you basically finishing high school with self-study so you could take the GED after you turn eighteen. I’m a little worried this might get in the way of that.”

“I don’t think it will,” I said. “I read faster now. I’ve already caught up with all the reading for Human Rights, and a lot of the reading for the other classes, so if I cut the other two, and I’m spending most of the day Monday, Wednesday and Friday alone here, I should have plenty of time to read in other subjects.”

“Hmm, yeah. Have you already had the lab science and foreign language courses you need in high school?”

“I had already taken Chemistry and was taking Biology when I dropped out. And I’ve already had French I and II.”

“I should figure out how to let you see and hear what I’m doing in Biology lab. That’s something you can’t get from books. I’ve got some ideas, but let me think it over.” They had Biology lab on Wednesdays after American Politics, and went in to work a couple of hours later than on Mondays and Fridays.

That evening, I rode along in their messenger bag to the Queer Student Union meeting and overheard a lot of conversations. I recognized Serena’s voice (and her laugh) several times. I wished I could hang out with these cool people as an equal, and I resolved to introduce myself to Serena next time she came around to visit Carmen at her dorm room.

The conversations I overheard gave me a lot of food for thought. Queer people were really diverse, and the handful of trans people I’d gotten to know on the chatroom and by email were just a tiny sample of that diversity. I’d never gotten to know a gay man, for instance, although there were rumors about a couple of guys at school. Listening to some of the gay people talk about the problems they were having at work was an eye-opener, and made me wonder what kind of problems I might have finding and holding a job once I turned eighteen and started living as a girl. Should I try to keep the fact that I was a lesbian secret from my employer? I decided it was way too early to worry about that.

One of the trans guys at the meeting announced that he’d finally figured out his permanent name (he’d been trying out different ones, like me). That reminded me again that I needed to think more about my name. Amanda was nice, but it wasn’t quite right, any more than Natalie, Amber, Isabella or any of the others I’d tried on for a few hours. That night after Carmen went to bed, I spent a long time thinking about names, and for each one that sounded good, I imagined several little scenarios. Meredith calling me that name. Carmen calling me by it. Writing the name on the top of a test or homework assignment. Signing a contract to buy a house...

When Carmen got back from the shower Friday morning, I said, “I think I’ve figured out my name.”

“Oh, congratulations. What should I call you?”

“Lauren. And Lydia for a middle name. Lauren Lydia Wallace.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks.”

“Well, Lauren, I need to get something to eat before class, so if you’re not coming with me, I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Bye.”

I wrote my name on the back of one of Carmen’s index cards several times before I settled down to studying geometry for my GED with a book they’d checked out of the library.

 

* * *

 

Friday morning, when Carmen came back after breakfast and American Politics, they had a couple of pieces of mail. One of them was something to do with their grant, and the other was a letter from Meredith.

 

“Dear Amanda and Carmen,

 

“How are you settling in as roommates? Has Amanda figured out any more about her name?

 

“We haven’t had any more trouble here. I’ll let y’all know right away if anything happens, but so far there’s not much. Mom had lunch with your (Amanda’s) mom a couple of days ago, but she didn’t tell me what they talked about. She asked me more questions about what we’d been venning each other into, but when I asked her if she and your mom were friends again, she said, ‘I’m not sure. It could happen, but I’m not going to force you to endure her company until and unless I’m sure she’ll be decent to you.’

 

“I hope to hear from you soon.”

 

I wrote back to her that evening while Carmen was at work. I tried to write as large as I could, but I’m afraid my lettering was a bit on the small side and hard to read. (You try writing with a pencil that’s three times longer than your arm, and twice as thick.) After trying to decipher it, Carmen suggested that I type out the letter and they would print it out at the library or study center.

 

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My new short story, "Race to the Altar", is up now on DeviantArt. It's a contest submission, so it won't be posted to BigCloset or other sites until after the contest is over.

She did a twirl, which was adorable and would have been much prettier if she’d had room for her dress to flare out without bumping into the walls and furniture.

 

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Saturday evening after Carmen got back from work, I was studying on Carmen’s bed and they were sitting at the desk working on their laptop when there came a knock at the door. Carmen got up and answered it.

A little girl with light green skin and dark green hair said, “Hi, Carmen.”

“Serena?” Carmen stepped aside to let her in.

“Yep!” She did a twirl, which was adorable and would have been much prettier if she’d had room for her dress to flare out without bumping into the walls and furniture. “I asked Drew to make me small and cute, but give me some weird feature that would make it obvious I was venned and not an actual little kid. This is what he came up with.”

“It is pretty cute,” Carmen said with a smile. “Have a seat; here, let me move a few things out of your way.” They came over toward the bed and with an apologetic look at me, started moving the books I had spread out (carefully marking my place in each one).

“Oh, hi, Amanda,” Serena said, and curtsied. It looked much nicer with a real dress.

“Hi, Serena,” I said, and waved. “I figured out my name. I’m going by Lauren now.”

Serena stared at me. “You’re venned!”

“Yes. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, but...”

Serena turned to Carmen. “You’ve got a venned roommate living with you! How long is she venned for?”

“Two years,” I said, and I started explaining why. Serena sat down beside me and Carmen sat back down in the chair, not saying much more until I got to the part where I ran into Tim at the mall.

“Oh, you poor thing!” Serena exclaimed when I was less than halfway done. “Can I give you a hug?”

“...Yes, please?” A moment later, I was being pressed against her upper chest and neck. It felt nice, and for a moment I wished I were plush rather than hard ceramic, although in that form I might not be able to hear. She put me down gently on the bed next to her again.

“So you decided to run away. And then what?”

I finished my story, and she hugged me again. “I’ll help keep you safe,” she said. “My parents weren’t anywhere near as bad as yours, but they weren’t all that supportive either. I had to pay for my own girl clothes and stuff, and they wouldn’t help me get hormones... Fortunately the Venn machines came along when I’d only been socially transitioning for a year or so, in time for me to convince the university I was a ‘real’ girl for housing purposes.” She made air quotes for ‘real’.

“Did you use a Venn machine during your senior year of high school or was it just before you went off to college?” I asked.

“It was early in my senior year, a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I heard about them on a trans subreddit, and I thought it was a hoax at first; if they were real, I figured the news would have been all over it. But then a couple of people in a chatroom told me they were real, they’d used them to transition, and they sent me a link to a list of known machines. So I got my best friend Drew to come with me and we drove to the machine in Lenoir, which was the closest at the time, although Lincolnton — that’s where we’re from — got its own machine just a couple of months later. He helped me transition and I fixed up some health problems he used to have.”

“You mentioned someone named Drew earlier. Is that the same as your friend from high school?”

“Yeah, we’d already been planning to go to college together for a while at that point, and had our applications in here and some other places. He helped me start the Venn trips. Did Carmen tell you about the Venn trips?”

“Yeah, after you mentioned it when you were here Monday night. That’s so cool.”

“It is pretty cool! You should join us sometime. But we’ll have to come up with a cover ID for you. Maybe you and Carmen can go to Burlington earlier in the morning, and they can venn you into a human form you like and y’all can go eat breakfast and come back to meet the rest of us at the machine when we arrive? And we can pretend you’re a student at Elon, maybe, or from the community college over that way, and you’re a friend of Carmen from online and you heard about the trips from them? Or maybe you’re a friend from Carmen’s hometown and you went to Elon instead of here.”

“That would be awesome!” I turned to Carmen. “Could we?”

“Maybe,” they said. “Not next weekend, but maybe the one after that. We need to come up with a deep, tight cover story for how we know each other and why I’m giving you a ride to the Venn machine, and we both need to memorize all the details so we don’t contradict each other.”

“Okay. I can do that.”

We chatted for a while longer, getting to know each other better, talking about weird forms we or our friends had venned into at various times, and coming up with a more and more detailed cover story for me to use, and then Serena started yawning. It wasn’t much past eight.

“This always happens when I venn into a little girl body,” she said. “The main downside is how much sleep this kind of body needs. Well, and being too short to reach high shelves, and... Anyway, I’d better get back to my dorm before I fall asleep.”

“Good night,” I said.

“It was great to meet you,” she said, and hugged me again, then hugged Carmen and said goodbye.

 

* * *

 

Sunday evening after they got off work, Carmen returned to the dorm with some hooks, tools, a curtain rod and a dark blue curtain, and hung the curtain between their desk and their bed so I could read by the desk lamp at night without disturbing their sleep. I thanked them profusely, especially when I realized they would need to set up the curtain every night before bed and take it down in the morning, or at least before they had guests over who didn’t know about me.

When I had more to do at night besides just think, I found that I spent less time in the fugue state, but I still tended to go into that state for a while every day. If I didn’t set aside idle time for it during the night, or while Carmen was out, I might find myself fuguing out in the middle of a conversation with them, which wasn’t good. My mind was still a human mind and needed sleep, or something like it, even if my body was very different.

Carmen and I worked on my cover story for a little while every day for the next two weeks, but I still spent most of my time studying to keep up with the Human Rights course and for my GED. On Wednesday morning after that meeting with Serena, Carmen set their alarm earlier than usual.

“You’re up early,” I said when I noticed the time.

“Yeah,” they said. “We’re going somewhere before class.”

“Where?”

“The World’s Largest Chest of Drawers. And while we’re there, we might as well use the Venn machine. I’ve figured out how you can see what I’m doing in Biology lab.”

“Cool!”

Carmen showered and dressed, then put me in their messenger bag and went to the dining hall for a cup of coffee, and got on the road. Once I heard the engine start, I crawled out of the bag, dragging the American History textbook Carmen had gotten out of the library, and read while they drove down to High Point.

“Do you want to be human for a little while before I venn you into something that can watch during lab?” they asked after a while.

“Oh! Yeah, that would be great if we have time.”

“I’ve still got to eat breakfast, and there’s several restaurants near the Venn machine.”

A few minutes later, Carmen parked and gently picked me up before getting out of the car. We were in a parking lot on a street corner, empty of other cars at this time of morning. In one corner of the parking lot was a Venn machine, and across the street there was a giant chest of drawers, taller than either of the neighboring businesses, with two enormous socks dangling from one of the drawers. Carmen fished around in their wallet and stuck a ticket stub in the slot of the Venn machine, then set the timer for eight hours and set me down just inside one of the booths.

“History,” they said as they entered the other booth. “I don’t think I’d better let you walk around in one of the same forms the police might have seen in the Catesville Mall camera footage,” they explained, “but we can use one of those forms as a starting point.”

“Sure,” I said. “I haven’t eaten food in weeks, so maybe make me big, with a healthy appetite?”

“That’ll be a good contrast to these petite forms,” they noted, and picked one of the forms from my history — I couldn’t tell which one. “Taller... heavier... warmer clothing...,” They selected a bubble. “Hungry.” They picked another bubble. “Okay, this form looks like five-ten or five-eleven, two hundred and seventy or eighty pounds. Not too overweight for that height. Do you want that?”

“I wouldn’t want to look like that long term,” I said, “but for my first meal in weeks and maybe my last for another long while, it might be worth a try.”

“Here goes.”

I was suddenly human again, and the shock of breathing for the first time in weeks had me gasping for a few moments, but I managed to calm myself. My breasts and butt were larger than they’d been in any of my previous human girl bodies, not to mention my arms and thighs. I was wearing a yellow sweater and a long sky-blue skirt over warm leggings. I figured out later, seeing myself in a bathroom mirror at the restaurant, that Carmen had based this on the “Amber” form from my history — the skin and hair color were about the same, and there was a vague resemblance in the face, but no one would have looked at a missing child poster with a still from security camera footage of me as Amber and recognized me.

The chance for me to transform Carmen timed out and the doors opened.

“Where are we eating?” I asked. It felt odd to look down to meet Carmen’s eyes; they were two or three inches shorter than me now, where before they’d been around ten or twelve times taller.

“There’s a couple of places in walking distance,” they said, “or we could drive a little farther.”

We looked at the maps app on their phone for nearby restaurants, and ended up going to a diner. I was studying the menu when I realized that the cash I’d withdrawn from the ATM at the Catesville Mall before I left to meet Meredith and Sophia in Greensboro wasn’t on me. Neither were my wallet or phone, battery, and SIM card. (I’d taken it apart before leaving the mall to keep myself from being tracked to Siler City by phone company records.) They must have all been venned as part of my body or clothes.

“I can’t pay for my breakfast,” I said. “I thought I’d have money to pay for it, cause I had money last time I was human, but —”

“Don’t worry about it,” Carmen said. “I mean, don’t order something super expensive, but I can afford a decent breakfast.”

I started looking for the least expensive things on the menu that I thought might be enough to satisfy me, and ended up ordering a combo with fried eggs, sausage, and hash browns with a big glass of grapefruit juice. Carmen got a lighter meal with a cup of coffee. We talked about options for what Carmen would change me into for the rest of the day. “Hopefully just the rest of the day,” they said. “I think I can come back here to change you back after I get off work tonight. I definitely won’t have time between lab and going to work. Maybe if we went to the machine in Burlington, but we’d be too likely to run into people I know there, and even then I’d risk being late to work if traffic is heavy or the line at the machine is too long.”

“I’m surprised the local Venn machine doesn’t get more traffic,” I said, “since it’s in such... picturesque surroundings.”

They shrugged. “The Chest is a funny novelty, but I don’t think anybody’d come to see it multiple times, like a great natural wonder or a museum you can see new exhibits in pretty often. There might be a lot of people there on evenings and weekends, though.”

There were a couple of people waiting to use the Venn machine when we got back, an older straight couple who were there to rejuvenate each other and fix some health problems. We didn’t have long to wait before the doors opened and a couple of college-age girls came out. Given the odd way the old couple stared at them as they walked to their car and got in, I guessed at least one of them had been male before; I wondered if they were binary trans and making a long-term change, or just curious and trying it out, or gender-fluid and regularly switched back and forth. From what I overheard, they were talking about their plans for the day, not about anything gender-related, so I guessed this was probably something they’d done before.

The old couple started working on the machine, constantly referring to a printout they’d made of a how-to. Carmen offered to help, and soon they had the timer set for three years and were inside.

We didn’t have long to wait before the doors opened and the newly young couple came out. The man wasn’t as young-looking as the woman, but both were a lot younger than before. They left, and Carmen and I set the machine for a month and went in. “Just in case I can’t get back here until the weekend,” they said, “I don’t want you reverting to your baseline body and getting reported by someone who’s seen your photo on a milk carton.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

It took Carmen a few minutes to work through the interface and find something close to what we’d talked about. “Ready?” they finally asked.

“Hit me,” I said, and the booth expanded vastly around me again, even more so than when Sophia had turned me into a little dragon statuette. This form could see and hear, but couldn’t move. My emotions felt more muted than they’d been when I was a dragon statue. I waited passively until Carmen came into the booth and picked me up, then fastened me around their neck. That felt good, like I was fulfilling a purpose.

“Let’s see how this goes,” they said, and went back to the car.

Riding back to UNC Greensboro and then to Carmen’s American Politics class was more interesting when I could see where we were going, and somehow I didn’t miss the ability to move as much as I’d expected. My vantage point was just a few inches below Carmen’s eyes. On the drive, Carmen bluetoothed music from their phone to the car stereo, an eclectic mix of nerd rock, classic rock, and jazz, which they hadn’t done on our previous drives. Later on, they told me they didn’t like to have music playing while they were having a conversation with their passenger.

I got more out of American Politics when I could see the professor’s gestures, the projector and the whiteboard, though not as much as I might have if I’d kept up with the reading. After class, Carmen went to the restroom; they took me off and put me in their messenger bag before using the toilet, but not before I saw myself in the mirror. I was a sort of loose choker or tight necklace, whose pendant was a combination lens/tympanum to let me see and hear. I felt slightly numb and bereft when they took me off, and a little spike of joy when they put me back on again after washing their hands.

Then they ate a snack at the student center and went on to Biology lab. Today they were doing an electrophoresis lab, taking samples of different proteins and inserting them, along with a tracking dye, into a gel that they then ran an electric current through. The different proteins would migrate different distances toward the positive or negative electrodes depending on their pH values, which I thought was pretty neat. It made sense with the reading I’d been doing, but it was more advanced than what we’d covered in my high school biology course. Carmen’s lab partner was a quiet girl named Zuleika who didn’t say much beyond what was required for the experiment.

Afterward, Carmen left for work. They worked at a Chili’s near the university campus, mostly waiting tables, and it was a busy shift, keeping them on their feet pretty much constantly for most of the evening. For the first hour or two, I was reeling from the sight of a “Missing Child” poster near the cash register, with my deadname and a photo of my old body that seemed to be cropped from one of the group photos we’d taken with Mom’s parents around Christmas. Until more customers came in and Carmen got busier, I spent a lot of time thinking about my parents making that poster and putting copies up in various places. They might have started back home the day after I didn’t come home, at the Subway and various gas stations and fast food places on my route home from there, and then once they heard from Tim or his parents, or heard from Mrs. Ramsey or the police about Meredith saying she and Sophia had hung out with me on Sunday at the mall, they would have put the posters up around the mall and other places in Catesville. Then the police would hear about my abandoned car from the manager at the Waffle House, and Mom and Dad would spend their free time for the next few days putting posters up around Greensboro, and maybe various gas stations, fast food places, and truck stops at the exits east and west of that Waffle House for who knew how far. Probably Dad was doing the bulk of the driving around and putting up posters, since he was out of work.

I’d been focused on my fear of what would happen when Mom and Dad found out I was trans. I hadn’t given enough thought to what Mom and Dad would feel when I disappeared. And now that it was brought forcefully to my attention, I found I couldn’t really imagine it, not having ever had children. It must be terrible, but terrible in what way? But after a couple of hours of muted guilt and self-recrimination, I finally decided that however bad they were feeling, it probably wasn’t as bad as getting electroshocked until I associated every aspect of being a girl with pain.

But the more time I spent on Carmen’s neck, the more I focused on what was going on around us and the more I identified with them. I was moving along with them, hearing what they heard, seeing most of what they saw — I say “most of” because when they bent or turned their head, their neck and my field of vision didn’t move as much. By the end of their shift, when someone spoke to Carmen it felt almost like they were speaking to me.

So as Carmen got busier with more tables to wait on, Mom and Dad were driven out of my mind temporarily. But I thought more about them later on.

My own restaurant experience was behind the counter at a fast food place, so some of the details of waiting tables were new to me, but I could relate to Carmen’s frustration with the occasional asshole customers who complained about getting exactly what they ordered because they hadn’t read the menu carefully, or the ones who treated you like an idiot because you were working a service job. I’d had to clean up after klutzy customers or their kids spilled their drinks, too, which happened at least three times during Carmen’s shift.

They were frequently misgendered by customers, called “waiter” or “waitress”, “mister” or “miss” about equally often, and “Carmen” only occasionally; they never corrected anyone or explained they were non-binary. Their co-workers and manager called them Carmen.

When Carmen went out to their car after clocking out, I wondered if they would drive down to High Point and change me back to my dragon statue body. They didn’t, and with the way they were dragging their feet on the walk from the freshman parking lot to the dorm, I didn’t blame them. I realized that they’d forgotten they were wearing me until they started getting undressed for bed. They absentmindedly unfastened me and then stared at me for a moment before blurting out, “Oh, I’m sorry, Lauren, I was going to change you back. I’m just too fucking tired to drive to High Point or Burlington again after all that. We’ll go tomorrow, I promise.” Then they set me on the desk, facing away from them while they undressed.

A few moments later, they hung me in the window, looking outward. They were such a thoughtful friend.

 

---

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I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.

On and off that day, I thought about that Missing Child poster I’d seen and what Mom and Dad were feeling and thinking about all this. Did they know I was trans by now? They almost certainly knew I’d venned into a girl body at least once; they’d have heard from Tim’s parents by now, even if the police hadn’t told them about the details of their investigation and what they’d learned from Meredith and Sophia.

 

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Thursday morning, I remained in the window as the sun rose (on the other side of the building) and the light outside got brighter and brighter. Birds, insects, and squirrels gradually became more active. Then Carmen’s phone alarm went off behind me, and after some shuffling of blankets, it went silent.

“Good morning,” Carmen said. “Hope you don’t mind, but I’ll leave you on the window till I’m dressed.”

Once they’d showered, dressed, and put me on, we were soon on the way to High Point. They set up the Venn machine for a two-year change and put me in the left-hand booth —

— and instantly I was back to my original body, bundled up in the raincoat and stocking cap I’d worn the day Sophia had venned me into a dragon statuette, with wads of gum in each cheek. I was startled for a moment by the return of my other senses, and the feeling of breathing and circulating blood and so on. But by the time Carmen entered the machine on the other side, the startlement had given way to severe dysphoria, and I was trying hard not to panic.

“Hey, you okay?” Carmen asked, concerned.

“Yeah, I’ll be okay. Just change me back as soon as you can.”

“You need to press the green button before I can do that. Quick, before it times out.”

Oh, right. When you put someone who’d been changed into a fully inanimate object into a Venn machine, it wouldn’t let you transform them again without their consent. If I just waited, the doors would open and the session would end. But I didn’t want that. I pressed the green button, which had already half phased out, and the interface lit up with bubbles representing ways I could transform Carmen.

“Okay, do you want to be the necklace again until after today’s classes? Could you see and hear fine that way? Or go back to the dragon statuette form and audit them from inside my messenger bag again?”

“Statue, please.” I squirmed. “This feels awful. Why is it so much worse now?”

“Hang on a moment, Lauren. I know it hurts, but if you want to have your spending money handy for next time we go out somewhere, take your wallet out and set it down where it’s not touching you, and then I’ll venn you.”

“Okay, just a minute.” I did so. “Ready!”

“History,” they said, then reached out and tapped a bubble, then the green button, and I was back to my familiar dragon statue form. I relaxed, feeling calm again as the waning green button counted down my opportunity to transform Carmen. While we were waiting, Carmen said, “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah. Just had kind of a panic attack from the dysphoria. I forgot when you put me in the machine I’d go back to my original body.”

“Yeah, that’s an issue. I doubt inanimate venning’s ever going to catch on among trans people. I liked letting Zoe wear me that one time I was a dress, but changing back to my old body afterward wasn’t fun, even though I don’t think I ever had dysphoria as bad as yours. Not doing that again.”

The doors opened, and I trotted toward the door in time to meet Carmen on the threshold. They picked up me and my wallet and were about to put us in their messenger bag, but I asked, “Can I have a hug?”

“Oh, of course.” We hugged, as well as we could with the size differential, and got in the car.

“I’m going back to eat some more at the caf,” they said. “I can’t afford to eat out all that often, or I’d have offered to venn you into something human for an hour like yesterday.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just ride along and listen. Did you bring something for me to read on the way back?”

“Yeah, I stuck one of your high school books in the bag... there you go.”

I pulled the geometry book they’d gotten from the library for me out and opened it to my bookmarked place.

 

* * *

 

On and off that day, I thought about that Missing Child poster I’d seen and what Mom and Dad were feeling and thinking about all this. Did they know I was trans by now? They almost certainly knew I’d venned into a girl body at least once; they’d have heard from Tim’s parents by now, even if the police hadn’t told them about the details of their investigation and what they’d learned from Meredith and Sophia. If the police had been able to look at camera footage going back several months, they’d know about my other venned forms and how all of them (except the tiny quadrupedal dragon) were obviously female. Would the police tell my parents about that?

That evening, I talked to Carmen about it.

“I think I might send my parents a letter,” I said. “Telling them I’m safe and healthy, but well hidden, and they’re not going to find me.”

“The postmark would lead them to your general location,” they pointed out, “unless you have somebody remail it for you. And then there’s danger the police could get your friend’s fingerprints and DNA off the envelope.”

“I think I can get my pen-pal Tatiana to remail it,” I said. “And I’ll put the envelope addressed to my parents inside a plastic bag so she doesn’t have to touch it. She can just dump it out of the plastic bag into the mail slot. Preferably at a mailbox in some other city... I think she said she goes to San Francisco at least once a month for one thing or another. And maybe to be on the safe side, she could remail it while she’s in a temporary venn whose fingerprints aren’t recorded anywhere.”

“That could work,” they said. “You’ll have to write it while venned into something about the same size as your original body, though, or your handwriting won’t look right. In that form, your handwriting’s either unreadably tiny or sloppy and still fairly small. You can’t type it in a word processor; if I print it out, there would be evidence pointing to a university printer, and if your friend Tatiana prints it out, it would pin it down to her printer.”

“Yeah, maybe next Wednesday when we go to High Point again? I could write the letters and address the envelopes during breakfast, and then you could venn me into the necklace and send the outer letter to Tatiana.”

“If you’re going to do this thing, you should do it sooner rather than later. One advantage of this is that the police might believe the California postmark enough to call off the search locally. Or at least focus their efforts on the Venn machines near expressway exits on I-40 west of Greensboro, going on into Tennessee and beyond, to see if they can get a photo of your new body to give to the California police. After that, if they haven’t already looked at the camera footage from the Siler City machine, they never will.”

“Okay, let’s do this as soon as I can get Tatiana’s physical address.”

 

* * *

 

I emailed Tatiana that evening. We hadn’t exchanged email since the day before I ran away, when Dad was at the job fair and I’d been able to use the computer privately for the first time in weeks. Then I thought more about what to say to Mom and Dad until I heard back from Tatiana late Saturday morning.

We had just enough time, then, for Carmen to drive me to High Point, venn me into a girl body with hands about the same size as my original body’s, and let me write the letters to Mom and Dad, Nathan, and Tatiana before venning me into a dragon statuette again and dropping me off at her dorm room before work.

The letter to Mom and Dad went like this:

 

“Dear Mom and Dad,

 

“I am safe and healthy, and have a safe place to stay and study to take my GED once I turn eighteen. But even though you’ve been good parents in a lot of ways, I don’t feel like I should see you again until I’m eighteen and no longer under your authority. I think you can guess why by now, after what you’ve heard from Tim’s parents and probably from the police about me venning into a girl at the mall that day, but I’ll tell you straight out if you haven’t guessed: I’m transgender, like Meredith. Well, not exactly like Meredith, because no two trans people are alike, but similar enough. It took me a while to figure it out, but in the last year or so, I’ve only been really happy when I was venned into a girl body.

 

“And ever since I heard you talking about how Meredith’s parents should have sent her to conversion therapy, and how you’d be willing to pay for it if they couldn’t afford it, I’ve been scared of what would happen if you found out I was trans. I looked up conversion therapy and found out it’s basically legal torture. You can’t really cure people of being gay or trans, just make them scared to admit it to anyone, maybe even themselves.

 

“Anyway, you’ve got about fourteen months until I’m eighteen to think about that. Please consider talking to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey about this stuff. I think they can help you understand it. I hope by the time I turn eighteen and contact you again, we can get along okay as parents and daughter.”

 

The letter to Nathan was shorter:

 

“Dear Nathan,

 

“I don’t know how much Mom and Dad have told you about my disappearance. They might not have mentioned that the reason I ran away is that I’ve been hanging out with Meredith and Sophia Ramsey, and venning into a girl, and they just found out. I’m transgender and I didn’t want to risk them putting me in conversion therapy. Look it up if you aren’t familiar with it — it’s basically torturing gay and trans kids to make them stop being gay or trans. You remember when Dad was talking about how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey should do that to Meredith?

 

“Anyway, I’m safe and have a good place to stay. I’ll be in contact again after I turn eighteen and Mom and Dad can’t force me to pretend to be a boy. Try to learn something about transgender people from unbiased sources sometime before then, okay? Maybe Caleb Ramsey can tell you something, if you’re still in contact with him.”

 

 

* * *

 

Things continued routinely for another week or so. Serena came by and hung out with us for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon, having venned into a small centauroid, around three feet high at the scalp. I couldn’t identify which species her venn partner had mixed together to get that, but she was extremely fluffy. Other friends dropped by at different times, both Tuesday and Thursday evenings and on the weekend, and I pretended to be an ordinary statue while they hung out with Carmen, not being ready to trust them yet. I “met” Carmen’s friend Zoe from high school that week, as well as some of their other friends such as Bailey, Ty, and Guadalupe.

I’d heard Guadalupe’s voice before from inside the messenger bag, but wasn’t prepared for her appearance; she was a cyborg, with a couple of air exchange valves on either side of her neck constantly blowing and sucking air at a much higher rate than a human would breathe. One effect of this was that she could talk continuously without pausing for breath, which she proceeded to do, in Spanish, to my admiration and mild frustration. The other, more primarily intended effect was that she was constantly extracting carbon and other pollutants out of the atmosphere. She was trying to persuade other people to venn into similar bodies and fight global warming that way, although she recognized that even if everyone did that all the time, we’d still have to reduce carbon emissions in other ways to make a sufficient dent in climate change. She had ideas about more efficient carbon-sequestrating venned forms; once, as a proof of concept, she’d had herself venned into a whole stack of carbon-sequestration machines, collectively enough to fill up a Venn machine booth and individually small enough to fit through the door. Her friends had scattered the machines around Greensboro and Winston-Salem with signage explaining what she was doing. Carmen showed me one of her videos on YouTube after she left.

I audited classes on Tuesday and Thursday in statue form, and on Wednesday in necklace form. That evening, Carmen had enough energy to re-venn me into a dragon statue at the machine in High Point before going back to the dorm to crash. We didn’t go to the Queer Student Union that week, although Carmen did go to a meeting for the wetlands bill protest that Guadalupe was organizing. Since they were going to work right afterward, I stayed in the room and read.

 

---

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I have a spooky new novelette, "A Girl, a House and a Secret", available in epub and pdf formats from itch.io. You can buy it by itself, but you would get more value for your money if you buy it as part of the Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology.

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“Okay,” Carmen conceded, “if multiple bodies is a core part of your identity, it’s probably fine to take them all to the protest. But venning into multiple bodies for the protest just to inflate the numbers —”

 

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The first Saturday in March, Carmen and I went to High Point early in the morning, where they venned me into a girl body, looking about eighteen or nineteen and distinct enough from any of my earlier ones to be safe. We ate breakfast and met up with the other venners at the machine in Burlington forty minutes later.

We’d been working on my cover story off and on for two weeks now, and had it pretty well worked out. I’d wanted to use “Lauren,” since the police or CPS wouldn’t connect a girl of that name with the boy they were looking for, but Carmen pointed out that later on, after I turned eighteen, claimed my identity, and filed name change and long-term transformation paperwork, we wouldn’t want the Venn club people to associate Carmen’s friend Lauren with Meredith’s friend Lauren with the mysterious past, especially if Meredith and I wound up going to UNC Greensboro and hanging out with many of the same people.

So I was Kayla Anne Saunders, a trans girl from Catesville who was working full-time while she saved up money to start at Mynatt Community College. I’d met Carmen online and found out they lived near me, and they’d invited me to hang out with the venners from UNC Greensboro. I’d usually used the Venn machine in Catesville in the past, which would explain why the university students hadn’t seen me hanging out around the machine in Burlington before, and hadn’t used it at all since my best friend from high school, the only person I trusted enough to go in the machine with, had gone off to SCAD down in Savannah, Georgia.

The Venn machine in Burlington was on a street corner, with a bank on one corner and various small businesses on the other corners and the intersecting streets. Finding nobody Carmen knew there was yet when we arrived, we hung out at a small bookstore for a little while. I bought a couple of books to help me study for my GED, as well as a novel from the discount table. After stashing the books in Carmen’s car, we returned to the machine.

Serena, Montana, and a couple of other people I’d seen at the Queer Student Union were there, along with one guy I thought I remembered seeing in Carmen’s biology lab and five other college-age people I didn’t recognize. They weren’t exactly lined up in a queue, more standing around in clusters chatting. Carmen and I joined them.

“Hey, Carmen,” said the guy from their biology lab, and when he noticed us, so did everyone else. Most of the people said hi or waved.

Serena came over and hugged Carmen, and said, “Is this your friend you told me about?” Of course she knew perfectly well who I was.

“Yeah,” Carmen said.

My anxiety at social situations hadn’t gone away completely now that I had a girl body, but it was a lot more manageable. I could push through it. “Hi, I’m Kayla,” I said. “Carmen told me about this. It sounds so cool.”

“Have you ever venned before?” the guy from biology lab asked.

“Yeah, back in high school. Not since my best friend went off to college in Georgia. There wasn’t anybody else local I trust enough to go in the machine with. But Carmen explained how y’all talk about what you want your partners to change you into and keep each other honest?”

I let Serena and her friend Drew, a lanky white guy with shaggy blonde hair and big floppy ears like a basset hound, explain and convince me. Drew gave me a one-page handout that briefly described how the system worked and listed (in three columns of small print) some of the neat things you could turn into with a Venn machine. As we talked, more people arrived, other groups hashed out what they were going to change into and how they’d pair off, and an orderly line gradually formed.

I’d originally been planning to ask someone to turn me into a dragon-girl — not too similar in appearance to the dragon-girls I’d been before, but a dragon-girl. It had been too long. But Carmen had convinced me to avoid that, as it might connect me to the “boy” the police were looking for. That was probably too paranoid; there must have been hundreds of people in the U.S. alone who had venned into dragon-girls by that point, but I wanted to avoid any possible risk of getting Meredith, Sophia, or Carmen in trouble, not to mention having to go back to my parents. After I looked over the list of nifty venns that Drew handed me, I said, “This. I’d like to be a carbon sequestration cyborg, like your friend Guadalupe you told me about. But not humanoid? Could I be kind of a centaur, but with an alligator back half? Or maybe some kind of four-legged dinosaur, like a scaled-down triceratops or a stegosaurus?”

Drew looked thoughtful. “Carbon offset cyborgs are tricky,” he said. “Cyborgs in general, really. If you don’t know exactly what to say and how to interpret the pictures it pops up, you’re likely to just get a basic human body with some light-up piercings. I mean the electronics are embedded in your flesh, but not really integrated into your nervous system or all that functional. I’m not good at that, but I know who is.” He turned and called out, “Hey, Adam!”

Adam was a hefty black guy with four arms; the lower pair were smaller, with girl-sized hands that were presumably better for delicate tasks, while the hands on his main arms were bigger than my dad’s. He also had an electronic left eye, which he explained later gave him infrared and ultraviolet vision. There was a kind of vent or pipe with a fine grille over the end sticking out of a hole in his shirt, similar to the ones Guadalupe had in her neck, and a bit later I realized he had another one in back. I explained what I wanted and he nodded and said he thought he could do it.

“I can’t guarantee anything,” he said. “Cyborging’s always tricky. Might need to go through the line two or three times while we refine it. But let’s give it a try. Are you new or someone I know in a new body?”

So I told him my cover story, and he told me what he wanted me to change him into: a puppy.

“Preferably a Corgi, but it can be hard to get a specific dog breed. Just something small and fluffy like that.”

“Okay,” I said. “That sounds easy.” And cute, I thought but didn’t say.

Carmen paired off with Serena, and Drew with a blue-skinned guy. The line moved fairly quickly; a lot of people were venning into forms from their history, and most of the people here were well-practiced at venning, so it only occasionally took more than a couple of minutes for someone to figure out how to find the form their partner wanted. Adam and I were at the end of the line, behind Carmen and Serena.

People went into the Venn machine and came out in weird and wonderful shapes. Per capita, it was the weirdest group of venners I’d ever had the privilege to watch; so different from the typical Saturday at the library or the mall watching old people rejuvenate and middle-aged people lose weight. We had giant insectoids, exotic animals and anthropomorphic animals of various kinds, centauroids, people with extra arms or heads, cyborgs, one 100% robot (vaguely like a maintenance droid from Star Wars, an ovoid on tractor treads), an animate crystal statue, people with two or three bodies (one pair of identical ones, another more diverse trio), and several articles of clothing or jewelry that were donned by their partner, either immediately or after visiting a nearby business’s restroom.

Then Serena and Carmen went in and came out as little kids. Serena had an electronic left eye like Adam and wore a pink ballerina dress. Carmen had cat-like ears and whiskers and wore overalls over a red T-shirt with an abstract design; their hair was pretty similar to what it usually was, black with a blue streak on the side, but a lot longer than normal.

“Cyborg ballerina for the win!” Serena exclaimed, high-fiving Carmen, who more phlegmatically added “Hmm. Cat... farmer, I guess?”

I gave Carmen back their messenger bag I’d been holding for them, along with the purse we’d picked up at a thrift store for my Kayla identity. The bag looked comically huge dangling from their little-kid shoulder. Serena had worn a smaller purse today, so it wouldn’t look so big once she venned into a little girl. Adam set the machine for a day, as we’d agreed. Neither of us planned to stay changed that long; we’d both return to the machine and change back after just a couple of hours.

“Corgi puppy,” I said once we were inside, and was presented with a bewildering array of dogs, wolves, dingoes and coyotes, most of them puppies but few or none of them recognizable as Corgis. I studied them for a few moments and picked the most Corgi-like. Then the image of Adam was replaced by a Corgi-ish puppy, incongruously reaching out with a paw to touch one of the bubbles and still talking in a low voice, while the bubbles were replaced with variations on the puppy I’d selected. I picked a fluffier one with a slightly longer snout and refined it a little more before saying, “Okay, I’m ready whenever you are.”

“Let me go first. This is going to take a little longer.”

Those words seemed silly coming out of a puppy’s mouth, and I couldn’t help giggling. “Sure.”

A few moments later he said, “Okay, here’s something interesting. Would you like to have a kind of triceratops head as well as your lower body? The upper torso looks like a human girl with a lacy blouse, but the head is... kind of a weird mix of human and triceratops.”

“Oh, that’s cool! Where are the air valves?” The bubbles surrounding Adam’s puppy-image changed, some of them into cyborg puppies with air valves in various places, some into machines with air valves, some into stand-alone valves without a machine or body to blow air through. Fortunately, I’d already selected a good puppy for Adam to become; as long as I didn’t press another bubble, he’d be fine.

“On the flanks of your lower body. Looks like six valves, three on each side, and they’re kind of flared like trumpets.”

“Awesome! Let’s go for it.”

A moment later, I was a cybertriceratopcentaur, and after taking a moment to get my bearings, I pressed my green button and heard a happy yip from the other side as the doors opened.

“Yay!” Serena cheered as we came out, and bent over to pet Adam for a few moments. “Can I have a ride?”

“Sure,” I giggled. “You want a ride too, Carmen?”

“Thanks,” they said, and climbed on between my air valves. The noise of the air sucking and blowing through them was louder than with Guadalupe or Adam, and I wondered if I might not be welcome in places of business that were otherwise Venn-friendly due to the noise.

“Giddy-up!” Serena exclaimed. Adam ran in circles around me, yipping, until the crystal statue came up and put a large collar around his neck whose dangling tag had a large “V” on it, with smaller print saying “Venned human, not animal.” I later learned that Alamance County had an ordinance saying people venned into animals could go around without a leash if they wore such a tag.

“Where are we going, cowgirl cyborg ballerina?” I asked.

“Follow the crowd,” Serena said. “We usually go to this cafe around the block that’s cool with venned customers.”

So we did, and as the group of people ahead of us were filing through the doors of the cafe, I took a look at my reflection in the window. I had a bony frill a little behind where my hairline would be, and no hair. There were two upper horns halfway between the frill and my eyes (which were pretty much human), and below that, my nose and mouth (or rather nostrils and mouth) stuck out a bit in a sort of a snout, though nowhere near as long as a real triceratops’, or a dog’s for that matter. Just above my nostrils, I had another horn, shorter than the upper horns but still a good bit longer than my nose in any of my human bodies. I wondered why I couldn’t see it except in my reflection, but later I realized my subconscious was editing it out; I could see it if I concentrated, just like you can see your own nose if you concentrate when you’re in a basic human form.

My hindquarters looked pretty much like a scaled-down triceratops, around five feet long. I’d found myself standing diagonally in the booth after the transformation, and had to bend a little in the middle to get out through the door. The air exchange valves weren’t as big or prominent as Adam had made them sound, but they were bigger than those Guadalupe or Adam had in their usual cyborg bodies. Serena and Carmen were gripping them like a saddle horn to help stay on my back.

The crowd up ahead cleared up and I made my way through the door of the cafe. I found I’d worried needlessly about the noise of my air valves; the noise of conversation was louder. Adam’s friend Ty, who’d changed into a trio of guy, girl, and intersex bodies, ordered and paid for Adam’s food, which the waiter set on the floor for Adam. He wasn’t the only member of our group who’d venned into an animal shape that couldn’t talk; there was also a capybara, whose name I didn’t catch. Drew, who’d venned into something like the pushmi-pullyu from the Doctor Dolittle books, a quadrupedal body with heads at both ends, stood next to me, Serena, and Carmen (who had booster seats) and not far from one of Ty’s three bodies, the girl one. Somehow we ended up talking about the ethics of venning to enhance protest marches and campaign rallies.

“It’s dishonest to venn into multiple bodies and attend a protest with all of them,” Carmen said. “Go to work or school with one and to the protest with the other, sure. I’m gonna do that for the pocosin protest. But taking multiple bodies to the protest is lying about how much support your cause has. It’s like paying homeless people a pittance to show up and yell support for your candidate at a rally.”

“Exploiting homeless people is a completely different issue and you know it,” Ty argued. “If someone feels more comfortable in two or three bodies than one, why shouldn’t they all attend the same protest? Would you want everyone attending the protest to de-venn and show up in the body they were born with?”

Ty handled their three separate bodies pretty well, but I noticed that if one of them got up to go to the restroom, only one of the two remaining at the table would continue carrying on a conversation and eating; the other one would sit still and quiet until the third got back.

“That’s a low blow,” Carmen began, and Serena put a hand on their arm.

“Carmen’s not saying anything like that,” she said.

“So how is having multiple bodies different from being trans?” Ty asked.

“Okay,” Carmen conceded, “if multiple bodies is a core part of your identity, it’s probably fine to take them all to the protest. But venning into multiple bodies for the protest just to inflate the numbers —”

“What about de-venning to make a protest look more respectable?” I asked. “Would the protest organizers want people like Adam to change back to their baseline form or at least something more quote ‘normal’-looking to keep the protest movement from looking too fringey?”

“I’ve heard of that happening,” Carmen said. “I don’t think it’s going to happen this time, since our local organizer is a cyborg herself. If she was getting that kind of pressure from the state headquarters, she’d have told me.”

“You want to know about something really sketchy?” one of Drew’s heads said. “I heard about a rally for this right-wing candidate for the state legislature out in Texas. Nearly all of his supporters are white for reasons that don’t take three tries to guess. So to make him look less racist, his campaign manager arranges for a bunch of the people who showed up early to venn each other into black and Hispanic people. Most of them were reluctant, but he pointed out they’d change back in eight hours and the rally would look a lot better on TV.”

Ty shook her head. “Yeah, that’s pretty disgusting.”

The conversation drifted to other aspects of politics for a while before coming back to the upcoming protest in Raleigh about the wetlands bill. Some of the protesters were going to venn into photogenic animals and plants native to the pocosin, the unique acidic wetland found in several places near the North Carolina coast. “Actual animals, or anthropomorphic versions that can wave a protest sign?” I asked.

“Some of both,” Carmen said. “Guadalupe’s got several volunteers lined up. She’s got permission to borrow samples of fur and feathers from the Biology department to take into the booth while she’s transforming people.”

After I finished eating, I excused myself to go to the ladies’ room. I was less than a fifth the size of a real triceratops, but I was still wider than I was used to being; it had been months since I’d been a dragon-girl with a wingspan wide enough to make fitting through doors a problem. I don’t want to go into detail, but getting in and out of the stall and doing my business was kind of an ordeal. When one of the other girls from our group came into the restroom, a kitsune with a range of bright reds, yellows and oranges in her hair and fur, I had to ask her to help me out.

“You’re Carmen’s friend Kayla, right?” she asked me through the stall door after she closed it behind her.

“Yeah,” I said, starting to wash my hands. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked Adam for such a big body. I’m not used to being centauroid, I should have started with something smaller for my lower half.”

“It’s cool,” she said. “We’ve all tried it at some point. Taur forms are best when you can go to a park or wilderness area straight from the Venn machine. Are those carbon offset implants?”

“Yeah, I heard about them from Carmen.”

“That’s awesome. I tried that once, but my roommate said she’d strangle me if I didn’t change back; the air flow was loud enough to keep her awake all night. Guadalupe’s got that dial on her chest that she can change the air flow rate with, but not many other people have managed to get that feature without some weird drawback. Like the second time I tried it, I had huge, flat air vents covering my whole chest and upper back... I guess you can process a lot of CO2 that way, but I couldn’t wear anything above the waist. Not to mention not having any boobs. So I went right back in the machine and went back to my usual form.”

“I kind of wish the vents stuck straight up from my back,” I said, “instead of out to the side and then curving up. I like the aesthetics of the curved shape, at least for a body I’m only going to wear for a few hours, but this restroom ordeal would have been at least five times easier with vertical vents.”

The toilet flushed and she came out of the stall to wash her hands.

“Better luck next time. Are you going to be joining us regularly?”

“Maybe? I’d like to.”

“I’m Bailey, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you.” I’d met someone named Bailey when they came by to see Carmen in their dorm room; they’d been a guy at the time, and I wasn’t sure if this was the same Bailey. Later on, I learned they were gender-fluid and switched bodies at least once a week. They actually had permission from the university to attend classes and take exams in either of their two main forms.

We went back to the table, where I found Carmen and the others talking about what might have happened if the Venn machines had come along earlier in history.

“If they came along that early, you’d get a lot of slaves using them to escape by venning into white people,” Ty said. “The white authorities would try to stop slaves, and probably free blacks too, from using them, but the makers of the Venn machines would make new ones pop up nearby, same as they do now when a property owner or local government tries to block one off, and sooner or later there’d be so many that they can’t guard them all.”

“Maybe they’d pop up in the slave quarters on some plantations?” Carmen suggested.

“Yeah, probably.”

Serena put in, “I’m not sure, though? I mean, when the owners of the antique mall here in Burlington blocked off the Venn machine that popped up in an empty shop space, this one at Davis and Main popped up, but that machine in Granddaddy’s Antiques wasn’t being used at all. Would the Venn machines or their makers detect that only certain people are being allowed to use them?”

“Yes,” Drew said. “I read about how in this town in Turkey, the local police weren’t letting the Kurds use the Venn machine, and then a new one popped up in the Kurdish neighborhood.”

“Would the slaves that escaped that way have trouble passing as white because of their dialect, though?” I asked. “I mean, I get the impression from some old books like Huckleberry Finn that slaves and white people spoke completely different dialects back then, but I don’t know how much of that was white writers exaggerating things.”

“That could be a problem, yeah,” Ty said, and the conversation drifted to linguistics, which only Ty and Montana were qualified to talk about, for a few minutes before Carmen wrenched it back to the alternate history.

“So what kind of impact would it have on society’s views of gender if they showed up that early? The women’s rights movement barely existed yet, you just had a few scattered activists like Mary Wollstonecraft and Abigail Adams.”

“I think you’d get a lot of frustrated women venning into male forms to escape arranged marriages or other oppressive situations,” Serena said. “Most would suffer enough dysphoria that they’d change back as soon as they got away to a safer place, but some might stay that way. Either because the dysphoria wasn’t as bad as the oppression, or they figured out they were trans men or agender.”

“You think there’d be enough women doing that to affect the sex ratio?” I asked. I could barely imagine changing back into a guy, but I supposed it would probably be less bad than facing a lifetime of marital rape.

“Quite possibly. There’d probably be laws in some places against changing your sex or race... maybe against venning for anything except healing or minor cosmetic improvement.”

“They didn’t have surveillance cameras in those days,” Drew pointed out. “Those laws would be impossible to enforce. Maybe at first they could station a police officer at every machine 24/7, but eventually there’d be too many Venn machines to do that.”

“Man, if they freaked out at people changing sex or race, what do you think they’d do about inanimate venning?” Montana wondered.

“Ban it, of course,” Carmen said. “While secretly indulging in it at certain machines in white neighborhoods where the police know not to arrest the right people.”

That was a fun conversation. After talking about Venn machines in antebellum North Carolina for a while, we started talking about what might be different if they’d showed up in ancient Greece, but didn’t get very far before some people started saying they needed to get back to Greensboro for work or whatever. A bunch of us went back to the Venn machine, including me, Carmen, and Adam, while some returned to campus in their modified bodies. A few who were keeping their venned forms for the weekend or longer hung out with us at the machine while we changed back, as they needed their driver to venn back into something that could drive. I noticed that Ty went from three bodies to two.

Carmen and I went in together so nobody else would see my history, and maybe recognize my not-quite-a-boy forms from the missing child posters Dad had plastered all over Greensboro. I changed them back to their usual neuter body with a blue streak in their hair, and they changed me to the Kayla form I’d worn earlier in the day. Then we drove to High Point, where they venned me back into the dragon statuette, and went straight to work afterward — they didn’t have time to drop me off at the dorm first. I stayed in the back seat of their car while they were at work, and read until it got too dark.

 

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My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as epub and pdf from itch.io. It will appear on Scribblehub, BigCloset, etc. in a few months; I'm not sure when yet.

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“I said they should venn into amphibious forms and swim out to see the Outer Banks, but Mom just smiled and said maybe.”

 

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The Monday after that first Venn trip, Carmen and I left early in the morning and went to Burlington. I venned them into two copies of their usual body, while they venned me into my Kayla form; then we dropped one of their bodies off back on campus to go to class and met up with Guadalupe’s group to carpool to Raleigh for the wetlands bill protest. Adam and one of Ty’s bodies (a tall guy with otter features, not like any of the three bodies I’d seen that weekend) joined us in Carmen’s car, and we had a lot of fun conversation on the way there and back again. The protest was the first thing of its kind I’d ever participated in, and it was super invigorating, but kind of terrifying at first, to join the big crowd outside the capital building holding a sign saying “Protect Our Pocosins.” (Someone mentioned that one of the older, retired protesters had venned into a big stack of blank protest signs, which some of their friends had lettered and decorated with markers and paint on Sunday afternoon. When the venn wore off, the signs would disappear — perfect recycling.)

Several speakers from different environmental organizations, both political activists and scientists, gave short speeches, and the whole thing lasted about three or four hours. The police stood around looking variously suspicious, benevolent, condescending or menacing, but never started any trouble. Several of us from UNCG ate a late lunch at the State Farmer’s Market Restaurant before carpooling back to campus.

March progressed and got a little warmer, not that it mattered to me except on Wednesdays when I sometimes ate breakfast with Carmen in human form, or Saturdays when I sometimes joined the Venn trips as “Kayla.” I made a lot of progress in my high school studies, finishing up most of the courses I’d been working on before the end of the month and starting in on another set of self-study courses. After meeting Bailey a couple more times, I trusted my identity to them as well as Serena, and got to know both of them better. I got to know some of the other regular venners like Adam, Ty and Drew better, but didn’t trust them with my real name and history, continuing to interact with them only as “Kayla;” I felt conflicted about that, but Carmen advised me to be extremely cautious about who I trusted.

Then April arrived, and my seventeenth birthday approached. It would fall on a Saturday, and I tentatively suggested celebrating it with the Venn group in Burlington, but Carmen nixed the idea.

“You can’t say Kayla has the same birthday as you,” they said. “And I can’t go on the Venn trips for the next couple of Saturdays anyway, because I’ve got term papers to finish. We’ll do something nice, though, I promise.”

So my birthday arrived. Carmen spent the morning working on their Human Rights in History term paper, and I studied world history for my GED. Carmen went to the caf for lunch a little after noon. About one o’clock, I heard the key in the lock, and though I figured Carmen was probably returning alone, it wasn’t unlikely they had a friend other than Bailey or Serena with them, so I climbed off my book and froze into my usual position. Then the door swung open and not just Carmen but four other people quickly walked (or flew) in. At first glance, I only recognized one of them, Sophia.

Carmen closed the door behind them and I looked closer at the others. “Surprise!” they all called out, and “Happy birthday, Lauren!”

When I took a closer look, the foot-high porcelain doll was obviously Meredith. She had the same color hair and a very similar face, though her porcelain skin was much paler than Meredith’s usual skin tone. She wore an old-fashioned ball gown in some dark red fabric.

The other two were venned into unusual enough forms that I wasn’t sure who was who, but I figured one must be Serena and the other Bailey — the only other people who knew who I was. One was a pixie about as tall as my dragon-statue body, with wings as wide as she was high, bat-like in structure but with brightly colored patterns like a butterfly’s, barefoot and wearing an artfully tattered blue dress. She fluttered into the room and alighted right next to me on the desk. The other was as tall as a toddler, but not with childlike proportions; more like an adult woman scaled down to toddler size, with three breasts showcased in a low-cut dress, and three arms — a normally proportioned one on the right and two smaller ones on the left.

Sophia, now that I thought about it, seemed to be shorter than when I’d last seen her. It was hard to be sure, since I’d never seen her and Carmen together to compare them before.

“This is so awesome!” I squeed, standing up on my hind legs and waving at them. “I recognize Meredith and Sophia, but which of you are which?”

“I’m Bailey,” the bat-pixie said, and the scaled-down woman added, “I’m Serena.”

“It’s so great to see you all at once! I guess Carmen invited you?”

“Yeah, I sent Meredith a letter about it,” Carmen said.

“We met up with Serena and Bailey in the common room so we could all knock on the door at once,” Sophia added. “And Carmen said their room was tiny — you weren’t kidding, were you? — so I venned Meredith into something small and she made me about as short as I could be and still drive safely.”

“And we venned into little bodies too,” Bailey added, “so there should be room for all six of us to sit on the bed.”

“Good thinking,” I said.

“And I brought games,” Sophia said, hefting the big shopping bag she was carrying.

“Set that on the desk and let’s see what you brought,” Carmen said, so Sophia set down the bag next to me and Bailey and started going through the bag. She’d brought a deck of regular playing cards, Escalation, Fluxx, Chrononauts, Scrabble, Settlers of Catan, Alhambra, and a set of double twelve dominoes.

We wound up playing about three different games, and then just chatted about various things until Meredith and Sophia had to leave. Serena and Bailey stayed a while longer, and we watched a couple of short indie movies. Finally, late in the evening, they said goodbye as well, and Carmen and I were alone.

“That was a great birthday party,” I said, hugging them. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” they said. “I hoped it would at least be okay. I talked with Serena about maybe having it at a restaurant or a park in High Point or Burlington, but we decided we could talk more freely about your situation, if that topic came up, if we were here in my dorm room rather than in a public place. She convinced me I could host it if I had all the guests venn down into smaller bodies.”

“That was neat,” I said. “One of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.”

“And hopefully next year will be even better,” they said.

 

* * *

 

The end of the semester approached and Carmen was busier than ever finishing their term papers and studying for finals. I think we only went on one of the Venn trips in those last few weeks, and some Wednesdays, they didn’t get going early enough to take me to High Point and venn me into a necklace, because they’d stayed up late studying on Tuesday. Then May arrived, and final exams, and after Carmen’s last exam, they packed everything up to go home.

I spent the first day or so after they returned home reading in their bedroom. They’d had to return most of the books I was studying to the university library at the end of the semester, but I was comfortably ahead of schedule in every subject, so I kicked back and read short stories and novels while Carmen hung out with their sister and caught up with her (and did several loads of laundry).

Then, Sunday evening, Carmen and I went to the Fisherman’s Cove in Brocksboro for supper. Meredith was Carmen’s waitress, and when she clocked out, she served herself an employee meal and joined us at our booth. Carmen’s messenger bag was on the table, situated where I could look out of the un-zipped gap, and when Meredith sat down, she strategically placed her purse where I could crawl out of Carmen’s bag and into it without anybody seeing me, which I proceeded to do.

“Here’s the books I borrowed from you,” Carmen said. She was actually giving Meredith a small grocery sack with the books I’d bought on our outings to Burlington or High Point or that I’d gotten for my birthday, plus a couple of notebooks I’d filled with tiny print while studying, my wallet, phone and SIM card.

“Thanks,” Meredith said. “It’s not much over a month since I saw you, but it seems longer. How were your finals?”

“I think I did okay; I’ll find out soon enough. Anything new going on here?”

“Not really. Sophia and I have been busy with term papers and studying for finals, too, but we’ve got a few more weeks till they’re due. Mom and Dad are going off for their anniversary in a few weeks and if you ask me, I think they’re going to do a lot of venning. I looked up the bed and breakfast in Elizabeth City they’re staying at and it’s like five minutes’ walk from the Venn machine on the wharf.”

“Good for them.”

“I said they should venn into amphibious forms and swim out to see the Outer Banks, but Mom just smiled and said maybe.”

“Have you got any plans for while your parents are out of town?”

“Not really. I’ll be working my usual hours and studying the rest of the time — that’s only a week before finals. Mom and Dad made us promise not to go on dates that weekend or have our boyfriends over.”

They talked for a while longer about their plans for the summer, never directly alluding to me, but occasionally glancing my way. Finally, they hugged and Meredith went out to her car, after peeking into her purse to make sure I was there.

“Welcome back, Lauren,” she said as she cranked the engine of her car.

“You haven’t had any more trouble with the police?” I asked, climbing out of the purse onto the passenger seat.

“No, they never talked to us again after that time they interviewed us after school. How’s life at UNCG been treating you?”

“It’s been pretty neat, even with all the restrictions involved in keeping my presence and identity secret from most people. It’s given me a taste for college life.”

She smiled. “You’ll get to gratify that taste again in about a year.”

“One way or another, sooner or later.”

I still hadn’t figured out exactly what I was going to do once I turned eighteen. The time between my eighteenth birthday and the beginning of various schools’ fall semesters would barely be enough time to take my GED, file college applications, and take entrance exams in the best-case scenario. And then there was the matter of applying for grants and loans. More likely, I’d have to put off starting college for a year — which would give me a year to work full-time and save money for college. Assuming I had a place to stay.

We returned to Meredith’s house and I crawled back into her purse.

“Hi, sweetie,” Mr. Ramsey said as she came in. His voice was younger than it used to be, too. “How was your visit with Carmen?”

“It was nice to see them again.”

“I expect you filled up already, but if you want some dessert, your mom and I made brownies.”

“Oooh, yum!” I heard Meredith rummaging around in the kitchen some for a minute or two before she went to her bedroom, set her purse down, and opened it.

“Is it okay if I eat this in front of you?” she asked. She was holding a little plate with a brownie on it.

“Sure,” I said, crawling out of the purse onto her desk. “I don’t get hungry in this form, so I don’t really miss eating that much.”

“Okay,” she said, and chowed down.

 

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My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io. It will appear on Scribblehub, BigCloset etc. in a few months.

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

There were more people in line than I expected for a town that size, more than we usually saw at the Brocksboro library on a weekday. Most were doing boring rejuvenations and improvements in each other’s appearance, as usual, but one couple venned each other into giant matte-black insectoids.

 

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The last few weeks of the semester at Eastern Mynatt High, Meredith and Sophia were too busy to hang out with me a lot. Caleb was home from college, but working a lot, and hanging out with his friends most of the time when he wasn’t working. I wondered if he was still hanging out with Nathan sometimes, but he didn’t talk a lot with Meredith or Sophia where I could hear them. Meredith didn’t think she could rig up a curtain to let me read at night without her parents getting suspicious, but she let me spend the nights in her closet, where the overhead light was enough to read by. It didn’t feel claustrophobic at my size.

Memorial Day weekend, Meredith’s parents went off to the coast for their anniversary. As Meredith had told Carmen, we didn’t do much special, as my friends were busy studying for finals, but Meredith let me have the run of the house while her parents were on vacation and Caleb was at work; I hung out with her and Sophia while they were cooking, eating, and cleaning up, and explored the house while they were at work. And we watched a movie together Saturday night. That was the first time I’d seen the rest of their house, outside of Meredith’s bedroom, since that time Mom, Dad, Nathan and I had gone to the Ramseys’ house for a Christmas party... maybe when I was thirteen or fourteen? It was a nice house, seemingly not as big as Mom and Dad’s house though it was hard to tell at my current size, but prettily decorated, with furniture that looked comfortable (though I didn’t sit on it with a human butt until a long while afterward).

When I saw some of the older framed photos in the living room and hallway, I realized that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey hadn’t just made each other younger. They were in much better shape now than they’d been when they were in their mid-twenties the first time. Well, good for them.

After the school year ended, Meredith and Sophia started working more hours, but they still had more time to hang out with me. One evening when Meredith and Sophia were chatting with me in Meredith’s room, I broached the idea of us maybe going to a Venn machine — not the one at the Brocksboro library or the Catesville mall — and having them venn me into a humanoid form for a few hours.

“Sure,” Meredith said. “Let’s see.” She brought up vennlocator.com on her laptop and said, “Maybe we should rule out the Venn machines you used with Carmen, too, just to be safe? Not that High Point or Burlington are exactly convenient from here, anyway. Hmmm... maybe over in Reidsville. Or Danville, Virginia.”

“What is there to see there?” Sophia asked.

Meredith looked up Reidsville and Danville. Neither had any particular attractions besides a few historic buildings, but since the Venn machine in Reidsville was outdoors and the one in Danville was in a mall, we decided to go to Reidsville (which was closer) unless it was raining.

Not quite two weeks later, after Meredith and Sophia arranged their work schedules to have the same day off, I rode along with them to Reidsville. The Venn machine was at an intersection downtown, like in Burlington, with a theater on one corner, the Chamber of Commerce office on another, a barber shop, a pawn shop, and couple of nice murals. The corner with the Venn machine had a wider sidewalk with benches, a small bank of coin-operated lockers, and a small sign informing visitors of the county ordinances pertaining to Venn machine use — no identity theft, people waiting for cosmetic or recreational changes must yield place to people needing urgent healing, if you venned into an ordinary animal you needed a collar or harness labeled “Venned person,” and similarly for adults venned into children. There was an awning covering the Venn machine, the lockers, and the area where people would wait in line.

There were more people in line than I expected for a town that size, more than we usually saw at the Brocksboro library on a weekday. Most were doing boring rejuvenations and improvements in each other’s appearance, as usual, but one couple venned each other into giant matte-black insectoids.

Meredith venned me into a four-armed kitsune, and I venned her into the rabbit-taur from her history, tweaked to have lighter fur for summer. Meredith venned Sophia into a plant-girl, with leafy branches sticking up from her scalp and shoulders. We walked around the downtown shopping area and saw some of the historic buildings and monuments to early settlers in the area, and stopped to eat at an Italian restaurant — it was the first time I’d eaten food since early April. Having four arms was a fun novelty, and it took me a little while to get the hang of them — I spilled my drink while I was still working on that, apologized profusely to our waitress, and left her as big a tip as I could afford. Once I got used to them and stopped being klutzy, I felt like extra arms could be pretty useful for certain jobs. I wasn’t sure if they were me, though.

On our way back to the Venn machine, we passed a store with several TVs in its window, tuned to different channels. One of them was a news channel, and Meredith stopped to look.

“Oh, no!”

Sophia pulled out her phone and brought up a news video. It seemed that Mallory di Stefano, a pop musician who had recently turned actress, had been shot by an obsessed fan at a promotional appearance, and had been pronounced dead at the scene. (I won’t go into details, and I don’t recommend you look for videos. Most of them have been taken down, thank God.)

“That’s horrible,” I said, shuddering. None of us were big fans of her music, though Meredith liked it more than Sophia or me, and she hadn’t really had time to show off what she could do as an actress — her first big film hadn’t been released yet. But the news cast a pall over the rest of the day.

 

* * *

 

A few days later, though, one evening when I was reading one of Meredith’s Anne McCaffrey novels after a long study session, Meredith came home from work, burst into her room, and said “You’ve got to see this!” She had her phone to her ear as she said that, but once she had the door closed, she put it away — she hadn’t actually been on the phone with anyone, just using it as cover in case her parents heard her talking as she entered the room.

“See what?” I asked.

“Hang on a second.”

She opened up her laptop and un-hibernated it, then brought up Google News. The top headline read:

 

Murdered musician Mallory di Stefano revived by transformation technology

 

It seemed she’d been venned — the article didn’t say exactly what changes she’d made, just “correcting minor health issues and making cosmetic improvements.” And when her body was turned over to her relatives, they had put it into a Venn machine and gotten her back alive.

I’d heard of people venned into inanimate objects who’d gotten broken and been fine once the pieces were put in a Venn machine or their transformation timed out. And I’d heard rumors of people who had died while venned (usually into something highly vulnerable like an insect or other small animal) and been fine later, but this was the first time I’d heard it from a reliable source. The first time I’d ever heard the news media admit the existence of Venn machines, for that matter. The news articles and videos spent a lot of words explaining the Venn machines for people who’d never heard of them, which seemed (as the news cycle progressed) to be a surprising number of people in the big cities that didn’t have Venn machines yet. Maybe I was biased because of living in one of the first towns where the Venn machines had appeared, and then living in Greensboro but hanging out with friends who frequently traveled to nearby smaller towns with Venn machines. But apparently, if you lived in New York or some other big cities, you might have to travel for hours through megalopolis traffic to get to a town with a Venn machine.

The Venn machines were all over the news for about a week. There were stories about other, less famous people who’d died while venned and been revived, and whose revivals had been quietly covered up until now. Human-interest stories about people who venned long-term into unusual forms, including a thirty-second interview on the local Greensboro news with Guadalupe about her carbon-offset cyborg form. Stories about attempted crimes involving venned disguises which were foiled by the ubiquitous surveillance of Venn machine use. A couple of reality shows involving the Venn machines were announced. Sports leagues that hadn’t overtly taken notice of the Venn machines did so, forbidding their use in pro sports and the Olympics, but some new local sports leagues that had been around for a while finally got media attention — for instance, a swimming competition for merfolk, gladiatorial combat for venned creatures, and a multi-ball game where every time a player was disqualified, they got turned into another ball until there were more balls than the remaining players could keep moving... And then it all went quiet again.

The Venn machine didn’t vanish from the news, but they weren’t news in themselves anymore. It was minor news if a celebrity venned into something unusual, or a politician took a controversial stance on venning, but there was a lot less media attention for the nifty things ordinary people were doing with the machines.

But the next time Meredith, Sophia and I went on an outing, to Danville, Virginia this time as it was raining, I saw fewer old people around the mall than I would have expected, and a lot longer line for the Venn machine. The media blitz a few weeks earlier must have finally gotten through to the shut-ins who didn’t use the Internet. And there were a lot more people casually walking around in nonhuman forms, including the staff at the stores and restaurants, than I’d ever seen.

 

* * *

 

In early August, Carmen came over to visit one evening. After supper, they and Meredith hung out in Meredith’s room for a while, and I chatted with them for a couple of hours about what Carmen had been doing all summer (mostly working and catching up with TV shows they’d fallen behind on during the school year) and how I’d been doing, living with Meredith and Sophia. It was a good while after that before I saw Carmen in person again, though a few times during the following school year, Meredith called them and put them on speakerphone so I could join the conversation.

Sophia continued to interview me every month about how I felt about my animate-statue body. One evening just before school started back, she told me that her YouTube video series about how to venn someone into an animate doll or statue had reached ten thousand views. She’d made contact through that with several other people who had done long-term venns into bodies kind of like mine, and three of them had agreed to participate in her study, answering the same questionnaire she was using on me once a month as long as they stayed in those bodies.

“That judge at the science fair will rue the day he scorned me when I win the Nobel Prize,” she said, and tried out her best mad scientist laugh, which to be honest was not that great. I suggested she have Meredith venn her into a body with a more resonant voice, or maybe a wider vocal range, if she wanted to do that again. She scowled and Meredith laughed.

Sophia was deeply interested in what I’d told her about being able to concentrate better and read faster. She’d had Meredith or her friend Julianna turn her into animate dolls or statues, but rarely for very long; her job at the Dollar Tree didn’t allow her to come to work venned into a visibly nonhuman body, and Ethan, her boyfriend throughout much of her sophomore year, liked venning into furry bodies with her, but was creeped out by robots, cyborgs, or animate statues, or especially pure inanimate venns. They’d finally had a fight over it and broken up not long before this, and she’d been trying all summer to find a better job at a more Venn-friendly employer.

Finally, with just two days to go until the start of her junior year and Meredith’s senior year, she told us that she’d gotten a job at a restaurant a few blocks from the library. It was under new management, and the proprietor was encouraging the wait staff to always come to work venned — he would pay them for the time they spent waiting in line at the Venn machine before and after their shift, if they didn’t want to stay venned all the time, and meet up with them to venn them as needed. Having heard about that, she’d worn an animate doll body to the interview (similar to the one Meredith had worn to my birthday party, but life-sized), and her new boss had been delighted with it.

So after she’d talked it over with her parents, and her parents had talked it over with her manager, she filed a long-term Venn form with the school, and began attending classes and working as a life-sized doll. She didn’t sweat, so her body and clothes didn’t get dirty nearly as fast, but they did get dirty from external sources over time. She’d already been a good student, better than her older siblings, but her grades were pretty much perfect after that.

Since she was staying up all night studying or websurfing (her parents still wouldn’t let her stay out past midnight), I moved into her room. I still spent some time in Meredith’s room, when she was home and awake, but when Meredith went to bed, Sophia would take me to her room where I could read all night, or use Sophia’s computer when she didn’t need it, without arousing Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey’s suspicions. And though we spent a lot of that time separately reading, we also talked a lot in low voices, sharing cool things from the books or websites we were reading.

The first few days she spent in animate doll form, she pushed herself too hard, postponing the fugue state for a couple of days. That worked better for her than it would for a human trying to go without sleep that long, but after about three days, she fugued out during class; fortunately, the teacher didn’t call on her, but when the class ended and she didn’t get up to go, her friend Julianna spoke to her, then shook her shoulder, at which she “woke up.” She still felt a little out of it as she went to her next class, and during lunch (which she was spending in the library some days, since she didn’t eat) she took the opportunity to fugue out again for a bit longer. After she told me about that, I made sure to remind her every night to rest and stop reading or listening to podcasts for a while somewhere between midnight and dawn.

 

---

---

 

My new 22k-word novella, “Smart House AI in Another World”, is available now as an epub and pdf from itch.io. It will appear on Scribblehub, BigCloset etc. in a few months.

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“I have a feeling I might see more of... let’s say the Hooters side of that place, if I drop in as a single guy.”

 

“Or if we’re a couple of single guys.” I could hear a smile in her voice.

 

---

---

 

A couple of days after her senior year began, Meredith told me something cool that became more important to me later on.

“There’s another trans girl at Eastern Mynatt!” she said. “She came out and did a long-term venn over the summer. We’re in the same Chemistry class, and after class today she came up and introduced herself, and we swapped phone numbers and all. Unfortunately we don’t share lunch or free period, but I’m gonna call her after supper.”

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“I don’t really know yet,” she said. “Kind of a goth, maybe? She doesn’t tick all the boxes, but she wears black and has black hair that’s long on one side and shaved on the other.”

I was with her when she called the girl. She put it on speakerphone.

“Hi, Poppy, this is Meredith.”

“Hey, Meredith. I kind of wanted to pick your brain about trans stuff.”

“Go ahead.”

She asked some basic questions, and Meredith answered most of them pretty easily off the top of her head; for some, she had to look something up online. At some point they got to talking about their histories, when Poppy asked Meredith how long she’d known she was trans and how she’d figured it out. It seemed Poppy hadn’t realized she was trans until near the end of the summer. The Venn machine wouldn’t let her use it until pretty recently, and after a few weeks of occasional venning with her girlfriend (who’d been able to use the machine for almost a year), she’d figured out that she really liked having a girl body.

“At first it was just this kinky thing Lisette suggested, I’d venn her into a guy and she’d venn me into a girl, and we’d see where it went. Like she wasn’t sure if I’d be into her as a guy and she didn’t want to push me. And I didn’t like making out that much when she was a guy, and I got cold feet when she wanted to fuck, but I really liked having tits, and all the rest of it. And I liked hanging out with her when she wasn’t getting too handsy with her big guy-hands, and going home afterward to jill off until the venn expired. And then the next time we venned, she made me a girl and I venned her into a taller girl, bigger than my new body, and I liked that a lot better. The sex was the best ever. So I tried it a couple more times to be sure, and then I went home and told Mom I’d venned into a girl for three years, and could she sign the paperwork to tell the school I was a girl now.”

“Is she cool with you being trans?”

“She already knew I’d venned into a girl a couple of times. She was worried about buying new clothes, but I said I could fix my old ones in the Venn machine, and that was all the objections she had.”

“How did your girlfriend take it when you said you wanted to stay that way?”

“She’s cool with it. I mean, she’s bi, and maybe she leans more toward guys, but she said she’s not going to break up with me over this, that would be a dick move.”

Meredith and Poppy had a couple more conversations in the next few weeks, but they never became close friends. I wasn’t with her for those other conversations, which took place at the Taco Bell where Poppy worked, but I got the impression that Poppy’s foul mouth made Meredith uncomfortable, and they didn’t have a lot of interests or experiences in common besides being trans. So she never came over to Meredith’s house and I didn’t get to know her myself until much later, though I think I would have piped up and introduced myself if Meredith had invited her over.

 

* * *

 

One evening in late September, Meredith had a couple of friends over to study together for a test. She told me later that she’d meant to take me over to Sophia’s room before they arrived, but at the time she just gave me an apologetic glance as she led them into her room.

One of them was a pretty white girl, tall and elegantly dressed in a long-sleeved cream-colored blouse and a matching skirt, but with no unusual features. The other was Jada, one of the girls who’d been waiting in line behind me and Nathan the very first time we’d used the Venn machine. She was venned into a body with larger-than-normal violet eyes, a pointy chin, and big, curly violet hair — kind of an anime face, except that you rarely see black people in anime. She and Meredith and the other girl (who one of the others addressed as “Lily” at some point; I’d heard Meredith mention her) spent a little over an hour and a half quizzing each other on ancient civilizations before Meredith suggested (glancing at me) that they go in the living room and play Mario Kart. She left her door ajar as they left.

I had more or less forgotten about my vague crush on Jada, having not seen her for so long, but seeing her again, interacting with Meredith and Lily and cracking silly jokes about Babylon and Egypt, had reminded me how cool she was. I seriously considered trusting her with my secret the next time she came over to visit Meredith, and asked Meredith more about her later.

“I mean, you can tell her if you want?” Meredith said doubtfully. “I don’t know of any particular reason you couldn’t trust her. But it’s safest if you keep the number of people who know about you as low as possible. And she doesn’t come over here that often — we usually meet up at Lily’s house because her bedroom is bigger and has a sofa, only it’s being painted.”

Safest for Meredith and Sophia, not just for me, I realized. I decided against it for the moment.

 

* * *

 

As I got used to the rhythms of the Ramsey household, and realized that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey went yard-saling together for several hours every Saturday morning, I started being a little more bold about leaving Sophia or Meredith’s room and walking around the rest of the house. My metabolism-free form made it easy to concentrate on reading about one subject for hours and hours at a time, but some more variety of scenery was still welcome. One Saturday in mid-October, when Sophia and Meredith had left for work and I didn’t expect their parents home for several more hours, I was perched on the back of the sofa, peeking through a gap in the living room curtains at the light traffic on the side street they lived on. It was a change from the view into the back yard and a little bit of the neighbors’ yards from Meredith and Sophia’s windows. Suddenly Mrs. Ramsey’s van pulled into the driveway, at least two hours before they usually came home.

Panicking, I looked around. I had at least thirty seconds before they got out of the car and into the front door; probably more like a minute, but I’d better not count on it. There was only one hiding place I could reach in that time. I jumped off onto the sofa cushions, then onto the carpeted floor, and crawled under the sofa, turning around so I could see what was going on out in the living room.

It was dusty, and I was thankful I didn’t need to breathe and wouldn’t sneeze. I heard a key in the lock, then the door opening, and then Mrs. Ramsey’s voice.

“— No, I feel a little bit better already. I’ll just sit down in the living room. Could you get me a glass of tea?” I saw her feet and Mr. Ramsey’s moving across the room, then she sat down in the easy chair — at that angle, I could see a good part of her calves too, until she raised the footrest of the easy chair. Mr. Ramsey went into the kitchen and then came back to stand by her chair for a moment. I heard a rattling sound like she was opening a bottle of pills.

“Thanks.”

Mr. Ramsey sat down in another chair near her.

“It wouldn’t have taken much longer to stop by the library and fix this, whatever it is,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. It just seems... I don’t know, kind of silly to use the machine to fix something this trivial. I’m sure I’ll get over it in a day or two.”

“It’s not trivial if it means you can enjoy the weekend. There are a lot of things people use the machines for that I’m still not too sure of, but fixing medical problems, even minor ones, is a no-brainer.”

“Okay. Just let me rest and give this Tylenol a few minutes to work and we’ll run over to the library. Okay?”

“Sure.”

There was a silence for a minute or two. I consoled myself that in the time it took them to drive to the library, venn Mrs. Ramsey into a healthy form from her history, and drive back, I could walk from here to Sophia’s room. (She’d left the door ajar for me when she left for work.) Then Mr. Ramsey said: “About what we were talking about before your headache started... I’m thinking about venning into an unrecognizable body and dropping in at Metamorphoses. I want to know what it’s like when Paget isn’t trying to impress a new employee’s parents. I’ve been getting an uneasy feeling about it lately.”

“Sophia’s not getting off work until six. We could both venn into new bodies and drop in together.”

“I have a feeling I might see more of... let’s say the Hooters side of that place, if I drop in as a single guy.”

“Or if we’re a couple of single guys.” I could hear a smile in her voice.

“Yeah, that would work.”

“Honestly, though, I think you’re probably being paranoid. The employee uniform is perfectly modest, and it’s not like he’s only hiring women and girls, or requiring all the staff to be women while on duty, or to venn into bodies with huge tits. He doesn’t even impose any particular restriction on the venns, just that they be able to take orders and carry trays.”

“Yeah, it all sounds good. But do you have any objection to doing like I suggested?”

“No. As long as we tell Sophia who we were afterward, once we’ve made our covert observations.”

Pause. “She doesn’t know we’ve been switching sexes once in a while.”

“We should probably tell them sooner or later. I seriously doubt Sophia or Meredith is going to be shocked. Caleb, maybe, but not for long.”

“You’re right, but...”

Another long pause.

“It’s okay. If you want to go by yourself after we venn, and let me run some errands while you’re at lunch, we can put off telling them. But I’d rather have two sets of eyes on the place, if we’re going to be ‘spying’.”

“All right. It’s been long enough; they deserve to know. Not all the details, but the basic fact.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

I had a lot to think about as I hurried back to Sophia’s room and climbed up onto her desk. I thought about using Sophia’s laptop to send her a message letting her know her parents were going to be dropping in pretending to be a couple of single guys, but one, I felt guilty about the eavesdropping and figured the best way to make up for it would be to not say anything, and two, Sophia would probably be too busy with the lunch rush to check her messages.

 

* * *

 

That night after supper, Meredith and Sophia told me what their parents had told them. I pretended to be shocked.

“I mean, I figured they were thinking about it back when Mom asked me a bunch of questions about the time Hunter venned into a girl to see what gender dysphoria was like and I spent a few hours with muscular dystrophy, and I figured they might try it out on their anniversary when they had more privacy, but apparently they’ve done it like four or five times since then! For a few hours while we were at school or work, or while they were out yard-saling, or whatever.”

“Like today when Mom changed into a guy to spy on me,” Sophia said disgustedly. “I was waiting tables in another section and I didn’t really notice them, but apparently they came to lunch at Metamorphoses today to see if the wait staff treat groups of single guys differently from families. Like they expected Todd to flirt with them like the girls at Hooters or something?”

“Remind me, which one is Todd?” I asked.

“He’s the one who usually venns into mostly-robot cyborgs, like with his brain behind glass in the chest cavity. Today he was all robot, and not a sexy fembot, either, more like a car factory robot. Serves them right if they try to fetishize that.”

Meredith giggled and so did I.

 

* * *

 

On Halloween, Mrs. Ramsey, Meredith and Sophia all volunteered to help out with their church’s Trunk or Treat, while Mr. Ramsey stayed home and dispensed candy and spookiness to the trick-or-treaters in their neighborhood. (He’d had Sophia venn him into an animated glowing skeleton for the night. “Made of real bone?” I asked her, horrified. “No, just plastic.”) I stayed in Sophia’s bedroom and read ghost stories from one of Meredith’s anthologies until the women came home. They had already re-venned into their everyday bodies, as it was a school night, but later on, they showed me photos they’d taken of their costume venns and their parents’. Meredith was a princess of ancient Egypt, and Sophia was a cute werewolf puppy. Their mom was a pirate — specifically Anne Bonny, who I’d never heard of until I looked her up later that night.

We had talked about me maybe venning into something that could participate in the Halloween festivities one way or another, but it just didn’t suit, since the whole family was going to the Venn machine together; there would be no way for Meredith and Sophia to explain me or to venn me privately and then pretend I was a friend from school they’d somehow never mentioned. We had our own little Halloween party in Sophia’s room that night, watching several Looney Tunes Halloween episodes until it was time for Meredith to go to bed. After she turned in, Sophia and I watched another, scarier movie. “Meredith’s a wimp,” Sophia confided. “She can’t stand anything scarier than those silly cartoons we were just watching. How do you feel about Friday the Thirteenth?”

“I’ve never seen it,” I said. “Mom and Dad didn’t approve of slasher movies. I’ve seen several classic monster movies like Dracula and The Mummy, but not much in the way of modern ones.”

“You’re in for a treat!”

It probably would have been better if I’d had a fleshy body. As it was, I was a bit disappointed, and Sophia admitted that it wasn’t as good as she remembered, either.

“It’s probably because our bodies don’t produce adrenaline,” I pointed out.

“Oh, yeah. We’ll watch this again sometime when I can venn into a human body for a night.” She turned it off.

“And me?”

“Hmm, good point. I’ll keep an eye out for horror movie revivals at actual theaters in towns with a Venn machine... but there might not be any until next Halloween.”

“And I’ll be eighteen by then, so we won’t have to sneak around.”

 

---

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My 335,000-word short fiction collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

From the fact that this isn’t their first time, I’m guessing they’re both realizing — or at least suspecting — they’re not as purely cis as they thought.”

 

---

---

 

A few days after Halloween, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey both venned into opposite-sex bodies for a few days. I heard about it from Sophia and Meredith the evening after they venned each other.

“They say they’re going to try to stay like that for a month if the dysphoria doesn’t get too bad,” Meredith said.

“How do you feel about that?” I asked. “Does it feel like they’re making light of you being trans or something?”

“Nah, I mean, it could be like that with some people, but I’m all for people trying out other bodies, whether to see what it’s like for other people or to see what kind of body they like best. From the fact that this isn’t their first time, I’m guessing they’re both realizing — or at least suspecting — they’re not as purely cis as they thought.”

“I remember,” I mused, “somebody on one of the trans subreddits talking about a theory that a lot of people are cis by default, and wouldn’t have ever known they were different from actual cis people if it weren’t for the Venn machines making it easier to experiment with gender. You think your parents are like that?”

“Yeah, maybe. We’ll see how long they stick with it this time and whether they switch again later on.”

But despite what Meredith said about their planning to stay switched for a month, they changed back just before Meredith’s birthday, which was not quite two weeks after Halloween. She had her birthday party at Metamorphoses the Sunday before her birthday; she told me she didn’t want to exclude me, but her parents didn’t want to have it at home given the sheer number of people they’d invited, friends from school, church and work. Sophia had venned into a mostly-human body for the occasion, similar to the body she’d usually worn the previous school year, but with four arms and two heads. “So I could eat with one mouth and talk with the other,” she told me.

Meredith, Sophia and I had a private little party on the evening of Meredith’s actual eighteenth birthday the following Tuesday. I had bought her a present on our last trip to Danville, Patricia McKillip’s new novel, and Sophia had wrapped it for me.

While we were sitting around chatting after she’d opened her present, Meredith mentioned, “Dad told me Uncle Eric and Aunt Vanessa are coming for Thanksgiving,” she said. “And their kids.”

“We haven’t seen them in ages,” Sophia said. “I can’t really remember them.”

“How far away do they live?”

“Atlanta,” Meredith said. “I mean, one of the suburbs around Atlanta? I forget the name. Dad and Uncle Eric used to be close, but they haven’t talked in years until just now, and I don’t know why. But apparently Uncle Eric wants to reconcile and be brothers again, and Dad invited him and his family for Thanksgiving.”

“I bet it’s going to be awkward.”

“Yeah. I asked Dad how Uncle Eric took the news about my transitioning, and he just said, ‘I wouldn’t have invited him if I thought he was going to hassle you about it, but I don’t know if he really understands it, either.’ Dad says he sent him some articles, but who knows if he’s read them.”

“Oh, great.”

“Yeah, and they asked me to change back into a human body the whole time the relatives are here,” Sophia said. “I was gonna change back for Thanksgiving dinner, but the whole five-day weekend?”

“They’re staying for five days? Where?” The Ramsey house was big enough for a family with three children — barely — but there wasn’t much extra room for guests.

“Uncle Eric and Aunt Vanessa are gonna be staying at the hotel,” Sophia said. (Even though we weren’t near an interstate and didn’t have any tourist attractions, we did have one small hotel, on the south side of town near the Food Lion.) “Our boy cousins are gonna sleep on the sofa bed in the living room, and our girl cousin is gonna sleep in my room.”

“How old are your cousins?”

Meredith shrugged. “Will and I were around kindergarten age and Savannah was a toddler the last time I saw them. I don’t think Aiden was born yet.”

“I hope it goes okay.”

 

* * *

 

On the day before Thanksgiving, Caleb came home from UNC Greensboro around mid-morning. I heard a little bit of his conversation with his parents and Meredith, but it was pretty muffled by Sophia’s door. Not long after that, the washing machine started going and ran almost nonstop for several hours.

Meredith and Sophia had the day off school, but Sophia was working a short shift in the morning before their Georgia relatives would arrive. When she came home from work, she was human again, and grumbled to me about it as she changed clothes. It was just a few minutes later when their relatives arrived.

I heard the commotion from the living room as they greeted Meredith’s family and brought in the kids’ luggage; in her haste, Sophia had left the door of her room ajar when her mom called out, “They’re here!” I couldn’t make out the details of their conversation, but it sounded reasonably cordial from the little I could hear.

A few minutes later, Sophia returned with Meredith and a younger girl, maybe around fourteen or fifteen. Savannah, presumably. Savannah was carrying a sleeping bag and Sophia and Meredith were carrying a small suitcase and a duffel bag, which they set down in a corner by the closet door.

“Is there something you want to put in the restroom?” Sophia asked her.

“Hang on a second.” Savannah unzipped the duffel bag and took out a large ziplock bag full of shampoo, conditioner, brushes and so on and said, “That can go in the bathroom, I guess.” She made no move to leave or ask where the restroom was, though. She looked around at the wall decorations — the periodic table, the dinosaurs of the Cretaceous poster, the DNA molecule artwork — and at the bookshelf and the desk, her eyes alighting on the dinosaur models and me for a few moments.

“What kind of dinosaur is that?” she asked, pointing at me.

“It’s not really a dinosaur,” Sophia said, looking dismayed. “It’s made up, but sort of based on theropods — the kind of dinosaurs that birds are descended from. Tyrannosaurus is probably the best-known —”

“Yeah, I know.”

“But anyway, it’s mostly a Chinese dragon with some theropod features.”

“It looks cool, anyway. I see a lot of books about dinosaurs — are you going to be a paleontologist?”

“No, I’m going to be a geneticist. And maybe a vennologist, or whatever we wind up calling scientists who study the Venn machines.”

“Oh, cool. I’m the only one in my family that can use the Venn machines — I mean, except for Mom and Dad. Will can’t get them to work for him and it pisses him off that I can. But I can’t do it very often because we don’t have one close to home. After I get my driver’s license...”

“When’s that?” Meredith asked.

“Next July.”

I did a little math: assuming Georgia let teens drive unsupervised at sixteen, like North Carolina (which I verified later), that made her a year and five months younger than Sophia.

“What all have you venned into?” Meredith asked, finally sitting down on Sophia’s bed now that it was clear Savannah wasn’t in a hurry to return to the living or dining room where the rest of the family was gathered. The others sat down too, Sophia in her desk chair and Savannah at the other end of the bed from Meredith.

“A cat and an ocelot. And a seagull. That was when we went to Jekyll Island for vacation, and there was a Venn machine not too far from our hotel.”

“Do you have trouble keeping control when you’re in animal form?” Sophia asked.

“A little at first. I got the hang of it, though. I wish I had more chances to practice. And I got my body fixed up — I wasn’t this pretty last year.”

Sophia nodded.

“What have y’all venned into? You can both venn, right? I know Meredith can...”

Meredith mentioned a few of the centauroid bodies she’d worn on different occasions, as well as the griffin kitten, but didn’t mention her transition. Then Sophia talked mostly about her science project and how she spent most of her time these days as a life-size porcelain doll, as well as a few of the other forms she’d tried.

“And you can walk around and talk that way?”

“And attend classes and wait tables and drive, yeah. If we have time and your parents will let you, I can show you what it’s like.”

“Maybe so. I’m not sure if I’d want that, but it might be interesting to try for a little bit.”

They kept talking for a lot longer, and the conversation drifted from venning to their jobs, school, and college plans, until Meredith’s mom poked her head in and said it was time to wash their hands for supper.

“I’ll show you where the restroom is,” Meredith said to Savannah, getting up.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Sophia said. Once Meredith, Savannah, and Mrs. Ramsey were gone, she whispered to me, “I’m sorry. I didn’t expect them this early, and I know we were planning to let you stay in Meredith’s bedroom this weekend so you wouldn’t have to pretend to be inanimate as much, but now that she’s noticed you here... I think she’d notice if you were missing.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t mind.”

“Sorry,” she whispered again, and went to wash her hands.

I read a few dozen pages, carefully listening to the sounds of conversation so if I heard people approaching, I could get back in the same position Savannah had seen me in. It was over two hours later when the girls came back. Savannah got her pajamas out of her suitcase and went down the hall to the bathroom to change, which allowed me to turn my back while Sophia changed. That hadn’t really been necessary most of the time while I’d been her roommate, as she’d been a living doll, not changing clothes all that often and not having anything to hide when she did. When Savannah returned, they blew up the air mattress that Mrs. Ramsey had brought in earlier in the day, and Savannah unrolled her sleeping bag on top of it and got in as Sophia got in bed. But though they turned off the light, they didn’t go to sleep right away.

At first they talked about supper and the tensions they’d noticed between their parents. Savannah asked Sophia if she knew what their dads had gotten mad at each other about, and Sophia admitted she didn’t know, either. “I was too little to remember it,” she said. “I think I was three the last time we came to y’all’s house, and I don’t really remember it like Meredith does. And she doesn’t remember it well enough to know what happened. Whatever argument our dads had might not have been in front of us kids, or it might not have even been during that last visit. Could have been on the phone or social media six months later.”

“Yeah.”

“There is one thing, though. A couple of nights ago, Dad told us not to say anything to y’all, especially your parents, about church. So if I had to guess, I’d say they had an argument about religion.”

“Is your family religious?”

“Some of us more than others. But yeah, we’ve gone to church as long as I can remember. A couple of years ago we started going to a more liberal church after some things happened and Mom and Dad had big arguments with some of their friends at church.” The vague way she’d worded that, I guessed she was avoiding giving away that Meredith was trans in case Savannah’s parents hadn’t already told her; if she was a toddler back then, she wouldn’t remember Meredith as a boy.

“Was it because Meredith came out as transgender?”

So they had told her, apparently.

“Yeah. I guess your parents told you about that.”

“I think they were more talking to Will. He’s old enough to remember when she was a boy, and Dad told him she was a girl now and warned him not to talk about stuff they did when they were little boys.”

“Hmm. While we’re merrily tramping through the minefield of stuff our parents warned us not to talk about, can I ask if your parents have used the Venn machine or if they naturally look like that?”

“Yeah, they’re younger than they were last year, but they didn’t want to get too much younger and look like they were too young to have kids our age. I think it was a shock for Mom and Dad to see your parents looking so young, even though they’ve seen pictures.”

“It was kind of freaky for us at first, but we got used to it months ago. Have your parents ever switched sexes or changed into animals or things like that?”

Long silence. “Not that I know of,” Savannah said. “I guess probably not. As far as I know, they haven’t done much with it besides get younger and lose weight. They’re okay with me using it, though, as long as I follow their rules. When Mom venned me into a seagull when we went on vacation last summer, I tried to talk her into letting me change her into one too, but she refused.”

“Huh. Mom and Dad were cautious about it at first. They grounded me and Meredith for using it without permission and they didn’t use it, or let us use it again, until a whole year had passed and we knew more about what you could and couldn’t do with the machines. And then they gave us some rules about using them. But after that, they made each other younger and eventually started experimenting with other stuff.”

“Like switching sexes?”

“Yeah. They kept it private and short-term, and didn’t tell us about it until just recently.” She told Savannah about how her parents had come to Metamorphoses for lunch as two single guys, and confessed the spying to her and Meredith at supper that night. “And then a few days later they spent a week as the opposite sex. And I think a little younger than usual, too. Mom told me it was going to be a whole month, so Dad could experience having a period, but Dad bailed early because your dad wanted to talk on the phone and he didn’t want to do that with a girl voice.”

“Huh. What rules do you have to follow?”

“We can’t venn with anybody we haven’t known for at least five years. And if we make a change for more than a day, we have to discuss it with them ahead of time. It was a real ordeal to talk them into letting me change into an animate doll for this school year.”

“I’m only allowed to venn with Mom or Dad, or maybe Will later on when he can use the machines. They didn’t say anything about what you can change into?”

“No, not really.”

“Mom and Dad won’t let me venn into anything inanimate — not that I really want to. I don’t know if they would consider a living doll to be against the rules, though.

“I won’t tell them if you won’t.”

“Let me think about it. Who knows if we’ll have a chance.”

They were quiet for a while, and I thought they might have fallen asleep, when Savannah said, “Sophia?” very quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think it would be okay if I ask Meredith some questions about transgender stuff?”

Pause. “Yeah, if you’re respectful and you back off if she’s uncomfortable with it. Maybe you should look stuff up on the Internet first and ask her only about the stuff you didn’t understand?”

“I have looked stuff up, but some of it’s kind of confusing. There’s a girl at my school who’s transgender, but the Venn machine won’t let her use it yet. I don’t really know her well, but she’s a friend of a friend, so sooner or later I’ll probably be spending more time with her, and I’d like to not mess up and say something wrong.”

“Okay. Just ask her sometime tomorrow when it’s just us girls around.”

Quiet again, and before long, regular breathing. And then cute little snores.

 

---

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I thought about what Sophia and Savannah had talked about last night, about their fathers and their long estrangement and how they were trying to be friends again now. Would it be like that between me and Nathan when I made contact again after I turned eighteen?

 

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Not long after dawn on Thanksgiving day, I heard Mrs. Ramsey bustling around in the kitchen hours before Sophia or Savannah got up. I thought about my parents and Nathan. Would they be spending Thanksgiving with Grandpa and Grandma Wallace, or Grandpa and Grandma McNeill, or would it be just the three of them at home? Mom would probably be taking the turkey out of the freezer to thaw pretty soon, whoever’s house they were staying at. If I’d been able to participate in the Ramseys’ Thanksgiving, I don’t think I would have missed my family’s Thanksgiving nearly as much. I kept reminding myself that Thanksgiving with my family wouldn’t be as much fun as it used to be if I was recovering from the trauma of conversion therapy and terrified of showing an inch of my real self. It didn’t help.

I thought about what Sophia and Savannah had talked about last night, about their fathers and their long estrangement and how they were trying to be friends again now. Would it be like that between me and Nathan when I made contact again after I turned eighteen? Or would Nathan not want anything to do with me after I’d come out as trans — or after I’d run away and worried our parents half to death — and we wouldn’t talk again until we were Eric and Justin’s age, if then?

Then there were voices from the living room or kitchen. Someone else was awake, too. Then the doorbell: Eric and Vanessa returning from the hotel. A little while after that, Sophia rolled over in bed, blinked, and then jumped up and ran from the room.

She returned five minutes later, grumbling, “I hate organic bodies. Having to wait for the bathroom — needing the bathroom — I’m going back to the doll body for good after this.” Savannah didn’t reply, apparently still sound asleep, and I didn’t reply either, just in case Savannah wasn’t as sound asleep as she looked. I did nod sympathetically, though, as Savannah’s head was turned away from me. Sophia rubbed my back with a finger, then gathered some clothes and returned to the bathroom.

Savannah still hadn’t gotten up or showed signs of waking when a gangly prepubescent boy, presumably her brother Aiden, came in and bent down to shake her shoulder. “Wake up, sleepyhead!” he said, much too loudly. Savannah rolled over and scrunched deeper into the sleeping bag.

Aiden shook her again, then started singing what sounded like the theme song to some cartoon. Not something I’d seen or had heard of, probably something that was new since I was his age and watching cartoons. Savannah groaned and punched him, then scrunched back up in the sleeping bag. He scooted back out of arm’s reach and kept singing.

“Get out, squirt,” Sophia said, coming back in. “I’ll make sure she gets up.”

“You better,” he said. “Or I’ll come back and sing all thirty-four verses.”

“No way it has that many.”

“It does! I found six verses on YouTube and I wrote the others myself.”

“You’re a regular Irving Berlin, aren’t you?”

“Who’s Irving Berlin?”

“A guy who wrote a lot of songs. Scoot.”

Staying still was much easier for me than for an organic person, but not laughing at this display was one of the hardest things I’d done since I decided to trust Serena with my identity. Sophia got Savannah up, much more gently, and after sitting up and rubbing the sleep from her eyes for a couple of minutes, she collected some clothes from her suitcase and decamped to the bathroom. Sophia closed the door behind her and said to me, “I see you’ve met Aiden. I pity Savannah, having to live with him all the time.”

“And sit with him in the car for however many hours.”

“I think they said it was seven hours? Well, you should have the room to yourself for a good while now.”

“Happy Thanksgiving.”

She smiled wryly. “Happy Thanksgiving. I wish you could join us for dinner. One of the only good things about being organic... Next Thanksgiving, though.”

She left, and after thinking for a while about how things would change after I turned eighteen, I started reading.

 

* * *

 

I read Fire and Hemlock for several hours, hearing but not distinguishing sounds of conversation and clattering dishes from the living room, dining room and kitchen. The noise was loud enough at times that I considered using Sophia’s laptop; surely nobody would notice the sound of me tapping the keys? But the thought of Savannah’s duffel bag and suitcase deterred me. Who knew when she might want to come grab something from them? If she spilled something and had to change clothes in a hurry, for instance, she might notice that Sophia’s computer was active, not hibernating as it had been when they left the room that morning. So I stuck to reading.

Eventually, Sophia returned, followed a moment later by Savannah. Having gotten back into my usual position at the sound of the opening door, I watched and listened.

“So that was a thing,” Sophia said, looking a little dazed.

“Yeah,” Savannah agreed.

“Do you think he planned that?”

“No. If he’d planned it, he would have said it when he was alone with your dad. He probably did plan to say it later on when they were alone, but... I don’t know. The conversation just led there, I guess?”

“I guess we’ll know how well it turned out when they get back.”

“Yeah.”

Someone knocked on the door, and Sophia said “Come in.” Meredith came in and shut the door behind her.

“I did not expect that,” she said.

“Did you understand everything they were saying?” Savannah asked.

“Not much; they were sobbing too much to talk clearly, I guess.”

Nobody said anything more for a few moments. “Well,” Savannah said, “it’s a good thing, right? Them letting their feelings out?”

I wondered what that was about, but I could guess the general outline of it, and I decided I wouldn’t ask Sophia or Meredith about it later unless they brought it up.

“Probably,” said Meredith. “So. Sophia said you had some questions for me?”

“Yeah. Is now a good time?”

“Sure. Or we could go for a walk or a drive while we talk?”

“Uh... yeah. What’s the weather like?” All three girls simultaneously checked the weather apps on their phones. Only belatedly did Sophia pull aside the curtain and look out the window at the overcast sky and the light drizzle.

“Let’s stay here,” she said, glancing apologetically at me.

So Savannah asked Meredith several questions about gender issues, and told her about her trans friend-of-a-friend at school, and got Meredith’s advice. “The best thing you can do is just treat her like any other girl,” she said. “Use her chosen name when you talk to her and her preferred pronouns when you talk about her. Talk with her about the same kinds of things you would talk about with other girls you don’t know very well yet. Then when you get to know her better, talk about the specific things you’re both interested in.”

“Yeah,” Savannah said. “That helps. Thanks.”

They talked for a few more minutes until Meredith’s mom stuck her head in and said, “I just got a text from your dad — he says they’ll be gone a good while longer. Do y’all want to watch a movie?”

“Sure,” Savannah said. The girls went out to the living room, and Sophia shut the door behind them.

 

* * *

 

A few hours later, after I’d finished Fire and Hemlock and gotten back to the trigonometry textbook I’d been working through earlier in the week, Sophia and Savannah returned. Savannah took her pajamas out of her bag and went down the hall to the bathroom, and I turned my back while Sophia changed.

“This has been a weird day,” she commented in a low voice. “I’ll tell you about it after they leave.”

“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” I said.

“I’ll think about it, I guess. I don’t think it’s super private, but I guess I should ask Meredith what she thinks. But I just don’t think we’ll have more than a minute or two of privacy before then.”

As if on cue, Savannah knocked on the door. “Hold on,” Sophia called out. A few moments later, she tapped me on the shoulder, silently indicating I should turn around and get back in position. Once I was ready, she opened the door and Sophia came in and plopped down on the air mattress.

“Your sister is an absolute fiend at Scrabble,” she commented.

“She knows all the words,” Sophia agreed, getting into bed. “Your mom wasn’t half bad, either.”

“Yeah, she almost always wins when we play, which is why we usually play something else that the rest of us have a chance to win.”

“So do you want to try venning into an animate doll or statue tomorrow, like we were talking about yesterday?”

“Yeah. Are all the stores at the mall okay with venned customers?”

“Pretty much, as long as you’re close to human size and don’t have a weird odor or shed a lot of fur or something.”

“Then let’s do it first thing.”

“Cool. Any preferences about what your doll or statue body should look like? I can’t guarantee anything exact, but it’ll give me something to aim for.”

They talked about that for a while and gradually drifted off to sleep. The next morning, they were up early and getting ready for the Black Friday sales, not much later than on a school day, although they didn’t leave before dawn to be at their favorite store when it opened like Tim’s mom or some people I knew at church. Sophia didn’t have a chance to talk to me alone before they left, but she did manage to work some “as you know, Bob” exposition into the conversation to let me know that I wouldn’t be alone in the house and should keep a low profile; their dads and the boys would be staying at the house, at least for a while. I heard some of the menfolk watching TV, playing video games and talking in the living room for a while, but when the noises stopped after a few hours, I played it safe and didn’t assume they’d left.

When the girls returned from the Catesville Mall around five or six hours later, Sophia was back in her usual doll body, and though Savannah was back to the same body she’d worn when she arrived, I learned from their conversation that she’d spent several hours, nearly the whole shopping trip, in a doll body similar to Sophia’s. She’d enjoyed it, and wanted to try it again for a longer time, but her mom had made her change back before they returned to the house.

“It was pretty cool, staying on my feet for so long and not getting even a little tired,” she said. “And you said you barely have to sleep in that body?”

“It’s not exactly sleep, but I sort of zone out for an hour or so every night. And I can focus on studying or video editing or whatever I’m doing better than when I’ve got a bladder and appetite and hormones to distract me.”

“That would be so cool. But never eating anything...”

“You can change back for special occasions like Thanksgiving dinner or birthday cake.”

“Yeah. I don’t know. The kind of guys I’d attract looking like that are not the kind of guys I’d want to date, though.”

“I’ve sworn off high school boys. They’re too immature. I’ll start dating again in college, or maybe grad school.”

Savannah giggled. “Let me know how long you stick to that plan.”

That led to some discussion of Sophia’s short and stormy dating history and the boys Savannah liked but hadn’t gone on any dates with yet, until Meredith came and told them supper was ready.

 

* * *

 

That night, as Savannah laid down, she asked Sophia, “Are you gonna sit in the dark all night, even though you don’t need but an hour of sleep?”

“No. I’ll sit with you and talk until you’re ready to fall asleep, then I’ll slip out quietly and read or listen to podcasts in the storage room until morning.”

“I wish Mom’d let me stay in that doll body the rest of the weekend.”

“Maybe next time we hang out. I have a feeling we’ll be coming to see y’all next year sometime.”

“That’ll be neat.”

They talked about their plans for Saturday, what would be involved in the different careers that Savannah had vaguely considered, and the pros and cons of animate doll bodies for another hour or so. Then, hearing Savannah’s little snores, Sophia gathered up a few things — including the books I’d been reading, and me — and slipped quietly out, tiptoeing down the hall to the room where her parents stored the things they bought low, at yard sales and small-town thrift stores, and sold high, mostly on eBay. It was stuffed to the eyebrows with bookshelves and boxes, and there was a small desk with a docking station for a laptop, a bunch of cushioned envelopes and other packing material, and so forth. Sophia carefully set down the stack of things of which I was the crown and I climbed off to let her sort out the books and plug in her laptop.

“Finally,” she said. “Savannah’s much cooler than I would have expected, but I’m glad to have some privacy again.”

“I could go back to your room, or read in the garage, if you want to be alone.”

“No, it’s cool. You’re there when I want to show you something cool I’ve found, but you don’t talk nonstop like Savannah.”

“That’s probably because y’all just met. Back when I was figuring myself out and getting to know you and Meredith better, I talked a lot more.”

“Still not as much as Savannah. But yeah.”

She had said she might tell me what had happened on Thanksgiving when we finally got some privacy together, but it sounded like she didn’t want to talk just then, so I didn’t ask. She checked her social media and email, then let me use the laptop to check mine, and we settled down to our books, occasionally sharing a funny or interesting quote but mostly leaving each other alone. Around five or six a.m., I reminded her to relax, and we closed our books and eventually fugued out for a while.

When we heard voices from the rest of the house, Sophia said, “Do you want me to leave you here for a while? I’m gonna go hang out with whoever’s making breakfast, and after Savannah drags herself out of bed I’ll take my stuff back to my room.”

“Sure,” I said.

A while later, Savannah looked into the room. “Hey, Sophia, I’m — oh.” She seemed like she was about to go, then came on into the room and looked at the shelves stuffed with old and rare books, collectible edition Coke and Pepsi bottles, dolls and action figures, and so on. After a minute or two of that, she glanced at the desk and saw me sitting next to Sophia’s laptop.

“Huh,” she said. She picked me up and looked at me closer, then put me back down and left the room.

A little later, Sophia came and took me, our books, and her laptop back to her room. “She asked me why I took you in there with me,” she said. “I told her you were my study mascot.”

“I’m honored.”

Sophia smiled. “I’ll be back in a few hours. We’re going to the mall in Greensboro, and probably to Country Park after the weather warms up.”

“Have fun.”

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who all do you know there?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What time is it?”

“Just past seven.”

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

“Yeah. Need any help?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

* * *

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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“Wake up! It’s Christmas morning! You just missed Santa Claus!” Mrs. Ramsey called out from the hallway.

 

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When Christmas approached, I asked Meredith if I could go to church with them.

“Do you want to venn into that necklace you told me about that Carmen wore to let you audit their classes?” she asked. “I’m not sure when I’d have good chances to venn you and venn you back. You might have to stay that way for several days.”

“No,” I said. “Just let me ride along in your purse and listen to the service from inside it.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

Their church was over in Catesville, so we had a long enough drive for them to sing several Christmas carols on the way there (and later, on the way home). They all had good singing voices, except for Sophia; her doll body didn’t have the vocal range that her usual human body did. That seemed like an interesting research topic to suggest to her later; for that matter, how could bodies like ours speak at all? (Or do anything else.) The Christmas Eve service was more traditional than I would have expected from what Meredith had told me about their church; there were some hymns and carols I didn’t recognize from growing up at Crossroads, but plenty that I did, and I heard different voices reading aloud from various Old Testament prophecies about Jesus’ birth and then the Gospel stories about it.

Afterward, they stopped by the library for Meredith to change Sophia back to her organic girl body for Christmas dinner. Meredith left her purse in the van while they used the Venn machine.

“Are you hungry now?” Mrs. Ramsey teased Sophia when they got back in the car.

“I gave her a big stomach and a high metabolism,” Meredith said. “She won’t let any food go to waste.”

“Let’s go,” Sophia said. “I’m starving.”

I remembered the body with the big appetite I’d asked Carmen to venn me into that first time we went to High Point for breakfast. I figured I’d see what Sophia looked like soon enough.

Sophia took her purse, and me, to her room and quickly changed clothes while I turned my back. (It looked like she’d brought a small bag of clothes into the Venn machine with her so she’d have casual clothes and sleeping clothes for the couple of days she’d stay human.) I got a brief glimpse of her before she left to join her family at supper; she was taller than her usual self, but certainly not as overweight as I’d been that day in High Point.

“Merry Christmas,” she said. “I’ll be back after a while.”

“Merry Christmas.”

 

* * *

 

She returned a few hours later with Meredith, and we talked for a few minutes, but Meredith didn’t stay long before she said she had to go to bed.

“Can I come with you?” I said, and then corrected myself. “I mean, to stay in your room overnight. I know I’ve been staying with Sophia, but she’ll be sleeping...”

“Sure,” Meredith said with a big smile that reminded me why I’d had a crush on her back when she first came out. “Hop aboard.” She held out her hands on Sophia’s desk and I crawled into them.

“Good night, Lauren,” Sophia said, and we left.

“Do you want me to put you in the closet with a book?” Meredith said once we were alone in her room.

“Not tonight,” I said. “Is it okay if you set me on your bedside table?”

“Of course.”

So she set me there and snuggled into bed. I got into my usual position, just in case Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey wanted to do something sentimental like watch their children sleep on Christmas Eve (I’d known Mom and Dad to do that once or twice, when I was trying to sleep but couldn’t), and kept her company.

Not having anything to do, I fugued out for a longer period after an hour or two of thinking. I came out of it to hear small silvery bells ringing nearby.

“Wake up! It’s Christmas morning! You just missed Santa Claus!” Mrs. Ramsey called out from the hallway. Meredith didn’t wake up right away, but rolled over in her sleep. I decided to take a chance, and jumped over from the bedside table onto the bed, then climbed onto her shoulder and touched her ear.

She sat up right away, and I fell off.

“I’m up,” she said loudly, and looked around. “Oh, good morning, Lauren.” She set me back on the bedside table.

“Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas. I need to go pee, then... I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

“It’s okay, I understand.”

I was alone for a while, and made my way over to Meredith’s desk to read. From the living room, I heard conversation and laughter as everyone opened their presents. Then, from the sound of clattering dishes, it sounded like they ate breakfast and washed up. I didn’t see Meredith again, or Sophia, for several hours.

When I did, I got each of them to get out the gifts I’d gotten for the other one the last time we went to Reidsville. Sophia gave me Sarah Pinsker’s new novel. Meredith had made me a tiny Santa hat, sized for my statue body. After we opened our presents and thanked each other, we chatted for a while and watched Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer on Meredith’s laptop.

 

* * *

 

The regional science fair was near the beginning of February, just before Sophia’s birthday, and she was busy working on her project and presentation. Since one of the judges last year had given one point to all the projects that used Venn machines, putting Sophia out of the running for the top places even though she got high points from all the other judges, she had decided to focus on something that didn’t involve venning. She had been doing a census of insect populations in various places around Mynatt County all the previous spring, summer, and fall, and that winter, but especially after Christmas, she was working on collating all that data, comparing it to published insect censuses from other places in North Carolina and neighboring states, and drawing conclusions.

But she hadn’t stopped doing science about animate doll/statue venns, either. She was regularly interviewing me and her other long-term venn subjects, as well as refining her venning technique to get animate dolls and statues with desirable combinations of properties.

“I’m going to keep doing Venn science on my own for my last year and a half of high school,” she said, “and see what I can do about finding a professor at UNC Chapel Hill I can work with on the Venn machines.”

For the science fair, I asked Sophia to venn me into a necklace like Carmen had worn on Biology lab days, but to let Meredith wear me that day, so I could see more of the fair as well as Sophia’s presentation. I was impressed with her professionalism. I had been studying biology more than the other sciences because that was the majority of the science books available in the Ramsey household due to Sophia’s interests, and she had been talking about her work for months, so I was able to follow what she was doing, as well as to understand a lot of the other projects. Sophia’s project scored well, though it didn’t place high enough to go to the state fair. I figured it was probably because she’d been dividing her time between her real, Venn-related research interests and the insect census.

Meredith didn’t want to venn me at the library in town, so I wound up being in necklace form for two weeks, from the weekend before the fair to the weekend after. My time as a necklace was bookended by two outings as a mostly-human girl in Reidsville and Kernersville, and in addition to the science fair, I attended classes with Sophia and Meredith and saw what their jobs at Metamorphoses and the Fisherman’s Cove were like. I changed back just in time for Sophia’s birthday; Meredith, Sophia and I had a small birthday celebration in Kernersville a few days before her birthday, and she had a larger one with her parents, siblings, and friends the weekend afterward.

After I returned to my dragon statue body, I counted the days: only fifty-seven left. I went back to the self-study courses I’d finished earlier, and the courses I’d taken in my freshman and sophomore years of high school, and reviewed that material for the rest of February and March. Sophia, having finished with her science fair project, had more time to help me study.

One evening in early April, with just a week to go until my birthday, I was fretting about what would happen after I turned eighteen, obsessively going over our plans again, and Meredith and Sophia were trying to comfort and reassure me.

“I’ll take you to work with me,” Meredith said, “and after work, I’ll venn you into a girl body that looks enough like your original body that Mom and Dad will recognize you. Then you’ll come home with me and we’ll tell Mom and Dad you showed up near the end of my shift, and you need a place to stay for a while. It’s going to be fine, Lauren. I’m positive Mom and Dad will let you stay with us.”

“And if not, you can stay with Carmen,” Sophia pointed out. We’d hung out with Carmen for a few hours one day during their spring break, a few weeks earlier, and learned more about how their plans to rent a place with Serena during their junior year were shaping up. They’d be moving in directly from the dorms at the end of the semester, and Bailey would be joining them and splitting the rent.

“Yeah... I mean, I know your parents will accept me as trans, I just don’t know what they’ll think about me running away and living on my own. Especially when I won’t tell them where I’ve been for the past fourteen months.”

“Just tell them you need to protect the people who helped you,” Meredith said. “Like we talked about.”

“But they’re going to ask why the people who helped me for the past fourteen months can’t help any more now that I’m eighteen,” I fretted. “And I can’t answer that.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they figure out you’ve been here all along,” Sophia said. “But they won’t say anything. They don’t want me and Meredith going to jail for helping you and lying to the police — I don’t know if we could still be prosecuted for whatever kind of crime that was after you turn eighteen, but if so, Meredith would be prosecuted as an adult.”

I impulsively hugged Meredith’s hand (I was sitting on Sophia’s bed, with the sisters sitting on either side of me). “I don’t want you to get hurt!”

“It will be fine,” she said, picking me up and hugging me back. “You’ll see.”

And then, seven days of intense worry and study later, my eighteenth birthday dawned. It was Palm Sunday. The Ramseys went to church, and I took my stroll around the house, seeing the Easter decorations and inevitably being reminded again of Mom’s decoration traditions. That hurt, but maybe not as much as seeing the Christmas decorations, for some reason? I paused before a little diorama of three crosses and an open, empty tomb, and prayed desperately that Meredith’s parents would help me out — at least help witness my new identity, and hopefully give me a place to stay until I could find a job that would pay for a share of an apartment with some other girls.

Then I went back to studying until the Ramseys got home. After they ate lunch, I got in Meredith’s purse and went to work with her, quietly reading in her car until it got dark. And finally, at nine-thirty at night, Meredith and I approached the Venn machine outside the library. I hadn’t been there since the first time Meredith had transformed me into a dragon-girl, almost two years ago.

She took me out of her purse and I saw the machine and the handful of people waiting to use it illuminated by the parking lot lights. There weren’t many at this time on a school/work night, but I guessed most of them were returning to their baseline body or their preferred body from their history after a weekend of fun; most of those in line were in fairly odd shapes. Two people with clusters of tentacles for arms, two nagas, a bunny-girl, and a robot, somewhat humanoid from the waist up but resting on treads rather than legs. When we approached near enough for Meredith’s face to be illuminated, the bunny waved. “Hi, Meredith!”

“Hi! Remind me who you are?”

“Oh, I’m Anna — we met at your sister’s birthday party. I work with her at Metamorphoses.”

“Right, I remember. You were the Patchwork Girl of Oz?”

“Yep! I love being hyperflexible. I’d wear that form to work, too, but it’s not strong enough to carry trays.”

They chatted for a few moments, then Anna resumed her previous conversation with her robot companion. I stayed still and quiet.

The people ahead of us finished up, Anna and the robot turning into ordinary-looking college-aged girls, and Meredith set the machine for three years. She set me down just inside the machine and then went into the other booth.

“Okay,” she said. “The second to last human girl from your history, right? The one you were when we went to Reidsville back in December?”

“Yeah.”

She picked that form from my history, pressed the green button, and I was human again. For more than a couple of hours. Depending on various circumstances, I might keep this body for months before it would be convenient to venn into a dragon-girl or anything else. I spent the time while the green button waned stretching and taking deep breaths, things I couldn’t do while in statue form, and gave myself a hug before stepping out and following Meredith to her car.

When we pulled up in her driveway, though, and I went to unbuckle my seat belt, my hands started trembling and I had to try several times to get it unbuckled. Meredith noticed and reached over to put her hand on mine.

“It will be okay,” she said. “I promise.”

I wiped away a tear. “Yeah. Your parents are good people. I just — let’s go.”

Once we got out of the car, she gave me a hug before we walked up to the door. I relaxed into the hug, which we held for a good twenty or thirty seconds, and felt a lot better by the time Meredith opened the door and I followed her in.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey were snuggling on the sofa, watching a movie.

“Welcome home, Meredith — oh. Who’s your friend?” Implicit in the question was “and what’s she doing here without prior notice on a school night,” and I got nervous again (though not as much as I’d been before the hug).

“Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey,” I said. “I’m Lauren Wallace. Peter and Kathy Wallace’s youngest child.”

I’d rehearsed that clever way of telling them who I was without using my deadname. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey stared at me in shock. They opened their mouths a couple of times without saying anything before Mr. Ramsey blurted out, “Where have you been all this time?” Mrs. Ramsey belatedly paused the movie.

“I — I’d rather not go into detail about that, sir? I don’t want to get the people who helped me into trouble. I’ve crashed in different friends’ houses and apartments, usually venned into a small body so I wouldn’t take up much room or eat much.” Pretty much true, if a bit misleading.

Mrs. Ramsey said, “I’m so glad to see you’re safe. Let me think — you must be eighteen by now, right?”

“I turned eighteen today. I was hoping I could get you to help me prove my identity and get legal ID and all. You have experience helping Meredith change her name, and you knew me before — I mean, knew me in person. Some of the people I’ve been living with had never met me in person before, so they couldn’t testify to a judge or a DMV clerk or whoever that I’m the same person.”

“All right. I gather from the fact that you’re here at ten o’clock on a Sunday night that you need a place to stay, too?”

“Um, yeah... if it’s not too much trouble. Or we could go to the library and Meredith could give me a body that would be comfortable sleeping in the park —” I had not rehearsed that bit. It just popped out as I got more nervous.

Meredith punched my arm. “Don’t be silly. You can sleep on the sofa bed until we get something better sorted out. Right?” she asked, turning to her parents.

“Right,” Mrs. Ramsey said. Mr. Ramsey was kneading his brow. “We’ll work out all the details tomorrow. For tonight, I think we should just celebrate the fact that you’re safe and healthy. Have you had any kind of birthday celebration today?”

“Uh, no.”

“Then if you’re not too tired, how about we do that?”

I smiled. This might work out after all.

 

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My 219,000-word short fiction collection, The Weight of Silence and Other Stories is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors 80% royalties, vs 70% or less at Amazon.)

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It was too short notice to make a birthday cake, Mrs. Ramsey said, but they had a couple of boxes of Girl Scout cookies that they’d bought from the scouts at church the previous Sunday, and we nibbled on those and they sang “Happy Birthday” for me, and I cried, and everybody hugged me.

 

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Sophia got home from work a few minutes later and joined in the hasty, makeshift birthday party, pretending to be shocked and overjoyed at my “unexpected” arrival. True to Mrs. Ramsey’s promise, she didn’t question me any more about where I’d been, and didn’t talk about how I’d earn a living or finish my education or whether and how we’d contact my parents. When Mr. Ramsey brought those topics up, she gently suggested we save them for tomorrow.

It was too short notice to make a birthday cake, Mrs. Ramsey said, but they had a couple of boxes of Girl Scout cookies that they’d bought from the scouts at church the previous Sunday, and we nibbled on those and they sang “Happy Birthday” for me, and I cried, and everybody hugged me. Then they unfolded the sofa bed for me, got out some pillows, sheets and a blanket, and made it up.

“Good night, Lauren,” Meredith said just before she went to bed. “I’m so happy for you!”

“I’m so glad to be here,” I said, and we hugged again. “Good night.”

 

* * *

 

Monday morning, Meredith was up early, showering and making breakfast. I woke up at the smell of cooking (I hadn’t smelled anything in months!) and pitched in. Sophia had been up almost all night, of course, and hung out with us once we sat down to eat. Then Mrs. Ramsey got up and joined us, followed a few minutes later by Mr. Ramsey.

“So,” Mrs. Ramsey asked, “have you thought through your plans? What are you going to do next?”

“Well,” I said, “some of the details depend on how much it’s convenient for y’all to help me — giving me rides and stuff, I mean. I need to prove my identity, get my name and gender marker changed, and get a new driver’s license, and I need to find a job. Hopefully in walking distance.” Their house was about six blocks south of the downtown business district, and four blocks west of a state highway that, while largely residential along that stretch, had businesses along it too. Brocksboro was way too small to have public transit. “And I need to take my GED. I’ve been studying for it.”

“I was thinking about enrolling you in high school after we get your identity sorted out,” Mr. Ramsey said. “But... let me think. You missed the last few months of your junior year, didn’t you? Have you been going to school anywhere else?”

“No, it wasn’t like I could attend classes when I was having to keep a low profile. But I’ve been studying on my own, like I said.”

“That raises another question,” he said. “Erin has convinced me not to pry about where you’ve been for the last fourteen months.” He shared a look with her, then met my eyes again. “But would you mind telling us why you left? Meredith and Sophia hinted that your parents might... well, that you might not be safe at home once they found out you’d been venning, but she wouldn’t say more without your permission.”

I told them about the conversation I’d overheard when Mom and Dad had talked about how they ought to send Meredith to conversion therapy, and how I’d looked that up later and been horrified at the idea of torturing kids into being cis and straight. “And I knew if they found out I’d venned into a girl, they’d probably do that to me, too. So I left. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest or bravest thing I’ve ever done, but it turned out okay.”

“It was dangerous,” Mrs. Ramsey pointed out. “The online friends you trusted to venn you into an unrecognizable form... you never know people online as well as you think. They might have turned you into almost anything. Not to mention hitchhiking to California.”

So they’d apparently heard, either from my parents or more likely from mutual friends at their old church, about the letter I’d gotten Tatiana to remail.

“I don’t want to give away too much and get my friends in trouble,” I said. “But it wasn’t as dangerous as you’re probably assuming.”

Mr. Ramsey’s eyes narrowed, and he looked at Meredith and Sophia. “Did you... venn her into something lightweight and mail her to this friend in California?”

“No,” Sophia said, and Meredith echoed her a moment later. In her doll body, Sophia had a nigh-perfect poker face, but Meredith’s expression was giving away that she knew more than she was saying.

“Let it go,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “She’s safe now. You said you’d been preparing for your GED?” she continued, turning back to me.

“Yes, with books and online self-study courses. I recently looked up the upcoming test dates around here...” I told them when the next couple of GED tests would be administered.

“I think it would be useful for you to have some external feedback on how well you’ve prepared for the tests,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “I think you should consider enrolling in high school again once we get your identity straightened out. If you can take exams as part of your high school courses and get a regular diploma from Eastern Mynatt, that would make it easier to get into college than a GED.”

“That would be good,” I said tentatively. I’d been so sure I couldn’t get into high school again after dropping out that I hadn’t even bothered to check. After over a year of studying on my own, I wasn’t super keen on going back to classroom pacing... and crowded classrooms... but I’d have to get used to it again in college if not now. And it would be worth it if it improved my chances of getting into the college I wanted, even if I had to “repeat” my senior year. Maybe not if I had to repeat my junior year as well, though?

About then, Meredith and Sophia left for school, giving me hugs again before they walked out to the car. Then Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and I continued our conversation.

“We talked about this last night,” Mr. Ramsey said. “You’re welcome to stay with us until you have a better place to stay, but there are some conditions.”

“Okay?”

“One is that you start looking for a job. Once you find one, we’ll negotiate rent you can afford.”

“It won’t be much,” Mrs. Ramsey said with a slight smile. “It wouldn’t be fair to charge the price of a studio apartment when all we can offer is a sofa bed and a bathroom you’ll share with two other people — three when Caleb’s home.”

“Sure, that’s fair.”

“The second is that you work on continuing your education. Enrolling in high school again if possible, taking the GED if necessary, making definite plans toward college. It sounds like you’ve already been working on that.”

“Yeah, I was already planning all that.”

“The third is that you get counseling. We’ll pay for the first few sessions, and if you have trouble affording it once you get a job, we’ll continue to help pay for it.”

“Okay. That might help.”

“And we think you should let your parents know you’re safe. You don’t necessarily have to meet them in person, but if you want to, we would be happy to be with you to... help smooth things over.”

“I was planning to do that. I sent them a letter once, and I promised to contact them again after I turned eighteen. And I’d really like it if y’all came with me to meet my parents... not at their house, but maybe at a restaurant?” I remembered the last time Mom, Dad, Nathan and I had had lunch with the Ramseys, how loud Dad had gotten and how the waitress and the other diners had stared at us. “On second thought, a restaurant might not be a great idea. But not at their house.”

“Do you want me to call them and let them know you’ve been in contact with us and you want to meet them sometime?”

“Yeah. I... I’m nervous about it, but I think I should get it over with.” I was wringing my hands; Mrs. Ramsey noticed, and patted them reassuringly.

“It doesn’t have to be today. We can sort out proving your identity first, if you like. But it should probably be soon.”

“Yeah. Maybe in a few days, after I get my new identity documents sorted out? I’d like to show them I’ve already done that.”

 

* * *

 

A few hours later, after we did some research and printed out some PDF forms, and Mr. Ramsey talked on the phone with his lawyer, we showered and got ready to go. Mrs. Ramsey told me I could borrow whatever I wanted from Meredith’s closet; “I’m sure she won’t mind, and you’re roughly the same size.”

As I went into the hall bathroom with the clothes I’d picked out and closed the door behind me, I realized I was about to see my girl body naked for the first time. I’d been a girl for an hour or two here and there over the last few years, but it was going on thirteen hours now, the longest time I’d ever been a girl — unless you counted the months in my almost-a-boy body. I’d used the toilet as a girl or dragon-girl several times, and I’d changed from the street clothes the Venn machine had given me into borrowed pajamas last night, but I’d never stripped down completely, much less showered like this.

After staring at myself in the mirror for a few moments, I finally bit the bullet and started taking off the pajamas Meredith had loaned me. It took a few moments to figure out how to undo the venned bra — venned clothes sometimes have unusual fasteners. This turned out to be something like Velcro, but without the characteristic ripping sound. With a strong enough tug at just the right angle, it came silently apart, while as much force as I could exert pulling on it at other angles had no effect. Cool.

Geeking out over the engineering of the bra had almost distracted me from the thrill of seeing my breasts, but not quite. I enjoyed the sight for a moment, and touched them gingerly, then finished taking off my pajama pants, socks, and panties. I’d seen my lady-bits before, of course, every time I peed or showered when I’d been living with Mom and Dad and going to school as a secret girl. But it was still nice to see them again, properly framed this time by girlish legs and wide hips.

I took a longer shower than I usually do, and maybe used up all the Ramseys’ hot water, but can you blame me?

 

* * *

 

At eleven on a Monday, there wasn’t any line for the Venn machine at the library. There was a white guy in his early thirties, wearing a business suit. He was standing near the machine, but not as though he were waiting to use it. We approached him and Mr. Ramsey said, “Ben, it’s good to see you.”

“Justin, Erin, hi. This is the girl you were telling me about?”

“Yes, we’d like to have you witness her long-term venn.”

“All right. You understand you’ll need to cancel your current change so we can all see your baseline body, then have Justin and Erin attest your identity, and then venn you into the form you want?”

“Yes, sir.” I wasn’t looking forward to it, but hopefully this would be the last time.

“All right.”

We set up the machine, and when the doors opened, I went in alone, braced myself, and pressed the red button. A moment later I was back in my original body, wearing the raincoat and stocking cap (but no longer with the wads of gum in my cheeks; one of the times I’d changed back after being a necklace, I’d spat out the gum into some tissue). I shivered unhappily, but I reminded myself this was the last time, and walked out.

“I guess it was cold and raining when you changed?” the lawyer asked. I nodded nervously. “Okay, I’m going to take a photo of you. Stand just there — so I can get part of the Venn machine and the sign in front of the library in the background — there. Smile. Wait, take off the hat first.”

I forced a smile and took off the stocking cap, and he took a couple of photos, one full figure with the Venn machine in the background, and one close-up of my face.

“Okay, now you’ll need to fingerprint this form...”

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had to swear that I was the same person they’d known for years under my deadname, and sign a document to that effect. The whole time, I was feeling how wrong my body was and trying to be patient. But just a few minutes later, I was back in the machine with Mrs. Ramsey, and it was only then that I realized the flaw in this plan. I should have stalled somehow, done this later when Meredith or Sophia was available to venn me.

“History,” she said, and looked over my recent forms — then her eyes got wide and she stared at a point on the screen in front of her.

We were both quiet, her staring, me stammering, for a few moments. Then: “You were with us the whole time! That dragon statue — the one Meredith gave to Sophia at some point —”

“Please don’t tell anybody,” I said. “I don’t want Meredith and Sophia to go to jail or something.”

“I won’t,” she said. “I might talk with the girls about it... or Justin... but nobody else. I need to think about it. Wow. I just... you must have been able to move and see and all, like Sophia’s doll body, right? Unless you were lying about working toward your GED all this time...”

“No, that’s right. I would just freeze into the same position every time I heard someone opening the door.”

“Wow. Okay, let’s set that aside. I see several human girls here, a necklace — wait, wasn’t Meredith wearing that a few weeks ago?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“Anyway. I also see some nonhuman and hybrid forms. Can I assume you want the girl form you were wearing last night and this morning?”

“Yes, please. And thank you for not telling anybody.”

“You need to be careful who sees your history... but I don’t suppose all that many people have seen your dragon statue form. Justin, some of Meredith and Sophia’s friends, Caleb... oh, and Savannah.”

“Yeah. Originally it was going to be Meredith who venned me when we proved my identity, but I didn’t realize you would rush to do it while they’re at school... could you please finish this? I’m getting —” It wasn’t the full-blown panic attack I’d had the first time I’d reverted to my baseline form after a day as a necklace, but I was feeling pretty gross.

“Sorry. I just wanted a few moments to talk privately, but...” She touched one of the images in front of her, then the green button, and I was back to the girl form I’d refined over the past couple of years. I sighed with relief.

“Thanks.”

The chance for me to transform her timed out and the doors opened.

“What took so long?” Mr. Ramsey asked. “You were in there a long time to just pick the most recent form from her history.”

“I saw some interesting things in her Venn history, and we talked about some of them for a few minutes.” She looked thoughtful, and I figured she was uncomfortable hiding the truth from her husband even temporarily, but didn’t want to talk about it in front of Ben.

The lawyer took a couple more photos and got me to fingerprint the next row of boxes on the form, then we all signed it, and he notarized it, and we returned to the house.

“There’s a lot more to do,” Mr. Ramsey said, “and we’ll help with it as much as we can, but we can’t drop our own work entirely. Being self-employed gives us the flexibility to do things like this, but if we do it too often, paying the mortgage and buying groceries becomes a problem.”

I spent the next couple of hours calling and making appointments, and filling out forms online — preparing for my name change and trying to get into high school again. Once I’d done everything I could with that for the moment, I went and asked Mrs. Ramsey, who was packing up things to send to customers, if there was anything I could do to help around the house.

“I can tell I’m going to love having you as a boarder,” she said with a smile. “Sure. Check and see if any of the trash cans are full, and take the bags out to the big can. And there’s clean towels and washcloths in the dryer — they go in the closet of the hall bathroom.”

“Okay, sure,” and I went to work. That occupied me until Meredith got home from school; Sophia had a short shift at Metamorphoses after school on Mondays.

“Meredith,” I heard Mrs. Ramsey say, “we need to sort out some clothes for Lauren.” I put away the last of the washcloths I’d been working on and went into the living room, where Meredith had just set down her bookbag.

“Sure,” she said. She glanced over at me as I came into the room and smiled.

“I figure you and Sophia and I can all spare a few things we don’t wear all that often,” Mrs. Ramsey continued. “Put them in a bag and let Lauren go in the machine with them, and let it tailor them to fit her.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Okay,” Meredith said. “I’ll do that tonight. I don’t have any homework due tomorrow.”

“I’ll go pick out some of my own things after supper,” Mrs. Ramsey said.

“I’m done with the trash and the towels,” I said. “Do you want help fixing supper?”

“It’s Justin and Meredith’s turn tonight,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “And my turn to clean up after, since Sophia’s working tonight. You can help me with that, and during supper we can sort out a new cooking and cleaning rotation that includes you. Did your parents teach you to cook?”

“Just a few simple things.”

“Well, you can learn more here.”

 

---

---

 

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Then she asked me what high school I’d gone to before I dropped out, and apologetically asked me for my deadname so she could ask them for my records, and made an appointment for me to come back the next day for placement tests. I was in!

 

---

---

 

While Meredith and her dad were fixing supper, I read for a little while. After supper and cleaning up, I went to Meredith’s room and looked through her closets and drawers with her. She let me pick almost anything I wanted except a few favorites, but I tried to pick things I hadn’t seen her wearing often. Two pairs of shoes, one casual and one dressy, several skirts and blouses, a few jeans and T-shirts, a coat and hat, and one dress that looked wonderful to me but which I’d never seen her wear.

“We might want to tweak that one beyond just resizing it to fit you,” she said with a laugh. “I wound up with that when Sophia and I were experimenting with changing some of my old boy clothes into girl clothes. It started out as a Mandelbrot set T-shirt, but the design had faded to where you could hardly tell what it was. The material still feels that soft, but the machine must have taken a cue from the fractal, because the pattern and cut are so ridiculously elaborate... I think I wore it on a date exactly once, and I felt so silly I haven’t done anything with it again. The venn’s going to expire later this year, but after we resize it for you and tone it down a little, it would last another three years.”

“It’s perfect,” I said, holding it up to my chin and looking at myself in the mirror on her closet door, admiring the frills that had frills with smaller frills of their own until they were barely big enough to see, each size of frill a different color that went well with the colors of the larger and smaller frills. “I guess I wouldn’t be able to wear it very often, but if you don’t want it, I’d love to have it as is.”

“You’re welcome.”

When we’d picked out a week or so worth of outfits, she opened up her drawers and asked me what type of panties and bras I liked. I blushed and said, “Um, wouldn’t that be kind of... unsanitary?”

“No, it’s fine. When you transform clothes in the Venn machine, whether you’re restyling them or just resizing them, they come out completely sterile. Better than any washing machine.”

“Huh. I bet you could save a lot on laundry that way if you don’t have a washer and dryer.” That might be an issue for me as a college student making ends meet on a shoestring budget.

“Yeah, unless you forget when the venns are going to expire and they suddenly all smell like you’ve worn them twenty times without washing them.”

“Oof.”

When Sophia got home, we hung out for a little while before Meredith and I went to bed. Sophia promised to pick out some things for my approval. After Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey finished the TV show they’d been watching since Mrs. Ramsey and I finished cleaning up, Meredith helped me unfold the sofa bed and I laid down. It had been a long day, and a bit stressful, but pretty neat too. I’d been trying to be unobtrusive and helpful to avoid making them regret taking me in, and going back to my original body for a few minutes hadn’t been at all my idea of a good time. And I was dreading the upcoming meeting with my parents; I still didn’t know when, but I figured it would be soon. But still, I was a human girl again, for two days in a row now, and looking forward to being a dragon-girl again before long, for the first time in over a year. And the Ramseys were willing to help way beyond what I’d dared hope for. Things were looking up.

 

* * *

 

Tuesday, not long after Meredith and Sophia left for school, Mr. Ramsey and I went to the library to resize the clothes Meredith, Sophia, and Mrs. Ramsey had given me. Then I changed into a professional-looking navy blue skirt and blouse in the library restroom, and we drove to Catesville to visit the DMV and file one of the forms I’d filled out the day before, for an updated driver’s license. I was also upgrading from the provisional driver’s license I’d gotten at sixteen to a full adult license. Then to the courthouse annex to file for my name and gender change. Those bureaucratic chores took up several hours, and we stopped for burgers on the way back.

Before returning to Brocksboro, we stopped by the bank and I tried to use my old debit card to check if I still had access to my savings account from before I ran away. Not surprisingly, I found that the account had been closed. I’d have to talk to Mom and Dad about that.

Our next stop was Eastern Mynatt High School. I’d only been there for football games before, never to the offices. We didn’t have to wait for long before the secretary said the assistant principal was ready for me.

“Do you want me to come back with you?” Mr. Ramsey asked.

I took a deep breath. “I... I think I can do this.”

He gave me an encouraging smile and I followed the secretary down the hall to an office. Assistant Principal Novacek was either really young for her job, or she’d been rejuvenated with the Venn machine; she didn’t look any older than Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey.

“Good morning, Miss Wallace,” she said. “I understand that you dropped out of high school last year, and want to enroll again?”

“Yes. Can I do that?”

“North Carolina law allows you to continue going to school until you turn twenty-one. But we look at individual cases to decide whether it would be best for you to come back to high school, or enroll in the Adult High School program at Mynatt Community College, or take the GED. Can you tell me something about the circumstances of your dropping out and what you’ve been doing since then?”

“Okay. Well, I’m transgender. I figured that with the help of a friend who came out — um, almost three years ago now? But my parents were so bigoted against trans people that I was afraid to tell them. Do you know anything about conversion therapy?”

She said, “I’ve heard of it,” with a distasteful expression.

“Well, they were talking about how my friend’s parents should have sent her to conversion therapy, and I was pretty sure they’d do the same with me if they found out. So I was planning to wait until I was eighteen to venn into a girl body long-term, but then somebody I knew from school saw me venning into a girl — I’d been doing that every few weekends, just for a couple of hours at a time — and I knew my parents would find out about it soon, maybe within hours. So I ran away and laid low until I turned eighteen.”

“I see. I won’t say that was a good idea, but you were faced with hard choices no one should have to make... Anyway, that’s past now. You said you recently turned eighteen?”

“Yes, this past Sunday.”

“How have you been spending your time while... laying low?”

“Mostly studying for the GED, ma’am. I didn’t really think I could go back to high school until recently.

“What subjects have you been studying?”

We talked about the subjects I’d studied and some of the specific books I’d read and online courses I’d taken. Then she asked me what high school I’d gone to before I dropped out, and apologetically asked me for my deadname so she could ask them for my records, and made an appointment for me to come back the next day for placement tests. I was in! And if I did well on the tests — I was pretty confident about most of them — I might be able to enroll for the last few months of senior year and graduate at the same time as Meredith.

I was beaming when I returned to the outer office where Mr. Ramsey was waiting for me, reading something on his phone. He looked up and saw my smile.

“I take it everything went well?”

“I need to be here tomorrow at nine for placement tests. It’s going to be several hours.”

“We’ll get you here.”

We went back to the house and he got back to work while I spent the remaining hours until supper reviewing for tomorrow’s tests.

 

* * *

 

I was jittery about the placement tests as I sat down with a set of fresh pencils and a borrowed calculator the next day, because so much was riding on how well I did, but once I started reading the questions and thinking about the subject matter instead of how many classes I might have to repeat and how soon I’d be graduating, my old test-taking habits kicked in and I managed to focus pretty well. By the time I turned in the last test paper, with five minutes to spare on the time limit, I was feeling pretty confident about having done well on most of the sections.

Mrs. Ramsey was waiting out front to pick me up.

“I’ve got to run by the post office next and mail some packages,” she said as I buckled my seatbelt. “Anywhere else you want to go before we head home?”

“I was thinking I could go ahead and start applying for jobs,” I said. “Stop in to various businesses close to your house, see if they’re hiring, pick up applications.”

“All right, let’s do that.”

I started with the post office, though it wasn’t super close to the Ramseys’ house. They weren’t hiring at that office, though they referred me to the main post office jobs site if I was willing to commute to one of the other nearby post offices. Since I’d be depending on the Ramseys for rides to work, if I couldn’t get a job within walking distance, I declined, planning to exhaust all the nearby options first. Then we drove back to the house, stopping at several businesses along Catesville Road.

After I’d picked up several applications, we returned to the house. Mrs. Ramsey asked me, “Have you thought any more about contacting your parents? Do you feel more ready for it now that you’ve gotten things moving on your name change and enrolling in high school?”

“Yeah. I’m still nervous, but I shouldn’t keep putting it off.”

That night after supper, Mrs. Ramsey called my mom. “Hey, Kathy? This is Erin Ramsey... wait. We need to talk. I’ve been in contact with your missing daughter, and — wait, let me finish. She’s going by Lauren now, and she asked me to talk to you about setting up a meeting... Okay, I’ll hang on... Hi, Peter. Yes, I’ve been in touch with Lauren — that’s what she’s going by now...”

Mrs. Ramsey winced and pulled the phone an inch or two away from her ear. I could hear Dad’s voice raised, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying.

“Peter, please just listen for a moment, okay? ...We can talk about that, but I think things will go better if you — okay. Yes. That’s why she asked me to call you; she wants to meet... No, not at your house. I talked to someone at my church about maybe scheduling a room for this, but the church we’re going to now is most of the way to Catesville — okay, yeah, that would be fine. Call me back when you’ve got it set up.”

I was on pins and needles as I listened. “They agreed to meet?”

“Your dad’s going to talk to the church secretary about scheduling a meeting room at Crossroads. This Sunday’s Easter, so there are things going on Friday and Saturday, but he thinks there should be at least one room available for us to use.”

“Good.” She could apparently tell how nervous I still felt, because she gave me a hug.

“It will be okay,” she said. “If they... if things go badly with them, you’ll still have a place with us.”

“Thanks,” I whispered.

 

---

---

 

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“You were scared of us?” Mom asked, looking heartbroken. I felt tears welling up, but I couldn’t honestly say no.

 

---

---

 

A lot of things happened Thursday. Ms. Novacek called, saying I’d done great on the placement tests and could finish up the year with the graduating seniors. I would start classes on Monday after they got my schedule worked out. And Dad called Mrs. Ramsey, saying he’d scheduled a room at the church for that same evening at seven. Mr. Ramsey made a run to the post office in the early afternoon, taking me by several places downtown afterward to apply for jobs. Then back to the house for supper, and off to the church at a few minutes till seven.

I was feeling jittery, fidgeting a lot and looking out the car window, unable to focus on the book I’d brought with me. Meredith had originally offered to come along for moral support whenever we met, but she was working tonight. I hadn’t expected Mom and Dad to get a meeting room this fast. I’d thought about changing clothes after looking for jobs, but decided to stay with the same blouse and skirt I’d worn earlier.

Within five minutes, we were pulling into the church parking lot. Only a handful of cars were in the lot. I recognized Dad’s Cadillac, which was parked near the main building; the rest of the cars in the lot were parked near the fellowship hall.

As we got out of the car and headed toward the side door that led to the Sunday School classrooms and the back entrance to the sanctuary, the door opened before us, and Dad stood there. My eyes met his and I stumbled. Mrs. Ramsey put a hand on my shoulder.

“[Deadname], it’s so good to see you again,” he said. “Even like this... Justin, Erin, I barely recognized you, either.”

“I-I’m going by Lauren now,” I stammered.

He didn’t answer that, but held the door open for us as we entered, and led the way down the hall to a classroom. As it would happen, the same room the youth group used to meet in — and still did, judging from the posters, the circular arrangement of chairs, and so forth. Mom and Dad seemed to have pulled five chairs aside into a smaller circle; Mom was sitting in one of them, and she stood up as we entered.

“[Deadname], is that you?” she asked, her voice trembling. She looked older. Dad must have been a year-plus older too; neither of them had gotten rejuvenated, but it showed a lot more on Mom. I suddenly felt guilty about how much I’d made them worry, not for the first time, but I still managed to say:

“I’m going by Lauren now, Mom. I’m glad to see you.”

“Why — what happened? Your letter said you were afraid we would torture you — how could you think such a thing?”

“Let’s sit down,” Mr. Ramsey said, and we did while I figured out what to say and how. I sat on the other side of the circle from Mom, smoothing out my skirt the way Meredith and Sophia had taught me; Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey sat down on either side of me, and Dad sat down beside Mom. Dad interrupted my thoughts, saying:

“I don’t understand where you could have gotten that idea, [deadname]. If you — if we could have just talked about this, instead of you sending that letter and then nothing for over a year...”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t figure out how we could communicate without the police being able to find me and make me come home. And after I heard you talking about how Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey should have sent Meredith to conversion therapy, I looked it up. I couldn’t find any details about how they try to cure trans kids of being trans, but to supposedly cure gay boys, they make them look at pictures of naked men while giving them electric shocks on their private parts. I didn’t want to risk that.”

“That’s...” Dad gaped. “Maybe one or two places did that, but we would never send you to a barbaric place like that!”

“Maybe I should have trusted you more,” I said. “But after what I heard you saying, and what I read... I was just too scared. I felt like I couldn’t take a chance.”

“You were scared of us?” Mom asked, looking heartbroken. I felt tears welling up, but I couldn’t honestly say no.

“Scared of what you would let your fear make you do. Of what liars who promise you they can cure trans kids might trick you into letting them do.”

“Will you please give me a hug, baby?” Mom said. “Do you still care about me?”

“Of course, Mom,” I sobbed. “I still love you. Just please don’t try to make me be someone I’m not.” I got up and took a couple of steps closer, bending to awkwardly hug her. She clung to me, apparently too distraught to stand up and get in a better hugging posture.

When I finally sat back down, Mrs. Ramsey patted my free hand as I rubbed away the tears with the other.

“Let’s put the past behind us, son,” Dad said. “Tell us where you’re living, what you’re doing, what your plans are.”

“Okay,” I said, too exhausted to nitpick about the ‘son’ thing. “I’m staying with the Ramseys for now. I just took placement tests and enrolled at Eastern Mynatt High. I kept up with my studies, but I couldn’t go to school while I was — well. When I was trying to keep a low profile. But I studied a lot and I did well enough on the placement tests that I’ll graduate with the other people my age.

“And I’ve been looking for jobs. Nobody’s called me back yet, but I’ve barely started. I’m going to start on college applications next. I don’t know if I can go this fall — probably not, with not starting to apply until spring. And I probably want to work for a year and save up money for expenses.”

Dad looked at me pityingly. “You don’t have to put up with those kinds of conditions. You can have your old room back — we haven’t touched it. And you don’t have to work for a year or more to save up money for college, either; we can help.”

“Please come back,” Mom said in a wavering tone.

“Maybe?” I’d never considered it, but they weren’t being quite as bad about this as I’d sometimes feared. “I’d have to know you accept me for who I am. That you’re not going to keep trying to talk me out of being a girl, or calling me by my old name or ‘son’ or using ‘he’ pronouns. And let me go to a college that’s okay with trans people, and with students venning into different forms for the weekend.”

“Whatever you need,” Mom said, but Dad shook his head.

“We would be irresponsible parents if we let you persist in this terrible mistake. God made you our son, and if you’re having trouble with that, you need to try harder to understand it and accept it. Pray about it. Not run away from it.”

I rubbed my forehead in frustration. This was more like what I’d expected and feared. “I’m sorry. I’d rather venn into a body that doesn’t feel the cold and sleep on park benches than live with you constantly trying to convince me I’m a boy. I tried to convince myself for so long, and it didn’t work. I don’t want you to waste more years trying to do it, too.”

“Please,” Mom said, more to Dad than to me. “Let me have my baby. Even if she’s a girl, it’s better than losing him.”

Hearing Mom use “she” pronouns for me felt great, even if she switched back a moment later. It hurt to see her hurting like this. I’d seen Mom and Dad have disagreements before, but never like this, with raw emotion pouring out. Dad just shook his head again, saying, “No. If you make a rash promise to treat him as a girl, you’ll regret it. We have to be firm.”

Mom broke down in sobs, and I got up to go hug her again. “I love you, Mom. If you can talk Dad into seeing sense, or if you just want to see me by yourself, let’s meet again.”

“Nathan’s going to be home for Easter this weekend,” she pleaded. “Will you please come to dinner and see him?”

I shook my head. “I want to see him, but not at y’all’s house. Maybe at the Ramseys’ or at a restaurant. But if he’s going to be like Dad, I’ll only see him once. I want to see you again, though.”

Dad was turning red in the face, angry at losing control of the situation. He stood up and loomed over me and Mom. “[Deadname], we love you, but that doesn’t mean indulging you in everything you want. If you want our financial support for college, we need to see you at least trying to do the right thing.”

“And by that I suppose you mean pretending to be a man for the next four years, or longer?” I asked, ending the hug with Mom but squeezing her hand one last time as I stood up. “No, thanks. I’d rather never go to college than pretend for one day longer. And I’m pretty sure I can manage to go to college on my own, if not right after high school.”

“What’s this nonsense about ‘pretending’?”

“I think we’re done,” I said, turning to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey.

“Please,” Mom said, and broke down crying again.

“Kathy, give me a call,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “Let me know when Nathan gets into town.” She took my hand and we left the room, Mr. Ramsey covering our rear in case Dad decided to object.

Once we were in the car, my barely held-together control fell apart and I started sobbing again. Mr. Ramsey hadn’t started the engine yet; I struggled with the seatbelt, having a hard time seeing it in the dark through my tears, and before I got it buckled, I felt Mrs. Ramsey slide into the back seat beside me and put an arm around me. Mr. Ramsey didn’t start the engine until she told him we both had our seatbelts on.

 

* * *

 

I was a wreck that night, telling the story over again to Sophia and then to Meredith when she got home from work, and then lying on the sofa bed awake for hours before I fell asleep. I was glad I didn’t have to start school until Monday. I was so distraught over Mom’s pleading sobs and Dad’s stern refusal to compromise that I didn’t think, until the next day, about the things I’d planned to discuss with them and hadn’t — about the rest of my savings I hadn’t been able to take with me because of the ATM withdrawal limit, or my stuff that was in my bedroom at their house — I didn’t care about the boy clothes, except as raw material I could venn into girl things, but some of the books were important to me, and not having to buy a new backpack, calculator, notebooks and so on for school would have been nice.

It took me a while to get going Friday, and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey didn’t push me, but eventually I managed to fill out some of the job application forms I’d picked up and go out with Mr. Ramsey to drop them off when he made the post office run. We stopped at a couple of stores on the way back and I bought a few school supplies. Ms. Novacek had said she’d send me my class schedule and other things by email, so I borrowed Meredith’s computer that afternoon to check, and found she’d sent them. I went over my schedule with Meredith after she got home.

“Looks like we don’t share any classes except Civics,” Meredith said, frowning. “And we don’t have the same lunch period or free period, either.”

“It’s okay,” I said, feeling anticipatory anxiety about the crowds of strangers I’d be surrounded by in a couple of days. “We’ll see plenty of each other here.”

“Yeah, but... I think I can introduce you to some of my friends, and have them look out for you. If you don’t share a lunch period with me, you’ll share it with my friends Jada and Lily... oh, and Poppy, do you remember me talking about her?”

“The goth trans girl? Yeah.”

“Do you want me to send them a photo of you so they’ll recognize you? And I think I’ve got photos of Jada and Lily here on my phone somewhere...”

“I remember Jada and Lily from when they came over here to study. Assuming they haven’t venned too drastically since then.”

“Oh, good. Yeah, they’ve kept basically the same look for a while, although Jada does more adventurous venns on weekends.”

So she sent them a new photo of my current venned body and asked them to look for me at lunch. A little later, I helped her cook supper; she taught me how to make stir-fried rice.

Saturday afternoon, when Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey got home from their yard-saling, she told me that Nathan had called just a few minutes earlier. “He wants to meet you,” she said. “I told him the ground rules: he has to call you Lauren and not try to talk you out of being a girl, and he agreed. I said you’d call him back once I got home.” She handed me her phone.

I looked up Nathan’s cell number in the contacts on my phone (which no longer had an active service plan), then dialed the number on Mrs. Ramsey’s phone. He answered, “Hello?”

“Nathan? This is your sister Lauren.”

“Oh, wow, you sound really different. Duh, Mom told me you were a girl now, and I figured you must be, after that letter. It sounds like you’re persona non grata around here, but if you want to hang out somewhere else, we could? I think I might piss off Dad a lot less if I hang with you after I leave here tomorrow and before I head back to Mars Hill.”

“That would be good,” I said, wriggling with joy at the way Nathan seemed to just casually accept that I was a girl now. “What time?”

We talked about what time would fit his schedule best, and then talked about what restaurant we wanted to meet at, eventually settling on Metamorphoses, which I’d heard so much about from Sophia and seen as a necklace.

“Sweet. Okay, Metamorphoses at a little after seven. See you then, uh... little sis. — Is ‘sis’ okay, or do you want me to just use your name?”

“‘Sis’ is fine,” I said, feeling a little euphoric. I was his sister! And he came right out and said so!

I stood there holding Mrs. Ramsey’s phone for a few moments after Nathan hung up. Then she asked, “Do you want one of us to be there for moral support like we did with your parents?”

“Maybe at a nearby table, just in case things go bad? But it sounded like he was pretty okay with me being a girl.” I remembered the things he’d said about Meredith when she came out and flinched. How much of this was real? Could I trust him? Maybe he was working with Dad — they were going to snatch me coming out of the restaurant and force me into the Venn machine or something...

On the other hand, I remembered that he hadn’t been going to church when we’d visited him early in his freshman year at college. He might have changed.

“All right,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “I’m glad that’s going well.”

“I think it might be, yeah.”

Meredith and Sophia got home from work a few hours later; Sophia had venned into her usual human body, as tomorrow was one of the days when the Ramseys went all-out out with a fancy meal, like Thanksgiving and Christmas. At supper, Mr. Ramsey asked me, “Lauren, do you want to go to church with us tomorrow?”

“Yes, please. Can you tell me more about it? Meredith told me y’all started going to an Episcopal church after you left Crossroads, but I don’t know a lot about it, except that they’re cool with trans people. Like, is there something I need to know about the service to not embarrass myself?”

I’d listened to the Christmas Eve service from inside Sophia’s purse, but I didn’t expect the Easter Sunday service to necessarily be the same. And I’d only heard it, I hadn’t seen anything. They told me what to expect and reassured me that if I didn’t stand, sit and kneel when most other people did, it wasn’t a big deal. “Some churches are more sticklers for procedure, but at St. Dorcas there’s a lot of leeway,” Mrs. Ramsey said.

 

---

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I have four pieces of short fiction available in epub and pdf formats on itch.io. Most of them are also part of ebook bundles where you can get a lot more trans stories for your money (look for the bit that says "Get this story and N more for $X -- View Bundle").

• "A Girl, a House and a Secret"
• “Smart House AI in Another World”
• "A Post-Scarcity Christmas"
• "Armored"

“I know Dad doesn’t want you at home unless you’re willing to change back, but when I have a place of my own, you’ll be welcome to join me there. I don’t know when I’ll have anything to offer that’s better than the sofa bed you’re sleeping on now, though.”

 

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Sunday morning, I put on the gloriously, fractally frilly dress that Meredith had given me. Meredith, Sophia and Mrs. Ramsey also wore gorgeous dresses, though less elaborate than mine. Mr. Ramsey was looking pretty sharp in a suit with a tie. We got to church around twenty minutes before the service started, and they chatted with friends in the vestibule for a few minutes beforehand. Meredith introduced me to her friends as “my friend Lauren who’s living with us while she establishes North Carolina residency,” which was true enough. I got a little anxious for a few minutes at all the new names and faces, but everyone seemed friendly enough, and it didn’t last long before we went into the sanctuary and found a pew. I noticed about a third of the people in the sanctuary were kneeling to pray, and when the Ramseys had filed into the pew, they did the same. Meredith, who was next to me, whispered, “You don’t have to kneel when we do if you don’t feel comfortable, remember.”

I did so anyway, partly because I felt like my anxiety would be lessened if I fit in better, and partly — I’m not sure why. Was it because I still had a little bit of a crush on Meredith and wanted to imitate her and please her? Was it because I was super grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and wanted to please them? Once kneeling, I managed to close my eyes and calm down enough to pray, something I hadn’t done a lot of lately.

After a couple of minutes, I heard something stirring and opened my eyes to see Meredith getting off her knees and sitting down. Sophia and Mr. Ramsey had already done so; Mrs. Ramsey did a moment later, and so did I. I had about five minutes to take in the decor of the church, which was very different from what I was used to, and the beautiful women and girls in their Easter dresses, before the service started. There were a fair number of visibly venned people, but fewer than I’d expected. I wondered if some had returned to normal human bodies for the special occasion, like Sophia.

When the service began, I tried to follow along and sing with the Ramseys on the hymns (which were out of a hymnbook, not off of PowerPoint slides), but after a brief attempt, I gave up trying to find my place in the prayer book when the congregation was saying something in unison in response to the priest. Meredith noticed, and gave me an encouraging smile, whispering, “It’s okay, don’t worry.”

Once I got over my initial self-consciousness due to the unfamiliar surroundings, I really enjoyed trying out my new singing voice. I hadn’t had as much voice dysphoria as Meredith used to have, but listening to myself sing was a fresh delight. I didn’t recognize many of the hymns, but they sang a version of “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” with slightly different lyrics. I had a feeling I’d be singing in the shower a lot on Saturdays when everybody else was away by the time I showered, just to enjoy the sound of my new voice.

There were fewer scripture readings than I might have expected based on the Christmas Eve service, but more than there usually were back at Crossroads, and the sermon was probably less than half as long as Dr. Debenham’s usual sermon. And then, when I thought it was almost over (because the services at Crossroads usually ended within five or ten minutes after the end of the sermon), they had a communion service — and I remembered that Mrs. Ramsey had explained that they did that every Sunday. That was different in some ways from the quarterly communion service at Crossroads, too, though good chunks of both were just quotes from the Gospel stories about the Last Supper.

Afterward, the Ramseys chatted in the vestibule with various friends for a while before we returned to the house. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had put some vegetables in the crock-pot before church. After we changed clothes, they put a roast in the oven and fixed a couple of other dishes that didn’t have to cook for so long. Then we finally sat down to eat.

It was a wonderful dinner, the best family meal I’d enjoyed since I’d been with them, and they really made me feel like part of the family. But I couldn’t help thinking about Mom and Dad and Nathan now and then. They were probably having their Easter dinner, too, but did Mom feel okay enough to cook after what had happened Thursday night? Was she so depressed over Dad’s refusal to compromise that they were eating out, or ordering takeout, or maybe Dad and Nathan were cooking something within their limited skillset? And why had Nathan been the only one to contact me through Mrs. Ramsey? Mom had sounded like she wanted to meet again, but maybe she’d changed her mind.

After dinner, Meredith and I cleaned up, and then we all watched The Greatest Story Ever Told, and played board games and card games for a few hours.

And then it was time to meet Nathan. Meredith offered to drive me, and sit nearby and be ready to rescue me if it went bad, so we got in her car and drove the few blocks to Metamorphoses.

I’d been there as a necklace around Sophia’s neck a couple of times, and I’d heard her tell a lot of stories about working there, but I’d never been there on my own feet or eaten their food. I looked around as we came in, and didn’t see Nathan, but you couldn’t see the whole dining area from the entrance area. A greeter who looked like an elf, with lean features, pointy ears, and long, glossy blonde hair asked us if we were the entire party or if we were joining someone or waiting for someone.

“I’m meeting my brother,” I said. “Wallace, party of two. Not sure if he’s here yet.”

“I’m just her ride,” Meredith said. “I’ll sit nearby so I can see when she’s finished.”

“Let me check if he’s already here,” the greeter said, and looked something up on the computer. “No. I’ll seat you and bring him to you when he arrives.”

“Thanks,” I said, starting to get nervous. We followed them to a couple of nearby but not adjacent tables — there were a couple of families dining in between me and Meredith, talking loud enough that Meredith wouldn’t be able to hear mine and Nathan’s conversation, but positioned so she could see us clearly enough. She sat down and opened the book she’d brought, not looking at the menu — I realized she’d eaten there a number of times, so she probably knew what she wanted. I studied the menu, and had long since decided what I wanted (jerk chicken with beans and rice) and started getting worried about Nathan not showing up when he finally arrived.

“Lauren?” he asked hesitantly. The waitress who’d escorted him was a bunny-girl, wearing a knee-length pastel green and yellow dress. I’d noticed that about a third of the wait-staff tonight were some variation of the Easter Bunny, some more rabbity and some more human; this one was more on the lapine end of the spectrum, but with hands human enough to carry food and drinks.

“That’s me,” I said. He didn’t look any different — if he’d venned, it wasn’t in a visible way. I seemed to remember that Mars Hill University didn’t allow students to come to classes venned except for medical reasons, but he was probably satisfied with his body anyway. “Hi, Nathan.”

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, sitting down. “Dad asked me at the last minute to help him check the fluids on Mom’s car. And then — Mom got all clingy as I was about to go, and wanted another long hug, and — and I only got away by whispering to her that I was meeting you for supper in negative ten minutes.” He spoke fast, with abrupt pauses, like he was nervous. He wasn’t the only one.

“So Dad doesn’t know you’re here?”

“No, he thinks I’m already on the way to Mars Hill. I called yesterday when they sent me to the grocery store for a few things. Mom gave me Mrs. Ramsey’s number to call you at — you don’t have a phone?”

“I’ve still got my old phone, but I don’t have a phone plan yet. I figure I’ll get one when I get a job. I don’t want to mooch off the Ramseys more than absolutely necessary.”

He nodded. “How long are you gonna be staying with them?”

I sighed. “I don’t know. As long as they’ll let me stay or until I can afford a place of my own?”

He frowned. “I know Dad doesn’t want you at home unless you’re willing to change back, but when I have a place of my own, you’ll be welcome to join me there. I don’t know when I’ll have anything to offer that’s better than the sofa bed you’re sleeping on now, though.”

“Thanks.”

About then, the waitress came back and took our orders.

“So,” I said after she left, “how have you been doing, the last year-plus?”

“Pretty okay. I’m working at this little hotel right near the university, and they want me to stay on this summer, so I might or might not come home. Depends on whether I can find somebody to split the rent on a place with and whether I think Mom and Dad need me at home... After yesterday and today, I’m kind of worried about her, honestly.”

I wrung my hands, the guilt I’d felt earlier coming back in full force. “How did she — did she say anything about —?”

“She called me Wednesday to say you’d gotten in touch and they were going to meet you soon, she didn’t know exactly when. And then she called back Thursday to say it was going to be that night. She asked if I could be there, but it was too short notice to take off work. I’d already asked for the days off to come home for the weekend, though. And then later that night she called me and she was crying so much I couldn’t understand much of what she said, except that the meeting with you didn’t go well. She told me a little more Saturday after I arrived, but she shut up about you as soon as Dad walked in the room. What happened?”

I told him about the meeting, concluding with “I was hoping Mom would call afterward and we could meet without Dad around, but I haven’t heard from her yet.”

He frowned. “She’ll probably call you during a break at work next week. I don’t think she wants to call from home when Dad might hear her.”

“Do you think he’s being abusive?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see any evidence of it. But it seems pretty obvious that he’s getting his way when they disagree.”

I must have looked pretty distressed, because right about then, Meredith caught my eye and I could see her miming a question. Did I want to bail? I subtly shook my head at her and turned back to Nathan. “I wish I could help. I should probably call her myself. What are their work schedules these days? What kind of work is Dad doing now?”

“Same thing as before, only he’s commuting all the way to Durham. He leaves at something like seven-fifteen on weekdays. Mom’s still at the same job, and doesn’t have to be at work until ten, so she sleeps until eight-something. This morning they didn’t go to Sunday School, just the main service — I don’t know if that’s a regular thing now or just because I was home, or what.”

“I’ll try to borrow a phone to call her tomorrow after she gets off work, then.”

“Look, I want to be able to talk with my little sister without working around the Ramseys’ schedules. I’ll buy you a cheap phone plan, okay? I’m not gonna splurge, I’m not making all that much, but I can pay for a few hundred minutes a month if you promise to use some of them talking to me.”

I beamed at him. “Really?”

“Yeah. We can’t really do anything about it tonight, but give me your new email address, and I’ll figure something out.”

We still hadn’t directly talked about my coming out and transition. He’d been treating it as a matter of course — a major contrast to how he’d talked when Meredith had transitioned. I wanted to know more about how he’d changed his mind, and what else he might have changed his mind about, but I was cautious about approaching the subject directly, and it wasn’t like there weren’t a lot of other things for us to talk about after so long.

“Thanks! I’ll pay you back once I get a job, but that’ll make it easier to apply for jobs if I can put my own number down instead of Mrs. Ramsey’s.”

The waitress brought our food about then. After we’d started eating, Nathan asked:

“So what have you been doing for the last year?”

I told him the sanitized version of how I’d been staying with different friends, venned into an unobtrusive body, and studying for the GED. “I figured I couldn’t go back to high school after dropping out, but I just found out I can...” I told him more about my adventures of the last week.

“So you’re gonna graduate on time? Awesome. Are the Ramseys gonna help you with college, or are you going to have to pay for it on your own?”

“I don’t want to ask them, and they haven’t offered. I think they’re gonna be stretched far enough with three kids in college at the same time, when Sophia’s a freshman and Caleb’s a senior. I figure by the time I establish North Carolina residency again, I can save up some money and figure things out with loans, grants, and scholarships.”

“Good luck. I’d offer to help, but by the time I’m earning enough to help much, I hope you’ll be close to graduating. And I’ll have loans of my own to pay off, even though Mom and Dad are paying for a good chunk of it.”

“Yeah, it’s going to be difficult, but I think I can manage with the amount of help I’m getting. Just you paying for a phone plan until I get a job is going to be a huge help.” I decided it was maybe time to work around to asking him what had changed his mind about trans people, why he was accepting me so readily now after talking trash about Meredith behind her back when she came out. “I’ve been thinking about my old job at Subway and whether I can use my old manager as a reference. I’d have to talk to her about being trans, so she knows that when people call her asking about Lauren Wallace’s work habits, she knows they’re talking about me. I don’t figure on telling other places I apply for jobs with that I’m trans, but what if she tells them when they call to ask about me?”

“I’m not sure I can help there?” he said, looking puzzled. “I mean, you know her reasonably well, and I’ve never met her. Do you think she’d be okay with you being transgender?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t remember ever hearing her talk about trans people. In fact, if one of my co-workers would start talking about anything controversial like religion or politics, she’d tell them to change the subject.”

“I’d guess she’s a live-and-let-live type, then. But it’s hard to tell. I’d say go ahead and talk with her, and if she seems okay with you, use her as a reference. But if not, you don’t have to tell anybody else you used to work there.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. I’ll call her in the next couple of days. What I’m also afraid of is that she might be okay with me being trans, but still mad at me for quitting with zero notice like that. I was just too panicked to think of calling her before I left Catesville, and before I got very far, I realized Mom and Dad could have the police track me through my cell phone, so I took the SIM card and battery out and never used it again until after I turned eighteen.”

“You haven’t really told me much about that. I mean, you don’t have to say who you hitched rides with and who you crashed with, I see how that could get them in trouble, but your letter didn’t say much about how Mom and Dad found out you’re transgender and why you decided to run away. And they didn’t tell me much, either — I didn’t find out you were transgender until I got your letter.”

I tried to remember what I’d said in that letter. “Well, almost as long as I’d had a driver’s license, I’d been hanging out at the Catesville Mall with the Ramsey girls...” I told him about the venning we’d been doing, and how I’d run into Tim that day and decided to run away. “So I took all the money I could out of my savings at the ATM, then took my phone apart and drove away from the mall, and I won’t say anything more about what happened until I showed up on the Ramseys’ doorstep last Sunday.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “The cops won’t hear anything from me. No reason they should poke into things anymore now that you’re eighteen, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

I still hadn’t really learned what I wanted. Maybe I should ask more directly instead of bringing up the subject and seeing if that prompted him to talk about it? “So what about you?” I asked when he didn’t say anything right away. “I mean, I was just as afraid of you finding out I was trans as I was about Mom and Dad. I hoped we could get along again eventually, but I didn’t really expect it this soon... what changed?”

“Your letter started me thinking,” he said. “Not right after that, but a few weeks later, I did what you suggested — I looked up ‘transgender’ on Wikipedia, and followed a shit-ton of links from that article because it didn’t make sense the first time I skimmed it. Eventually I learned enough of the terminology to make sense of those articles. And when I came home for the summer, I called Caleb Ramsey and we met up for lunch a couple of times, and I picked his brain about it. He’d done a lot of that reading I’d just done back when his sister came out, and he was able to help me with some bits that still didn’t make sense.

“Then Caleb told me about something he’d done to try to understand his sister better. Don’t let this go any further, okay? I don’t think his parents and sisters knew about it at the time and they still might not know. He talked one of his buddies at school into going to another Venn machine — this was back when there wasn’t one in Catesville yet; I think they drove halfway to Raleigh to find one nobody back home would know about them using. Then they turned each other into girls for a couple of hours.”

“Huh. I wouldn’t have expected that.”

“Me either, and apparently he never did it again, because it felt awful. He told me he figured that’s how his sister felt her whole life up until she got a chance to use the Venn machine and change into a girl body that suited her like a dude body suited him, or me.”

“Wow.”

“And then, well...” He looked away at a corner of the room and didn’t meet my eyes again for a few moments. “I thought about that for a while, and I considered asking him to go with me to a Venn machine far enough away that nobody we knew would recognize us, so I could find out what you felt like... but I decided I didn’t have to sit on the stove to find out it’s hot. He made it sound horrible, and I figured if you’d felt as bad about having a boy body as Meredith used to, well... you deserved a girl body as much as any girl.

“And that brings me to something I’ve been meaning to say. I’m sorry for all the ignorant things I ever said about transgender people. I’m sure you must have heard me say some of them, I don’t know exactly what I said when you were around, and I can’t imagine how much it must have hurt you. I’m sorry.”

I felt happy tears welling up. “Thank you,” I said. “That means a lot to me.” He smiled awkwardly back at me, and we didn’t say anything for a minute or so.

After a little while, I asked him: “Have you ever venned into anything else, since that day you turned into a falcon and got lost?”

“Not really. I’m just now starting to feel like I know some of my friends at Mars Hill well enough to trust them in a Venn machine. And there’s no Venn machine in Mars Hill; the nearest is in Asheville. I know there’s a group of students who go down there to use it, but I haven’t gotten involved — too busy with other things.”

“Those groups can be good if they have somebody smart and ethical organizing things,” I said. “You’re probably safer venning with them than with one other person you like but haven’t known that long. Like if the person you go in the machine with turns you into a toy car when you wanted to be a cat, the other people in the group can say, ‘Not cool, that’s not what you agreed to turn Nathan into,’ and make him put you back in to change back. If the group is a bunch of pranksters who like seeing who can venn the other person into something weird the fastest, though, you’re better off avoiding them.”

“You sound like you’ve got some experience with that?” He raised his eyebrows.

“One of the people I stayed with was part of a Venn club like that. I mean the good kind. And I’ve read about some others that didn’t work so well.”

“I’ll think about it next semester,” he said. “I’ll be too busy studying for finals the next few weeks.”

“But...” I suggested, “you know how if you get killed while you’re venned, you don’t die permanently?”

“Yeah, I’ve heard about that.”

“Does Mars Hill do routine retinal scans or fingerprint checks to make sure nobody’s venning in unobvious ways?”

He raised his eyebrows. “No.”

“Please let me venn you before you leave town. Not anything major. I could just remove a mole or make your earlobes a fraction of an inch shorter or something. You’d still look the same, but if you got in a wreck going back to Mars Hill, you’d be fine after the venn wears off, or when we put your body in a Venn machine.”

“Huh,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that. I just figured I liked my body and didn’t want to be different unless it was just for a few hours, so I wouldn’t get any benefit from that protection unless I was willing to put up with a weird body — and transfer to another school and piss off Mom and Dad. But if it can just change you a little smidgen that you barely notice... let me think about it while we finish eating, but I’ll probably do it.”

“Cool.”

We talked some more about what he’d been doing at college, the friends he’d made there and the student organizations he’d gotten involved in, and that led to my college plans, and so on until we’d finished eating and he noticed the time.

“I’d better get on the road,” he said. “Any later than this and I might wake up my roommate when I slip into the room.”

“Do you still have time to let me venn you real quick?” I said. “There probably won’t much of be a line at this time of night.”

“Sure,” he said. While he was paying for our supper, I went over and talked to Meredith, who had finished whatever she’d eaten, about meeting Nathan at the Venn machine.

“You’re going to venn each other?” she asked. “Are you sure you can trust him not to just cancel your change?”

“Yeah, I think so, and if he does, you’ll be right there to change me back. But he’s not going to change me, and I’m not going to change him much — just a smidgen to protect him in case of a car crash or something.”

“Okay. I’ll hold onto y’all’s stuff while you venn him.”

 

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I have four pieces of short fiction available in epub and pdf formats on itch.io. Most of them are also part of ebook bundles where you can get a lot more trans stories for your money (look for the bit that says "Get this story and N more for $X -- View Bundle").

• "A Girl, a House and a Secret"
• “Smart House AI in Another World”
• "A Post-Scarcity Christmas"
• "Armored"

I knew Jada was cool with trans people because she was friends with Meredith, but I didn’t know about any of the other people listening in, so I didn’t go into detail about what my “trouble with my family” was about.

 

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Less than five minutes later, we were in the library parking lot. Nathan was there slightly ahead of us, and there seemed to be only one person in line ahead of him, a pretty black woman in her twenties; she held a small pet carrier in one hand, presumably containing her friend or significant other she was about to restore to human form. In the couple of minutes we stood there waiting for whoever was inside the machine to finish up, Nathan kind of shuffled his feet, looked this way and that, and said:

“Meredith, I apologized to Lauren earlier, but I should apologize to you too. I don’t know if any of it was in front of your face, but back when you came out I said some stupid, ignorant things about it. I’ve learned better since then, and I’m sorry.”

Meredith looked surprised, but in a good way, and after standing there speechless for a moment, she said, “Thank you. I forgive you. I’m glad you and Lauren can be brother and sister now.”

He smiled nervously, and about then, the doors opened. A purple-haired catgirl wearing goggles and a labcoat came out of one booth, then reached into the other one and picked up something large and slightly unwieldy that I couldn’t see until she brought it out. It looked like some kind of power tool, like a weed eater or leaf blower, but with a lot more attachments — like if you jammed several power tools together, and maybe a tricorder and a sonic screwdriver for good measure. There were glowing buttons and knobs on the haft, and when she pressed one of them experimentally, one of the extensions whirled around and made a chiming sound. She raised it above her head like Luke’s lightsaber in the original Star Wars poster and laughed theatrically, “Muahahaha!”, before clearing her throat and returning to her car. The woman with the pet carrier, Nathan, Meredith and I all stared at her until she got in her car and drove away.

Then the woman with the pet carrier shrugged, set up the machine, and opened up the pet carrier to let the creature inside into the booth. I only got a brief glimpse of it before the door closed. It looked furry, but not like any specific mammal I was familiar with; I thought I’d seen six or eight legs, but I wasn’t sure. The woman went in the other booth a moment later, and it seemed she was restoring the creature to his baseline form or a form from his history, because it didn’t take more than a minute. She came out not visibly changed, and the creature became a lighter-skinned black guy slightly shorter than she was; they held hands as they walked toward their car, the guy carrying the empty pet carrier.

“Okay then,” Nathan said. “You wanna remind me how this works?”

“We touch the Venn diagram, then put something in the slot,” I said, fishing around in my purse. “It doesn’t have to be money, like we thought when we used it a few years ago.” I found some strips of paper torn off of one of Sophia’s old test papers which she’d given me before one of our trips to Reidsville or Danville, and stuck one of them in the slot. “Then we pick the duration. If you trust me to just change you a smidgen like we talked about, there’s no reason you shouldn’t pick three years, but I wouldn’t blame you if you want to pick something shorter the first time.”

“Sure,” he said. “Push the earth-orbiting-the-sun icon three times, right?”

“Yeah.” He did, and three copies of the icon appeared; I touched them and the doors opened.

“Okay,” I said. “Now you’d better let Meredith hold your wallet, keys, and phone — anything you’re carrying that’s got writing or pictures. They can get garbled even with a slight change.”

He nodded and did so, and I gave Meredith my purse — just in case, though I was pretty confident I could trust Nathan not to change me. Then Nathan and I were inside the machine together for the first time in two and a half years. I was presented with an array of variations on Nathan, some minor and some major but all of them noticeable for someone who knew him.

I’d suggested adding a mole or making his earlobes slightly shorter, but on the way over, I’d thought of something simpler. “Same body, slightly longer hair,” I said, and the images vanished, replaced by versions of Nathan which mostly looked the same except for the hair: it was anywhere from knee-length to barely longer than before, and styled in a bunch of different ways. There were also a few outlying images where his body wasn’t the same, despite my request, and a fair number had different clothes. I searched for a minute until I found one with the same hairstyle and only slightly longer hair. The shirt was yellow rather than blue, but the pants looked pretty much the same.

I touched that and got another array of variations. I searched but didn’t find one with a blue shirt, except one outlying one where he was wearing a skirt or kilt as well and looked a bit heavier-set.

“Okay,” I said. “I think this is good. Your clothes are gonna be a little different, but not too different. I hope that wasn’t your favorite shirt — if it is, you can get it back by getting a friend who’s not venned to go in the machine with it by themselves and push the red button.”

He shrugged. “It’s a nice shirt, but not that important. I’m gonna look basically the same but with slightly longer hair?”

“Yeah.”

“Not so long it’s gonna be obvious to my professors that I got venned?”

“I don’t think so. It’s probably less than an inch longer?”

“Okay, I’ll get a haircut after class Monday. Go for it.”

I pushed the green button. “Now just wait for your button to phase out,” I said.

“Okay.”

As we came out, Meredith eyed him critically for a moment. “Is his hair a little longer?”

“Yeah,” Nathan said, self-consciously combing his fingers through it. “Is it too much?”

“I think I only noticed because I was looking for a difference. Nobody’s gonna notice otherwise.”

“Cool. Well, it was good to see you, Lauren. You too, Meredith. Let’s meet up again next time I’m home.”

We hugged, and he got in his car and set off. He’d be almost midnight getting back unless he went way over the speed limit. Meredith and I returned to her house, and I told her and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and Sophia, the basics of how my meeting with Nathan had gone.

“That sounds wonderful,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “Well, except for the part about your mom. I’ll try to talk to her tomorrow.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I want to help her, but I don’t know how.”

“I don’t either, not yet. Let’s think about it.”

 

* * *

 

Monday morning, I got up at the same time as Meredith and showered right after her. Sophia drove us to school; Meredith and Sophia usually drove to school together when neither of them had work or an extracurricular activity afterward. When we got to the school, we went our separate ways. I went to the office and picked up my textbooks, then hauled most of them to my locker and went to homeroom.

My homeroom teacher didn’t tell anyone anything about my situation, if she even knew the details herself; she just briefly introduced me as “Lauren Wallace, a new student.” I looked around, not recognizing anyone at first, then smiling as I recognized Jada, who was waving at me. I recognized her from her face, though her eyes were no longer super big, her curly hair was orange with a crimson streak down the middle and her arms were longer than a normal human’s, with two elbows. There was an empty seat near her, and I headed toward it. I reminded myself that though I’d met Jada, she just had Meredith’s text message introduction to go on. Should I tell her I was the little dragon that she’d squeed over a couple of years ago? Would that be weird? It would probably be weird.

“Hi,” I said nervously. “I’m Lauren.”

“Hey,” Jada said. “Meredith asked me to look out for you, but she didn’t tell me much about you. Where’d you move here from? How do you know Meredith?” A few other girls and guys sitting next to us were looking at me and listening for my answer, and my nervousness increased, but I focused on Jada and said:

“I’m from right here in Brocksboro. I used to go to the Everett Academy, but... well, I had some trouble with my family and I’m living with Meredith and her family now.” (I knew Jada was cool with trans people because she was friends with Meredith, but I didn’t know about any of the other people listening in, so I didn’t go into detail about what my “trouble with my family” was about.)

“Oh, I’m sorry. But it’s cool Meredith’s family took you in. They’re good people. How about we eat lunch together? I can introduce you to some other friends.”

She introduced me to some of the other girls sitting around us in homeroom, but my anxiety was spiking and their names whooshed past me without sticking. After a couple of minutes, she went back to the conversation she’d apparently been having with another girl before I came in, and made some effort to include me, but I was too anxious to participate much. I felt like I’d almost used up my daily allotment of courage by introducing myself to Jada at all, and I kept overanalyzing our brief exchange for the next twenty minutes or more until I got engrossed in my first period Biology class. Was it disinterest or politeness that had led her to not ask me about the trouble with my family that led to me living with the Ramseys?

After Biology, I had a free period, which I spent exploring the school and making sure I knew where everything was. Once I had done that, I spent the next fifteen minutes browsing in the library, taking note of what looked interesting and checking out a book that I’d heard Bailey recommend.

At lunch, I served a tray and then looked around for Jada. It took a few minutes, but I found her with a couple of other girls I recognized: Lily, who’d come over to Meredith’s house to study one time, and Cristina, the Hispanic girl who’d been with Jada the day I’d first seen her, when Nathan had venned me into a cute little dragon. There were other people I didn’t recognize — it wasn’t easy to tell where their group of friends left off and the next group of people crowded around the table began.

“Hey, Lauren!” Jada said, waving to me as I got close. “Hey, this is the new girl in my homeroom I told you about, Meredith’s friend that used to go to Everett. How about make some room?”

They scooted chairs around and one of the guys, who I learned a bit later was Lily’s boyfriend Chase, grabbed a chair from a less-crowded table and stuck it in between Jada and Lily. I squeezed in and sat down.

“Thanks for letting me sit with y’all,” I said.

“So where do you know Meredith from?” Lily asked.

“We used to go to the same church,” I said. “And our parents used to be friends, so we hung out together when they’d get together.”

“Used to be friends?” Lily asked, pouncing on the salient detail.

“Don’t pry,” Cristina quietly admonished when she saw me hesitating to answer.

“Yeah, I’d rather not go into detail. They had a big argument and Meredith’s family stopped going to our church. Then I had problems with my family and eventually wound up living with the Ramseys. I just did placement tests last week and they’re letting me finish my senior year here.”

“Cool,” Jada said. “So how about I introduce you to everybody?”

I tried to take in the barrage of names, but most of them went in one ear and out the other, and I never managed to get them all straight in the few months left in the school year. That was a much larger social group than I was comfortable with. Only a couple besides Jada were visibly venned, a boy and a girl with matching light blue skin and dark blue hair, but everyone was so good-looking that I figured they were probably all venned.

After lunch, I shared fifth period Civics with Meredith, though we didn’t have a chance to talk before class and only had a few minutes afterward.

“How’s your day been going?” she asked.

“Pretty okay,” I said. “I’ve gotten to know some people. Your friends Jada and Lily and some of their friends.”

“Oh, cool. Maybe you can join us next time I go over to Lily’s house for study group.”

“That’d be cool.”

“How about your classes?”

“I’m doing okay in most of them,” I said. “Most of what the teachers covered I’ve already read about. The only exception was in American Literature where they were talking about a Hemingway story I haven’t read. I guess I can catch up with that soon enough.”

“Hemingway,” she said, making a face. “I’m glad to have that behind me. I love reading, but in college I’m going to try to stay away from courses where you have to memorize the teacher’s interpretation of boring stories by old white guys.”

I started to say that I’d read another story by Hemingway in one of the literature anthologies I’d devoured during my fourteen months of self-study, and enjoyed it pretty well even if he wasn’t going to top my favorite author list, but I didn’t have time; we both needed to get to our next classes.

My last couple of classes didn’t give me any more trouble than the earlier ones, at least mentally. But my thrift store backpack betrayed me on the way from Civics to Trigonometry, the left shoulder strap giving way suddenly; I felt the weight suddenly swing to the right, causing me to stumble into a taller girl, who swore at me and shoved me back. I managed to keep my footing, but I was flustered and had to cram myself up against the wall and let the foot traffic flow past me for a minute while I calmed myself down and figured out what had gone wrong. The strap wasn’t broken, it had just slipped free of the carabiner or buckle or whatever you call that thing. I carried the backpack awkwardly to my last class, arriving a minute late and apologizing to the teacher, and re-threaded the strap while listening to the lecture.

I met up with Sophia and Meredith at the car, and Sophia drove us home. “So how was your day?” Sophia asked, and I told her what I’d told Meredith, plus a little more detail since Meredith and I had been in a hurry earlier.

“We can probably fix that strap so it won’t come loose again,” Sophia said. “With glue or duct tape if necessary.”

“Or go in the Venn machine wearing it and we can venn you into the same body but with a better backpack,” Meredith suggested.

“Thanks.”

When we got home, Mrs. Ramsey asked me how my day had gone, and then told me that my mom had called.

“She said to call her back between six-ten and six-thirty,” she said. “After she gets home from work but before your dad gets home.”

“Okay,” I said. I set an alarm on my phone to remind me and did the little bit of homework I had, then read the Hemingway story and started the Faulkner story that we were going to be talking about next in that class.

When my alarm went off, I asked Sophia if I could borrow her phone and called Mom.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hi, Mom, this is Lauren. I’m calling from Sophia’s phone.”

“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry. I think — I hope your father will come around, but — I don’t know... he’s been so angry again these last few days.” I heard a muffled sob, like she’d pulled the phone away from her mouth for a few moments.

“You there, Mom?”

She didn’t answer right away, but after a few more moments, she said, “You started school again today, didn’t you? How did it go?”

“Really well, Mom. I made some new friends and I think I can keep up with all my classes. Can we get together sometime soon? Like after you get off work tomorrow or Wednesday?”

“Yes, let’s do that. Could I come to visit you there at the Ramseys’ house, or would they rather give you a ride to somewhere nearby? I don’t think I can arrange a room at the church without —” She broke off, and I completed the sentence mentally: without Dad finding out.

“Hey, Mrs. Ramsey,” I said, walking into the living room, “would it be okay if my mom came over to visit for a little while tomorrow?”

“It’s fine with me. Tell her I’d love to have her over for supper. You said your dad has a long commute home these days, right?”

I said into the phone, “Yeah, Mrs. Ramsey says it’s fine. You can join us for supper.”

“I shouldn’t stay that long — I ought to be home when your father gets home. But I’ll get off work a little early if I can, so I can stay longer. They still live in the same house, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Tomorrow around six-ten, maybe a little earlier. I love you, Lauren.”

“I love you, Mom. See you then.”

 

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I have four pieces of short fiction available in epub and pdf formats on itch.io. Most of them are also part of ebook bundles where you can get a lot more trans stories for your money (look for the bit that says "Get this story and N more for $X -- View Bundle").

• "A Girl, a House and a Secret"
• “Smart House AI in Another World”
• "A Post-Scarcity Christmas"
• "Armored"

“I mean, I like taur forms as much as the next girl, but they can make it hard to get around in crowds, and four arms are useful, but they feel kind of played out after last year...”

 

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Tuesday morning, I rode to school with Sophia. Meredith took her own car since she would need to go to work right afterward. I chatted some with Jada in homeroom, getting to know her a little better, and worked up the courage to ask her about her long arms and extra elbow.

“Oh, yeah, it’s pretty neat,” she enthused. “I mean, I like taur forms as much as the next girl, but they can make it hard to get around in crowds, and four arms are useful, but they feel kind of played out after last year...” Apparently there’d been a local fad for having four arms, which I’d missed out on due to being at Everett for the first few months of it and at UNC Greensboro, or hiding in Meredith’s room, for the last few months. “But these longer, more flexible arms are pretty useful too — they let me reach things I couldn’t otherwise, like those parts of your back you can’t scratch in a normal human form, and they catch the eye without creeping people out like tentacles. Have you ever venned much?”

“Yeah,” I said. I still didn’t want to tell her I was trans with various other people around and possibly listening, but I could tell her a lot. “I’ve done a decent amount of venning. Mostly short-term, with Meredith and Sophia and some other friends, but I’m in a long-term venn now, just a body that I’m more comfortable with.” Depending on how much she’d talked with Meredith about trans stuff, she might get that hint. “Eventually I’d like to go back to one of my less human forms — a dragon-girl with purple scales. But I’m looking for jobs now and I don’t know if I’ll be able to find an employer that’s okay with nonhuman venns.”

“That dragon-girl body sounds cool. You’ll have to show me sometime. What else have you venned into?”

“Well,” I said, “several other dragon and dragon-girl bodies, a little girl about four or five years old, a couple of furry bodies and several taurs — sometimes furry but mostly scaly — and a couple of cyborgs and cyborg taurs. Some inanimate forms, like a necklace or one of Sophia’s semi-animate dolls. And a couple of times I’ve had multiple bodies.”

“Oh, wow, you’re another hard-core venner like me! I can never get Lily or Cristina to try anything weird. Meredith does once in a while, but she usually goes for simple taur forms with various animals for the back half. What’s the most bodies you’ve had at once?”

“Just two.”

“Yeah, me too. I might try working up to three or four at some point.”

“Do you find it easier if the two bodies are mostly the same or very different?”

“That’s hard to say. It’s easier to get started on using them in a coordinated way, like if you’re playing a game in multiplayer or doing yard work with both bodies, if they’re the same or mostly the same. But if you’re trying to do yard work with one while you play a game with the other, it’s easier if one’s a taur and the other’s a basic human shape, or something to make it easier to separate them in your mind. I’ve heard you can split your consciousness in two, but I haven’t tried it yet — have you done that?”

“No, how do you do that?”

“Once you split into two bodies, you go in the machine again with your bigger body. As soon as the door closes on you, your mind will split in two across the body inside the machine and the body that stayed outside; at least that’s what I hear. There’s two versions of you running around acting independently, and when the venn on the smaller body wears off, it disappears and you get both sets of memories.”

“Oh, wow. I have to try that.”

“Let’s do it sometime. Both of us venn into two bodies and then we’ll split them up. How’s that?”

“That might be fun, yeah.”

“You want to invite some other friends?”

“Sure. I’ll talk to Meredith and Sophia about it.”

“I’ll talk to some other friends who are into venning and see if they’re busy. I’m working weekends, but... hmm. If we can get that technique to work like I’ve heard it does, we could go by the machine Saturday morning and split each other up, and then one of me could go to work while the other hangs out with you.”

“I’ll guess I could look for jobs with a human body while I hang out with you with a dragon-girl body?”

“Cool. What’s your phone number?”

“Uh... I don’t have one,” I said, blushing a little. I briefly explained more of my situation, but didn’t have a chance to say much before the bell rang and we had to go to our first period classes.

 

* * *

 

During my free period, as the weather was nice, I went to a little courtyard just off the cafeteria and read ahead in the anthology we were using for American Literature, the next several pieces that the teacher had said we’d be covering and which I hadn’t already read. I’d read the remainder of the Faulkner story and a couple of poems by Langston Hughes when a guy I’d seen sitting on one of the other benches and reading came over to talk to me.

“Um, hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said warily. “Can I help you?”

“I just wanted to say hello,” he said. “I’m Dawson. I don’t remember seeing you here before.”

“I’m new,” I said. “I used to go to the Everett Academy, but I’m finishing up here. Oh, and my name is Lauren.”

“Nice to meet you, Lauren.” He could apparently read upside down, because he remarked, “Langston Hughes... those were some weird poems, but kind of cool.”

“Not the weirdest thing I’ve had to read for a literature class,” I said.

“Yeah, no kidding. But the way he was coming up with new ways to write poetry and all... and he was born right down the road from here, too.”

“That’s cool, yeah. I like this one, even though it doesn’t sing like a poem with rhyme and meter, but there are a couple of bits I don’t understand, and there were more in the last one I just read.”

He sat down next to me, and I flinched slightly when he leaned over to look closer at the page. “Oh yeah, that had some lines that didn’t make sense until Ms. Crawford explained some stuff.”

We talked about the poem, and the teacher he’d taken American Literature from and I was taking it from now, for a few minutes. Then, when the bell rang for the end of second period, he said:

“So I guess I’ll see you here tomorrow?”

“If the weather’s nice, I guess.”

“Cool.”

 

* * *

 

When I brought my lunch tray to the table where I’d eaten with Jada, Lily and the rest on Monday, I saw Lily, her boyfriend, and the rest of the group, but not Jada. When she didn’t show up within the next few minutes, I remarked on it. I was feeling a little bit uncomfortable because Jada had been the friendliest of that group. The others weren’t exactly unwelcoming, but they didn’t make as much attempt to include me in conversation as Jada had.

“Some days she eats with some of her other friends,” Lily said. “I think they eat in the courtyard when the weather’s decent, or over there,” she gestured toward the far corner of the cafeteria, “on bad weather days.”

I looked toward the windows opening on the courtyard, but I couldn’t make out Jada at that distance, if she were sitting near the window at all. I didn’t want to snub Lily and the others by getting up and going to look for Jada, who might not want to introduce me to her other friends anyway, so I stayed put and listened, occasionally rousing myself to speak up. Toward the end of lunch, Lily asked me what classes I was taking, and invited me to join them for their next study session, which would be after school at her house on Thursday. The study session wasn’t that whole group of friends that ate lunch together, just Lily, usually Jada and Meredith, sometimes a girl named Emilia, (who I’d heard about from Meredith; she used to date Meredith’s friend Andrew), and sometimes one or two other people. I said I’d come if Meredith was coming that night, but I wouldn’t have a ride otherwise.

After Sophia and I got home from school, I borrowed Mrs. Ramsey’s phone and called the Subway where I used to work, asking if my old manager was around. She was.

“Hi, Ms. Puckett, I’m Lauren Wallace. I used to work for you at Subway...” I reminded her of the name I used to go by. “I’m transgender, and I’ve done a long-term venn into a girl body.”

“Oh, congratulations,” she said. “But what’s this about? Does it have to do with why you didn’t show up for work and then your parents and the police came asking questions about you?”

“Well, yeah. I left in a hurry because I was afraid to go home. I’d rather not go into detail about family stuff, but I’m back in town and living with friends, and if you can forgive me for quitting suddenly without notice, I’d like to use you as a reference as I’m applying for jobs.”

She was quiet for a few moments. “All right. I can read between the lines. If you had to go, you had to go. Are you safe now?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a good place to stay and I’m back in school. So can I use you as a reference?”

“Yes, you can. I’d recommend you to Hank, but we’re not hiring right now.”

“Yeah, I figured, most places aren’t. Thanks.”

Then I used Meredith’s computer and worked on job applications for a while, finishing up all the entry-level positions I’d found in town and venturing into openings over toward Catesville or Reidsville, which might be difficult to get to at times. My mind wasn’t fully on it, though; I was on pins and needles, wondering when my mom would get there and what we would say to each other. After I finished up with the job applications, I checked my email and saw a message from Nathan. “I’ve got you fixed up with a phone plan — a thousand texts and a thousand minutes of phone time, and 3GB of data a month. Should last you pretty well if you’re mostly using the Ramseys’ wifi or the school wifi, I reckon. Call this number from another phone and give them your phone’s SIM card number and so forth, and they’ll activate your phone. Then call me sometime...” He gave me the company’s customer service number and his schedule, and I made a note to call the customer service people the next day after school, or maybe during lunch if I could borrow someone’s phone to make the call.

It wasn’t quite six yet when the doorbell rang. I got up and went into the living room; Mrs. Ramsey was already opening the door. It was Mom.

“Mom!” I cried, and ran toward her. Mrs. Ramsey stepped back to let Mom in, and we hugged. Mrs. Ramsey patiently stood there holding the door until we got out of the way so she could close it.

“Supper’s about ready,” Mrs. Ramsey said, “if you want to eat with us, or you could talk privately with Lauren in our bedroom.”

“I can’t stay that long,” Mom said. “I need to be home in a little over half an hour.”

Sophia came in from the kitchen, drying her ceramic hands. “Hi, Mrs. Wallace.” Mom stared at her in astonishment.

“Sophia’s done a long-term venn like me,” I said. “She’s an animate doll.”

“It lets me do a lot more without getting tired, and I need a lot less sleep,” Sophia said. “I’ve been like this most of the time since the school year began.”

“She doesn’t eat, but she still does her share of the cooking and cleaning,” Mrs. Ramsey said proudly.

“Oh,” Mom said, still gaping for a moment after that, then turned back to me and Mom. “I don’t want to be impolite — I would like to talk with you more sometime, Erin — but I’d like to speak with my — daughter — alone for now. Thank you for the offer. Uh, remind me where your bedroom is?”

“This way,” I said, and led the way to Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey’s bedroom, which she’d apparently cleaned up for the occasion. It wasn’t always that tidy. (I’d never gone inside, but I’d passed by when the door was open, and there were usually some clothes draped over chairs and doorknobs, half-open drawers overstuffed with clothes, and so forth.) Mom closed the door behind us, and I sat down on the edge of the bed. She sat beside me and hugged me again.

“Oh, sweetie, I missed you so much. I don’t want to waste our little half hour with recriminations, but I just don’t understand why. Why you went away. Why you need to be a girl.”

“Did you look up the things I suggested?” I asked. “After you got my letter, or after we met Thursday?”

“I did,” she said. “Friday during a break at work, I found what you were talking about, an old news story about people torturing gay boys with electric shocks... but that was over a decade ago in another state. What I mostly found was just counselors trying to help people overcome temptations. And some people saying it doesn’t work, but...”

“Mom, being a girl is just part of who I am. It’s not a temptation like gossip or stealing.”

“I’m trying to understand. I just — you seem happier like this. More alive. But it just doesn’t click in my brain, how you can be the boy I raised and also a girl.”

“Do you remember when I was little and put on one of Courtney’s dresses?”

She stared at me for a moment. “...Yes. You mean you’ve wanted to be a girl that long? I thought — I thought you were just too young to understand you shouldn’t — that boys and girls were different.”

“I don’t know how old I was, you would remember that better than me, but I remember it well enough that I was probably old enough to notice that boys and girls were treated different and wore different clothes. I probably didn’t know about the, uh, plumbing until later, I guess. But — I don’t know. I don’t remember everything about that day, not all the details of what I was thinking, but I remember being happy when I looked at myself in the mirror wearing the dress, and sad when you took it away. I think I probably suppressed that for a long time afterward, because I don’t remember anything more like that until after Meredith came out and it started me thinking about this.”

I told her some more about how I’d figured out I was trans, and then how I’d started occasionally meeting up with Meredith and Sophia to venn into girl bodies for a little while. I didn’t go into detail about the more unusual bodies I’d venned into, though I did tell her about being a dragon-girl sometimes.

I had just started telling her about how Tim had confronted me coming out of the Venn machine that day when an alarm on her phone went off.

“Oh,” she said, dismayed. “I need to run. I love you, sweetie. And there’s so much we haven’t talked about... but I’ve got to go.” She was already standing up and moving toward the door.

“I love you, Mom. I’d like to get together again soon. Or talk on the phone — Nathan’s getting me a phone plan.”

“Oh, good.”

We walked out of the bedroom and toward the living/dining room. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey were sitting on the sofa, eating off of trays and watching the local news on a Greensboro station.

“I’m sorry I have to run like this,” Mom said. “Don’t get up,” she added as Mrs. Ramsey started to set her tray aside. “I need to get home soon. Let’s talk — we could eat lunch later in the week, like you suggested.”

“Talk to you later,” Mrs. Ramsey said, getting up and coming to the door with us despite Mom’s protests. Mom and I hugged again, she walked out, and I stood there staring at the closed door for a few moments, mulling over our too-brief visit.

“How did it go?”

“Better than I expected. She still doesn’t get being trans, but she’s trying to understand, unlike Dad.”

“Good. We had a brief conversation about it earlier today; she asked me some questions about being the mother of a trans girl, about how I dealt with it when Meredith came out... I won’t go into details, but she loves you, Lauren. Be patient with her.”

“I will.”

 

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My fantasy romance/courtroom drama, The Bailiff and the Mermaid, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better and more promptly than Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“So what’s your story?” Poppy asked. “Trans, lesbian, or both?”

 

I gaped at her. “How did you know?”

 

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Wednesday in homeroom, I told Jada how I expected to have a working phone before long. I also asked her about her other friends Lily had mentioned.

“Oh, yeah, I could introduce you to them too, if you want. They’re a little less mainstream than Lily and her friends that I introduced you to Monday, though, so don’t say I didn’t warn you, okay?”

“Are they into unusual venns?” I asked. “You know that’s not going to weird me out, right?”

“Well, yeah, some of them do a lot of venning, but most of them do less of it than me. I mean socially non-mainstream. But they’re good people,” she said defensively.

“It’s cool,” I said. “I won’t judge. But I did want to ask... is it a large group of people? The group we ate with Monday — I ate with them again Tuesday — it’s a little large for me. I’m having a hard time keeping everyone’s names straight and following the conversations.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, this is a smaller group... three girls besides me, but they aren’t all always there. Some have other friends they eat with sometimes, and one of them...” She hesitated. “She skips school or get suspended sometimes.”

I must have looked alarmed, because she hastened to add: “Nothing bad! Not, like, bullying or anything. Mostly just dress code violations, or coming to school venned without filing the paperwork.”

“Ugh, paperwork. I sympathize.”

She grinned. “You’ll get along with them, I expect.”

“Lily told me where to look for you. In the courtyard, or in the corner near the freshman classroom hall if it’s raining?”

“Yeah.”

The weather was a little cloudy, and the forecast had said it might rain at some point. But it wasn’t raining yet, so I went to the courtyard during my free period and read. I’d gotten over a week ahead in American Literature, and I was already ahead in my other classes, so I read The Art of Starving, the novel I’d checked out Monday; I’d started it last night before bed.

Someone suddenly said: “What’s that about?” I looked up and saw Dawson, the boy I’d met the day before.

“Oh,” I said. “It’s about this gay anorexic kid who develops super-powers. So far it’s mostly enhanced senses, but I think there’s more later on? And the less he eats the sharper his senses get, so it’s making his anorexia worse.”

“Cool,” he said. “Well, I mean, that sucks, having your powers tied to a mental illness like that, but that’s a cool premise for a novel. It reminds me of...”

Twenty minutes of discussion of superheroes’ personal problems later, some offhand remark he made about Buffy the Vampire Slayer constantly losing her cell phone during fights made me remember the phone plan. “Oh,” I said. “That reminds me. Could I borrow your phone? I’m just gonna call an 800 number,” and I explained the situation.

“Oh, sure,” he said. He loaned me his phone, and after a few minutes talking with a customer service tech, I had a new phone number and a working phone. I asked Dawson to text me to test it, and it worked.

“Neat!” I said. “Thanks. Where were we? Oh, yeah, characters losing their phones to drive the plot...”

That was a fun discussion, but apparently he’d seen more in it than I had. When it was about time to head toward our next classes, he said, “You’re really cool, Lauren. Would you like to go out somewhere this weekend?”

I gaped at him. Had he been flirting? Had I given signals like I was interested in him that way? Not intentionally, but I hadn’t been living as a girl for long and there was only so much Meredith and Sophia could teach me...

“I, uh... I mean...” I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell him I was a lesbian, but it wouldn’t be honest to say I wasn’t interested in dating right now. If I met a single lesbian here at school and I had the courage to ask her out, I would. On the other hand, we’d been talking about the gay protagonist in The Art of Starving and a couple of other gay or bi characters, and he hadn’t said anything stupid or bigoted, so he’d probably be okay with it. After a few more moments of stammering, I finally decided to risk it. “I’m not into guys, okay? I like you, you’re cool and you have good taste in books, but... I’m sorry, I don’t deal with situations like this well.”

“Oh,” he said. He looked disappointed, but not disgusted or angry or anything. “Okay, then. You want to talk about books some more tomorrow?”

I smiled. “Yeah. Let’s do that.”

 

* * *

 

By lunchtime, it had started raining. So after I got my tray, I went over to the corner where Jada had said to look for her and her friends. I didn’t see her, though I did see some people with unusual venns, heavy goth makeup, and so on. I wondered which of them were Jada’s friends and was standing there indecisively when Jada came up beside me and said, “Hey, Lauren, over here.” She led the way to a table and sat down, saying “Hey, gals, this is Lauren, she’s a new girl in my homeroom.”

“Hi,” I said nervously as I sat down next to her. The girl Jada had sat down next to was tall and muscular, with four arms and light brown skin. She was wearing a sweatshirt with swirly dark colors that was probably venned, and ripped jeans that probably weren’t. Across the table from them sat two white girls dressed in black; one was taller and wearing a dress and... maybe a corset? Or something like it. She was extremely pale, her black hair was long and loose, and when she smiled at me, she showed pointed teeth. The shorter girl was wearing a black band T-shirt and slacks; her black hair was in a kind of double mohawk with two strips of hair (not super long and spiky, just standing up an inch or two like a pixie cut). She’d been talking with the girl to her right, but glanced up as Jada and I approached, and waved at us.

“Hey,” she said as we sat down. “You’re Lauren, right? Meredith told me several days ago you’d be starting here. Haven’t seen you until now, though. I’m Poppy.”

“Hey,” I said. “Meredith told me about you.”

“What’d she say about me?”

“Oh, um...” My loose tongue had put me on the spot again. I was 99% sure that Poppy was out as trans to everyone. She’d transitioned while continuing to go to the same school, after all. But she’d transitioned over the summer and might have been able to pass herself off as a new student to most people. If the other girls didn’t know...

“Pretty fucking bad, huh?” Poppy said as my silence stretched out. I wasn’t sure if she was joking.

“No, no! It wasn’t anything bad, it was just... I wasn’t sure if I should say it in front of, um...”

“We know,” Jada said, nudging me. “Everybody knows.”

“Oh. Well, anyway, she told me she was happy to meet someone else at school who was trans.”

Poppy nodded. “Yeah, it was nice to have someone to talk to in person when I was figuring this stuff out. I talked to some people online too, but my home Internet is pretty crappy and the chat kept disconnecting. She seemed like a nice girl, but we don’t have that much in common besides being trans.”

“I kind of got that impression... she didn’t really say that, though.”

The girl in the corset sitting next to Poppy introduced herself. “Hey, I’m Lisette,” she said. “Poppy’s girlfriend.” I nodded; I wasn’t sure if I should say Meredith had mentioned her, too.

“So what’s your story?” Poppy asked. “Trans, lesbian, or both?”

I gaped at her. “How did you know?”

“Your parents kicked you out, or you had a fight with 'em and left, you dropped out of the ultra-conservative Christian school to go here, and you’re living with a family that has a trans daughter. I figured it had to be one of those. Sorry if I outed you, but everybody here’s fine with you either way.”

“No, it’s fine, it’s not a big secret, I just haven’t gone around telling everybody either.”

Jada was nodding. “I wondered if you might be, but I wasn’t going to be blunt about it like Poppy.”

“So which is it?” Poppy asked, and I realized I hadn’t directly answered her question.

“Oh! Um, both.”

I knew Lisette and Poppy were a couple. Jada was sitting pretty close to the girl with four arms, who hadn’t introduced herself, and I was starting to wonder if maybe she and Jada were a couple as well. I thought Jada looked pleased when I said “both.”

“I told them about our date to split up,” Jada said, and my brain exploded at the word “date,” so I didn’t hear her next few words. “...but Britt said she might join us later. Did you talk to Meredith about it?”

“Uh,” I said eloquently, “who’s Britt?”

“Oh, duh,” the girl with four arms said (her mouth was full, as it had been the whole time the rest of us had been talking). “I never introduced myself. I’m Britt.” She finished her mouthful and swallowed, then said: “Yeah, I might hang out with y’all later in the day Saturday, but I can’t meet up before Jada goes to work. Got to work on a car with my dad.”

“Oh, sure, cool. And... I kind of forgot to mention it to Meredith. We didn’t have much time to talk last night after she got home from work, and by this morning I’d forgotten it.” I double-checked my phone calendar. “I’ve got the reminder here, though. I won’t forget.”

“Good,” Jada said. “That’ll be a trip.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling in anticipation.

Having broken the ice like that, I wound up telling them more about myself, though I didn’t say anything that would incriminate Meredith and Sophia. Jada might figure out where I’d been if we venned together enough that she saw my history, but she’d only been over to Meredith’s house while I was living in her bedroom once, almost eight months ago, and might not remember the little Chinese dragon on her desk. After that, the others started sharing their coming out stories too, but we got derailed with talking about horror movies partway through Lisette’s story about hugging her best friend for support during a scary movie, and I didn’t find out what Jada or Britt’s deal was until later.

Near the end of lunch, I finally remembered to send out a text telling people what my new phone number was. I sent it to Meredith, Sophia, Nathan, and Mom, and swapped numbers with Jada and the others, too.

 

* * *

 

When I checked my texts on the way home from school, I found a smiley emoji from Nathan and a message from Mom saying: “Please call me sometime before 6:15 tomorrow evening. I don’t think we can talk tonight. I’m going to have to work late and won’t get home much before your father does.”

Tomorrow night would be the study group. I said to Meredith, who was driving us home, “Mom wants to talk on the phone tomorrow night, and there’s just that one narrow window when we can talk. I think I might bail on the study group for this week, at least.”

“I think you can come,” she said. “Let’s talk to Lily about it. She can probably find you a private place to make the call.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll sit with her at lunch tomorrow so I can talk to her.” I felt a little reluctance even as I said that. Lily seemed friendly enough, but her social group was so large... the group studying at her house wasn’t that large, but it would probably be bigger than the group I’d sat with that day, especially if everybody who sometimes came showed up tomorrow night.

Meredith picked up on the implication of what I’d said. “Did you not sit with her today?”

“No, I sat with Jada and her other friends. She introduced me to Poppy and Lisette and another girl I’m not sure you know, Britt?”

“Oh, yeah, I’ve got second-period World History with her. Doesn’t say much, does she?”

“Not that I noticed. Poppy and Jada did most of the talking. And, uh, I came out to them... and also to this guy that asked me out.”

“What?” Sophia exclaimed, turning her doll’s head 180 degrees like an owl and mildly freaking me out. When had she gotten someone to add that capability to her doll body? “Details!”

So I told them about meeting Dawson yesterday, about our conversations about Langston Hughes and superheroes, and how he’d asked me out and I’d told him I was a lesbian.

“Did you tell him you were trans?”

“No... I guess he didn’t need to know that. I kind of did feel, in the moment, like he deserved to know why not wanting to go out with him wasn’t personal. If I had a conversation like that with a lesbian, I’d definitely want to go out with her.”

Sophia shook her head. “If you were straight, that would be a meet-cute for the ages. Did he take being friendzoned hard?”

“No, he seemed cool with me being gay. We’d been talking about some gay characters in the book I’m reading and in the Marvel universe and I figured it would be safe to tell him.”

“Was anybody else in earshot when you told him?” she asked. “Or when you told Jada and her friends?”

I hesitated. “I don’t actually know. There were some people at the same table with us at lunch, but they seemed to be pretty engrossed in their own conversations.”

“It’ll be all over the school,” Sophia predicted. “Don’t worry, though, we’ve got your back.”

 

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My short gender-bender fantasy novel, A Notional Treason, can be found at Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors 80% royalties, vs. 35% or 70% at Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“With the way Dad is being, I can’t move back in any time soon. Would it be okay if I came over sometime after you get off work and before Dad comes home, and get a few things out of my room? Or could I ask you to pack up a few things and bring them to the Ramseys’ house, or bring them to work and let me come by to get them when Meredith or Sophia are giving me a ride home from school?”

 

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I didn’t end up eating lunch with Lily and her friends Thursday after all, but Meredith called her Wednesday evening and put her on speakerphone for us to talk about stuff, and she said I could use the guest bedroom to have a private conversation with my mom. I ate with Jada and her queer friends in the courtyard Thursday, and after school, Sophia went to work and Meredith and I went to Lily’s house. It was actually in my old neighborhood, just a few streets over from Mom and Dad’s house, which made me feel a little weird, but the layout and decor of the house was different enough to not trigger any particular memories. It was about the same size as our house: bigger than the Ramseys’ house, but with slightly bigger rooms rather than more rooms. But the Bannisters only had two kids, and their older daughter was away at college.

Lily’s mom, who looked like she was in her early twenties, like Meredith’s parents, greeted us at the door and told us Lily and the others were in her room. Meredith knew the way, and soon we joined Lily, Jada, and a girl I hadn’t met before, who Lily introduced as Emilia.

After Lily asked me what classes I was taking, which subjects I was good at and which I needed help with, we split into groups of two and three to study different subjects, then regrouped about an hour later to study others, and then after a while we just hung out and chatted about whatever. It was fun, and the splitting into smaller groups helped keep my anxiety from flaring up, but I didn’t feel like I was connecting to Lily and Emilia like I had to Carmen and Serena, or Jada’s queer friend group. At 6:05, the alarm on my phone went off, and I excused myself.

“I’ll show you the guest room,” Lily said, and led me down the hall to an immaculate bedroom decorated in neutral colors with minimal bric-a-brac on a couple of glass shelves. I sat down gingerly on the bed, not wanting to rumple it, and called Mom.

She didn’t answer right away, and I got a little worried, then figured she was probably driving and couldn’t answer the phone. I was about to try again a few minutes later when she rang me.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, Lauren. I was driving when you called just now.”

“I figured. How are you doing?”

“I’m getting by. I looked up some of the things you talked about Tuesday evening, and I tried talking with your father about it last night, but... he insists you have to change back if you want to come home.”

“Thank you for trying. Please take care of yourself.”

“So... you were telling me about how you met Tim at the mall on the day you left. Do you mind telling me more about that?”

“Sure,” I said. “But do you mind if I ask a couple of other things first?”

“What is it?”

“With the way Dad is being, I can’t move back in any time soon. Would it be okay if I came over sometime after you get off work and before Dad comes home, and get a few things out of my room? Or could I ask you to pack up a few things and bring them to the Ramseys’ house, or bring them to work and let me come by to get them when Meredith or Sophia are giving me a ride home from school?”

“...Yes, that would be fine.” She sounded hesitant, and I wondered if she was reluctant to let me get my stuff, or bring it to me, because it would mean admitting that I’d moved out for good. But she wasn’t so selfish as to refuse. So we talked for a couple of minutes about the books, school supplies, and other things I wanted from my room, and she said, “That sounds like enough that I would rather you came over here to get it. Probably with Justin or Caleb to help carry the boxes. I’ll try to pack it up before you get here. Your father won’t notice, since the door to your room is usually closed.”

“Okay, thanks. Caleb’s off at college, but I expect I can get someone to help.”

“Oh, right, of course. About the day... I think we should leave that up in the air for now. Several days a month, your father has to work late, and he always calls or texts me when he’s swamped with work and can’t get away in time. I’ll call you next time that happens, so you and whoever helps you will have plenty of time to haul the boxes out and still have a good visit.”

“Thanks, Mom. The other thing I wanted to ask about was my bank account. I was only able to take $250 with me because of the ATM withdrawal limit, and then I didn’t want to touch it again, because, well... My friends I was staying with were generous, and I didn’t need to spend much, so I still have a fair amount of that left, but I’d like to get the rest of the money out of my savings. When I tried to use my debit card, the bank said the account had been closed.”

“Oh. Your father does most of the financial stuff; I don’t know what happened. He probably figured there wasn’t enough in the account to keep it from getting gobbled up by fees, so he moved it into one of our other accounts.”

Since I was a minor when I got the account, my dad’s name was on it too. I wasn’t sure, but I suspected that meant Dad could legally do whatever he wanted with the money. “Yeah, I figured. Could you ask Dad about it, sometime when he’s in a good mood?”

“Yes, of course.”

With that behind us, I finished telling her about that encounter with Tim at the mall and how I’d decided to run away. I heard some rattling in the background on her end as I spoke; I figured she was fixing supper or doing the dishes.

“I’m not going to say much about where I went after I left my car in Greensboro,” I said. “Or who I stayed with. They were good people who treated me more than fairly, and I managed to not only keep up with my studies but get ahead. I’m doing well in my classes at Eastern Mynatt and I’m planning to live with the Ramseys and work until I’ve re-established North Carolina residency and can go to college at local tuition rates. Or,” I added to give her some hope, “if Dad comes around, I could move back home until I start college.”

“I’ll keep trying, sweetie. I’m so proud of you still doing well in school after so long away. How — Oh, I’d better let you go. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

“Bye, Mom. I love you.” But she’d already hung up. Probably Dad was walking in and she didn’t want him to overhear even the tail end of our conversation.

 

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Apologies for the short chapter; there will be a long (7600 words) chapter next week. That's just how the scene breaks fell out.

My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

“Yes!” I said, and babbled on before I could lose the momentary burst of confidence, “I’m interested in —”

 

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Friday, I had quizzes or tests in several classes, and I felt like I did well on most if not all of them. I got my weekend homework done that night while Meredith was out on a date with Hunter, and the next morning, she dropped me off at the library on her way to work. She didn’t have far to go and we were a few minutes early, so she hung out with me waiting for Jada to show up.

“Sorry, but this splitting yourself in two is just too weird,” she said. “Once was enough for me.”

“Supposedly this way is actually easier to deal with,” I said. “You don’t have to coordinate two bodies with one mind, the machine splits your mind in two so one of you can operate one body and one the other, and...”

“Nope. That way lies evil duplicates and ‘I’m the real Meredith, shoot her!’ drama. No thanks.” I giggled.

Jada pulled up in her old Dodge Neon just then, got out and jogged over toward us excitedly. “Hey, Meredith! Did you change your mind about joining us?”

“No, I’m just hanging out with Lauren and I wanted to say hi since we haven’t seen each other much this semester. I’ve got to get to work in a few minutes, but I can hold your stuff while you venn.”

(The library had just recently put in a set of coin-operated lockers for people to stash their stuff in while they venned, so their keys, money, ID cards, etc. wouldn’t get distorted or subsumed in their new body. But whenever we had an extra friend with us who wasn’t venning at the same time, we would let them hold our stuff instead of paying for a locker.)

“I need to be at work pretty soon too,” Jada said, “but one of me will also be hanging out with Lauren.”

Meredith shivered.

While we were in line, we talked about what we wanted each other to make our two bodies like.

“I need one of them to be about like this, to go to work,” Jada said. “Especially the face. And it needs to be wearing black pants, to go with the uniform shirt I’ll put on before I go to work with that body. The other should be taller and heavier. It’s important for your two bodies to be different sizes if you’re going to split your consciousness in two, otherwise you might wind up with one of your bodies vanishing instead of splitting off independently.”

“Okay. Anything in particular for your bigger body? Should it have the same kind of arms and all?”

“You can surprise me, as long as it’s humanoid enough to sit in a car and drive. It can be tricky to get exactly the change you want on the second body while making the first one look like my everyday body.”

“Okay. I’d like one of my bodies to be a dragon-girl. About this tall. Um... if we’re going to be driving around, I guess I want the wings to be pretty small and high up on my shoulders so I can sit in a car seat comfortably. The face should be sort of a mix between human and dragon features — look for something that looks pretty, I guess? And I like purple scales, but other colors are fine if you can’t get one with purple scales and the other important qualities. The other body should be a human girl, shorter than me; maybe with extra arms like Britt.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Sounds awesome.”

“Do you want her to pick one of your dragon-girl forms from your history to start with, and tweak that?” Meredith asked.

“Yeah, that would be fine,” I said.

“If I’m starting with a dragon girl and adding a second human body, the human won’t look much like you do now.”

“That’s okay.”

“Hang on,” Meredith said. “I think I might have some pictures of her dragon-girl forms in my phone.” She started looking through her phone gallery for old photos from a couple of years earlier — glancing over her shoulder, I saw she had them organized in folders, not just in one huge chronological list like me. Before long, she showed us a selfie of Meredith, Sophia and me in our “dragon sisters” forms.

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be a good starting point. Or one of the more recent dragon-girls, but smaller wings, like I said.”

I wondered if Jada would recognize the dragon statue in my history. I wasn’t worried; I didn’t know Jada as well as I knew Meredith, but after a week of hanging out with her at school, I was pretty confident that she wouldn’t blab about my having lived with Meredith as an animate statue.

We didn’t have much longer to wait, and soon Jada and I were in the booths.

“History,” she said, and started looking through my old forms. If she recognized the dragon statue, she didn’t react or say anything about it. She’d only seen the statue once, the better part of a year ago, and probably didn’t remember it.

I said, “Two of her, one just like this, the other taller and more muscular.”

I looked through the resulting images, mentally eliminating ones where neither of the bodies looked quite like her current one. Of the ones where one body looked the same and the other was taller and more muscular, some looked grotesquely huge and misproportioned, and I ignored them too. I studied the remaining ones, finding several that looked good, some of them with interesting oddities, and picked one. Variations on that appeared, and after some hesitation, I picked one of those. Meanwhile, Jada had been muttering and picking through images too.

“I think this’ll look good on you,” she said. “You ready?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

We pressed our green buttons and suddenly I had two bodies again. Both were wearing dresses, the dragon-girl body an open-backed one with room for my wings. The easiest thing to do at first was to make both bodies do the same thing at the same time. So I turned with both bodies and walked out of the machine single file, then stopped once both bodies were clear of the door and it closed behind me. I glanced over at Jada, who’d done something similar, although her bodies were already moving more independently, taking different stances. Her taller body (about four inches taller than her everyday body and six inches taller than my dragon-girl body) was looking at its hands, which had six long, slender fingers; she had different hair in that body too, greenish on the left and shading toward blue on the right. Both bodies were wearing black pants, like she’d been wearing before, but the shorter one was wearing a T-shirt with a blocky, stripy abstract design and the taller one a lacy tank top.

“We’d better get out of the way,” she said. I nodded both heads and turned to walk to the side, letting the next people in line use the machine, then carefully navigated around to the back of the line.

“Here’s your stuff,” Meredith said, “but which of you is going to take it?”

“Here,” I said, reaching out with my dragon body’s hands and taking my purse.

Jada took her purse with her shorter body, then said to me, “No, it’s your smaller body that needs to be holding the purse while we go in again with our bigger bodies.”

“Oh, right,” I said, and handed the purse to my smaller body.

“Okay,” Meredith said, “I’m gonna go to work now. See you gals later.”

“Bye, Meredith,” we said with four sets of vocal cords, then giggled at each other. Meredith rolled her eyes and turned to walk toward her car.

When we got to the head of the line again, I used the body holding the purse to take a slip of scrap paper out of my purse and feed it into the machine, then set the machine for two days again. Then I walked into the machine with the dragon-girl body, and Jada did the same with her taller body.

As soon as the doors closed, I could no longer feel or see through my other body. “Whoa,” I said. “You just got cut off from your other body too, right?”

“Yeah. Now we just push our green buttons to renew the changes and open the doors — unless you want me to tweak your body a little more?”

“No, this should be fine.”

“Okay.”

We pushed the green buttons and the doors opened. Our other selves were staring at us in fascination.

“This is weird,” my smaller, softer self said as I walked out.

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t feel as weird as controlling two bodies at once, but I think it might be even weirder once we think it through.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

Jada’s bodies — or selves, now — gave each other a high-five, giggling at their imperfect coordination. Jada’s smaller self handed the purse back to the taller one, and we headed toward their car. I sat up front with the tall Jada, who was driving, and the ones who were going home and to work sat in back.

“So where do you work,” the four-armed me asked, “and are they hiring?”

“Food Lion,” said the Jada in the back seat. “And not really, but they’re always taking applications to have on file in case a vacancy opens up,” the one in the front seat added.

“Yeah, I applied there —” I said. The other me started to say something (probably the same thing) a moment after I did and stopped. We both giggled.

“It’ll be less confusing once there’s only one of each of us,” the Jada who was driving said. “But possibly less fun.”

It didn’t take us long to get to Food Lion on Catesville Road, and the Jada in the back seat hopped out, taking her Food Lion employee shirt to change into in the restroom. Then we returned toward the Ramseys’ neighborhood.

“You sure you don’t both want to hang out with me for a while?” Jada said.

The other me said, “I really should do more job hunting, and help the Ramseys out around the house. And I think we’ll enjoy merging memories more if we’re combining completely different sets of memories, instead of slightly different perspectives on the same events.”

“And if we stick together, we’ll be talking over each other a lot,” I said. “Thought it might be interesting to watch how that happens less over time, and see if it’s noticeable by the end of the day.”

“Something to suggest to Sophia for her research,” the other me said.

“Okay, then you’d better remind me how to find Meredith’s house,” Jada said.

“Turn left on —” we both started to say, and then I continued uninterrupted: “— on Buckley Street.” I finished giving her the directions and she parked on the street to let the other me out.

“Wait,” four arms said. “You need to lend me your house key so I can unlock the door.”

“You might as well keep it,” I said. “I’m not going to need the key to get in later — you’ll be home to let me in, if not Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey too.”

“Yeah, but I might be in the bathroom or something when you ring the bell. Hang on a sec.”

She unlocked the door, ran back to the car and handed me the key, then waved goodbye and went back inside.

“Okay,” Jada said, “where to now?”

“Um,” I said, “I don’t have a job yet, so I’d rather do something that doesn’t involve spending money. Maybe we can go to the river park and walk?”

“Sounds great,” she said. “I think I know where the park you’re talking about is, but how about give me directions?”

I hadn’t been in a couple of years, since the summer after I turned sixteen when Mom, Dad, Nathan and I had last picnicked there, so I was a little vague about the exact route. I got out my phone, looked it up, and got the maps app to give us directions. Somehow I was feeling more nervous now about being alone with Jada than I’d been when Meredith left us and we’d had extra copies of ourselves to sort of chaperone us. She’d called this a “date” during lunch Wednesday, but I didn’t think she meant a romantic date; or did she? In the course of two more chats in homeroom and two during lunch, she’d never gotten around to telling me her story like Poppy and Lisette had done, but I had gotten confirmation, from things she and other people had said, that she liked girls. I still wasn’t sure whether she was bi or a lesbian, and hadn’t gotten a clear indication that she liked me that way. And I’d been reluctant to tell her I’d had a crush on her since I first saw her (and how long ago that had been) until I had some kind of hint that she liked me back.

“So,” I said, “the other day when me and Poppy were telling our stories, you seemed like you were going to say something too, but then we started talking about horror movies instead. Did you have a hard time figuring out you liked girls?” It took a great effort to say that, but being a dragon-girl helped.

“It should have been obvious,” she said, “the way I was crushing on Shuri when we went to see Black Panther. But no, I didn’t really figure it out until a couple of years later. Cristina was over at my house for a sleepover, and we were sitting on the sofa in the basement watching a movie, and I sort of unconsciously snuggled up next to her, and — well, she noticed I was getting turned on before I did, and she just sort of gently nudged me back toward the other end of the sofa and said, ‘It wouldn’t work, Jada, I’m not like you,’ and I asked what did she mean and she said she was straight. She’d figured it out before I did, by how I looked at girls in real life and in movies and TV. Or at least she’d suspected and seeing me nip out when I snuggled up to her confirmed it.”

“Oh, wow. That reminds me of how after I came out, not to everybody but just to Meredith, she told me Sophia had guessed I was trans before I knew it myself. I guess it was because of the kind of questions I asked Meredith after she came out?”

“Yeah, you need your friends to be a mirror sometimes, or you can’t see yourself clearly.”

“Have you ever dated anybody?”

“I dated Britt for a few months last year,” she said, “back when she thought she must be lesbian because she didn’t like guys. Eventually she figured out she was ace, though, and we sort of broke up.”

I’d run across a little bit of information about asexuality when I was first doing research on gender and sexuality a couple of years ago, and I’d learned more when I lived with Carmen. “Sort of?”

“We still snuggle sometimes,” she said. “Just that. No kissing or making out. I care about her a lot, but she knows I want to date someone who’s interested in more than that.” She looked over and met my eyes for a moment before looking back at the road, and my heart skipped a beat.

“Yes!” I said, and babbled on before I could lose the momentary burst of confidence, “I’m interested in —”

The damn phone talked over me then, saying “In one thousand feet, turn left on Byram’s Mill Road.” I faltered and lost my nerve, mumbling, “if that’s something you...”

“Yeah,” she said with a smile, a little distracted as she looked for the turn, “I’d like that.”

The park entrance we were heading for was just a few hundred feet down the side road. The river park consisted of two sections a couple of miles apart, one of which had a small parking lot, a restroom, a picnic pavilion, and a boat launching ramp. The second section just had a single port-a-potty at the corner of the parking lot, and the two were connected by a two-mile-long trail winding along the riverbank, dotted with benches every quarter of a mile. There was a margin of forest, thinner in some places than others but usually at least ten yards wide and often over fifty, between the river trail and the road. There were also a couple of sculptures along the trail, one representational WPA sculpture from the thirties and an abstract thing that nobody understood that had been carved when I was a kid. (Dad had been very sarcastic about it.) It was officially the Clarence L. Woodberry Memorial Conservation Trail, named after a conservationist county commissioner who’d lived around the time of the New Deal and got the Civilian Conservation Corps to contribute the labor for the park while he brokered a deal to buy the land cheap. He’d died partway through the construction, thus the “Memorial” part of the name and the WPA statue of him at the midpoint of the trail. But everybody I knew just called it “the river park.”

Jada had never been there somehow, despite living less than seven miles away all her life, and I was delighted to be able to show it to her. We used the restroom and then set out along the trail, pausing to look at the first of the little laminated signboards describing the plants and wildlife native to the area.

“Otters!” she said. “Have you ever seen any otters along here?”

“Once when I was little,” I said. “I think I was about seven or eight? Elementary school age, anyway.”

“Sometime or other I want to venn into an otter and go swimming somewhere like this,” she said. “I’d need a friend to drive me. And preferably another friend to venn into an otter too, and play with me. Do you know if it’s safe to swim around here?”

“It’s not the most polluted river in the South, but it’s not recommended. If you’re in a temporary venn, though, whatever pollutants you come in contact with would go away when you venn back to your everyday body.”

“Yeah. Let’s do it sometime!”

We hadn’t gone much farther before we met someone walking the other way, a white couple walking their dog, a collie or at least some mix that looked mostly like a collie.

“Awww!” Jada squeed. “What’s her name?”

“Her name’s Molly,” the woman said indulgently.

“Can I pet her?”

“Sure, she’s pretty friendly.”

Jada bent down to pet her, saying “Who’s a good girl?” and such silliness, but Molly thought I smelled suspicious and whined when I got too close. I backed away and folded my wings tighter against my back.

“Sorry,” the woman said. “I guess she doesn’t understand venning.”

“No reason she should,” I said. I wondered if there were animals that would be okay with my dragon-girl body and how long it would be before I had my own place, either a house or an apartment in a building that allowed pets.

After they continued on their way, Jada shot me a commiserating glance, saying, “I’m sorry about Molly. Did that upset you?”

“A little,” I admitted. “Not too bad. The trope is that dogs are always good judges of character, and if a dog growls at somebody you know they’re a villain, but in real life dogs are cute but kind of dumb.”

“Yeah,” she said and laughed. Then: “Is it okay if we hold hands?” she asked a few moments later.

My heart started pounding harder. “I’d like that.” I slipped my scaly hand into hers.

“Your scales are so delicious,” she exclaimed.

“Did I give you taste buds in your hands somehow?” I asked, startled.

“No, but I’m kind of synaesthetic. When I pet my snake it tastes kind of like this, but not as good.” She closed her eyes for a moment and sniffed deeply, which was weird but extremely cute. I giggled.

“You have a pet snake?”

“Yes, her name is Nefertiti. She’s a corn snake, a little on the small side for her species. I’ve had her since I was ten.”

“There’s so much I don’t know about you,” I marveled.

“Well, we’ve only known each other for a week. Give it some more time.”

I felt a little troubled, and I said: “Actually...”

“What?”

“I’d met you before. You probably don’t remember it, and you wouldn’t have recognized me if you did, because it was before I transitioned.”

“Oh. When was that?”

I told her about the day Nathan and I had first used the Venn machine and how Jada and Cristina had been in line behind us, and how Nathan had venned me into a tiny dragon and she’d petted me and cheered me on as I learned to fly.

“Oh! I remember! You were so adorable!” I felt warm, and if I hadn’t been covered with scales, I would have visibly blushed. “I mean, you still are, but... now I’m babbling.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of cute,” I rejoined. Her blush wasn’t all that obvious either, but I was paying close attention. “That meant a lot to me. You were the first girl that ever thought I was cute. Even though I was a tiny dragon at the time, I had an instant crush on you after that, and I figured it would go nowhere because I didn’t know your full name or what school you went to or anything. Then I saw you at the grocery store a few months later, and...” I decided against telling her about seeing her at Meredith’s house when I was a dragon statue. “Well, I was really glad when Meredith told me she was going to tell some of her friends who have fourth period lunch to look out for me, and you were one of them.”

“Okay. But... well, my point is, even if you’d met me or seen me a couple of times before, we still haven’t known each other long. I have a lot more to learn about you, too, you mysterious girl.”

“Where do you want to start?”

“Well, we talked about horror movies and anime earlier in the week, and about books. What else do you like to do?”

“Walking like this,” I said. “In the woods or in a nice downtown area... I haven’t ever been to a big city, not any bigger than Greensboro or Raleigh, but I’d like to walk around downtown Atlanta or New York sometime. Maybe not Los Angeles; it sounds like it’s a terrible place for pedestrians. And I’d like to go hiking out west, maybe at Yosemite and Yellowstone and Redwood National Park. And I like flying. I’ve only had a good chance to venn into forms small enough to fly a few times — back before I came out, I would only get a chance to venn every few weeks at best, and sometimes it would be months, so I wanted to spend as many of those as I could refining my human girl body and my dragon girl body for when I eventually came out.”

“Did you try venning into a little bitty version of that body you’re wearing now? Could you fly like that or would it need more modifications to be aerodynamic?”

“Yeah, it’s a little clumsier than the four-legged tiny dragon form, but I can make it work.”

“Oh! I want to see that sometime. Do you think we could do that today? Maybe you could venn me into a copy of you after I venn you into that form from your history?”

“That would be fun! Maybe for our next date, though? I’m not sure how it would work if we venn again while we’re split in two.”

“I’m not sure either. I think it’s okay, as long as it’s the bigger versions of us who go in the machine, but I’ll look it up on VennWiki later.”

“And maybe it shouldn’t be on a date — more like sometime we’re hanging out with friends. Or on a double date with Poppy and Lisette.”

“I think we can make it work. I know the interface adapts to your size, so the buttons and the image bubbles are down near the floor at around your eye level if you’re tiny.”

“We’d be too small to get our purses out of the locker and get a coin out, so we’d need something else to feed the machine when we want to change back. Unless we want to stay that way for eight hours or more, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to ever let a venn expire naturally again. I’ve had to go back to my original body too many times already.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That must be awful. But we don’t have to haul around a scrap of paper or a coin while we’re flying. We can just find a leaf.”

“Of course. I’m glad I’m dating such a smart girl.”

We walked on in silence for a couple of minutes before I said, “Uhhh... I just realized. If we’re dating, shouldn’t we tell Britt before we go any further than holding hands?” I thought a moment longer and the vague guilt I’d started feeling got worse. “Or maybe before we hold hands again.” I let go of her hand reluctantly.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Really, I told you Britt and I already talked about this. She knows sooner or later I want to find a girlfriend who wants to do more than hold hands and snuggle.”

“But...” I struggled to articulate what felt wrong. “I just don’t feel comfortable going any further until you talk to Britt about dating me, specifically, now. Not some hypothetical girl you might meet at some point.”

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it this afternoon. Hopefully she’ll be able to hang out after a while.”

I was a little taken aback that Jada wanted to talk about it with Britt while I was present, but I couldn’t articulate my objection, so I didn’t say anything. We fell silent for a while as we passed a few more walkers and a sandbar with a few small trees growing on it. Then we came to the statue of Clarence Woodberry.

“This is the halfway point,” I said. “We’re about a mile from where we parked. Do you want to go the rest of the way?”

“Sure,” she said.

We continued on, and came upon a straight couple seemingly in their early twenties, but probably rejuvenated; they looked too young to be the parents of the eight or ten year old girl and boy with them. They weren’t walking, but standing there looking out across the river.

“There’s a heron over there,” the man said in a soft voice. We stopped and looked, and eventually spotted the Great Blue Heron in the shadows on the other side of the river. We all stood around watching it fish until it flew away.

“How long have you been a dragon?” the boy asked me as the family continued their walk. They were going the same way we were, and we walked together for a while.

“Just an hour or so this time,” I said. “I’ve been a dragon-girl like this several times, and I’ve also been a little bitty four-legged dragon.”

“She was so cute like that,” Jada reminisced.

The boy shook his head. “Dragons should be fierce, not cute. When I grow up I’m gonna be the biggest dragon that can fit in a Venn machine.”

“Rarr!” I growled. “Is that fierce enough?” The boy made a face and his sister giggled. Their parents smiled.

“But seriously,” I said, “I can’t fly with these little wings, they’re just there to look pretty. Even if I have big wings that won’t fit through doors or let me sit in a car, they won’t really let me fly. If you want to fly, you can’t be any bigger than a large bird like a condor, and it’s easier if you’re small, like a robin or a brown bat.”

“Oh,” the kids said. Then the boy said: “What if you turn into a cyborg dragon with jetpacks?”

“That might work,” I said. “I was a cyborg triceratops taur one time.”

“You haven’t told me about that,” Jada remarked. “I want to hear this one.”

“Well, the friend I was staying at the time with had a friend who was into cyborging, and they venned me into a cyborg like I described with implants to process air and take the carbon out of the CO2 and spit it out as graphite. Like the gray stuff in a pencil,” I explained as the kids looked puzzled, but I think there was more they didn’t understand besides the word “graphite.”

“That sounds great,” the woman said. “Could we really stop global warming if enough people did that?”

“I think she said we’d have to go farther than that to really stop it,” I said. “Reducing carbon emissions too, and having a lot of people venn into dedicated carbon-extracting machines for a month every year or whatever, not just going around as cyborgs processing CO2 all the time. But every little bit helps.”

“Yeah.”

A little further on, we came to the abstract sculpture. It had been carved in place by a local artist from the log and stump of an oak tree that had fallen in a storm, and then treated so the wood wouldn’t rot. The kids climbed on it and played, which was allowed; Nathan and I had done the same when we were their age. Jada and I stood nearby talking with their parents for a minute or two, and then walked on.

After we came to the other end of the trail and turned back, we met them again and passed them with a brief greeting.

“Those were cute kids,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jada said. “The girl reminds me of my little sister when she was younger.”

I told myself the first date was way too early to talk about how many kids we wanted and how we wanted to conceive or adopt them, but I was definitely thinking about it.

“I remember seeing her that time I saw you at the grocery store,” I said. “At least I assume it was your sister? She was around twelve or thirteen.”

“She’s fifteen now. I’ll show you a photo when we get back to the car if you like.”

“Sure.”

More people passed us on the trail as we got closer to the main parking lot. When we got back to the car and Jada got our purses out of the trunk, we checked our phones for messages before we started driving.

“Oh, Britt texted,” she said. “She says she’s done and could meet us somewhere. But we’re not that far from her house.” She dialed and put the phone to her ear. “Hey, Britt,” she said a few moments later, “I’m at the river park with Lauren. And I’m also at work and Lauren is also at Meredith’s house, but we’re the versions you care about, right?” She grinned and listened silently to whatever Britt was saying in reply. “Okay, I could swing by and pick you up. I think we’re like five minutes from your house... Okay, cool.”

“You ready?” she asked when she hung up.

“Sure.”

We were on the road again before she said, “Oh right, I was gonna show you a picture of Tamily.”

“No hurry.”

“You can pull my phone out of my purse and look at it. You don’t need to unlock it or anything, it’s the background image for the lock screen.”

So I tapped the button on the side of her phone and saw a photo of her (in the orange-haired four-elbowed body she’d been wearing lately) with the girl and woman I’d seen with her at the grocery store a few years ago, all wearing beautiful, colorful dresses and standing in front of an azalea bush. The image was marred with the overlay of text asking for her PIN.

“Do you... never mind,” she said hastily.

“What is it?”

“...I was gonna ask if you have any pictures of your family, but I guess that might be a sore subject, with them kicking you out or whatever.”

“I’m getting on okay with my brother and mom. It’s Dad who’s still a problem. But I’m not sure if I have any pictures of them on my phone... let me check.” I started looking through the gallery on my phone, but I’d never taken a lot of pictures with it, and apparently I’d emptied the pictures off it onto the computer just a couple of months before I ran away. There were several from the camping trip Dad, Nathan and I had taken the winter before I ran away, but mostly nature photos without Dad or Nathan in them, and there were some from the Christmas road trip — mostly the roadside scenery or the relatives we were visiting rather than my immediate family. I did find one photo of my cousins with Nathan in it, and when we got to Britt’s house, I showed it to her.

Britt didn’t live in a subdivision or in town, but on a poorly maintained rural road about halfway between the river park and Eastern Mynatt High. It looked like a fairly nice house for the neighborhood, if a bit small. There was an outbuilding almost as big as the house, apparently a garage as I realized when we got closer and saw the sign painted on its side, “Boyce Automotive.” A big white guy with four arms was bent over the open hood of a minivan and there were several other cars parked around and behind it. Britt was sitting on a bench and chatting with him while he worked, but she’d apparently washed up and changed clothes since she finished working.

“See you after a while, Dad,” she said, standing up. The big guy looked up and turned to look at us.

“Oh, hey, Jada. Who’s your other friend? Nice venn, by the way, miss.”

“This is Lauren,” Jada said.

“Hi, Mr. Boyce,” I said.

“Y’all have fun,” Britt’s dad said. “Britt, let us know if you won’t be home for supper, okay?”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

We got back in Jada’s car. I was hesitating whether to get in the front or back seat, but Britt went to the back driver’s side door, so I sat in front again. I gave Jada a mute glance, silently asking, “Are you going to tell her now?”

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk face to face,” Jada said. “Is the Forbidden City okay with y’all?”

“That sounds expensive,” I said.

“It’s not, it’s a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese place over near Catesville; they mostly do takeout, but they have a few little tables for eating in.”

“Then sure,” I said. I figured I could just eat an egg roll or some fried wonton, and if I was feeling pangs of hunger by the end of the outing, they would go away when I merged with my other self, who would probably be helping herself to leftover soup around now. (Turns out I was wrong about that.) I wondered what she was doing. I’d find out soon enough, but I had no way to ask her, as I had our phone and the Ramseys didn’t have a landline.

“Sounds good to me,” Britt said, and Jada started talking about our split consciousness experiment. She didn’t bring up dating me until we got to the restaurant, which made me too nervous to participate much in their conversation on the way there.

When we walked in and looked at the menu, the girl behind the counter, who was venned with some draconic traits although she was far more human-looking than me, said approvingly, “Very good dragon venn. I venned into a full dragon for Chinese New Year.”

“Neat! I’ve venned into four-legged dragons, but usually really small, so I could fly. Sometime or other I’d like to venn into a big dragon that barely fits in the Venn machine.”

“Be sure to get your friend to specify that you’re really flexible. Otherwise you might have trouble getting out. I heard about someone who took so long to figure out how to untangle his giant centipede body and get out that the Venn machine turned him back.”

After a couple of minutes of studying the menu, I ordered a little more than I’d planned — an egg roll and a bowl of wonton soup. Jada ordered Mongolian beef, and Britt ordered a lot of stuff — two entrees and a couple of appetizers, I think, including multiple egg rolls. She’d been doing hard physical labor all morning, I realized. We filled our cups at the soda dispenser (I’d gotten water) and sat down at the table farthest from the cash register to wait for our food to be ready. Jada sat down next to me, Britt across from us.

“This cutie wants to make sure it’s okay with you before she’ll let me hold her hand,” Jada said. I spluttered and the sip of water I’d taken sprayed across the table, fortunately missing Britt.

“Jada!” I exclaimed. “I thought you’d, you know, sort of lead up to it gently.”

“Yeah, I hoped y’all might hit it off,” Britt said, casually wiping the splatter off the table with a napkin. “Congratulations.”

I felt relieved and my wings relaxed some. Jada slipped her hand into mine, and I felt hot again but didn’t resist, squeezing her hand for a moment and then holding it loosely.

“So we should talk about how this fits with Britt’s and my relationship,” Jada said. “Is it okay with you, Lauren, if Britt and I still snuggle sometimes?”

“...Um... yeah, I guess? The way you explained it, Britt doesn’t want to do any more than that, so...”

Britt and Jada smiled, and I felt good about making them happy, though I was still slightly weirded out about sharing my girlfriend with her previous girlfriend... but just for innocent snuggling.

“Would you like to snuggle with us?” Jada asked.

“Umm...” For just a moment I pictured myself sandwiched between Jada and Britt and I felt like if I were a cartoon character, steam would be blowing out of my ears. I mentally corrected that image: Jada in the middle, with Britt and me snuggling her on either side on a big sofa. Probably while watching one of the magical girl anime that Jada had been telling me about yesterday. There, that made sense. “That... might be nice? We could try it sometime...”

“Number thirty-eight,” the girl at the counter called out. We got up and brought our food back to the table.

“So does that make us a poly triad?” Jada asked.

“I feel like I’ve heard of that but I can’t remember what it is,” I said.

So Jada explained what she knew about polyamory — she wasn’t exactly an expert, she’d just read about it — while Britt and I started eating. Britt occasionally contributed something, but let Jada do most of the talking, like she did when we ate lunch at school.

“Does that mean that you’d be my girlfriend too?” I asked Britt after Jada had finished explaining.

She shrugged. “If you don’t read too much into it? I feel like most straight girls don’t snuggle on the couch with their straight friends, even if they hug a lot.”

“Uh, maybe. I wouldn’t know.”

She shrugged again. “Anyway, yeah, we could call it being girlfriends. Even though I reckon that will mean something different for you and Jada than it does for me and you, or me and Jada.”

“Okay. Thanks for being so understanding about this.”

Britt just nodded, her mouth full again. Jada said: “We’ve talked about this a lot, what we’d do if I found someone else that was interested in more than cuddling, so we were ready for whatever. Whether you were okay with including Britt or not. But I’m glad you are.”

After that, we talked about other things for a while. I got a little more backstory about how they’d started dating. Britt’s older sister had set her up with a couple of dates with boys that hadn’t done anything for her, and she’d told Jada she wondered if she might be lesbian, although she wasn’t sure. Then Jada had asked her out, and they’d started dating.

“Then after two or three months, I figured out I was ace, but not a lot really changed,” Britt said. “We stopped kissing and Jada stopped asking me every few dates if I was ready to have sex,” (Jada blushed at that,) “but we kept doing other stuff together. Going to movies, watching anime at each other’s houses, hugging and snuggling.”

“That sounds so sweet,” I said. “I’m glad you were able to keep your relationship working like that.”

Jada reached out across the table with the hand that I wasn’t holding and touched Britt’s hand. Britt smiled around a mouthful of lo mein.

When we finished eating, Jada said: “So what do y’all want to do next? I need to pick my other self up from work at six, but we could do whatever until then.”

Britt didn’t say anything right away, and I timidly suggested: “What about if we go somewhere more private and snuggle?”

“Your house, Jada?” Britt mumbled, then swallowed her mouthful of food and said more clearly, “or mine?”

“We’d better go back to your house, Britt; if we go to mine, my grandma will want to know why I’m not at work and I don’t want to have to explain the split consciousness thing right now.”

“If you don’t explain it at some point, you’d have to always stay away from home with one self while the other one goes to work,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, I want to see how I feel after we merge back to decide if I want to do it again. I don’t see any sense in worrying Grandma about it if I’m only going to do it once.”

“That makes sense.” I started to worry, for the first time, that I might suffer some kind of backlash from integrating however many hours of divergent memories. A headache, dizziness, confusion? I should have looked this stuff up myself rather than just relying on Jada to do the research.

We went back to Britt’s house, and Britt led the way inside. Her parents were sitting on the sofa watching one of those home renovation shows. Her mom was darker-skinned than Jada, and apparently rejuvenated to her mid-twenties; she didn’t have any unusual features like her husband and daughter’s extra arms, just a strikingly beautiful face and figure, somewhat downplayed by her T-shirt and sweats.

“Hey, Britt and Jada. And, ah... Laura, right?”

“Lauren,” Britt said.

“So this is the new girl you were telling me about?” Mrs. Boyce said. “You didn’t mention she was a dragon.”

“It’s news to me too,” Britt said.

“Hi,” I said. “I like being a dragon-girl when I can, but it has its inconveniences, so I’m a normal-looking human most of the time.”

Mrs. Boyce nodded approvingly. “Will you girls be staying for supper?”

“No, ma’am,” Jada said. “I’ve got to be somewhere at six, and I need to get Lauren home.”

“All right.”

Britt led us back to her room, and we ended up cuddling on her bed with Jada in the middle and Britt’s laptop in Jada’s lap. They introduced me to Ms. Vampire Who Lives In My Neighborhood; we watched the first few episodes with subtitles.

I later realized I had only the vaguest idea what had happened in the first episode, because I was too wrapped up in the delightful sensation of cuddling with my girlfriend (girlfriends!) for the first time. Holding hands had been wonderful, but snuggling up against Jada and feeling her arm wrapped around me, stroking my wings and the scales between them now and then... it left my cloaca all squishy and my mind dazed. In between the second and third episodes, Britt got up to go to the bathroom, and once she was gone, Jada kissed me on my dragony snout. I didn’t have lips in that form, but kissing was pretty nice anyway, if not any more mind-blowing than the snuggling had been. I figured it would be even better if we both had human lips and tongues next time.

“If holding hands tasted delicious,” I asked, “what does kissing feel like?”

“Plaid,” she said. “Extremely plaid.” Then, seeing my consternation, she burst into giggles and said, “No, I’m joshing with you. It’s more visual this time, though. Kind of a blue and orange pattern, but not a grid, something more loopy and swirly... hmm.” She closed her eyes and kissed me again, then said: “Yeah, kind of like a complicated knot.”

“Are you saying I’m knotty?”

“You knotty girl!” She tried to look stern and couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds without giggling again. It was infectious; Britt came back to a barrage of terrible rope, string, and knot puns, and started the next episode of Ms. Vampire in self-defense.

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“How was work?” my Jada asked when her other self got in the back.

 

“Don’t rub it in,” other-Jada said. “Please tell me I get to have some nice memories to cancel the last eight hours out with.”

 

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After a couple more episodes of Ms. Vampire, not long before Britt’s family ate supper, Jada and I said goodbye and she drove us to the Ramseys’ house. I called Mrs. Ramsey to let her know we were on the way.

Jada parked on the street and we walked up to the door. I let us in with my key, and Mrs. Ramsey and my other self met us at the door. (Meredith and Sophia were still at work.)

“Did y’all have fun?” other-me asked.

“Yeah,” I said, sharing a conspiratorial glance with Jada. “We went for a walk at the river park, then we hung out with Britt for a few hours after she got done with work.”

“You’ll have to tell me more about this split consciousness thing later,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “It sounds intriguing.”

“We’ll tell you about it after we merge back,” I said.

“You’ll be coming right back afterward?”

“Yeah,” Jada said. “We’ve gotta pick the other me up when she gets off work first, though, and there could be a line for the Venn machine at this time of day.”

“Let us know if you’re going to be more than half an hour,” Mrs. Ramsey said, “and I’ll hold supper for you. Meredith should be home from work by then.”

So Jada and both of me got back in the car and we went to Food Lion. Other-Jada was apparently watching for us, because she came out of the store right as we pulled into a parking space.

“How was work?” my Jada asked when her other self got in the back.

“Don’t rub it in,” other-Jada said. “Please tell me I get to have some nice memories to cancel the last eight hours out with.”

“You could say that,” Jada said, throwing a grin at me. “No spoilers.”

I realized that the other versions of us didn’t know we were dating now. They’d had hopes, but they didn’t know yet, and apparently Jada didn’t want to tell them, but let them find out by merging with us.

“To the library, and step on it, then,” backseat Jada said. Other-me giggled.

“Actually...” my Jada said, making no move to back out of the parking space. “Wouldn’t it be better if you drove, since you look more like our driver’s license photo?”

“Neither of us has the same eyes or hair we had then,” she said. “You’re dragging your feet, aren’t you.”

“Guilty as charged,” my Jada said, and got out. The other Jada hopped out and switched places with her, and we got to the library in record time. As she stopped at a light, she glanced suspiciously over at me. I mimed zipping my lips, but couldn’t help grinning at her.

Wouldn’t you know it, there were twelve people in line to use the Venn machine. The other version of Jada kept trying to get us to tell her what had happened, but we wouldn’t tell, and the other me (I later realized) wanted to know just as badly, but was laughing too hard to ask.

Fortunately, there were only five pairs of people who actually wanted to use the Venn machine. The other two were there to watch their friends’ stuff while they venned. That was the first time I’d seen someone venn into a small sheet of paper to let their friend mail them to another friend’s house, though I later found out that people had been doing that for years. Most of the people ahead of us weren’t doing anything too complicated and didn’t take too long, but the two people immediately in front of us must have spent at least ten minutes in the machine. We were all getting pretty impatient — Jada’s other self most of all — when the doors finally opened and two furries came out. One was a ferret-girl, and the other a guy of some cervine type, with twisty horns or antlers and mottled fur. They wore extremely elaborate clothes, something like Regency or Victorian formal wear, but with a lot of anomalous features like the glossy, transparent ribbons dangling from their cuffs and hems.

“Finally,” other-Jada huffed. She stuck a scrap of paper in the slot and set the timer for three years.

I took the hand of my other self and went in one side, and the two Jadas did the same on the other side. The moment the doors closed, I was holding nobody’s hand, and I suddenly remembered the last eight hours from two different perspectives.

I’d gone back to the Ramseys’ house, did some job hunting online, did some laundry, took out the trash, scrubbed the toilet and sink in the hall bathroom, ate lunch (leftover chicken and rice soup that Mrs. Ramsey and I had made the night before), and done some more reading for school.

And I’d also gone on a date with Jada... and Britt. A real date! I had a girlfriend! Two girlfriends! I laughed and hugged myself, remembering Jada’s arms around me.

Jada’s voice brought me back to the present. “Hey, could you bring up my history and give me the body I was wearing at school all week?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. And the same for me.”

Less than a minute later, we were back in our everyday bodies and the doors opened.

As we walked back to the car, Jada said: “I can’t believe I haven’t kissed you in almost two hours. Let’s fix that before I take you home.”

 

* * *

 

Sunday after church, the Ramseys and I went out to eat at a Thai restaurant over in Catesville. I’d never eaten at a Thai place before; Meredith helped me pick something I might like, and it was a bit odd but really tasty. Later in the afternoon, I checked my email and saw a message from Jada with attachments. I clicked on it and saw a series of photos. One of my tiny quadrupedal dragon form crawling on the sidewalk near Jada’s shoe, then several blurrier photos of me flying, or perching on a branch.

“What are you grinning at?” Meredith asked, looking up from her book.

“Look,” I said. “This is the first time I ever venned.”

She came over and leaned close to the laptop screen. “Oh, wow. Whose shoe is that?”

“Jada’s.”

“She was there the first time you and Nathan used the Venn machine?”

“Yeah...” I told her about it in more detail than I’d ever gone into before.

“And now you’re dating her. Wow.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.”

That evening, Mrs. Ramsey reminded me that I’d agreed to get counseling or therapy when we talked about me living with them.

“Yeah, I want to do that. You said you’d pay for it until I get a job?”

“Yes, we can afford to pay for a few sessions at least. Have you started looking for a therapist yet?”

“Uh, no, I’m not sure where to start. And I’ve been kind of busy getting my driver’s license updated and getting back into school and all. Could you help me with that?”

“Of course. I’ll look things up and make some phone calls tomorrow and we can go over what I found out after school, okay? The only counselor I’m really familiar with is the one we saw after Meredith came out, but in hindsight she’s not as good about gender issues as we could have wished.”

“Yeah... I think I’m pretty okay with my gender now, honestly? Now that I can just be a girl and most people don’t question it. What I want a therapist for is to help with my anxiety... and I guess my feelings about Mom and Dad. But that doesn’t mean a transphobic therapist would be okay.”

Jada and I talked on the phone a little later, after she got off work, and again during homeroom and lunch the next day, and on the phone again after we got done with homework in the evening, and at every chance we got for the next few days. We even figured out that our class schedules allowed us to meet up in the halls for a couple of minutes between second and third period, if we each took a slight detour. We were usually sitting with Britt at lunch, and Jada had a class with her.

Monday right after school, I went over a list of therapists Mrs. Ramsey had researched with her and picked one, then called and made an appointment. I was dismayed to find that the earliest available was in June.

Monday evening after she got off work, Mom called and we talked some more about gender issues and how I’d figured myself out. She told me that she’d talked to Dad about my bank account and he’d said he would talk to me, but he hadn’t done so yet.

Wednesday evening just before six, Mom called and said that Dad had called to say he’d be working late. So Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and I all got in the van and went over to Mom and Dad’s house to get my stuff.

Mom wasn’t home yet when we got there, but she drove up a minute later and, after hugging all of us, she let us in. We went straight to my bedroom. She opened the door and revealed several cardboard boxes containing all my books, school supplies, and personal belongings other than clothes. The posters were gone from the walls, the shelves were empty, and the sheets had been stripped off the bed.

“This is more than I thought,” Mr. Ramsey said, and I added,

“You didn’t have to pack all of this... that’s a lot more than I asked for.”

Mom wrung her hands. “I didn’t want to tell you over the phone... but we’re moving.”

“What? Where?”

“Closer to your father’s job. I don’t know when; we just started looking at house listings online this past weekend. We’ll probably go over to Durham and Hillsborough to look at some houses next weekend. We talked about it back when your father got this job, but I talked him into waiting until after you turned eighteen... since you’d promised to contact us then, and I thought we should keep the same address as long as we could. And then... well, he brought the idea up again recently. The long commute has been really bad for him.”

“I’ll miss you, Mom.” I hugged her, then turned to the Ramseys. “Do you think we can take all of this? I don’t want my stuff to fill up your house or anything...”

“I think we can find places to put it,” Mr. Ramsey said. “At least until you have time to sort through it and figure out what’s important.”

So we started hauling boxes out to the van. My books had filled up three bookshelves before Mom packed them up. That many books (plus some old toys, framed photos, school supplies and miscellaneous stuff) filled up a lot of boxes, and if Meredith or Sophia had been with us, we wouldn’t have had room for everybody to sit once the van was loaded.

While Mom, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey were hauling the first set of boxes to the car, I went through the drawers and closet to see if there were any clothes I particularly wanted to take. I grabbed a few things the Venn machine couldn’t replace — T-shirts with witty quotes on them by W.C. Fields and Dorothy Parker, for instance — but left the rest.

Then I pitched in on carrying boxes to the car. Some were too heavy for me, but Mom had used boxes of a bunch of different sizes and I could carry the smaller ones, or Mom and I together could carry a larger one. We got done in time to chat for a while; Mom had gotten another text from Dad while we were working, saying he was finally leaving work — which meant he wouldn’t be home in less than an hour and twenty minutes, probably a bit longer.

“Can I get y’all anything to drink?” she asked as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and I all sat down in the living room.

“Sweet tea or water, if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Ramsey said, and Mr. Ramsey and I said the same. When Mom came back with our drinks, she sat down next to me on the smaller sofa — Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had taken the larger one. (We had an L-shaped double sofa.)

“I also wanted to give you this,” she said. She handed me a flash drive. “I copied as many of our family photos onto it as it had room for, plus Aunt Patricia’s family history.” My mom’s aunt had done a lot of research on our family tree, and written a history (it was a typewritten document, which I’d seen passed around at a family get-together when I was a kid); her daughter had digitized and updated it a few years ago.

“Thanks,” I said. “That means a lot.” I wondered how many of the people mentioned in the history or depicted in those photos would understand what I was doing or approve of it. Not many, maybe.

“How have you been doing at school?” she asked.

I told her about the grades I’d gotten for the previous Friday’s quizzes and tests, and a little more about getting to know some people and making new friends. I didn’t exactly tell her Jada, Britt and I were dating; I wanted to lead up to that gradually, but I told her I’d hung out with them on Saturday.

“How have you been feeling, Mom?”

“Better since we’ve been talking regularly. I wish we could all be together as a family... but even this is a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, compared to the last year or so.”

I felt guilty, and I also felt a little resentment at her guilt-tripping me, but I decided she probably hadn’t meant to do that. “I’m glad to be able to see you again.”

“Have you given any more thought to letting me venn you into a younger body, Kathy?” Mrs. Ramsey asked. I’d been meaning to talk to Mom about that myself, but we’d spent so much time talking about transgender issues, and school, and so forth... I was glad Mrs. Ramsey had brought it up.

Mom furrowed her brow. “I’d like to. The idea of getting rid of all these little aches and pains... but Peter is so down on the idea of those machines these days. Back when they first appeared, he was cautiously in favor of using them to heal and rejuvenate people, but since — since Lauren left, and we found out why — well, he’s decided they’re no good. And I’d like to be younger and healthier, but I don’t want to risk my marriage over it.”

“You could venn just a little,” I said. “Let me or Mrs. Ramsey make you young and healthy inside, but pretty much the same on the outside.”

“Can you do that?” Mom asked.

“It’s always a trial and error process,” Mrs. Ramsey said, “but if you decide your new body looks too different, you can change back in less than a minute.”

“I changed Nathan just by making his hair slightly longer,” I contributed. If Mom was avoiding venning only to placate Dad, Nathan wouldn’t get in trouble if I mentioned that, and it might help nudge Mom in the right direction.

Mom was quiet for a moment. “Let’s do that. Some afternoon after work when it’s convenient for one of you to meet me at the library.”

We talked for a while longer; Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey asked after some people at our old church, and told Mom some more about their new church (Mrs. Ramsey had evidently already told her some in their phone conversations in the last week or two). I got distracted thinking about how to tell Mom I was dating a girl and sort of dating another one, and missed some of what they said.

Finally, I noticed we’d need to leave soon. Dad could be home in as little as fifteen minutes. I decided to bite the bullet; I still hadn’t figured out a good way to gently lead up to the subject.

“Mom,” I said, “we’ve got to go pretty soon, but I wanted to tell you before I leave...”

“Yes...?”

“I had my first date this past weekend. I told you I hung out with my friends Jada and Britt on Saturday? The first part of that, where Jada and I went to the river park... that turned out to be a date.”

“What?”

“We didn’t plan it that way; originally we were going to hang out with our other friends, but Meredith and Britt had to work, and since we were by ourselves, one thing led to another and the next thing I knew we were holding hands and talking about dating. I reckon we’ll do a more formal date in a week or two — we’ve been hashing out plans, but we’ll have to wait and see what Jada’s work schedule is next week and all.”

Mom was still staring at me as I babbled. Mr. Ramsey glanced at his phone and said, “Yeah, I expect we’d better go pretty soon here.” He glanced at me.

Mom finally asked, “You’re dating a girl?”

“Yes, Jada Plinkett, the girl I told you about earlier. She’s a friend of Meredith and she’s in my homeroom and we usually eat lunch together... she’s really nice. I think you’d like her.”

Mom was still staring, wringing her hands. “Just when I think I’m starting to get used to the idea of you being a girl, you spring this on me,” she said. “I’m not sure what to think.”

“I’m still me, Mom.” I made a tentative gesture toward hugging her, and she hugged me back, hard and strong. Then we really did have to leave.

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

The envelope was hand-addressed in my dad’s handwriting, which got my hopes up even though he deadnamed me, but inside there was no handwritten or even printed letter.

 

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Mom and I talked on the phone again a couple of nights later, more about my gender identity and sexual orientation. She’d apparently been talking with Mrs. Ramsey during her lunch breaks about what Episcopalians thought about LGBT+ people, and she was a little less gobsmacked about it after having a couple of days to think about it, but was still having a lot of trouble with the idea. Not that she was completely reconciled to the idea of my being trans, either, but she was desperate not to do or say anything that would push me to cut contact again. I sent her a photo Meredith had taken of me and Jada during the study group meeting at Lily’s house, thus dropping the other, smaller bombshell — that Jada was black. She didn’t say anything about it; she wasn’t as racist as you might expect from someone of her age and background, but I’m pretty sure she had some work to do to process that, too. I still didn’t say anything about snuggling with Britt.

Saturday, I worked on weekend homework in the morning, then on job applications and chores for a while. In the evening after work, Jada came to pick me up and we went out to supper at an Italian place downtown that I’d often eaten at with Mom and Dad and Nathan. Kissing was better when both of us had human lips and tongues. And afterward, we venned each other into tiny dragon-girls. I taught her how to fly, and we flew around the neighborhood until a few minutes after sunset, then perched in one of the old oak trees overlooking the library parking lot and cuddled for a while.

We talked about a lot of things that night, and I told her more about my history — how I’d figured out I was trans, and venned into a girl a few times with Meredith, and got caught, and hid with Meredith and Sophia until I was eighteen. She told me how she and her sister had ended up living with her grandmother, but she’s asked me not to talk about it in my memoir, so I’ll honor her wishes.

Afterward, we had a little trouble changing back. Jada plucked a leaf from the tree, and we got in line and waited, but the next couple who got in line didn’t see us standing there and almost stepped on us before we yelled at them, at which they apologized profusely. Once we got to the head of the line, Jada looked up at the display expectantly and waited.

“Huh,” she said. “I read that if you’re too short to reach the regular interface, it would shrink down to your eye level so you could.”

“That’s only the inside interface,” said one of the guys in line behind us. “I don’t know why they made the inside interface adapt to shrunken people and not the outside, but oh well. You want me to start up the machine for you?”

“Let me try this first,” Jada called back, and fluttered up into the air. She tried to hover in front of the interface and feed in the leaf, but our wings weren’t really built like hummingbirds’, and our fluttering was a bit chaotic, such that it was impossible to hover in one place or go in a straight line for very long.

“Yeah, I guess we could use your help,” Jada said. Jada held up the leaf and the guy bemusedly bent down and took it from her, then started the machine and fed it into the slot.

“How long?”

“A year,” Jada said.

“Okay.” The guy pressed the sun button and waited while Jada and I trotted into either booth, calling “Thank you” over our shoulders just before the doors closed on us. We soon had each other changed back into our everyday bodies, and she took me back to the Ramseys’ house.

 

* * *

 

Caleb came home from UNC Greensboro that weekend, and the house got more crowded for the next few months. He was planning to split the rent on a house not far from campus with three other guys; they had already made arrangements to move in after the current renters moved out later in the summer, and he told me I was welcome to have his room after he moved most of his stuff out. “I can sleep on the sofa bed when I come to stay a few days at Thanksgiving and Christmas and things like that,” he said. I thanked him fervently.

A few days later, when I came home from school, Mr. Ramsey told me I’d gotten something in the mail. The envelope was hand-addressed in my dad’s handwriting, which got my hopes up even though he deadnamed me, but inside there was no handwritten or even printed letter. There was a check, and photocopies of a couple of bank statements showing how much there’d been in my old bank account when Dad had closed it and transferred the money into his and Mom’s account. That was it. I was glad to have the money, so I could start contributing more to the household, but at the moment I felt like I would have rather had a letter from Dad. Or any other kind of communication that wasn’t so impersonal as a check and financial documents.

I was gradually getting used to the way the Ramseys did things, all the little differences between one household and another that you don’t think about until you spend an extensive time living with someone else. I’d noticed some differences when I’d been living with them secretly, but a lot more differences jumped out now that I was helping with the cooking and cleaning, and eating family meals with them. They routinely cooked brown rice rather than white, for instance, and when they cooked meat or eggs, they usually greased the pan with canola oil rather than Pam spray like my mom used. They weren’t as concerned about washing whites separately from colored fabrics, except for a few formal clothes. I realized that most of their clothes had been through the Venn machine at some point, being tailored to fit their new bodies, and the colors on venned clothes never run.

Instead of each person having a set of chores they were responsible for all the time, everybody did some of everything — cooking, cleaning, taking out the trash, yard work, grocery shopping, basic car maintenance — on a rotating schedule. They’d worked me into the schedule within the first couple of days, and before long I was helping with pretty much everything. I even helped out a little with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey’s business, helping get things ready to mail out to people who’d bought them.

In early May, I buckled down to working on term papers, letting Sophia venn me into a living doll during the first weekend in May so I could sleep less and spend more time researching and writing. Jada and I got together after she got off work the second Saturday in May; she split me into two living dolls, then venned the larger one into a human girl so my human self could go on a date with her, while my doll self went home and worked on term papers.

On Sunday, the human part of me went to church and ate out with the Ramseys and some friends from their church while the doll part stayed home and continued to write. During the next few days, my human self went to school while the doll self stayed home, studied, and wrote term papers. We didn’t merge back until the following Thursday evening when Meredith and both of myselves stopped at the library on the way home from Lily’s house; I had some tests on Friday that I wanted the benefit of both selves’ studying for.

Merging five days’ worth of memories was more dizzying than merging nine hours’ worth. I realized that in doll form, my intense study habits from the fourteen months as a dragon statue had come back to a large extent; that self had spent very little time relaxing, either recreational reading or fuguing out, figuring she could get the benefit of my human self’s better psychological balance when we merged. She did, but the cost was that I was rather subdued and un-talkative for the rest of that evening, despite the Ramseys’ questions about how splitting and merging felt. Sophia was planning to do some splitting experiments herself at some point, but she didn’t want to complicate her doll experiment with that, so she’d decided to stay a doll as much as possible for a full year — until the end of the summer after her junior year — only changing back temporarily for holiday meals. “Next year I’m going to split in two for a week or two at a time and merge back before quizzes and tests,” she told me.

Taking those tests was a slightly surreal experience at times, as some questions might trigger contradictory proprioceptive memories of having two completely different bodies while studying the material. But not so much that I couldn’t answer the questions fairly promptly.

That had worked well enough that I let Sophia split me into a human and a doll again the next day, planning to have the doll self focus on studying for finals for the next couple of weeks — but not at the expense of everything else, I resolved. My human self spent that Saturday evening with Jada and Britt at Britt’s house snuggling and watching anime. I still hadn’t been to Jada’s house.

I got my new driver’s license in the mail that week. Even though I wouldn’t do much driving for a good while after that, since I didn’t have a car and the friends who gave me rides mostly preferred to drive their own cars, it felt really good to see my girl photo, my real name, and the correct gender marker on my license.

Then, Tuesday evening of the week before finals, Sophia came home from work and told me, “We’ve got an opening!”

“What?” I said (my human self, I mean, who was washing up after supper when Sophia walked in; my doll self was in Sophia’s room reading). “You mean Metamorphoses is hiring?”

“Yeah! You should totally apply!”

“I’ll be there first thing tomorrow. Remind me what time they open?”

“Nine o’clock — but we’ll be at school... Oh.”

“Right.” We went down the hall to Sophia’s room and told my doll self about the job opening.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll go in and apply tomorrow while you’re at school.”

“You can use me as a reference,” Sophia said enthusiastically. “Mr. Paget will want to know what kinds of things you’ve venned into in the past and what you’d be comfortable venning into for work, as well as your regular work experience...”

 

* * *

 

Wednesday morning, Meredith drove Sophia and my human self to school, dropping off my doll self at Metamorphoses on the way. It was still over an hour before the restaurant opened. I sat on one of the benches out front, reading, until the first employees arrived to open up.

“Good morning,” said a short, mousy (literally) girl, her ears and tail twitching. “We don’t open for another half hour.”

“That’s okay, I’m here to apply for a job and my ride had to drop me off early.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I’ll let Mr. Paget know when he gets here. Meanwhile you can sit inside if you like.”

“Thanks.”

So I sat and chatted with the mouse-girl, who introduced herself as Jill, while she and a couple of other co-workers got the restaurant ready to open. After a few minutes, feeling uncomfortable sitting around while they worked, I pitched in, wrapping sets of silverware in napkins and so forth, which was how Mr. Paget found me when he arrived.

Mr. Paget, that particular day, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with auburn fur and cat-like ears and whiskers, but no tail. He wore a navy blue business suit, and greeted each of the employees by name until he came to me.

“Sophia?” he asked tentatively. “Isn’t this a school day?”

“This is Sophia’s friend Lauren,” Jill put in. “She’s here to apply for the job.”

“Already making yourself useful, I see,” he said approvingly. “Let’s meet in my office in about fifteen minutes. I have a couple of things to do first.”

He asked me a lot about my venning history, as Sophia had told me to expect. I listed pretty much everything I’d ever venned into, and told him I was comfortable with all sorts of bodies as long as they were feminine or at least androgynous.

“A dragon-girl, hmm? I don’t have many staff who like venning into reptilian forms. Would you mind meeting me at the library in a little while and letting me see your history?”

“In principle, I don’t mind, but we’d have to wait until after school and meet up with my other self. I’m split in two right now, and I’m the secondary body, so if I go in the Venn machine I’ll vanish and my other self will suddenly get all my memories for the last few days, which could be distracting.”

“Tell me more about splitting. I’ve heard about it, but haven’t tried it yet.”

So I told him how it worked, how it felt, and what I’d used it for so far, being rather vague about my dates with Jada and Britt.

“That’s intriguing,” he said. “I’ll have to try that sometime. Anyway, what hours would you be available?”

“Pretty much any time you’re open, I think? My other self and I were planning to re-merge the night before our final exams, but we can split in two again right after we merge, so one of us could work any time while the other’s in school. The only constraint might be when one of the Ramseys could give us a ride, if the weather’s too bad to walk this far.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were still in school. You’ll be graduating in a couple of weeks, I suppose?” I’d told him I was eighteen when he asked my age near the beginning of the interview.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have immediate plans to go to college?”

“I’m planning to work and save money for at least a year before I start college. I hope I’ll be able to start in the fall of next year.”

“I’ll have to ask a lawyer to be sure, but I don’t think I can have one of your selves working here while the other one is in high school. It might be different since you’re over eighteen. But that will only be an issue for a couple more weeks.”

“Then I’ve got the job?” I asked, gobsmacked after so many weeks of looking without finding anything.

“Not quite,” he said. “You’re the best candidate I’ve seen yet based on your venning history, although your work history is kind of short. I’ll talk to your references and interview a few more people, and call you back in a couple of days. I’d like to hire someone by Friday afternoon so they can work Saturday and Sunday mornings — will you be available then?”

“Of course.”

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

My other free stories can be found at:

• Scribblehub
• DeviantArt
• Shifti
• TGStorytime
• Fictionmania
• Archive of Our Own

I also have several ebooks for sale, most of whose contents aren't available elsewhere for free. Smashwords pays its authors higher royalties than Amazon. itch.io's pay structure is hard to compare with the other two, but seems roughly in the same ballpark.

• Smashwords
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“We’re gonna be working together! This is gonna be kind of awesome. I mean, it’s menial service industry work, so that kind of sucks, but it’s about as good as waiting and busing tables ever gets, from what I hear. Mr. Paget’s a fair boss, unlike that asshole at my old job, and you get to work in all kinds of cool bodies.”

I apologize for the lateness of the chapter. I just forgot to post it manually after it went up automatically on Scribblehub. So here it is on Sunday instead of the usual Wednesday evening or Thursday. If I forget it again, you can always find the new chapter on Scribblehub -- all chapters through the end are already pre-scheduled there for Wednesday at 8pm EST.

 

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Both of me were on pins and needles for the next couple of days, waiting for Mr. Paget to call back. My doll self overheard half of his conversation with Mr. Ramsey when he called to talk to him about me on Friday morning — I’d given him as a reference based on helping out with their home business a little. Just a few hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey left for their anniversary vacation; they wouldn’t be back until late Monday evening.

Then Friday afternoon, my human self rode the bus home because both Sophia and Meredith had to work after school. She was looking kind of bedraggled when she got in, and my doll self made her a cup of tea. She was sipping at it and telling me about her day at school when our phone rang. We both stared at it for a moment.

She picked it up. “Hello?... Oh, wow, that’s great... Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow at eight-thirty. Thank you so much, I won’t let you down... Okay, bye.”

My human self hung up and looked at my doll self, her eyes shining. “That was Mr. Paget; he wants us to start tomorrow. I mean one of us. And he wants a dragon-girl.”

“Do you want to merge back and then get someone to venn us into a dragon-girl for work?” my doll self asked. “Or stay split until Sunday night, and let me keep studying while you venn into a dragon-girl for work?”

“It would be nice to have one of us get another couple of days of studying in before finals while the other one goes to work. And if Mr. Paget wants us to work on Sunday morning, maybe you could go to church with the Ramseys while I work.”

“I don’t think they’ll blame us for working during church hours when our brand new job wants us to work Sunday morning.”

“Yeah. But we’re already split. It’s not like we’re asking our friends to do extra venning for us — besides venning one of us into a dragon-girl. Oh, and Mr. Paget said to keep track of how long we spent waiting in line and venning into the form we’re about to go to work in, and he’ll pay us for that time, and that if we need him or one of our co-workers to meet us at the machine and venn us, that can be arranged.”

“I think we should ask Sophia when she gets home from work.”

So we did. Sophia was excited, having heard from Mr. Paget that he’d given us the job.

“We’re gonna be working together! This is gonna be kind of awesome. I mean, it’s menial service industry work, so that kind of sucks, but it’s about as good as waiting and busing tables ever gets, from what I hear. Mr. Paget’s a fair boss, unlike that asshole at my old job, and you get to work in all kinds of cool bodies.”

When we described our plan to stay split until the night before our first final exam, she suggested that our human self ride to work with her the next morning and she would venn her into a dragon-girl. We agreed that made sense.

We talked with Jada on the phone that night, telling her the good news and making kissy noises. Sophia, who wasn’t as out of earshot as we’d thought, made fake gagging noises.

 

* * *

 

I said goodbye to myself the next morning and rode with Sophia to the library. At that time of morning, everyone who was waiting to use the machine worked at Metamorphoses. Sophia knew all of them, and I’d met one of them, Jill the mouse-girl; she was wearing a pretty mid-twenties human body at the moment. Sophia introduced me to everybody as we waited. A couple of people asked Sophia to venn them, so she went through the machine three times, with them and with me. After her second time through, she had a tall, svelte plastic body with green hair in a ponytail, wearing a skin-tight navy blue body suit with a lot of pouches and pockets. Everybody was pretty experienced using the machines, and in most cases were just venning into a recent form from their history, so the line moved quickly.

When Sophia and I got inside, she said, “History,” picked the dragon-girl body I’d worn on a date with Jada recently, and started tweaking it. When she pressed her green button, I was a purple-scaled dragon girl with slightly larger wings than usual and significantly larger pseudo-breasts. (I checked in the restroom later and found I still didn’t have nipples.)

I ribbed Sophia about my bust size on the way over to Metamorphoses.

“Wait and see the tips you make,” she said unrepentantly.

Before I started working, I had to read and sign a big stack of employment paperwork in Mr. Paget’s office. He was still male, if I had to guess, but much more slender and androgynous than when I’d seen him on Tuesday, with sky-blue skin and six arms, four of them slender and delicate. Most of the paperwork was familiar from when I’d started at Subway, but there were also a couple of forms saying that I understood I’d be expected to always come to work in a visibly-venned body, that I understood I’d be paid for my time spent at the Venn machine, and that I understood that Metamorphoses might, given reasonable advance notice, require me to come to work venned in a particular way on particular occasions.

“Is there something where we can put an exception for forms I’m not comfortable with?” I said. “I can’t do anything male.”

“Yeah, there’s a blank space on page three where we can fill that in. It’s no problem.”

I found the reservations and exceptions section he’d mentioned, and carefully wrote “No male forms,” then initialed the first two pages and signed the third. Mr. Paget signed it, and then we discussed my schedule, sketching in my hours for the next couple of weeks. I’d be working on Saturdays and Sundays as well as Tuesday and Wednesday evenings after school, up until graduation, when I’d start working about forty hours a week. Then I was ready to start training.

Jill, who Sophia had venned into a somewhat different mouse-girl body that morning, showed me the ropes; I learned how the different sections and tables were designated and how they were divided up among the waitstaff at busier and less-busy times, the shorthand abbreviations they used for various dishes on the menu, and so forth. Then I shadowed Jill for a while as she waited tables during the breakfast rush. Toward the end of breakfast hours, she turned me loose to wait tables by myself, which was a bit scary at first, but I managed okay, only occasionally having to ask someone for help about how to code it when a customer asked for something extra or for a standard topping to be left off.

During the breakfast and lunch rushes, I was kept on my feet the whole time, but during the lull between them, I spent some time studying the menu and chatting with some of the other staff. A lot of the kitchen staff were visibly venned, too, even though they weren’t required to be so like the public-facing staff. There weren’t any furries, such as predominated among the waitstaff, but several people had hairless forms, including one scaly like me, a couple of people with extra arms, unusually muscular forms, and so on.

I got to know Jill better, and realized (which shouldn’t have surprised me, but did) that the cute little mouse-girl had to be at least in her fifties, given the number and age of her grandchildren. (She showed me pictures; one of them looked as old as eight or ten, and there were several babies and toddlers.) I also got to know a couple of other waitresses and Ryan, one of the cooks, a lizard-guy.

“That’s a great dragon venn,” he said. “Who did it?”

“Sophia; she tweaked a form from my history that my girlfriend designed.” I mentioned Jada as a subtle hint that I was taken (and not interested), since he’d been kind of flirtatious in a friendly way.

“My compliments to both of them. Sophia’s brilliant; I always get her to venn me when she’s available.”

“Yeah, she’s about the smartest person I know. And my girlfriend’s pretty sharp, too.”

Sophia got off work around the same time I did, and showed me how to clock out, including logging the time we’d spent at the Venn machine.

“Do you want to venn back into your everyday human girl body now?” she asked.

“If I do, I’ll need to get someone to venn me back into the dragon-girl tomorrow morning,” I said. “And you won’t be available since you’ll be getting ready for church.” She wouldn’t go to work Sunday until shortly before I got off.

“One of us needs to give you a ride before church anyway, so we might as well —”

I shook my head. “Y’all have been great about giving me rides, but the weather’s fine, the neighborhood is as safe as it gets, and nobody’s going to mess with a dragon-girl. I’ll walk.”

“Okay with me. Don’t be surprised if Mom or Dad insists on giving you a ride anyway.”

We went home with the same forms we’d venned into for work. My doll self had been working with Mr. Ramsey on fixing supper. Meredith got home from work not long after Sophia and I did, and we ate. Then my doll self and I talked with Jada on the phone for a while before getting back to studying for finals.

That night was the first time I’d slept in a dragon-girl form. Back when I had a male body, I would sometimes sleep on my belly, but I couldn’t do that as a girl; I would sleep on my back or sometimes on my side. As a dragon-girl, I couldn’t sleep on my back because of my wings, but I found that sleeping on my belly didn’t make my pseudo-breasts uncomfortable the way it did my real breasts when I was human. After I figured that out, I got a decent night’s sleep.

 

* * *

 

Sunday morning, my phone alarm woke me up earlier than Meredith or Caleb. I wasn’t sure if I needed a shower this soon; I didn’t sweat in dragon form, but I decided to play it safe. As I dried off afterward, I realized I had another problem: the Venn machine had made a blouse with a gap for my wings, but none of my usual clothes would fit, and I didn’t want to wear yesterday’s blouse again. I’d have to get someone to go to the Venn machine with me before work.

Or — no, I didn’t necessarily need one of the Ramseys to do that. I could just meet up with the other Metamorphoses employees who were venning before work and have them venn me with a few of my blouses so they’d fit. For now, I’d put on the dirty blouse from the day before along with a clean skirt.

When I went to the kitchen, I found that my doll-self had fixed me a bowl of grits and scrambled an egg. The Ramseys usually didn’t eat breakfast until around nine on Sunday, and I would need to already be at work by then. While I was eating, Meredith came in and sat down with me, still in her nightgown.

“Are you really gonna walk to work?” she asked. “You know I can give you a ride.”

“You don’t look wide awake enough to drive safely yet,” I teased.

“Okay,” she said, stifling a yawn. “Then let Sophia drive you. She’s got to be well-rested.”

“Look,” I said, “it’s a safe neighborhood in a safe town and if you hadn’t noticed, I’m a dragon today. I don’t think anybody’s going to mess with me.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” she said. “You’ll be as safe as any pedestrian in this county.”

“Anyway,” I said, finishing off my last bite of grits and scrambled egg, and saying the next bit with my mouth full, “I need to get going.” I stood up from the table.

“If you got me or Sophia to drive you, you’d still be early,” she pointed out.

“Bye.” I hugged her, grabbed my purse and the bag of tops I’d set aside to v-tailor, and got going. It was a pleasant walk, the weather being sunny but not hot yet, with a mild breeze. I got to the library with twenty minutes to spare before I had to be at work, and found several of my co-workers waiting for the Venn machine, including Jill.

“Hey,” I said. “Could one of y’all just push the green button while I’m holding this bag of clothes? I forgot I’d need some changes of clothes for this body when I venned into it.”

“Sure,” Jill said. “Just as soon as me and Terri venn each other.”

A few minutes later, I had several tops with space for my wings, Jill was a mouse-girl again, and Terri was an androgynous cyborg with light-up implants in her scalp and forearms. Jill gave me a ride to work from there, which I had fewer qualms about accepting since she was heading that way anyway, unlike Meredith or Sophia.

“Do you ever stay in your mouse-girl form overnight,” I asked, “or do you always re-venn before and after every shift?”

“It depends,” she said. “My husband’s a long-haul trucker and when he’s home, I like to be human. Other nights I’ll go home with the same body I work in, unless it’s a silly holiday body like the turkey-girl Mr. Paget asked me to be around Thanksgiving.” She hadn’t said a lot about her husband when she’d been showing me pictures of her grandchildren during a break the day before, though she’d mentioned him once or twice.

We didn’t have time for any more conversation than that in the four blocks she had to drive. We clocked in and got to work.

The breakfast rush was lighter on Sunday, but the lunch rush was bigger. I figured of all the people from Crossroads who were going out to eat after church, only a tiny fraction would ever eat at a place like Metamorphoses; and if they did, they wouldn’t recognize me anyway. And that particular Sunday, nobody I knew from Crossroads ate there during my shift, though later on I did occasionally see Crystal Hallock and her new husband Mark, who I’d met a couple of times when he was dating her, and a couple of other people I knew from church. But I got a pleasant surprise that Sunday: Jada, her sister Tamily, and their grandma came in to eat wearing glorious Sunday dresses.

“Hi, welcome to Metamorphoses —” I stumbled for a moment as I recognized Jada, and a moment later, her sister and grandma, but then recovered. “I’m Lauren and I’ll be your server this afternoon. What can I get you to drink?”

“Sweet tea,” Jada’s grandma said. Jada and her sister ordered Coke. Jada’s eyes were twinkling, but she didn’t let on that she knew me, and after a few moments of confusion, I went along with her on that. After four dates, she still hadn’t taken me to her house to meet her grandma and sister, though she’d shown me some more pictures of them. She’d told me that her grandma didn’t know she was into girls, or that she was dating me, though she’d told her about making friends with me and hanging out with me both at school and on weekends.

I went to get their drinks, as well as those for another table, and when I brought them back, I got their lunch orders. Jada ordered the fish tacos, which made me extremely glad that my scales wouldn’t show a blush, and when I stopped by their table later on to see if they needed anything, she teased me by savoring a bite of taco in a way so suggestive I couldn’t believe her grandma didn’t spot it. We still hadn’t had sex yet, though we’d had gotten as far as touching each other’s breasts on our last date, and I was afraid my cloaca would be damp enough to stain my dress. Fortunately, I was too busy rushing from table to table to stay aroused or flustered for long.

When I brought them the check, Mrs. Plinkett took her debit card out of her purse and handed it to me, and as I was about to go off to the register with it, I heard Jada say, “I’ll cover the tip, Grandma.” She threw a lascivious glance at me over her shoulder as they left, and when I cleaned up their table afterward, I found her tip with a hastily scrawled note folded between the bills:

 

“Let’s get tacos again after finals.”

 

I had to go to the restroom after that to cool down a bit.

 

---

---

 

My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

We venned each other into two bodies each, normal-size and small, but this time the smaller ones were tiny — about an inch or two high.

 

---

---

 

I walked home from work; both Sophia and Meredith were at work, and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey were still on their anniversary trip, but Caleb was home. I said hi to him and went to study with my doll-self; we quizzed each other on material for tomorrow’s American Literature final.

After Meredith and Sophia got off work and we ate supper, Meredith and both of me went to the library. First my doll-self went in the machine alone, and vanished, so I (in my dragon-girl body) felt the rush of two weeks worth of memories and experiences.

“You okay?” Meredith asked as I stumbled.

“Yeah, I just need a minute to integrate all these memories.” Going to school, staying home and studying, making out with Jada, the interview, our first couple of days on the job, Jada flirting with me right in front of her grandma and sister... all of it was me.

We went in the machine next. Meredith called up my history, and before I had finished assimilating all the two weeks of divergent memories, I was back in my everyday body.

 

* * *

 

I was as well prepared for finals as I’d ever been, if not better. Jada and I made plans to go out Saturday evening after finals. Meredith was going to be going out with Hunter that evening, too. And of course we had other, more collective celebration plans for after graduation. Lily was hosting a graduation party at her house in the afternoon after the ceremony, and Lisette was hosting a smaller get-together around the same time; both invited me, but I declined Lily’s invitation because I didn’t think I would have fun at any party with that many people.

Saturday evening, about two hours after I got off work and half an hour after Jada got off, she picked me up for our date and we went to the library to venn each other. She’d had a daring idea which I was a little nervous about at first, but willing to try.

We venned each other into two bodies each, normal-size and small, but this time the smaller ones were tiny — about an inch or two high. We didn’t quite get the scale even, so when I looked at her small body through the eyes of my small one, she looked about eight feet tall. We scooped up our tiny bodies with our big bodies’ hands and deposited them in a nest of pillows and blankets that Jada had made in her back seat, then rolled down the windows so it wouldn’t get too hot, and while we waited in line again with our big bodies, our small bodies played in the pillows and blankets like a giant labyrinthine bouncy castle. We couldn’t help constantly giggling with both bodies, apparently at nothing, and I’m sure some of the people waiting in line with us thought we were daffy.

We didn’t change each other’s normal-size bodies much; we’d mainly gone in the machine again just to split our minds across our two bodies. I made sure Jada still looked enough like her driver’s license photo to drive us, just making her slightly taller and lengthening her hair; she was a little more free with her tweaks to me, making my breasts larger and more sensitive while giving me scales over my midriff, back and butt, but making sure my face was human enough to kiss well.

“Whatever will the tinies get up to without us to chaperone them!” Jada exclaimed, fanning herself. I giggled nervously.

“Let’s go check on them,” I said as we exited the machine. But we pointedly didn’t; we just got in the car and drove off without looking back at our tiny selves. We could hear their soft high-pitched giggles now and then as they chased each other through the labyrinth of crumpled blankets.

We got tacos and burritos at a taco truck in the Walmart parking lot, and ate them in the car with the windows rolled down, feeding one another bites and setting aside a little for our tiny selves.

“Hey, little squirts, y’all ready to eat yet?” Jada asked.

“Already eating,” came a muffled, high-pitched version of her voice, followed by a giggle and moan from somewhere in the mass of blankets. I blushed bright red.

“Oh, right, they brought their own tacos,” Jada remarked. I spluttered and sprayed bits of bean and beef across Jada’s dashboard; she laughed and handed me some napkins to clean it up with.

“Should we go for a walk and give them some privacy?” Jada suggested when we’d finished eating (except for a couple of bites we’d set aside in the wrappers for when our little selves cooled off enough to notice how hungry they were).

“Sure,” I said. She drove us over to the nearest park, which was a tiny patch with a playground and a tennis court, a little way south of the library. We walked around the park and then the neighborhood around it for a while, holding hands. When we got back to the car, we kissed and made out in the front seat, listening to the first episode of an audio drama podcast I’d gotten into recently and wanted to introduce Jada to. Suddenly, just at a dramatic moment when the heroine was free of the silencing spell the villain had put on her and was about to tell her girlfriend who she really was, I felt a sudden something plop onto my shoulder and then into my cleavage, and I squeaked. Jada yelped a moment later. In the dim light, I couldn’t see clearly at first, but Jada turned on the overhead light and I saw a tiny Jada snuggling in between my overly-sensitive breasts. I glanced over and saw my tiny self teasing Jada in the same way.

“Boarders!” Jada exclaimed. “Don’t let them get away!” She squeezed her breasts together, eliciting a gasp and a delirious sigh from my tiny self.

“No!” the tiny Jada in my cleavage squealed, “anything but that!”

I was a little worried I might choke or crush her if I squeezed too hard, and I was already extremely distracted by simply having her there, much less squirming around like she was doing now, so I squeezed gently and gasped in unison with my tiny captive.

We didn’t hear much more of the podcast after that, though it kept playing until she had the presence of mind the turn it off.

Later on, when we merged and shared memories, I remembered how we’d continued playing tag among the blankets and pillows while our big selves drove to the taco truck and got their supper. We stopped, out of breath, laid down in a crumpled fissure of blankets and kissed. My heart was pounding, and not just with the exertion of playing tag.

“You ready to do more?” Jada asked.

“I — yes,” I said, but even though it felt good when she put her hands under my blouse and ran her hands along my side toward my breast, I thought about my big self for a moment and felt uneasy, too. I added, gasping, “But not all the way. I know what we planned, but... I think I want to be one whole person when we do that.”

“Okay,” she said, pausing and taking her hand away. “I have an idea how we can get privacy for that without having to be split. For now, though, how far are you comfortable going?”

I tried to think; it was difficult with her lying snuggled next to me. “Um, let’s say... above the waist?”

“I can live with that,” Jada said with a grin as she nuzzled into my cleavage.

A few minutes later, big Jada asked us if we were hungry. I was too busy nuzzling into Jada’s chest to think of a reply, but Jada called back, “Already eating.”

I giggled. Big Jada, not to be outdone, quipped “Oh, right, they brought their own tacos.”

That led my mind places I wasn’t ready to go yet and after another couple of minutes, I whispered, “I think we’d better stop or we’ll go farther than I’m ready.”

“Okay,” Jada said, stroking my hair. “That’s fine with me. But listen, I’ve got another idea for how to prank our big selves.”

Jada had left climbing equipment for our tiny selves to use in case we fell off the seat onto the floorboard — needles and strong thread we could use to climb back up to the nest of blankets. So we used them to climb the backs of the front seats and coordinate a leap off the headrest onto our shoulders and then into our cleavage. That kind of overhang might have made a nigh-impossible climb on rock at human scale, but our tiny selves were stronger in proportion to their mass than normal humans. So it was a challenge, especially since I’d never done any serious climbing before, but not something requiring a well-prepared team of professionals to attempt. And stabbing needles into upholstery is probably a lot easier than chipping handholds into rock with whatever kind of tool real mountain climbers use.

 

---

---

 

My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

Jada was the only one of our group of lunch friends who was going to college in the fall. I was working for a year to save money and establish residency, Britt was going to take online trade school classes while learning more from her dad about working on cars, and Poppy and Lisette were just going to start working full-time.

 

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---

 

Most seniors didn’t have anything substantial to do in the last week of school, when the teachers were grading our previous week’s final exams for graduation and the lower grades were taking their finals. A lot of people skipped one or more days that week, including Poppy, Lisette, and Britt, but I attended classes that week so I could hang out with Jada during homeroom and lunch. And free period; she went to school that week but skipped her second period class to hang out with me in the courtyard. I introduced her to Dawson, who I didn’t see again for a long time after that week, and we talked about books and TV shows as well as our plans for after graduation.

Those post-graduation plans were a source of tension between us. Jada was the only one of our group of lunch friends who was going to college in the fall. I was working for a year to save money and establish residency, Britt was going to take online trade school classes while learning more from her dad about working on cars, and Poppy and Lisette were just going to start working full-time. Jada had been accepted into several state schools, including North Carolina Central University in Durham (where her grandma had gone), Winston-Salem State University, and UNC Greensboro, but by the time I got to know her, she had decided to go to East Carolina University for much the same reason Nathan had elected to go to Mars Hill University — to be far enough away that her grandma wouldn’t drop in casually as she might in Greensboro or Winston-Salem. It was a three hour drive from her grandma’s house, assuming no unusual traffic.

But now that we were getting serious, she was having qualms about going to school that far away from me while I was staying in Brocksboro for another year. She’d started talking about not starting school until the following year, at the same time as I did and possibly at the same school as me or at schools fairly close together. I’d tried to talk her out of it. I didn’t want her to hurt her own prospects and delay getting her degree. Then she suggested splitting in two and leaving one of her at home, to continue working at Food Lion, contributing to her grandma’s household expenses, and dating me and Britt; her college student self would re-merge with the stay-at-home every few weeks and re-split after assimilating all the new memories.

“I’m not sure I’d want to split for that long at a time,” I said as she drove us from the high school to Lisette’s house after the graduation ceremony. “The longer you go without merging, and especially the more radically different your experiences are, the harder it’s going to be to assimilate the memories. If the two of you are living in different places, and one of them’s meeting lots of new people, learning a lot of new things, and hopefully making new friends, it’s going to be a really dizzying merge.”

“Yeah, I know. I figure I can come home at least once a month, every two weeks whenever possible. And maybe merge just before bedtime on Friday, and split again before I leave for college on Sunday afternoon.”

“The more college-you gets involved in extracurriculars at school, and makes new friends there, the less willing you’ll be to come home often and miss whatever your friends and clubs are doing doing that weekend.”

“Maybe, but I’ll have you and Britt to keep me coming home regular.”

“You should test it out. Split up for a month sometime over the summer, and see how you feel after you merge back.”

“Hmm,” she said. “My grandma might not want to feed two of me for a whole month. Even if I’m paying for a lot of our groceries now, and it’s going to be more when I start working full-time after graduation. What about if I make my second self a tiny pet for you?”

“I can’t have a pet,” I protested. “Six humans is already kind of pushing it for the Ramseys’ house.”

“I could be so tiny they’d never notice,” she pleaded. “Or a plushie for you to sleep with.”

I squirmed in my seat at the thought of snuggling with Jada every night. It would depend on Jada’s ability to be discreet. I’d had several close calls during my fourteen months of living with Meredith and Sophia without their parents’ knowledge; Jada would only have to lie low for a month, but she’d be staying in the living room most of the time, not in a closed bedroom.

“What if,” I said, “we try something radical. Tell the Ramseys what we’re going to do. I don’t think they’d object — as a plushie you wouldn’t eat or use water, and you’d hardly take up any room. And if you’re snuggling with me all night, you wouldn’t use any extra electricity — not like me when I had an extra doll body that was sitting up and studying most of the night.”

“You don’t think they’d mind you sleeping with your girlfriend?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But they’ve been really good to me and I’d rather not deceive them if it doesn’t seem really necessary.”

Just then Jada slowed down and parked on the side of the street. “We’re here.” I’d been engrossed enough in our conversation that I hadn’t paid close attention to where we were going, except that we were somewhere north of downtown. The houses around here were smaller than in my old neighborhood or Meredith’s, and most of them had unkempt lawns and ragged shrubbery. We got out and Jada led the way to the next house down the street, which had a driveway full of cars. That made me a little apprehensive — Lisette had given the impression there were only going to be a handful of people at her party. I recognized Britt’s old Ford Focus, and wondered who else was there; I later realized that most of the cars belonged to Lisette’s parents, her older sister, and her aunt who was living with them temporarily.

Lisette’s aunt answered the door and showed us to the door leading to the basement stairs. Downstairs, we found Lisette, Poppy, and Britt dancing to some techno band I wasn’t familiar with. Lisette and Poppy were venned with an even greater height difference than usual, Lisette being over a foot taller than Poppy, and they both had extra arms like Britt, which they weaved around while dancing, clasping each other’s hands with this arm, then that one and another one.

Jada grabbed my hand and we started dancing too, not really talking to anybody except to say hi until after the song (which was pretty long) ended. It was amazing to see the moves Britt and Jada could make with their extra arms and extra joints. After the song was over, Jada, Britt and I collapsed onto an old sofa with stained upholstery and Poppy and Lisette plopped into a beanbag chair; Jada put her long, flexible arm around me. The loud, fast techno track gave way to a soft, meditative guitar instrumental.

“We were wondering when y’all would get here,” Poppy said, reaching over to the side table and picking up a pipe from an ashtray. “Britt was here almost an hour ago.” I’d known for a while that Poppy and Lisette smoked pot, but I’d never smelled it before. Poppy tamped down the pipe and lit it, then toked and passed it to Lisette, who offered it politely to us. Britt waved it away, but Jada surprised me by reaching over and taking it. She picked up on my surprise and asked me, “Are you worried?”

“Kind of, maybe? I don’t know much about pot... just what they tell you in school, which I guess is probably exaggerated.” It was a sweet smell that might have been nice if it hadn’t been quite so close and concentrated.

“No shit,” Poppy said with a loud laugh.

“Well, it’s not super addictive and dangerous like they tell you,” Jada said. “And if you’re doing it in a venned form, there’s pretty much no downside. The high wears off a lot faster than if you get drunk or tipsy on alcohol, but I still won’t smoke any in the last couple of hours before I drive you home.” She toked and after holding the pipe where I could take it if I wanted for a few moments, passed it back to Poppy.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Make up your mind soon,” Lisette said. “I don’t have a lot left, we’re gonna run out before the party’s over. What took y’all so long, anyway? Britt got here almost an hour ago.”

Poppy and Lisette hadn’t participated in the graduation ceremony, claiming it would be too tedious for words. I wondered if the cost of the cap and gown might have been a factor, too, though I could readily believe they were just bored at the very thought of the ceremony. I’d considered skipping it myself until both Mom and the Ramseys had strongly encouraged me to go. Mom had asked Mrs. Ramsey to take lots of photos for her.

“We had lots of pictures to take afterward,” I said. “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey wanted pictures of me and Meredith with all of our friends who were graduating... it was a lot. And Jada’s grandma wanted to meet me too, and take pictures... fortunately Britt got away as soon as her parents had taken just a couple of pictures.”

“It was so hard to keep my hands off you while Grandma was watching,” Jada lamented, doing a notably poor job of keeping her hands off me at the moment.

We talked about the ceremony for a couple more minutes and when the next song started, got up to dance again. After several songs, we sat down again and Lisette broke out the snacks.

“So me and Poppy have been thinking about splitting in two like y’all have been doing,” Lisette said. “We can’t really afford to take too much time off work, but if we leave two of us at home to work, maybe the other two can go on a road trip like we were daydreaming about.”

“Yeah, that would work,” I said. “Me and Jada have both done that, gone to work with one body and gone on a date with the other. How long a trip are you thinking about?”

Poppy shrugged. “However long we can afford to keep traveling. I’ve got some ideas about keeping the expenses down. Like we take turns venning each other into a motorcycle instead of taking Lisette’s car.”

“Oh, that could be cool. A regular motorcycle or like a cyborg or robot? Either way, I guess you wouldn’t need gasoline.” Venned machines usually had their own long-lasting, built-in power supplies.

“Maybe try it different ways and see how we like it best.”

“Do you both know how to ride motorcycles?” Britt asked.

“Just regular bicycles,” Lisette said. “We’d need some practice first.”

“You probably don’t want to get your practice riding in the library parking lot and the streets around there,” Britt said. “How about if I borrow my dad’s truck and load motorcycle-you on it to take you out to the dirt track on Lehigh Road?”

“Yeah, let’s do that sometime,” Poppy said.

“And then you’ll need to get your motorcycle licenses,” Britt added. “I don’t know if the DMV will let you take the test on a venned cycle, though.”

“Huh,” Poppy said, frowning. “Do you think they could tell?”

“Probably,” I said. “Most venned machines don’t look like anything standard. And you’ll want to make sure your cycle body has cameras — probably one facing forward and one looking back at the rider — so you can see what’s going on. Probably microphones too.”

“Oh, yeah, good point,” Lisette said, snuggling closer to Poppy.

“Hmm,” I said to Jada. “Maybe instead of making one of your bodies a plushie, we can make it a cycle I can ride to work.”

“But I want to be cuddled,” Jada pouted.

“Just think about it,” I teased, feeling daring. “My behind nestled in your seat, my hands on —” I faltered, blushing too hard to speak, and Jada laughed. My teasing had backfired!

“What’s that about a plushie?” Britt asked. “I like the plushie idea, especially if I can cuddle her too.”

So we told them what we’d been talking about on the way over.

“A whole month like that?” Britt asked. “I’d be down for spending a few hours as a plushie, maybe a day, but not any longer.”

“I won’t miss any work,” Jada said. “And if I decide I don’t like it, I can ask Lauren to change me back early. I think I’ll let her split me tomorrow or the next day after work.”

“What kind of plushie do you want to be?” I asked. “And Britt, maybe you could be a plushie at the same time — not the whole month, obviously, but the first day. Or some day in the middle, whenever it suits.”

“Make me whatever sort of critter you want to snuggle with,” Jada said. “Surprise me.”

“A stegosaurus,” Britt said. “I know you like dinosaurs. And I’ll let you know about the time later on.”

After that, Lisette and Poppy wanted to know more about our experiences splitting in two, and we wound up telling them more than I was comfortable with about our date the previous weekend when we’d chased each other through the maze of blankets in the back seat while our big selves sat up front. Jada didn’t come right out and give them a play-by-play, but she said enough to make my cheeks glow and Lisette and Poppy laugh at my discomfiture. I swatted Jada on the arm.

“Fuck yeah, let’s try that,” Poppy said. “Maybe not an inch tall, but if we were smaller your bed would feel a lot bigger and softer,” she added aside to Lisette.

“Or your bed,” Lisette added.

“Nah, my bed would be hard as concrete even if we were small enough to fall between the atoms,” Poppy said morosely. Nobody said anything for a few awkward moments.

“Could the Venn machines make you that small?” I wondered.

“We could try and find out,” Britt said. “I doubt it could make you smaller than an atom, but it could probably make you so small it would take hours to walk out of the booth, so small your friend can’t find you to pick you up.”

“Wouldn’t that just tie up the Venn machine until your venn wears off?” Poppy wondered.

“No, see, if you can’t get out of the booth in a reasonable time it turns you back early,” Jada said.

“We should try that,” Lisette said.

“You oughta do it when the machine’s not busy,” Britt said. “Late at night, maybe.”

“Yeah, it’d be a dick move to tie it up deliberately,” Poppy said.

“Let us know how that turns out,” I said. “I think it’d probably be pretty boring, though. You’re all alone on a vast, featureless plain. Even if you brought your phone or a book, you can’t read because it’s all nonsense. You walk and walk but never get anywhere. Finally, after however many hours, you’re suddenly back to normal. No, thanks.”

(Later, when I mentioned it to Sophia, she told me some guy in Ukraine had done exactly that and it was pretty much the way I’d guessed. His friends had gone over the floor of the booth with a magnifying glass and couldn’t find him. He’d seen vast shapes darkening the sky but couldn’t make out details at that distance. I don’t remember exactly how long it took for the machine to time out and turn him back; you can look it up on VennWiki.)

After a little more conversation and snacking, we got up and danced some more, then watched an old movie about a high school graduation, being silly and making fun of it. The party finally broke up after midnight. I kept dithering and never got around to trying pot before Lisette ran out.

Before she took me home, Jada and I went by the Venn machine to clean the pot smell off our clothes.

“Anything else you want?” she asked.

“You could go ahead and change me into a dragon-girl for tomorrow’s work shift,” I said. “Second most recent form from my history.”

“Got it.

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

I finally had my first therapy appointment the Wednesday after graduation. I debated over whether to venn into my human girl body for the appointment — I’d been wearing my dragon-girl body ever since graduation — but decided it would be more honest to meet my therapist in my most preferred body. If she couldn’t handle my being a scaly, it would be good to know that up front so I could start looking for another therapist.

 

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Before my next date with Jada, I watched Sophia’s video series about venning people into animate dolls and statues again and got her to coach me on it.

“It’s maddeningly subjective,” she lamented. “Somebody else can give a Venn machine the exact same verbal instructions I used to turn you into a doll and they’d get different results. But those are the basics: you need lenses for the eyes and something hard but not too rigid for hearing. And a soft body will have a more sensitive sense of touch, but probably be less strong.”

“We’ll try it several times, I guess,” I said. “See what works.”

I also knuckled down on filing applications for colleges, scholarships, and grants the week after graduation, though I’d started just a week after my eighteenth birthday. Though I was leaning toward East Carolina, where Jada was going, or UNC Chapel Hill, where Meredith was going, I applied to just about every state university in North Carolina and a few private schools, just in case I hit the jackpot with scholarships.

On Friday, I got my first paycheck. After I deposited it, I gave Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey my first rent payment. (We’d decided on an amount after I’d gotten the job and knew about what I was going to be paid.) It was generously low rent, way lower than the smallest apartment in the area from what I could tell, but then I didn’t have the privacy of a studio apartment, or even a mother-in-law suite.

I finally had my first therapy appointment the Wednesday after graduation. I debated over whether to venn into my human girl body for the appointment — I’d been wearing my dragon-girl body ever since graduation — but decided it would be more honest to meet my therapist in my most preferred body. If she couldn’t handle my being a scaly, it would be good to know that up front so I could start looking for another therapist.

The therapist I’d picked was a woman named Kelly Ferreira, who worked at a practice in Catesville. Mr. Ramsey gave me a ride, and said he’d visit the thrift stores in Catesville while he was waiting for me.

I didn’t have all that long to wait before Ms. Ferreira called me back to her office. It was a cozy space with several comfortable chairs and some nice paintings — a couple of landscapes and a still life, plus the usual diplomas and accreditations.

“So, Lauren, what brings you here today?”

I told her briefly about my long-standing anxiety issues, and my estrangement from my family, and how I’d reconciled with Mom and Nathan but was still on the outs with Dad. She asked some questions and I gave her more detail, telling her about how I’d figured out I was trans, my clandestine venning, and running away. I didn’t tell her who I’d stayed with until I was eighteen, even though I was pretty sure she was legally obligated not to share anything I said. (Later I found out that legal obligation only applies to doctors and lawyers, and Ms. Ferreira wasn’t a doctor. But I don’t think she would have reported Carmen, Meredith and Sophia anyway.)

She went through some exercises to help with my anxiety, some of which I’d already found on my own through Internet research, but others of which were new to me and turned out to be pretty helpful. Then we talked for a few minutes near the end of the hour about my relationship with Dad, and how badly I actually wanted to rebuild it.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I got along with him pretty well before I started suspecting I was trans, and worrying how he would react if he found out. When he found out. But it turns out that relationship was built on a shakier foundation than I thought. I would like to build a new relationship with him if I can, but I don’t know if it’s possible — he won’t speak to me unless I give up being a girl, and I can’t give up being a girl to please him. And I don’t think he even knows I’m a dragon-girl; who knows how he’ll react to that.”

We set another appointment for about a month later, and I texted Mr. Ramsey to let him know I was done.

Jada, Britt and I met up in the early afternoon the following Saturday to implement Operation Plushies. I was still in a dragon-girl form. First, I tried venning Jada into a triceratops plushie (to go with the stegosaurus plushie Britt had volunteered to be). It worked, in the sense that she was a recognizable triceratops, and very cuddly, but she seemed to be fully inanimate, and when I changed her back, she said she hadn’t been able to hear very well, though she could see and feel. Three tries later, I finally had her able to move, see, and hear, but not talk.

“Sophia makes this look so easy!” I groaned, leaning on Britt as she cuddled a squirming tricera-Jada in her arms.

“You’ll figure it out,” she consoled me. When the people using the Venn machine came out, Jada and I went in again and I tweaked her form some more until she could talk.

“Yay, this works!” she exclaimed in a high, squeaky voice.

“You can still move, hear, and see fine?” I asked.

“Yep!” she chirped, trotting around the booth and kicking up her heels — probably not a thing that any actual triceratops ever did.

The timer for further changes had nearly phased out when I said, “Two of her — one twice as big.” I hastily picked the best-looking of the options offered, and the image changed to show a second, larger triceratops plushie shadowing her movements. The smaller plushie was a slightly darker blue than before and the larger one was lighter blue, but they were about the right sizes, so I pushed the green button with a couple of seconds to spare.

I walked out of the machine and looked over to see the two plushies trotting out side by side. The bigger one was rapidly gaining on the little one, as her legs were longer (though still adorably stumpy), and Britt scooped up the little one and cuddled her before she quite cleared the threshold.

“You can still talk and all?” I asked. “Giving you two bodies didn’t mess that up?”

“La la la la,” she sang with both plushies. The big one, still on the sidewalk, nuzzled up against my leg and I knelt down to pet her.

“Okay, let’s get out of the way and let these fine people use the machine... Oh, hi, Anna and Genevieve.” Two of the people who’d just walked up were my co-workers, apparently just getting off of a shift. Anna was a seal-girl, as usual, with flipper-like arms that ended in something more like human hands, and pretty much normal legs — anything more flipper-like wouldn’t be practical for waiting tables. Genevieve was a preying mantis of sorts, less spindly than an actual insect (insect-proportioned legs wouldn’t support the weight of an adult-sized body) and with a more humanoid face.

“Hey, Lauren. Who’s this?” asked.

“This is my girlfriend Britt, and this little cuddle-saur is my girlfriend Jada.” Jada gave a cute little growl.

“Awwww!” Genevieve squeed. “Can I pet her?”

“That’s up to her,” I said. “Britt, can she pet you?”

Britt snorted and said, “Go ahead,” and Genevieve’s antennae quivered in embarrassment.

“I didn’t mean —”

“You can pet me,” Jada said with the larger dog-sized plushie body. Genevieve petted her.

“So are y’all fixing to change her back?” Anna asked.

“No, we’re in the middle of a multi-stage process. Y’all can go ahead.”

So Anna and Genevieve changed into their off-duty bodies. Anna’s everyday body was human, with smaller breasts than she had in her seal-girl body, but just as cute a face, and Genevieve’s was a lot like the mantis-girl she was at work, but more overtly insectoid, with fewer human features. (Mr. Paget had asked her to tone it down after some customers got creeped out.) Then I went in the machine again with Jada’s larger body, and venned her into the body she’d been wearing since shortly after graduation, which had the big anime eyes she’d had back in the spring semester combined with aquamarine hair, elfin ears, and three breasts.

Then it was time to venn Britt. Britt handed off Jada’s little plushiesaur self to Jada’s big human self, and Britt and I went in the machine. With the practice from venning Jada multiple times, I managed to make Britt an orangey-pink stegosaurus plushie that could move, see, hear and talk on the second try.

So I picked up Britt and snuggled her to my face for a moment before following Jada to her car. Jada handed the little Jada to me and I put her in my lap with Britt as we drove to the movie theater at the mall in Catesville.

“So how do y’all like being plushies?” I asked them.

“It’s comfy,” little Jada said. “Snuggling like this feels nice. Though not as, um... not as sexy?”

“I’ve heard that it can feel sexy too if the person who’s venning you knows what they’re doing,” I said. “I’ve been hard plastic or porcelain dolls, and a ceramic statue, but never a plushie yet. I should try it sometime.”

“Sometime or other you and Jada can be my plushies,” Britt said. “I gave all my plushies to my little cousins when I turned thirteen and decided I was too old for them. I don’t miss them that much, but once in a while...”

“Let’s do that!” little Jada exclaimed. “Next time you and Britt both have enough time off work.”

We arrived just barely in time for the last showing of Batwoman at matinee prices. Britt and little Jada pretended to be normal inanimate plushies while we were in line to pay for tickets, and then sat on our shoulders so they could see the movie.

Afterward, we ate at the Italian restaurant nearby (with the plushies sitting on the table next to our plates, chatting with us and drawing the stares of the other diners.

“Hmm,” I said near the end of the meal. “We’d look less childish playing with these plushies if we were actual children.”

“You want to go over to the Venn machine and turn into little kids?” big Jada asked.

“Yay!” little Jada exclaimed.

“Do you mind? It’s been a long time since I venned into a little girl.”

“Maybe you should take turns,” Britt said. “Two little kids with no adult around could get hassled by the mall cops, maybe get CPS called on you.”

“Or we could give each other some weird feature that normal kids don’t have,” I said, remembering Serena’s strategy for not getting hassled in child form. “Like green skin or cat ears something.”

“Let’s do it,” big Jada said.

We found out that the mall playground had, sometime after Meredith and I had played there as little girls a couple of years earlier, instituted a rule against venned adults playing there during most of the day, and set aside the last hour and a half before the mall closed for venned adults and teens to play. All four of us romped through the maze of gerbil tunnels and slid down the slides, and us two human girls clambered across the monkey bars while our plushie girlfriends called out encouragement to us from their perch on the nearby tower. There were several other little boys and girls of various ages playing there, some with adult “supervision” who were fully getting into the role (or might have been actual kids whose parents didn’t read the sign saying it was the time of day for venned adults, or didn’t care) and some who were just enjoying being small and super-energetic and didn’t bother pretending to be their apparent age.

There was an adorable tiny tot, apparently about two or three, who was being pushed on the swing by a woman in her twenties. When Jada and I, carrying Britt and little Jada, approached the swings, the little girl reached out her hands and said, “Teddy!”

“Her name’s Britt,” Jada announced, walking up next to where the girl was swinging. “She’s a stegosaurus.”

“Say hi to Britt, Melanie,” the woman said.

“Hi, Bwitt,” the little tot said.

I wasn’t sure if it was polite to ask if Melanie was venned or really as young as she looked.

“Hi, Melanie,” Britt said. The little tot looked astonished. Little Jada and I giggled.

“This is Jada,” I said. “That’s Jada too,” I added, pointing at my bigger girlfriend. “They’re sort of the same person.”

“Oh, you’ve gotten into splitting?” the woman asked. “Melanie is a younger version of me. Kind of a way of placating my maternal instinct without doing something as insanely reckless as popping out a sprog.”

“Spwog!” Melanie said, and giggled.

“How long did you split for?” big Jada asked.

“We split for the weekend about once every month or two,” the woman said. “And every time I make Melanie a month or two older. I started a few months ago with her just old enough to be toilet trained.”

“Keep pushing, Mommy!” Melanie demanded. Her swing’s oscillations had slowed while we were talking till she was barely moving.

“She’s adorable,” Jada said. “You want us to help push for a while?”

“Sure.”

We chatted with older-Melanie, who introduced herself as Melinda, while we took turns pushing Melanie and letting her cuddle Britt and little Jada. By the time we said goodbye to the strange mother and child and returned to the Venn machine, we were pretty tired. Big Jada and I changed back into our everyday bodies, which meant a dragon-girl for me, and she drove me home.

“That was a fun date,” Jada said. “Let’s do the playground again sometime.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to tell Meredith and Sophia they have grown-up hours now.”

“I want to climb the monkey bars in a little version of my four-armed body,” Britt said.

“Good night, Jada,” I said. We kissed and I got out, carrying little Jada and Britt. They snuggled against me as I walked up to the door and fumbled my key out of my purse. Sophia opened the door before I could get the key in the lock.

“How was your — Oh, those are so cute! Where did you get them?”

“The Venn machine,” I said.

“You weren’t supposed to tell her right off,” little Jada pouted.

“We agreed we weren’t going to pretend you were inanimate,” I said.

“Who are they?”

“Britt,” Britt said.

“I’m Jada,” Jada said.

“But if Jada’s here, who drove you home?”

“The other Jada,” Jada said. “I’m the cute one.”

“Oh, of course,” Sophia said. “I can’t wait to try that out. Just two more months and my one-year experiment will be over...”

“I’ve gotten some experience from splitting Jada,” I said. “You want me to split you when you’re ready?”

“Sure.”

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had already gone to bed that night, so they didn’t remark on the plushies I was snuggling with, but Mrs. Ramsey noticed them the next morning as I was folding up the sofa bed. She’d gotten up a little earlier than usual, and I’d slept a little later than usual; she was sipping her coffee while I cleaned up my sleeping area. I’d temporarily piled up my blanket and pillows in one of the easy chairs while I worked on the sofa bed, as usual, and had set Britt and little Jada on top of the stack until I was ready to put the pillows in the cabinet.

“Oh,” she said, “those are some cute dinosaurs. Are they yours or Sophia’s?”

“They belong to themselves,” I said. “You met Jada and Britt at the graduation ceremony.”

“Hi, Jada and Britt,” Mrs. Ramsey said. Then a moment later: “I guess they’re inanimate, not like Sophia’s doll form?”

“Speak up, silly girls,” I said, pausing to rub their snouts. Then: “I guess they’re fugued out at the moment.”

“I met a lot of yours and Meredith’s friends at graduation, but only for a few moments in most cases. I know we took some pictures of you with Jada, but I can’t place Britt.”

“She’s the tall mixed-race girl with four arms. Usually. Now she’s the stegosaurus.”

“How long are they venned for?”

“Jada’s venned for a month — don’t worry! She’s not gonna lose her job. We split her in two, and her other half is human, back home with her grandma and sister. Britt’s venned for a day, and I need to take her back to the library to change back before work.”

“I still can’t get used to you girls splitting yourselves in two,” she said. “It seems like an odd place to draw the line after all the other strange things we’ve gotten used to in the last few years, but... I suppose us old people who were already set in our ways before the Venn machines came along are always going to have trouble with some of their stranger uses.”

“You’re not that old,” I said. “You’re younger than my mom and dad. And a lot younger in terms of your mental flexibility.”

“Thanks.” She gave me a bemused smile, took another sip of her coffee, and went off to start fixing breakfast. I took a shower and got dressed for work, then went back to the living room to pick up Britt and take her with me.

Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had finally acquiesced in my walking to and from work in daylight if I was in dragon form. Stubbornness counts for something. They still wanted to give me rides home, or get Meredith or Sophia to do so, if I was working after dark. I ate a protein bar during my walk to the library, having slept a little too late to eat a regular breakfast. Britt woke up pretty soon after I walked out the door.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Good morning, sleepyhead. We’re on Walcott Street, going north toward the library.”

“Okay, cool. What time is it?”

“Eight-oh-five,” I said, pulling my phone out and checking the clock display. It was tricky with Britt under one arm and a protein bar in my other hand.

“Thanks.”

“So how did you enjoy being an animate plushie?”

“It was nice snuggling with y’all like that. I wouldn’t want to stay like that for too long, though. I like working on cars too much. And driving.”

“Have you talked to Poppy and Lisette about their motorcycle plans any more?”

“I’m waiting to hear from them about their work schedules.”

I finished off my protein bar about a block south of the library, and stuck the wrapper in my purse until I got to the library, where there was a trash can near the Venn machine. There were a few of my co-workers there venning for work, as well as some other people I didn’t know. Britt and I got in line, and when it was our turn, I venned her into her everyday four-armed body and asked her to tweak my dragon-girl body a little for variety. I came out with fuchsia scales and different spines on my head, shorter and more numerous.

“You want a ride to work?” Britt asked as we stepped out. She’d left her car at the library the previous evening.

“Sure,” I said. When we got to Metamorphoses, we hugged for a long moment before I got out of her car and went inside.

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

“Let’s try it,” Ms. Paget said. “Joy and I are going to be chibis on Thursday, and I’d like to get some other volunteers to do the same. You don’t have to wear schoolgirl uniforms or anything; you can be chibi mice or chibi dragons or whatever, even chibi robots,” (nodding toward Todd, who was in one of his less humanoid robot forms today). “If it works out, we might make it a regular thing. Chibi Thursdays. Come in anime cosplay, or better yet venned into a chibi form, and get 10% off...”

Sorry for the late post. Since I'm over a week behind, I'm posting two chapters at once. I've scheduled all the chapters in advance to appear weekly on Scribblehub, so if you don't see the new chapter here when you expect it, check there.

 

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Mr. Paget — or Ms. Paget, as she usually was around this time — encouraged the employees to venn into holiday-appropriate forms, like the many bunny-morphs I’d seen around Easter or the turkey-girl Jill had mentioned being for Thanksgiving, but lately she’d started doing other special events and promotions, too. One of her ideas that didn’t work out so great around this time was Chibi Thursdays. I was basically familiar with chibi art by that time due to watching a fair bit of anime with Jada and Britt, but some of the other staff were having trouble with the concept as Ms. Paget showed some of us a slideshow early one morning before the restaurant opened.

“Joy tells me she has some experience venning her friends into chibi forms,” Ms. Paget said, indicating an anime girl with pink hair who waved cheerily to the rest of us. She’d been hired not long after me. “Here’s where she venned me into a chibi form yesterday...” The slides of chibi art from manga and anime gave way to a photo of a freakily adorable little girl in a sailor fuku with a huge round head and huge eyes relative to her head, posing for the camera with the library in the background. Seeing someone with chibi proportions in real life was kind of unsettling, and I wondered if it might be entirely unsettling for people who weren’t familiar with chibi art.

“Your arms look pretty short,” Jill pointed out. “How are we supposed to carry trays like that?”

“And on short legs like that we’d have to trot around twice as fast and get tired out twice as fast,” Anna said.

“The arms are stronger than they look,” Joy said. “And you’ll have a lot of energy in that form, like a little kid.”

“A toddler will run you ragged for a few hours, and then collapse and nap for an hour or two,” Jill said. “I don’t know if an adult with a body like a toddler’s could work an eight-hour shift, much less twelve.”

“Let’s try it,” Ms. Paget said. “Joy and I are going to be chibis on Thursday, and I’d like to get some other volunteers to do the same. You don’t have to wear schoolgirl uniforms or anything; you can be chibi mice or chibi dragons or whatever, even chibi robots,” (nodding toward Todd, who was in one of his less humanoid robot forms today). “If it works out, we might make it a regular thing. Chibi Thursdays. Come in anime cosplay, or better yet venned into a chibi form, and get 10% off...”

“I’ll try it,” I said. It looked cute, if potentially impractical, and I didn’t think Ms. Paget would stick to it for long if it didn’t work well. So the following Thursday, I and several other people on the morning shift met up with Joy at the library and let her venn us into chibi versions of our usual work bodies. I got Jill to take a photo of me with my phone, and sent it to my friends. I got back squeeing responses from Meredith, Jada and Lily in the next few hours, and Jada asked if she could post my chibi photo on Facebook. I said sure, just mention Chibi Thursday at Metamorphoses.

It sort of worked, in the sense that we got a fair number of anime and manga fans coming in on Thursday afternoons and evenings for the next couple of weeks, but not so well because, as Jill and Anna had noted, chibi forms weren’t all that practical for serving and busing tables. We were stronger than we looked, true, but we still weren’t as strong as our usual full-size, more sensibly proportioned selves and tired out more quickly. After a couple of Thursdays where several of us had to take a break to go venn into a more practical shape, Ms. Paget cut it back to having just the greeter be in chibi form, and a few weeks after that she quietly dropped it.

Before that, we had the Fourth of July. Ms. Paget was an Uncle Sam, male for the first time in weeks, though he’d had to buy the costume at a store and venn into a body that would fit it. There were a couple of bald eagle morphs, a cyborg George Washington (Todd), and several furries with red, white and blue fur (but never in the stars and stripes pattern of an American flag; just getting the colors the right shades of red, white and blue at the same time was tricky enough, and a lot of people couldn’t manage it). Anna tried to get the scales of my dragon body to be red, white and blue, but the white was slightly silvery and the red a bit pink.

There were other promotions that were more successful: Cyborg Mondays and Furry Fridays. I preferred scaly forms, but I didn’t mind venning into a furry of some sort when I had a shift scheduled on Fridays. Ms. Paget gave a discount to customers who came in venned into cyborgs or furries on those days, as well.

I was still snuggling with little Jada every night, and seeing big Jada and Britt at least once a week. One afternoon, after hanging out with Britt at her house for an hour or so, I left little Jada with her while big Jada and I went to see a movie, then went for a walk around downtown Catesville, doing a little shopping and a lot of people-watching.

Carmen had only been home with their sister briefly before moving into an off-campus house in Greensboro with Serena and Bailey, and they’d extended an open invitation to come visit sometime that summer, but so far Meredith and I were having trouble making our work schedules line up with Carmen’s. We finally managed it toward the end of July, spending the better part of a day with them, playing video games at their apartment and going to an escape room where the employees were venned into monsters, which you had to “trick” in certain ways to get out.

I had my second therapy visit a few days after that. Ms. Ferreira and I talked mainly about my anxiety issues this time, tabling my family stuff for the next visit.

One morning in July, a month after Jada had split in two, I woke up and plushie Jada was gone. I had a series of texts waiting for me saying Jada had woken up early in the morning with an influx of memories and wanted to get together to talk about it as soon as we could. “Right after work,” I texted back.

Jada took “right after work” seriously. She was there to pick me up from work when I got off. I texted the Ramseys to tell them I wouldn’t be home for supper, and Jada and I went to eat at the Mexican place on Catesville Road.

“So what was it like, merging all those memories?” I asked. “The most I’ve ever merged was about two weeks’ worth, and those experiences weren’t nearly as divergent.”

“It was a trip,” Jada said. “Being your plushie was wonderful. I want to do it again. Snuggling with you wasn’t as good as making out when we have organic bodies,” she added, bringing a warmth to my cheeks that hopefully didn’t show through the scales, “but it was a lot better than not seeing you for days at a time.”

“You need to calm down and think before you do anything about that,” I said. “I’ve heard about how people can get addicted to almost any form if they stay that way long enough and people treat them nicely while they’re like that. I won’t venn you into a plushie again for at least... um, let’s say a week. And I hope Britt won’t, either — I’ll talk to her about it.”

I hadn’t exactly gotten addicted to being a dragon statue, but it hadn’t been long before I was used to it and didn’t miss being human nearly as much as I’d expected. And I hadn’t gotten nearly as much affection as a statue as Jada had as a plushie. I was pretty sure plushies had a more sensitive “skin” than animate ceramic statues, too.

“Would you say the memories of being a plushie are more vivid than the memories of being human for the last month?” I added after chewing a mouthful of food.

“Maybe? Probably not. Not much really stands out from being a plushie, except that time you and Meredith took me with you to see your friends in Greensboro. But it was a lot nicer overall. No highs like the times we made out on our dates, but no lows like the terrible day at work I had a couple of days ago.”

“After you go to college, you’ll be able to get a more fulfilling job than working the cash register at Food Lion,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m not giving that up. I just want to be your plushie at the same time.”

“Maybe later,” I said with a smile. “For now, let’s do some stuff that a plushie can’t do.”

“I like the sound of that,” she replied with a lascivious wink.

 

* * *

 

By this time, I had already heard back from the colleges I’d applied to back in April, and was beginning to hear back from some of the ones I’d applied to after graduation, as well as a couple of scholarships and grants. After I’d gotten the job at Metamorphoses, something to put on the applications that would make me look more creditworthy, I’d started applying for loans as well, though I didn’t want to rely entirely on loans if I could help it. So far I’d been accepted to Mynatt Community College, East Carolina University, and Winston-Salem University, and I was strongly leaning toward East Carolina if I could get enough scholarship and grant money. So far, I’d been turned down for two scholarships and one grant, and gotten another one that would just cover textbooks. I’d done the math on how much I’d be able to save over the next year, and the only place it would cover tuition without more grants or scholarships would be Mynatt Community College.

In late July, the Ramseys spent a long weekend visiting their relatives in Georgia who’d visited them last Thanksgiving. They asked me not to have guests over while they were gone, so although Jada suggested we use the opportunity for a rare bit of privacy that weekend, I regretfully refused. “They’ve been too good to me,” I said, “taking me in and helping me with my ID change and charging me a ridiculously low rent. I want to respect their wishes.”

So instead, Saturday evening after work, Britt, Jada and I met at the library. Britt venned me and Jada into tiny forms, a couple of inches high, and took us home in an open shoebox lined with an old pillowcase. Once we got to her house, we sat on her lap, chatted with her and watched a couple of movies on her laptop. When she went to bed, she put us back in the shoebox and set it on her dresser. Jada and I made love for the first time and slept blissfully tangled up in each other. The next morning, Britt took us back to the Venn machine to venn each other into our everyday bodies before we had to go to work.

I’d been meeting up with Mom every week or two and talking to her on the phone at least once a week, often twice. I still hadn’t seen Dad since that evening at the church back in April, and I hadn’t seen much of Nathan since he’d moved into a house in Mars Hill with several other guys, though he’d come to visit Mom and Dad (and me) not long after I graduated.

Mom came by the Ramseys’ to see me one evening when Dad was working late. It was three or four days after Jada’s plushie venn expired, a couple of hours after I’d gotten off work.

“I wanted to tell you in person,” she said; “we’ve found a house. And it’s closer to your father’s office than we were thinking we could afford. Not far from downtown Durham. A lot of people are leaving Durham lately, since so many people have venned into healthier bodies and several of Durham’s major employers are hospitals and clinics. I hear Duke is converting some of its hospital space to apartments and offices.”

“So you’ll be living an hour and a half from here.”

“Yes. We’ll be moving as soon as we can sell our house here. We’ve got a buyer lined up, but there are things that could still go wrong between now and the closing, which should be in a couple of weeks if all goes well.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t have a job in Durham yet, though I’ve applied to a number of places,” she said. “So until I find one, I could come back here to see you on some days when I don’t have interviews.”

“But I can’t come to see you. It wouldn’t be reasonable to ask the Ramseys or one of my friends to drive me that far.”

“I’m sorry. But that long commute is really doing your father in. I’ve tried to talk him into venning for his health — what Erin did for me has worked wonders — but he won’t hear of it.”

I shook my head in amazement at Dad’s stubbornness. “I’ll miss seeing you, Mom. Let’s talk on the phone more often to make up for it.”

“Yes, let’s do that. I’ll keep working on him, Lauren. I hope he’ll come around soon. Maybe by Thanksgiving we can all be together.”

“I hope so, too.”

 

* * *

 

At the beginning of August, Caleb moved into a house in Greensboro with his friends, and turned over his bedroom to me. He took his bed and other furniture with him, so Britt and I borrowed her dad’s truck and went shopping. I bought a futon at a furniture store in Catesville and a small bookshelf and chest of drawers at the PTA thrift store. Then I started moving in the boxes of books from my bedroom at Mom and Dad’s house, which we’d stashed in various places around the house (mostly in the storage room and garage) after I got them back.

Sleeping in my own bedroom behind a closed door for the first time since I’d run away from home was utterly sublime. I gradually started decorating the bare walls, trying not to spend too much so I could save as much for college as possible. Jada had split in two again by then, and little plushie Jada advised me about where to hang the pictures and posters that big Jada and I had bought at thrift stores on our dates. I tried to put them where Caleb had already messed up the wall with his tacks and tape.

After some mild confusion when I talked about the two Jadas with Britt or Meredith, one night when we were snuggling but hadn’t fallen asleep yet, triceratops Jada said she wanted me to call her something else, and let her big self who was about to go off to college keep using their first name.

“What do you want me to call you?”

“Make up something cute,” she said. “Like a little girl who’s just gotten a triceratops plushie for Christmas.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I don’t want to start treating you like just a toy rather than my girlfriend. Part of my girlfriend. I can help you brainstorm new names, but you need to be the one to decide.”

So we talked about names for a while, and she finally decided on using her middle name, Desiree (with no acute accent). She then wanted to know my middle name, which I’d somehow never told her, so I did.

“Lydia’s a sweet name,” she said. “Kind of old-fashioned, but not in a prim and prissy way.”

Not long after that, Britt, Jada and I got together for our last date before Jada went off to college. We drove to Greensboro for an early dinner and then went to a concert by Bulletproof Sombrero at the Blind Tiger. It was the first concert I’d ever been to that wasn’t some obscure Christian band playing at a church, and I was super excited even while I was melancholy about Jada going off to college three hours away. The band had a lot of energy, dancing on stage in a silly way that showed they didn’t take themselves too seriously, and I only realized afterward how much I’d danced in unconscious response to the music when I felt how exhausted my muscles were. Work the next day would be hell, but it was worth it.

On the drive home, Jada asked me, “Would you consider splitting for a month and coming to college with me as a plushie?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I wish you’d asked me earlier so I could think about it longer. Are you sure you’d want me to be a plushie, though? You’ll want to make a good impression on your roommate, whoever she is, and she might think you’re childish if you come to college with a plushie dragon or whatever.”

“I don’t care what she thinks,” she said. “And she’d find out you’re my venned girlfriend sooner or later.”

“That could be a problem,” I said. “I’d have to keep a low profile and pretend to be inanimate until you get to know your roommate and know she’s not gonna rat you out to the housing administration for having an unauthorized third roommate.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Well, let me know — anytime in the next couple of days.”

“Anyway, what I was going to say was that you could venn me into an anime-style figurine or something. She’d know you’re a weeb, but she’s gonna find that out pretty soon anyway, and it wouldn’t make a bad first impression like a plushie might.”

“But I couldn’t snuggle a hard plastic figurine. That would be the main point of bringing part of you with me; if I just want to talk with you, I can call you on the phone.”

“Besides,” Britt said, “what if Jada’s roommate is into anime too and she asks what show you’re from?”

“Okay,” I said. “If you don’t mind the risk of looking childish in front of your roommate, let’s meet up at the library after work tomorrow. I don’t want to stay out any later tonight while we go through all that trial and error we went through splitting you into a plushie and a human. Come to think of it, I’ll try to get Sophia to split me. She’s a lot better at making animate dolls than any of us.”

 

* * *

 

So the following day after work, Jada, Sophia and I met up at the library. Desiree came with me. Sophia venned me into two animate dragon plushies of different sizes, giving me sight, hearing, speech and mobility on the first try. That venn was for a month, so if for some reason Jada couldn’t bring me home to merge with my other self and re-split within a month, the plushie would vanish and my selves would merge. I used a Venn timer app to figure out when the moon would return to the same phase and the Venn would expire, and was reassured it would be early in the morning a month later — a little earlier than I would normally wake up to get ready for work, assuming I was working that day, but not so early that waking up from a memory merge would be a disaster for my sleep schedule, or so late that the sudden memory merge would distract me while I was working.

Then after waiting in line again, Jada venned my larger plushie self into my everyday dragon-girl body. Jada and Desiree merged, and then I re-split them using forms from their history. We kissed goodnight, and my plushie self went home with Jada while Desiree went home with my dragon-girl self. I was finally going to see her home, I realized, though I wouldn’t really get to know her grandma and sister. I was supposed to pretend to be inanimate when other people were around until Jada was sure she could trust her roommate — something I was quite familiar with from my fourteen months as a statuette.

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon

Before she unpacked any more of her stuff, she looked over Jada’s things, including me, but didn’t touch anything — except me. She petted me gently before going back to her side of the room and finishing unpacking.

 

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Jada parked in front of a small house in a neighborhood on the north side of town, a little tidier and more prosperous than Lisette’s neighborhood, from the little I saw of it as she got out and carried me into the house. There was one other car in the driveway, a white Ford Taurus, and there was a wheelchair ramp as well as a set of stairs leading up to the side door. That door opened onto the kitchen, where her grandma was cooking something.

“Hey, Jada,” she said. “Supper’s almost ready. Where’d you get that stuffed animal?”

“Lauren gave it to me,” she said. “We met up right after work. It was a going away to college present she forgot to give me the other day.”

“Nice. Well, go change out of your work clothes and wash up, and tell Tamily to wash her hands too.”

We went to Jada’s bedroom, where she set me gently down on the bed and then changed out of her work uniform into a T-shirt and sweats. Then she said quietly, “I’m gonna go talk to Tamily and eat supper. Talk to you later, sweetie.” She kissed me and I nuzzled her in return, not having lips to kiss her with.

I was bigger than when I’d been a statuette, but less dexterous with my plush claws than with the ceramic ones I’d had before. I tried flapping my wings, but though I was lighter than an organic being of the same size, my cloth wings weren’t anywhere near strong enough to lift me. I could climb, though, and I explored Jada’s bedroom while she and her grandma and sister ate supper, looking through the glass of the terrarium at her pet corn snake, Nefertiti, and watching her stare back at me. Later, Jada came back to her bedroom and did some last-minute packing for college; we chatted in low tones as she worked, and she started an anime episode playing to cover the sound of our voices.

“Can I ask what the ramp was for?” I asked. “Was your grandma disabled before she venned into a younger body?” Or you, I wondered.

“No,” she said. “That was for my great-grandma; she used a walker. She died not long after me and Tamily came to live with her and Grandma.”

After she finished packing, she let Nefertiti out of her terrarium for a little while, letting her wind around her arm and slither around on the bed. I petted her with my forefoot.

“I wish I could take her to school with me,” Jada said, “but there’s no pets allowed in the dorms, and she’d be harder to hide than you.”

“Is your sister going to take care of her while you’re gone?”

“Yeah, I trust Tamily to take care of her.”

After putting Nefertiti back in her terrarium, Jada went to bed early and we snuggled until she fell asleep. I thought about whether it was really such a good idea to venn into a plushie and go to college with her for a while, then fugued out until her alarm went off in the morning. She unconsciously slapped the snooze button and dozed off again, and I took it upon myself to wake her up, nuzzling her face and then tickling her with my wingtips and claws (which weren’t sharp) until she squirmed around and sat up.

“Bratty girl,” she said. “Why must you force me to wake up on time and get to college by — oh, right.”

Tamily and Mrs. Plinkett helped her haul the remaining things to the car — she’d loaded some of them the night before. Within ten minutes after she finished eating breakfast, we were off, with me sitting in the passenger seat, perched on top of some bags and pillows where I could see out the window.

Most of the route we took was on surface roads, with only a few miles on interstates as we passed through Greensboro and Raleigh. A few miles down U.S. 421 from Greensboro, we passed through Siler City, and I told Jada again about how Sophia and Meredith had helped me the day I ran away.

We got to Greenville and the university campus around eleven, and after a little trouble with the maps app on her phone giving misleading directions, she found the freshman dorm she’d be staying in and started hauling stuff in. I was one of the first things she brought in, after she’d identified herself and gotten her room key, and I sat on top of her desk while she brought in her stuff. Her roommate wasn’t there yet, so once she had all her stuff in the room and had moved her car from the temporary moving-in parking to the freshman parking lot, we had some time to talk while she unpacked and put things away.

“Okay,” she said when her phone alarm went off, “I’ve got to go meet up for a campus tour. I’d leave something playing on my laptop for you to watch, but my roommate could be here any time now...”

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I won’t get bored.”

I was only alone with my thoughts for a little while before there was a knock at the door. A few moments later, a key turned in the lock, and a tall, muscular white girl with short auburn hair came in, carrying a small suitcase and a duffel bag, followed by a big, beefy man who looked like her father rejuvenated or her older brother, carrying a larger suitcase.

“Looks like your roommate’s already here, punkin,” the man said. “Where do you want to put this stuff?”

“Over by the wardrobe and dresser, I guess? Most of it’s gonna go in there; the desk stuff is still in the car.”

“I’ll go get the rest while you start unpacking, then.”

The girl unzipped the larger suitcase and started unpacking clothes into the dresser and wardrobe. I noticed her brushing her fingertips along the furniture, the walls and the open door frame of the wardrobe a lot while she was doing that. Her dad came back with a couple of cardboard boxes, which she directed him to put on her desk. She continued unpacking the suitcases while he went to the car for a larger but apparently lightweight box.

“Where does this go?”

“On the bed for now.”

“I didn’t see any more stuff, but maybe you’d better double-check.”

“Yeah, I think this is the last box.”

“Your campus tour group doesn’t meet till four, right?”

“Yeah. We could eat lunch or something before you go?”

“Sure, let’s do that.”

They left, and an hour later, returned in different bodies — shorter in her case, less muscular in both cases, and newly female in his case, but with recognizably similar faces — carrying bags of groceries, which they proceeded to unpack into the mini-fridge and the chest of drawers. Once that was done, they stood there for a moment, looking awkwardly at one another, and her dad finally said, “I guess I’d better go, punkin. Have fun, make lots of friends, and learn a lot, okay?”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll call y’all tomorrow after the tour and orientation and so on.”

“And... don’t be afraid to ask for help, okay? Not just from us, but from your professors or the administration or your fellow students. It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you need extra time for exams or —”

“Okay,” she said, looking more than a little ashamed, and glancing toward the door as if she were afraid her roommate might barge into the room at any moment. I felt bad about overhearing this and started to have second thoughts about tagging along with Jada to college. “I will. I don’t think it’ll be an issue until I get into more advanced classes, though.”

“Probably not, but if so, be sure to ask right away, not wait until the problem gets bad. Promise me?”

“I promise.”

“Good girl.” They hugged, and her dad finally left.

Before she unpacked any more of her stuff, she looked over Jada’s things, including me, but didn’t touch anything — except me. She petted me gently before going back to her side of the room and finishing unpacking the suitcases, then the school supplies, laptop, and peripherals (including a nice speaker system), then the large box that her dad had left on the bed.

It turned out to contain a quilt, a pillow (much fluffier than the college-issued pillows or the pillows Jada had brought), and several plushies. She set them up on her desk facing me, trying to be friendly, I guess. So much for my worry that my presence might make a poor impression on Jada’s roommate.

After that, she took an MP3 player out of her purse, plugged it in into her speaker system, and selected an audiobook chapter. I knew it was going to be an audiobook chapter because it spoke aloud the folder names and track names as she navigated from the music she’d apparently been listening to earlier to the book, pushing the buttons without looking at them. Once she had chapter ten of Tik-Tok of Oz playing, she switched from the normal speed she’d been listening to music to 2X speed, and laid down and listened for twenty minutes or so (the characters fell into a tube through the center of the Earth and out the other side, then met some people even stranger than themselves) until the door opened and Jada came in.

“Oh, hi, I’m Steph Merricks, hang on a second while I pause this.” She sat up straight as she did so, and looked toward Jada but didn’t meet her eyes for more than a moment.

“Hey, I’m Jada Plinkett. Just got done with the campus tour and lunch. When did you get here?”

“A little before noon, I guess? My dad and I ate lunch and then I unpacked stuff. My campus tour group doesn’t meet until four.” She had a look on her face that I recognized; I used to have the same anxiety when I met new people, and still did to a lesser degree.

“Okay, cool, we’ve got time to hang out a while. Are you going to that mixer in the common room later?”

Steph didn’t look thrilled. “Uh, no, not really.”

“I guess we can just mix things up here for now, then. Care to introduce me to your friends?” She gestured toward the plushies lined up on Steph’s desk. “This is Lydia,” she said, laying a hand on my back possessively and stroking me between the wings. I had to make an effort not to shiver with pleasure and give the game away right off. Being plush was a lot more sensuous than being ceramic, or maybe it was a difference in how Sophia had designed my body back when she expected I’d be living mostly on Meredith’s desk, versus now, when I’d be sleeping with my girlfriend. (My girlfriend! Even after over three months, it felt nice to think those words.)

“Oh,” Steph said. She introduced us to her pig, Freddy, her puppy, Toto, and her octopus, Ms. Longfingers. Then there was an awkward silence. Steph filled it by saying, “And, uh, I won’t play my audiobooks over the speaker like that unless you’re out of the room. Most of the time I’ll use my earbuds. Only I like to use the speaker when nobody else is around because having the earbuds in too long irritates my ears...”

“Sure, that’s cool. You listen to a lot of audiobooks?”

“Yeah.” Steph ducked her head slightly as if she was a little ashamed of it for some reason.

“What were you listening to just now?”

“Oh, um... Tik-Tok of Oz. It’s the eighth Oz book.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember my friend Meredith telling me about those one time. That guy, what was his name, he wrote a whole bunch of sequels to The Wizard of Oz, right?”

“Yeah, L. Frank Baum. I’ve listened to them a bunch of times ever since I was little, not just the Oz books but several of his other books too. And I used them to learn —” She broke off and looked away.

“Cool. I mostly read manga, as far as fiction goes. I’ve got a stack of manga I haven’t read yet somewhere in one of these boxes. And other stuff, history and urban fantasy and things, but probably more manga than anything else. What else do you like to do?”

“I’m kind of still figuring that out. There’s a lot of stuff I can do now that I used to couldn’t.”

“Did you get healed of something with the Venn machine? My friend’s boyfriend used to have muscular dystrophy.”

That seemed to put Steph at ease a bit. “Yeah, I used to be blind. After we found out about the Venn machines, Mom and Dad took me to the machine in Chapel Hill and changed me so I could see. And they made each other young again.”

“Yeah, my grandma and her friends rejuvenated each other too. Most of the older folks in Brocksboro have done that by now. Where are you from?”

“I was born in Charlotte, but my family moved to Raleigh when I was little so I wouldn’t have to board at school. That’s where the state school for the blind is.”

“Are they changing the way they do things now that kids are only gonna be blind until they get old enough to use a Venn machine?”

“I think so. They’ve been phasing out Braille for a while, because it’s not as useful as it used to be before we had computers with screen readers and before the big audiobook boom, but I think they’ll ditch it entirely now. And the upper grades are focused on teaching kids like me to read print, and learn the names of colors and what they symbolize — things sighted kids learn in kindergarten. I’ve heard some kids’ parents won’t let them use the Venn machine for religious reasons, but everybody in my class had at least tried to use the machine by the time we graduated, and all but one of us had our sight by then.”

“Yeah, my girlfriend’s parents were like that,” Jada said. Steph looked at her, startled. “I mean religious objections to the Venn machines, not...”

“Is your girlfriend going to school here?” Steph asked.

“Not yet; she’s gonna work for a year and save up money before she starts college. Her parents cut her off after she used the Venn machine without permission and they won’t help pay for her tuition or anything.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

That led to Jada bragging about me for a while, which would have made my ears burn if I’d had distinct ears in that form, and asking Steph if she had a boyfriend or girlfriend.

“No, not really. I went on two dates in high school and neither of them went well.”

Jada seemed to notice that was a sensitive topic and backed off, drawing Steph out about what new things she’d tried since she gained her sight, whether she’d used the Venn machine for anything else, and so on. Steph seemed to gradually relax a little as she started talking about her new baby brother — reading between the lines, her parents had decided not to have any more kids after Steph was born blind, and had recently had another one after rejuvenating. “That’s why Mom didn’t come with us; driving for over an hour with a newborn in the car is not fun.” That made me wonder how many other people might start having more children now that they were young again. With people also living longer because of the Venn machines, it might be a problem.

After they’d talked for a while, an alarm on Steph’s phone went off and she said she had to go meet the campus tour group. “It was nice to meet you,” she said as she grabbed her purse and plugged her MP3 player into her earbuds. “I’ll see you later tonight, I guess.”

“Or maybe at supper. I’ll be going down to eat in another hour or so.”

After she was gone, Jada asked me, “What do you think of her?”

“She seems nice. I think she might have anxiety issues like me; you’ll need to watch for signs to avoid making it worse. Like when you and Lily introduced me to about eight new people at once. She seemed pretty nervous about that mixer.”

“Yeah, I’m not gonna push her to go to that. Introduce her to one or two new people at a time, maybe?”

“Wait and see.”

We snuggled and watched a couple of episodes of Hourou Musuko until Jada started feeling hungry and left for supper.

 

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My 335,000-word short fiction collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collection here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
The Translator in Spite of Themself	Smashwords	itch.io

On Furry Friday, I had Jill venn me into a two-headed creature with a sheep-like head and a wolf-like head. After some practice, I tried talking with my usual voice with the sheep head and with a fake Scottish accent with the wolf head; I would recommend the meat dishes with the wolf head and the vegetable dishes and salads with the sheep head.

 

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Meanwhile, the me who had stayed at home was getting off work after a busy shift. It was Cyborg Monday, and I was wearing a dragon-girl body with a metal mesh left wing, a camera for a right eye, and LEDs displaying random, slowly changing patterns on my forearms. That was a fun novelty once in a while, but I wanted to get back to a more huggable body before Meredith left for college the following morning. I went by the Venn machine with a few co-workers who were getting off work at the same time and we venned each other into our everyday bodies.

I found Meredith in her room with Sophia and her mom, doing last-minute packing.

“Is there room for me to help?” I asked. “It looks crowded in here.”

“I’ll let you take a turn at it,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “Girls, call me if you need anything.”

It turned out Meredith had already finished packing the essentials and was now figuring out which favorite novels she wanted to bring with her for emergency comfort reading, which posters she wanted to bring to decorate her share of the limited wall space, and so on. Sophia and I gave her advice, but she had to make all the actual decisions, and there wasn’t a lot of physical packing left to do, which was fine with me because I was kind of tired from work. Her boyfriend Hunter came over for supper a little later, and went for a walk with Meredith afterward.

The next morning, I ate breakfast with the Ramseys before they all four drove off to Chapel Hill to get Meredith set up in her dorm room at UNC Chapel Hill. Then I went to work, the same as usual. When I got home, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and Sophia were home again, and said things looked good for Meredith — they’d met her roommate and her roommate’s mom, and they seemed personable enough.

Later in the evening, I talked on the phone with Jada for a while about her freshman orientation, her roommate, the people she’d met at the mixer the night before, and so on. I put it on speakerphone so Desiree could listen in and ask questions, but Jada didn’t involve Lydia in the conversation, probably because Steph was in the room.

Work continued as usual for the next few days. Desiree and I hung out with Britt at her house on Thursday evening, snuggling and watching anime, and on Furry Friday, I had Jill venn me into a two-headed creature with a sheep-like head and a wolf-like head. After some practice, I tried talking with my usual voice with the sheep head and with a fake Scottish accent with the wolf head; I would recommend the meat dishes with the wolf head and the vegetable dishes and salads with the sheep head. The customers, or at least a good many of them, seemed to like the schtick, and I got better tips than usual. Once when my wolf head was taking a guy’s order, his friend (whose order I’d just taken) whispered to my sheep head asking if I (the sheep) could put in a word for him with my friend the wolf. I played along, whispering back that she was taken.

After work, I met up with Sophia, Mrs. Ramsey, and Ben Vass, the notary who had witnessed my long-term venn a few months earlier. Sophia’s experiment of spending one year as a doll (minus a few days for special family meals like Thanksgiving) was over, and she was ready to try splitting into two independent bodies. So she venned me back into my everyday dragon-girl body and I split her into two bodies, with me, Mrs. Ramsey and Ben acting as witnesses to prove Sophia’s identity to the DMV and the high school.

The smaller of her new bodies was a doll, similar to the one she’d worn most of the time for the last year, but a good six inches shorter. The larger was similar to her baseline body, with a few improvements. She didn’t have a baseline-like body in her recent history, so she’d made two extra trips through the Venn machine, one by herself to split her consciousness by canceling the venn on the larger version of the doll (leaving her in her baseline body), and one with me to make cosmetic improvements. She was now a little taller, with larger breasts, a better complexion, light green hair, and enhanced senses (which entailed slightly larger eyes and ears). On this last trip through the Venn machine, she had a big bag of clothes with her to v-tailor. Mr. Vass took her photos and fingerprints and got us to sign the paperwork, and we were done.

On the way home from the library, Mrs. Ramsey asked them, “How do you feel?”

“Fuzzy and emotional,” the fleshy Sophia said. “And hungry. I haven’t been hungry since Easter.”

“I think I might be sharper and more focused than usual,” doll-Sophia said. “I’ll find out when I do some reading later on.”

“More than usual?” Mrs. Ramsey asked. “You mean more than you’ve usually been over the past year?”

“Right.”

“I felt something like that,” I said, “but I don’t know how big a difference it was. I mean, between being a doll that’s split off from an organic version of myself versus just being a doll. I wasn’t emotionless as a doll, but my emotions were less on a hair trigger, it took more to stimulate them, and I think it was more so when my flesh body was split off.”

“Is that going to be a problem for Desiree?” human-Sophia asked. “And your plushie self that’s living with Jada?”

“I haven’t noticed Desiree being less emotional than Jada,” I said. “It might be a difference between plush and a hard ceramic or plastic body? I don’t know why that would make a big difference, though.”

Mrs. Ramsey and I fixed supper while the Sophias went off to their bedroom to conspire. Later, when they came to the supper table with Mr. Ramsey, doll-Sophia said: “I’d like y’all to call me Bianca.”

“Do you feel like you’re a different person from Sophia?” Mr. Ramsey asked.

“Kind of, but not really? It’s just to avoid confusion, like Jada’s plushie self has been going by Desiree.”

Everyone was used to Sophia sitting with us and chatting but not eating during the year she’d spent as a doll. Now that Sophia was split and Meredith was away at college, the number of people sitting around the table, and the number of those people who were actually eating, was the same. That didn’t mean we didn’t miss Meredith.

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, Jada was going to her first few classes, going to meetings of a queer student group and an anime and manga fan club, and making a lot of new friends. She only brought a couple of them back to her room to hang out, though. Steph got super anxious whenever Jada brought friends over, so over time Jada started hanging out with her new friends in the common room, or in their dorm rooms, or the student center, and I (as Lydia) saw less of her.

Whenever she was in the room, whether studying or writing essays or watching anime or sleeping, I snuggled in her lap. But I wound up spending a lot more time with Steph than with Jada, since she hardly left the room except for classes and meals. And not all that often for meals; she always ate breakfast in the room, and often lunch, going to the dining hall only for supper. She listened to audiobooks and podcast audio drama, she listened to lectures she’d recorded on her phone, and she talked on the phone with her parents and with a couple of friends from high school. I enjoyed what I heard of her books and podcasts, but they tended to be interrupted, as she’d listen to a good chunk of them via her earbuds rather than the speakers when she was out of the room or Jada was in it.

Possibly because of Jada’s offhand revelation that she was into girls, or possibly from modesty, she always changed clothes in a stall in the bathroom if Jada was around or likely to return soon. But from my perch on Jada’s bed or desk, I saw her change clothes a couple of times, and wished I’d asked Sophia to give this body eyelids so I could give her some privacy. She would snuggle her plushies, mostly at night but also when she seemed to hit a snag with her study or homework, and sometimes when Jada was out of the room, she would gingerly pet me like she’d done the day they moved in.

About the only times Jada and I had to speak privately, when I could move and talk freely, were when Steph had a class and Jada didn’t. And as she started hanging out at the student union with friends between classes more often than coming back to the room, I started seeing her mostly only when Steph was around and we could snuggle but not talk.

One Saturday morning about three weeks into the semester, when Steph had just gone down the hall to the shower and Jada had decided to postpone showering until later, I said, “If I’m going to split like this again after I merge with Lauren, I’d like to reveal myself to Steph before the merge.”

“You think you can trust her not to report us?”

“I’ve spent more time with her than you have, and I’m getting uncomfortable with the way I’m unwillingly violating her privacy, overhearing her phone calls and occasionally seeing her change clothes when she thinks she’s alone. Even if she doesn’t like the situation, I think I can trust her anxiety not to want to confront you about having an extra roommate or go to the housing administration with a complaint. But I’d like to be able to chat with her, when she feels like it. I feel like I might be more sensitive to the cues when she’s getting too anxious to socialize than you are.”

“Probably, yeah. You want me to broach the subject or just hint at it and then let you speak up?”

“You’d better tell her outright. It’d be less of a shock that way when I talk.”

“Okay. As soon as she gets back from the shower?”

“Sure.”

So when Steph got back, fully dressed except for shoes, Jada said, “Hey, Steph, I wanted to talk to you about something.”

“Oh?” Steph didn’t seem worried or wary; good. She sat down at her desk and swiveled the chair so she could face Jada. And me, incidentally.

“You know how I usually sit with Lydia in my lap when I’m watching TV or reading?” I was sitting in Jada’s lap at the moment, as usual when she was in the room and sitting down.

“Yeah... it’s fine, I don’t think it’s weird or anything. Even if I just sleep with my plushies and don’t cuddle them that much during the day.” (She was totally lying about not cuddling her plushies during the day.)

“Well, there’s a reason for that. I don’t get to spend as much time with my girlfriend since I started college and especially since I started getting involved in clubs and stuff, so when I’m here, I like to snuggle with her as much as I can.”

“...With her... you mean?”

“Hi,” I said.

She stared at me in shock for a few moments before gathering her wits to say, “You’re venned? But — I’ve heard Jada talking on the phone with her girlfriend? And you were with her when — do you have more than one girlfriend, Jada?”

“Yeah,” Jada said, and I added:

“Have you heard about people venning into multiple bodies?”

“So you’re here and also back home? But then why would Jada need to talk on the phone with your other body when — oh. Because I was here and she thought I’d think she was crazy if she talked with you. And you couldn’t talk back with this body because... wait, why are you telling me now?”

“Because you’re a neat person and I’d like to hang out with you as a friend,” I said. “But only if you feel like talking. Also, the way we venned me, I’ve got independent copies of my mind in my body back home and here. When the venn expires in about another week, this body will vanish and my mind will merge back into my other self’s body.

“Oh!” Steph was having a hard time taking all this in; I didn’t blame her. “That... but you... uh, that must be really cool. Can you show me how to do that sometime?”

“Sure. I can’t go in a Venn machine myself, because I’ll vanish and merge with my other self early if I do, but Jada can show you.”

“You can read about it on VennWiki before we do that,” Jada added.

“Anyway,” I said, “like I said, this split venn is going to wear off in about a week, and I’d like to spend a few days as one whole person before I split again — if I do it any time soon. Whether I split again in a couple of weeks kind of depends on you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you’re not comfortable with having me as an extra roommate, Jada can just take me to the Venn machine today and pop me in to merge me with my other self, and I won’t bother you any more.” Jada looked surprised; we hadn’t planned that. “But if you don’t mind hanging out sometimes and maybe being friends, then I’ll come back with Jada as a plushie again next time she goes home for a visit.”

“Oh, um... you seem nice? But I’m still a little weirded out... I mean,” she said, blushing, “I changed clothes here when I thought I was by myself...”

“I apologize; I don’t have eyelids, and I thought about turning around toward the wall, but I was worried about you being shocked and I wound up doing nothing... But now that you know I’m here, if you don’t mind my staying after that, you can ask me to turn my back when you change.”

“Oh, no, I’d probably just change in the bathroom... Can I decide later?”

“Sure. If you ever decide you don’t feel comfortable with me here, I’ll ask Jada to take me to the Venn machine the next chance she gets. Only we need to talk to my other self and make sure she isn’t busy. I don’t want to merge our minds and several weeks worth of memories when she’s in the middle of a busy shift at work.”

“Oh, sure, no hurry... I guess it’s probably fine if you stay. Um, is Lydia your real name? I thought I heard Jada calling her — I mean you — I mean — when she called her on the phone, she called her ‘Lauren’?”

“Lauren Lydia Wallace is my full name. When we split up, the smaller version goes by my middle name.”

“Neat.”

After that, poor Steph was plumb socialized out, and Jada and I shut up and left her alone for a while. But we were able to snuggle more freely after that, and I didn’t have to stay still so much. And later in the day, after Jada went to hang out with some friends from the anime group, Steph looked over at me and shyly asked, “Do you... would you like to come sit next to me while I work on this?”

“Sure,” I said. “You’d have to pick me up, though. I can’t jump that far.”

“Oh, sure.” She came over and gingerly picked me up, holding me just below her chin, and brought me over to sit on the desk beside her. “You’re so soft!” she marveled.

“Yeah, the Venn machine makes the cuddliest plushies. What are you working on?” I glanced at her laptop screen. It was running a word processor I wasn’t familiar with, the screen filled with several lines of bulleted text at the top followed by an incomplete paragraph.

“An essay for Freshman Comp. It’s supposed to be about someone you admire, and I think I’ve pretty much figured out who I’m writing about — E. Nesbit. She was a writer and a political activist around the turn of the last century...” She told me about E. Nesbit’s life and works, a couple of which I’d heard of but hadn’t read. “Only I’m having trouble getting my thoughts in order.”

“Let me read what you’ve got so far,” I said, and read the highly tentative bulleted outline and the fragment of an opening paragraph. I gave her a little advice about narrowing down the focus a bit — her outline covered a whole bunch of stuff, too much for the word count she’d been assigned. I noticed a couple of typos in the opening paragraph, but didn’t point them out; I figured I could do that after she finished the first draft.

After that, for the next nine days, I would sometimes help Steph as well as Jada with homework in the subjects I was good at, and we got to know each other better. She had a huge vocabulary, and was a fast, fairly accurate typist, but had to guess at the spellings of a lot of words, since she knew their pronunciations and meanings but hadn’t seen them written out all that often. She read more slowly than most college freshmen, which was understandable given that she’d started learning to read print only two years ago.

She was not exactly affection-starved; she seemed to have loving parents who called every few days if she didn’t call them first, which happened more often, and they were apparently planning to come see her later in the semester. But she was lonely, apparently being away from home for the first time, and not making a lot of new friends. We hadn’t been working on homework together for very long, less than a week, when she asked me timidly if she could pet me. She’d been very gentle every time she picked me up from Jada’s desk or bed and brought me over to her desk to sit next to her, but she hadn’t touched me more than was necessary to get me over the big gaps between pieces of furniture.

“It would be okay with me,” I said. “But I wonder if I might should ask my girlfriends if it’s okay with them?”

“Girlfriends?” she asked. “You mean Jada and the other you — Lauren?”

“I guess it wouldn’t hurt to ask her, too. But I meant Britt, Jada and me’s other girlfriend.”

“Oh... Jada said something about sort of having two girlfriends, but then she explained about you being split in two and I thought that was what she meant.”

“Britt’s our girlfriend, but she’s asexual, and we just cuddle and hold hands with her. We don’t kiss or anything beyond that.” She seemed curious, so I told her a little more about our relationship, and the little bit I knew about polyamory in the larger world, but didn’t go into any details about how much farther than cuddling Jada and I had gone. “So anyway, I figure they would probably be okay with you petting me, but I think I should ask them.”

“Oh... okay. I shouldn’t have asked... you don’t have to say anything to them about it.” She looked embarrassed.

“No, it’s okay. I’m a plushie, I like being snuggled. It’s not sexual for me in this form any more than it is for Britt. But still, I feel like it would be more respectful to talk with my partners about it first.”

“Okay,” she said. “That’s cool.”

I talked to Jada about it the next morning when Steph was in the shower. “Sure,” she said. “Steph is a sweetie and I’d be a hypocrite to say you can’t let her pet you, or even sit in her lap and snuggle, after I started out our relationship asking if I could keep snuggling with Britt.”

I asked her to let me talk with Britt and Lauren next time she called them so I could ask them the same question. “Now’s not a good time,” she said, “but maybe tonight. I’m sure they’ll say yes, anyway.”

 

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My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

Britt and I went on a couple of dates that month, taking Desiree with us and snuggling with her. On one of those dates, we went to the mall in Catesville, venned into little girls, and played on the playground until closing time. We didn’t run into Melinda and Melanie that time, but we played tag with a couple of little girls and then chatted with them after we got tired of chasing each other around the playground, up the stairs and through the tunnels and down the slides.

 

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I had continued hearing back from colleges, loans, and scholarships I’d applied to, and things weren’t looking great. I’d been accepted to NC State and UNC Greensboro, but turned down for UNC Chapel Hill. And I’d gotten rejected for almost every scholarship and grant I’d applied for, except a couple of small ones. So it looked like, unless I decided to go locally to Mynatt Community College — and the Ramseys were okay with me continuing to live with them for a good chunk of my college career — I’d have to rely mostly on loans. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey helped me look over the loan offers I’d gotten and said it looked like they were going to charge me more interest than Meredith or Caleb, probably because I was on my own without my parents’ support. But I didn’t have much choice unless I wanted to put my college plans on hold for years while I worked and built up my savings and my credit rating. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to bite the bullet and start finalizing plans to go to East Carolina next fall.

I’d gotten pretty good tips working as a two-headed creature with sheep and wolf heads, so a few days later I tried having Sophia venn me into a two-headed dragon with long, sinuous necks like a goose or swan (or apatosaurus, Sophia commented). It didn’t take as long this time to get the hang of speaking with different voices from the different mouths, and I got up a patter between the two heads, with one recommending this special and the other recommending that one. The tips were better than usual, though not quite as good as they’d been the previous Furry Friday. I started using two-headed forms two or three times a week for a while — not every day, because keeping up the comedy routine and remembering to always talk with the right accent with the right head was kind of stressful, although fun when I had the energy for it.

Britt and I went on a couple of dates that month, taking Desiree with us and snuggling with her. On one of those dates, we went to the mall in Catesville, venned into little girls, and played on the playground until closing time. We didn’t run into Melinda and Melanie that time, but we played tag with a couple of little girls and then chatted with them after we got tired of chasing each other around the playground, up the stairs and through the tunnels and down the slides.

“So what do you do when you’re not being little and playing tag?” one of the girls asked, the one with long red hair. “Or a plushie?” she added to Desiree.

“I’m working for my dad’s car repair business,” Britt said.

“I’m waiting tables. And studying. I’m saving money for college,” I added.

“I snuggle with my girlfriend at night and watch anime all day,” Desiree said with a giggle. She was exaggerating; she only watched anime when Bianca wasn’t using her laptop for something else.

“Ah, the easy life of a stuffed animal,” the other girl said, the one with short blue hair and cat ears. “I remember watching Speed Racer when it was first on American TV back when I was a kid. I thought it was the niftiest cartoon ever. I didn’t get a chance to watch much other anime until a lot later, after I retired from running a business.”

“And now you’re running another one, silly,” the red-haired girl said. “Instead of enjoying your retirement.”

“it’s not the same,” the cat-eared girl rejoined. “I bought an existing business and I’m making it more successful. It’s nowhere near as much work as starting a new business from scratch. But I couldn’t just sit around and watch TV with the Venn machine giving me a second chance at life.”

“He had to retire early because of heart trouble,” the red-haired girl said. “We sold the restaurants and took it easy for a decade or so until the Venn machines came along.”

“What restaurants?” I asked.

“Masquerade,” the cat-eared girl said. “Three fine dining places in the suburbs of Raleigh.”

“Ms. Paget!?” I exclaimed.

I’d never gotten to know Ms. Paget personally, but I’d heard a few things about her from my co-workers, and one thing I knew was that she used to run a chain of restaurants in the Raleigh area. I’d only heard the name of those restaurants once and forgotten it, but hearing it again, I recognized it.

“I see my fame precedes me,” Ms. Paget said. “Where do I know you from?”

“I’m Lauren Wallace.”

“Oh, Lauren! It’s great to meet you here.” To the other little girl — her wife, I was pretty sure — she added: “She’s one of my waitresses — dragon, really hard worker.” I blushed.

“Did this just get awkward?” the other Ms. Paget asked. “How about some more — tag! You’re it.” She tagged her husband and scurried up the ladder of the fort, giggling. Britt and I jumped up, Britt with Desiree under her arm, and ran in different directions. My boss chased after her wife, and we played tag for another twenty minutes before we sat down to talk again. By that time any awkwardness was pretty much gone; we were just a couple and a polycule on a double date, one of them forty years older than the other.

 

* * *

 

The next time I talked on the phone with Jada, we talked about when she’d be coming home, and decided the best time would be the weekend after my Lydia self merged with me. Four or five days after merging those memories, I hoped I’d be ready to split again and go back to college with her as Lydia.

The Friday after Steph asked me (Lydia) if she could pet me, Britt picked me (dragon-girl Lauren) up after work and took me to the dirt track on Lehigh Road. Poppy and Lisette were already there, Britt having venned Lisette and taken her and Poppy out there a while earlier. When Britt and I arrived, there were several tweens and young teens driving around the track in go-karts. A couple of the go-karts looked weird, sleek and off-kilter in the way of venned machines. Poppy was standing off to the side, next to a purplish-grey motorcycle with the same off-kilter look, looking on.

“Hey, girls,” Britt said as we approached. “You gotten any more time in since I left?”

“No, we’re coming up next,” Poppy said. Lisette whistled and beeped like R2-D2.

“Cool. Nice venn, Lisette.”

Poppy, Lisette and Britt had been coming to the track whenever they could align all their schedules for the past few months, but this was the first time I’d managed to come join them. On the drive over, Britt had told me in her laconic way that they’d taken turns being the motorcycle and were starting to get pretty decent at driving each other. She’d refined their venned forms, too, so Lisette could see and hear through cameras and microphones. And she could talk, but her voice sounded mechanical and she preferred to save it for conveying detailed information, whistling like a droid when a phatic expression of interest was all that was needed.

“So Britt was telling me about the troubles y’all have been having getting permission to drive each other on regular roads?”

“Yeah, apparently it’s illegal to drive a person venned into a vehicle on public roads. Not because there’s specific laws against vehicle venns, at least in most states, but because somebody like Lisette doesn’t have a fucking speedometer. You can venn someone with a speedometer, but it won’t be labeled with any readable units or numbers. Lisette can talk and tell me how fast she thinks we’re going, but it’s just a guess, she doesn’t know much better than I do. But by the time we found that out, we’d started having so much fun cycling that we didn’t want to quit.” Lisette chirped in agreement. “So we’re still figuring out how and when we’re gonna do our trip. We’re leaning toward just walking. Giving our road trip bodies really great stamina and something like a camel’s hump so we can go a long way without eating or drinking. And tolerance for a wide range of temperatures, and so forth.”

“So basically a cameltaur?”

“Hopefully less silly-looking, but maybe. We’ve been tinkering with the forms we’re gonna use.”

“What about animate dolls, like the form Meredith’s sister wears? You don’t need to eat or drink, and you don’t sweat or suffer from the cold or heat.”

Poppy looked at Lisette, who chirped doubtfully. “Can’t fuck, either, but I guess we could venn each other into meat bodies when we feel like it. That’s a good idea, thanks.”

The go-kart race came to an end and someone announced the results. Then Poppy straddled Lisette and rode her to the starting line, along with several other people on motorcycles and dirt bikes of various kinds, some of them apparently venned. Britt and I watched the next race, and another one later on that Poppy and Lisette participated in, and then just after sunset we loaded Lisette onto the bed of Britt’s dad’s truck and headed off.

“You want to get a ride home with Lisette or with me?” Britt asked Poppy as she and I squeezed into the front seat.

“I better go straight home,” Poppy said, checking her texts. “My mom’s getting... you know how she gets.”

I didn’t, but Britt apparently did. We went down Lehigh Road to Reidsville Road, past the Taco Bell where Poppy worked and the Dollar Tree where Sophia used to work, and then turned off onto a side road that led to a trailer park. Poppy lived near the back of the park in a single-wide trailer. In the rearview mirror, I saw Poppy lean over and pat Lisette’s flank before walking up to the door and letting herself in.

We went by the library next. While we were waiting in line for Britt to venn Lisette into her everyday body, her phone rang: caller ID said it was Jada.

“Hey, Jada,” she said. “No mushy stuff just yet, I’ve got you on speakerphone so Lauren can hear, and Lisette’s here too, plus some strangers.”

“Hi, Jada,” I said, and Lisette whistled and beeped.

“Hey, everybody. I’ve got Lydia here, she wants to ask you a question — both of you, Britt and Lauren. Probably better turn off speakerphone, though.”

“Okay,” Britt said, tapping an icon and handing the phone to me.

“Hey, Lydia,” I said, feeling self-conscious. I hadn’t interacted with my other self while split for some time now, not since the date when Jada and I had split into tiny and big selves. And I’d never had a phone conversation with my other self.

“Hey, Lauren. I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to this, because I diverged from you just a few weeks ago, but would you be okay with Jada’s roommate Steph petting me? Maybe snuggling me in her lap or something? Assuming Britt is okay with it, I mean. I already asked Jada and she said it was cool with her.”

I was floored. I’d been a life-size doll not too long ago, but I hadn’t been a statuette for several months, and I’d never been a plushie, still less a plushie divided from my organic self’s mind. I wasn’t prepared for how differently plushie-me would think. “Uh, I guess? I don’t — I mean, you and Jada decided it was okay to trust her and tell her you’re venned, so she must be all right, but I don’t know her and you do.”

“Okay. Could you hand the phone to Britt?”

I did. She listened and laconically said, “Sure, she sounds like a nice girl.” Silence for a few moments. Then “Yeah, that’d be nice. We’ll see if it suits... Okay, bye, honey.”

Lisette chirped inquisitively. (I don’t know how she made the chirp sound inquisitive. You try listening to her and see if you can analyze it.)

“I think our polycule just got bigger,” Britt said.

Lisette chirped in approval. I just stood there, being gobsmacked. Britt noticed my gobsmackedness and gave me a hug.

The ladies who’d been taking so long inside the Venn machine finished up and emerged. Much cry and little wool, as my grandma Wallace would say; they’d been in there at least ten minutes and all they’d done was make each other prettier? Britt rolled Lisette into the booth, tilting her up so she was leaning against the wall nearly vertically. (Lisette was much lighter than a normal motorcycle, but she was still heavy enough that I couldn’t have done that. Britt’s everyday body was really strong.) Just before she stepped into the booth, I stuck one foot in the door while keeping the rest of me outside, and stayed like that until Britt had Lisette situated. That way the door wouldn’t close on both of them and require them to cancel both venns and get re-venned individually. Once Britt got her situated, she stepped out of the booth and went into the other booth to venn Lisette into her everyday form.

Once they came out, Lisette said goodnight and congratulated us on our new girlfriend. I was sufficiently recovered to say, “I’m not sure if she’s our girlfriend, exactly. I’ll let you know when Lydia merges with me and I get her memories.”

“Just you wait,” Lisette said with a knowing nod. “In another year, you’ll be dating half the sapphists in North Carolina. You can’t have Poppy, though.”

Britt laughed and I chuckled nervously.

Lisette drove her car home from there and Britt dropped me off at the Ramseys’ house. We hugged before I got out of the car, and I said a distracted hi to Sophia, Bianca, and Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey as I joined them for supper.

 

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The third book in the Launuru and Kazmina series, Like Bees in Springtime, is available for free in epub format from Smashwords and for $0.99 in Kindle format from Amazon. Amazon didn’t allow me to set the price to zero, but a commenter says there's a way to do so, so I'll keep trying. I’ve also reduced the price of the first two books in the series, Wine Can’t be Pressed Into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, and the spin-off in the same setting with different characters, A Notional Treason, to zero on Smashwords and $0.99 on Kindle.

I’ve been charging money for this series for a decade, and made some decent pocket change off of it, but as my understanding of gender and sexuality has matured in recent years, I’ve felt vaguely guilty about making money (however small the amounts) off of a book or books that I no longer feel quite right about. There is a lot to like about the first two books in the series, but the first one in particular has enough compulsory heterosexuality and gender essentialism baked into the plot and worldbuilding that I don’t really want to charge money for it anymore. I considered taking down the first two books and leaving the third unpublished, but finally decided that enough people liked the first two that I’d keep them available, while editing the last one to match my current understanding of gender better, and finally releasing it.

You can find my ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
Like Bees in Springtime	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
The Translator in Spite of Themself	Smashwords	itch.io

“You’re heavy. Did it make your bones out of osmium or something?”

 

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Just after Britt hung up, Steph got back from the restroom. (Jada had waited to call when Britt and Lauren would be off work and Steph was out of the room.) I crawled out of Jada’s lap (she was sitting propped up on her bed) and over to the end of the bed near Steph’s side of the room as she approached.

“Hey, Steph,” I said, “my girlfriends said it was okay if you pet or snuggle me.”

“Oh!” She gingerly picked me up and gave me a wonderful hug. I spread my soft, dull claws and my wings around her neck as far as they would go. “This is okay?” she asked.

“This is very nice,” I said.

Steph put me down on the foot of Jada’s bed again, looking happier than I’d seen her yet. “Thank you. I needed a hug.”

“I like hugs.”

“She gives great hugs,” Jada said with a wink that made poor Steph blush.

After that, when I would sit on Steph’s desk helping her with homework or study when Jada was out, she would sometimes stroke my back between my wings or scratch my head, which felt really nice, and when we finished our study session, she’d give me a hug.

The next day was a Saturday, and Steph’s parents came to visit. After some discussion with Steph, we decided I’d pretend to be a regular plushie while they were there. Steph’s dad was carrying a baby carrier with a tiny baby in it; she’d told me her little brother was just three months old. He was awake when they arrived, and looked around and waved his arms as Steph introduced her parents to Jada and me. (She didn’t tell her parents I was a venned person. She just said, “This is my roommate, Jada, and her dragon, Lydia.” I was sitting in Jada’s lap at the time, next to a textbook she was reading.) Her mom had long hair a shade redder than Steph’s, a light scattering of freckles, and three breasts. Her dad was in a male form again, though not as muscular as when he’d been helping Steph haul stuff in from the car.

Steph went out with her parents and didn’t return for a couple of hours. Jada studied for a while longer, and then we watched an episode of Carmilla before she started studying something else. The episode was near over when her phone rang. “Hey, this is Jada... Oh, sure, that would be fine. No problem. See you in a bit.” She hung up and said, “That was Steph. She asked if it would be okay for her mom to nurse Liam here.”

“It’s cool with me,” I said.

Steph and her family returned a few minutes later, and Mrs. Merricks sat down on Steph’s bed with the diaper bag while Mr. Merricks set the baby carrier down next to her. Liam was fussing, not wailing exactly, but making his displeasure known. She unbuttoned her blouse and started nursing him, starting with her left breast and then working through the other two. That was one hungry baby. While she did so, she and Mr. Merricks continued a conversation with Steph that seemed to have started some time ago.

“I’m not saying you need to be a social butterfly,” Mrs. Merrick said. “But it sounds like you’ve hardly gotten to know anybody except for your roommate. Thanks for being a friend to Steph, by the way,” she said, turning to Jada.

“Steph’s a sweet girl,” Jada said. “She reminds me of a friend of mine from back home.”

“Where are you from?” Mr. Merricks asked.

“Brocksboro. It’s a little town about halfway between Greensboro and the Virginia state line. It was the first place in North Carolina to get a Venn machine.”

“All I’m saying is,” Mrs. Merricks resumed, “you could make some more effort to get to know a few people. You said you hadn’t gone to any student organization meetings. Have you tried going through the list of clubs to see if any of them might suit you?”

“The student life web page says the name of the organization and where they meet and all,” Steph said. “It doesn’t say how many people there are. I tried a book club and there were way too many people.”

“How about try sending an email to the contact person for some of those clubs,” Mr. Merrick suggested gently, “and ask them how many people go to a typical meeting? You might find one that’s manageably small that way.”

“Okay,” Steph said. “I’ll try.”

He gave her a hug. “I’m so proud of you, Steph. You’re making perfect grades so far, and we’re proud of you for doing that, but it won’t wreck your future career or make us love you any less if you earn a B now and then because you’ve spent a little time making friends rather than studying.”

Steph nodded.

 

* * *

 

Three days later, early in the morning when neither Jada nor Steph were awake yet, my plushie venn expired and I merged with my other self. She’d been asleep, too, and we woke up remembering the last month from two points of view. It was the longest period we’d merged memories from yet, and anticipating that it would take some time to get used to, I’d arranged things so I wouldn’t have to go in to work at the usual time. My shift today wouldn’t start until eleven.

I lay awake on my futon, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Jada, Britt, and Steph. I missed Jada and Steph already. I’d gone to bed snuggling with Jada, and I wanted to be with her again, but I wouldn’t see her until she came home for the weekend, four days from now. It was silly; I’d already gone a month without seeing her, another four days should be nothing... but I’d also cuddled with her every day and night for the last month. The cuddling hadn’t been sexual at the time — at least for me as the plushie — but thinking about it now was getting my dragon-girl body revved up.

Time to get up and shower.

Twenty minutes later, I was fixing breakfast. Bianca, who’d been doing something on her laptop in the living room, came into the kitchen and helped out, then sat down with me and chatted as I ate.

“So you just got back your memories from the plushie, right? How was college life?”

“Really nice in some ways,” I said, “especially after we told Jada’s roommate Steph who I was and I asked Britt and Jada... and me... if it was okay for Steph to pet and cuddle me. Being a plushie, I really liked hugs and snuggles. A lot more than when I was a statuette or a ceramic doll. But with soft plushie claws, I wasn’t strong enough to lift most books and turning pages wasn’t that easy, either. I wound up spending a lot of time listening to Steph’s audiobooks with her.”

“Hmmm. We’ll have to refine the design a little. Sophia and I have been thinking about some ways to make soft doll bodies stronger, giving them some kind of rigid internal structure like a skeleton.”

“As long as I’m still soft and cuddly. That’s the whole point of going to college with Jada as a plushie.”

“We can test it out later. Not you and me, I mean, but you and Sophia.”

Speaking of whom, I’d heard the shower running for a few minutes. Sophia was up and getting ready for school. She came into the kitchen and served herself a plate of the pancakes and sausage I’d made. Bianca told her I’d gotten the plushie memories back and how I’d had trouble with books.

“Yeah, plushie bodies tend not to be very strong. We’ve been thinking about giving them some sort of skeleton —”

“Bianca told me,” I said. “You want to try working it out some evening this week, before Jada comes home?”

“Sure.”

 

* * *

 

Thursday evening, after I got off work and Sophia got home from school, she gave me a ride to the library and we set up the Venn machine for a two-day change. (We were planning for her to change me back sooner than that, but I liked to give myself some leeway to make sure I never had a venn expire and leave me in my original body.) I waited while she called up my history and picked the two plush dragons pair from a few weeks earlier, then tweaked it so there would be only one plushie, then tried to give me a skeleton and more dexterous hands or forefeet.

“There’s no way to be sure if this works except to change you and see if you’re stronger than before,” she said. “I can’t see the skeleton inside you. But your wings in the image do seem to be less floppy, so that’s a good sign.”

“Give it a try,” I said. She pressed the button and I was a cat-sized dragon plushie again. But something felt different. I tried flapping my wings, twisting my head around to look. They were holding their shape better, not just two expanses of cloth sewn onto my back, but they seemed to have a web of bones defining their shape.

“I think it worked,” I said. I didn’t exactly have muscle memory in this form, but I could try to remember what it had felt like to fly in my small dragon bodies and use my new, stronger wings to fly. It didn’t go well; I couldn’t get off the ground.

The button phased out and the doors opened. Sophia came around to look at me as I waddled out of the booth.

“You look just as cuddly as before,” she said. “Mind if I pick you up?”

“Go ahead,” I said. She did, and gave an oof.

“You’re heavy. Did it make your bones out of osmium or something?”

“How heavy?” I worried.

“I can barely lift you. Let’s try this again and I’ll try to specify lightweight bones.”

Someone else had arrived and wanted to use the machine, a straight white couple, so while they were changing each other, Sophia sat down on the bench and snuggled me. She decided my bones were not only too dense, but too near the surface in some places, so hugging me was like hugging a skinny person and getting poked in uncomfortable places by their bones.

When the couple came out, having switched each other’s sexes and given each other a few animal traits — cat ears and a tail for him, webbed fingers and fins for her — Sophia and I went in the machine again and she tried to give me lightweight bones with plenty of padding around them. After she pressed the green button, I tried flapping my wings and managed to get off the floor for a moment, which augured success. I also poked myself in a few places and couldn’t feel the bones as close to the surface as they’d been before. The green button phased out and we came out. Sophia did the lift test and the hug test and pronounced me much more snuggly than before, as well as lighter than an organic creature of my size.

“So how long do you want to be like this before I change you back?” she asked.

“If you don’t mind, we could go home and I could try my strength and dexterity on various tasks like picking up a hardback book and turning pages, or typing on a keyboard. Then if all goes well, I could stay like this overnight and you could change me back to a dragon-girl on your way to school tomorrow, or if not, you could change me back tonight.”

“Either one would be fine.”

So we returned to the house, and Sophia set me down just inside the front door, where I walked to my room. The door was closed and I couldn’t reach the doorknob, but I found I had the strength to jump up and grab it, and did so, managing to get it open. Pushing it completely closed again behind me was more than I could manage, though. I climbed up onto my bookshelf and picked out one of my heaviest books, a one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings, then pulled it off the shelf and read a few pages, finding that my modified claws were good enough for that.

So I stayed a plushie overnight, hanging out with Bianca in the living room a good part of the night, alternately reading and chatting about what we were reading, and fuguing out at about the same time. Early Friday morning, Sophia took me to the library on her way to school and venned me into my two-headed dragon-girl body for work. I sat in front of the library, trying to read two books at once without much success, until some of my co-workers showed up to venn for work, then rode to work with them.

Toward the end of my shift, I got a text from Jada saying she was done with her last class and was heading back to her dorm to pack up for the weekend trip home. She texted again less than an hour later saying she was on the road, and a few hours later saying she’d arrived at her grandma’s house and would call after supper.

I’d arranged to have a short shift Saturday and to have Sunday off, so I could spend more time with Jada and Britt that weekend. We called and texted back and forth that evening about our plans for the next couple of days, and the next day after work, Britt and Jada came to pick me up.

“I love your two-headed form!” Jada exclaimed when I got in the car.

“Do you want to just scale it down?” I asked. “I was thinking I’d venn into something more human for tonight.”

“Yeah, more human would be nice,” she said. “But maybe still with two heads?”

“Okay,” I said, laughing.

“What about if y’all don’t scale down quite as much as last time,” Britt said. “I want to be able to cuddle you without worrying about crushing you.”

“About kitten-size?” Jada asked.

“That’d be cute.”

At the library, Jada and I venned each other into eight-inch forms, mostly human with two heads and a scaly tail in my case, and human with fluffy kitten-fur and whiskers for Jada. Then Britt picked us up and and brought us home.

“Look what followed me home, Mom,” she announced as she brought us into the house, one of us cradled in each hand. “Can I keep them?”

“Pets are a lot of work,” Mrs. Boyce commented. “Especially strays.”

“We’re housebroken,” I piped up with my left head, and with the right, “We’ll be very quiet.”

“Mrow,” Jada remarked.

Mrs. Boyce smiled. “Hi, girls. Supper will be ready in an hour, but I don’t suppose you’ll be eating much, will you?”

Britt took us to her room and we snuggled, chatting about Jada’s college experiences, Sophia’s experiments with venning me into a plushie with a skeleton, and Britt’s project of rebuilding a 1973 Ford Mustang. After a while, Britt’s mom called us to supper, and Britt scooped us up in her arms and carried us to the dinner table.

Jada and I shared a plate. We were just strong enough to lift one of the child-size forks from when Britt and her older siblings were little, but small enough that fitting it into our mouths was impossible, so we ate with our hands, which was pretty messy, as Mrs. Boyce had cooked macaroni and cheese and fried okra — plus a pot roast, which was too fibrous for our tiny mouths to chew even after Britt patiently cut some of it up really small. She had to cut the pieces of okra up small, too, as they were half as big as our heads.

Mrs. Boyce asked Jada some questions about how she was finding college life, whether she got along well with her roommate, and so forth.

“Steph’s a great roommate,” Jada said. “She doesn’t leave her clothes lying around and she doesn’t complain when I do. She’s pretty shy, but she’s just starting to come out of her shell. She promised me when I left for the weekend that she’d go to a meeting of the chess club and wouldn’t stay in the room all weekend.”

“Great,” I said. “That shouldn’t be too overwhelming for her. She was pretty freaked out after going to the book club meeting and seeing how many people there were.”

“That’s right, you were there, weren’t you?” Mr. Boyce said. “I remember you told us you’d gone off with Jada as a little stuffed dragon. We’ll have to try that sometime, honey,” he added, turning to his wife.

“Maybe,” she said. “I hear it’s difficult to venn someone like that and still have them able to see and hear and all, and I wouldn’t want to be just a thing.”

“I’ll show you my friend Sophia’s YouTube series,” I said. “She did a science fair project on how to get the Venn machines to give animate dolls specific properties. She venned me into a plushie and in the last few days we’ve been experimenting to improve my strength and dexterity in that form.”

The conversation drifted to Sophia’s year-long living doll experiment, then to other strange things people had venned into for long periods, then to Poppy and Lisette’s motorcycle racing, then to NASCAR, then to Boyce Automotive, the family business, and back around to my work at Metamorphoses and Jada’s job hunt in Greenville. After supper, we went back to Britt’s room and watched a short movie; then Britt left us on her bed while she sat in her desk chair with headphones on and watched YouTube videos while Jada and I made love and then cuddled for a while

A couple of hours later, Britt drove us back to the library and we venned each other into dual forms. Jada picked the plush dragon with a skeleton from my history and turned me into two copies of it, one larger than the other, and then I did something similar with the dual plushie forms from her history, telling the machine to give her a skeleton like mine, lightweight and not too close to the surface at any point. It worked pretty well, as we found after emerging from the machine and testing our strength and dexterity, so we went back in with our larger plushie bodies while Britt snuggled the smaller ones, and venned each other into the bodies we wanted to sleep in and use the following day.

We went home carrying each other’s plushie selves, and I snuggled with Desiree that night for the first time in a week, knowing that Lydia was snuggling with Jada a few miles away, and remembering our lovemaking at Britt’s house.

 

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My new short story, "Carpet-Bound," is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed stories by trans authors for $8.

The third book in the Launuru and Kazmina series, Like Bees in Springtime, is available for free in epub format from Smashwords and for $0.99 in Kindle format from Amazon. Amazon didn’t allow me to set the price to zero. I’ve also reduced the price of the first two books in the series, Wine Can’t be Pressed Into Grapes and When Wasps Make Honey, and the spin-off in the same setting with different characters, A Notional Treason, to zero on Smashwords and $0.99 on Kindle.

I’ve been charging money for this series for a decade, and made some decent pocket change off of it, but as my understanding of gender and sexuality has matured in recent years, I’ve felt vaguely guilty about making money (however small the amounts) off of a book or books that I no longer feel quite right about. There is a lot to like about the first two books in the series, but the first one and the spin-off have enough compulsory heterosexuality and gender essentialism baked into the plot and worldbuilding that I don’t really want to charge money for it anymore. I considered taking down the earlier books and leaving the third unpublished, but finally decided that enough people liked the first two that I’d keep them available, while editing the last one to match my current understanding of gender better, and finally releasing it.

• Smashwords
• Amazon
• itch.io

When they returned, Jada was a cyclopean llama-taur and Steph was an octopus-taur. She was riding on Jada’s back, having apparently gotten tuckered out on the way back — she was surprisingly fast on her tentacles, but they’d tired after walking a third of the way across campus.

 

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The next day, I went to church with the Ramseys while Jada was at church with her family, and we got together in the afternoon for a couple of hours before she returned to college. We went for a walk in the river park again, and went to watch Lisette and Poppy at the racetrack. Lisette was riding Poppy this time; Poppy’s motorcycle form had a wider wheelbase with a colorful blue and orange chassis, in contrast to the plain black clothes she usually wore. And it was odd to see Lisette in motorcycle leathers instead of the fancy dresses and corsets she usually wore. They raced against several other riders on venned cycles and placed second. Afterward, as we were loading Poppy on the truck to take her back to the library, Jada asked us if we had any plans for Halloween weekend.

“Poppy and I are gonna be watching horror movies on Halloween night,” Lisette said. “You girls are welcome to join us. I don’t think we have any plans yet for the weekend before Halloween, though.” Halloween was going to fall on a Monday that year.

“I don’t have any definite plans yet,” I said. “Sophia and her parents are volunteering for the Trunk or Treat at their church on Sunday evening, and I might join them if y’all aren’t doing anything.”

“What about if y’all come visit me?” Jada asked. “The queer group is having a Halloween party on Saturday night. Those of y’all that don’t have cars could ride with Lisette or Britt, and venn into party bodies at the Venn machine on campus.”

“And then drive all the way back here after midnight?” Lisette asked. “Or pay for a motel room?”

“No,” Jada said, “you could venn into small bodies and sleep in my dorm room. We could all venn into tiny bodies and share my bed, only we’d need to get Steph or somebody to carry us to my dorm room and open the door for us and take us to the Venn machine the next morning... probably better if one of us stays big enough to reach the doorknob.”

“You’d better make sure Steph’s okay with that,” I said. “But if she’s fine with having guests that night, I’d like to come.”

“Let’s see if we can get the days off work,” Poppy said in her mechanical voice.

After that, we hugged Britt and said goodbye to everyone, and Jada drove me home.

 

* * *

 

So the next day, I asked for Halloween weekend off work. It was another week before I found out for sure I could get those days off. Things continued to be fairly uneventful in Brocksboro; I worked, hung out with Desiree, Sophia and Bianca at home, had a therapy appointment, went on dates with Britt and watched Lisette and Poppy race. I was also continuing to get to know some of my co-workers a little better. Anna and I got to talking one day during a slow shift and she invited me and Britt and Desiree to join her and Genevieve for a double date, which we did about a week later. Then Joy invited me to a Halloween party she and her boyfriend were hosting. It would be the day after Britt, Lisette, Poppy and I returned from visiting Jada, assuming all of us were able to get those days off work.

Meanwhile, at college, Jada and I were watching Steph cautiously poke her head out of her shell. She’d gone to the chess club meeting the weekend Jada was visiting at home, and it had gone well enough, with a small enough group of strangers to be manageable for her anxiety and most of them no more brash or outgoing than she was. “It helped that mostly I just had to deal with the one person I was playing with at the moment,” she explained.

There were a few groups of friends who used the Venn machine regularly, but no organized Venn club. Jada was trying to start one, beginning with her new friends in the queer group and the anime club and a few people she’d met through her classes. It was a fairly small group at first, and Jada had invited Steph to hang out with them one Saturday morning in early September, but she’d declined. The Saturday after Jada and I re-split, however, she agreed to go on the condition that she’d turn right around and come back to the dorm if there were too many people. So I was left alone and spent a pleasant hour reading.

When they returned, Jada was a cyclopean llama-taur and Steph was an octopus-taur. She was riding on Jada’s back, having apparently gotten tuckered out on the way back — she was surprisingly fast on her tentacles, but they’d tired after walking a third of the way across campus. Jada stood alongside Steph’s desk for a few moments while Steph wriggled off her back onto the chair.

“Thanks for the ride,” she said. “This is a fun body, but it’s not made for distance walking.”

“No problem,” Jada said. “I guess we’d better buckle down and study for a while.”

So they did. I sat on Jada’s shoulder, since she didn’t really have a lap in llama-taur form, and read along with her. Then when she’d finished reading a chapter of her poli sci book, I took the book and quizzed her on what she’d read. Then Steph asked me to proofread her Freshman Comp essay. A while later, she said, “I’d kind of like to go to the chess club meeting, but I’m not sure. It’s not as far as from here to the Venn machine, but it’s a pretty good distance for walking on tentacles...”

“I can give you a ride,” Jada said. “It’ll be on my way to the queer group meeting, if I remember right about where y’all meet.”

“I’m sorry to keep imposing on you,” Steph started to apologize, but Jada waved it off.

“It’s really no big deal. Come on, let’s go.”

So Steph wriggled onto Jada’s back again and rode out the door. A couple of hours later, they returned, chatting about something that I didn’t get all the context of until later.

“— more I think about it, it probably is a date,” Steph was saying. “And I don’t know... he seems nice, but I barely know him, I’ve played like two games of chess with him and we didn’t talk all that much beyond the game.”

“Are you worried about what he might do?” Jada asked, standing by Steph’s bed so she could wriggle off Jada’s back. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about at the student center, there’d be lots of people around to stop him if he tries anything.”

“No, I don’t think he’d do anything bad, it’s just... I don’t know if I can handle it.”

“You don’t have to go if you don’t feel like it,” Jada said. “Just tell him something came up and you’ll see him in class Tuesday. Maybe go out with him later once you get to know him better through the chess club and class, assuming he’s still interested.”

“He’ll probably be going out with somebody else by then... I don’t think this is gonna happen all that often, so I guess I should probably take advantage of it when it does. I’m just super nervous.” She turned to me where I was sitting on Jada’s desk; I’d been reading when they came in.

“Can I hug you, Lydia? And ask you for dating advice?”

“Yes to the hug,” I said. “And you can ask, but I doubt I can help. I never went on a date until a few months ago when Jada asked me out, and I didn’t realize it was a date until after she picked me up and took me to the park.”

“Originally we were gonna hang out with some other friends, but they wound up not being able to come, so it was just us, and one thing led to another,” Jada explained.

“Oh,” Steph said. She had already climbed down off her bed and was now climbing Jada’s desk chair to pick me up and hug me. It was a very thorough hug and I squirmed happily. She passed me off to Jada, who snuggled me as well.

“So,” I said, “tell me about it from the start. I heard some of it just now, but it seemed like it was only the tail end of the conversation.”

There was a guy named Greg in her Freshman Comp class who was also in the chess club. She’d never exchanged a word with him in class, not until last week when she played a game of chess with him, and then again tonight.

“And as the meeting was breaking up, and I was waiting for Jada to get back from her meeting to give me a ride to the dorm, he asked me if I wanted to hang out at the student center and go over our notes from class and maybe play another game of chess afterward. And I thought about it for a moment and said yes, but after Jada came, I started thinking about it more, and it seems like a date, and that’s got me all nervous. Like what if I mess it up and then I can’t go to chess club meetings anymore because it’s too awkward and that’s the only club on campus that’s not too big and noisy for me?”

“Slow down,” I said, remembering some of the techniques my therapist had taught me. “Look around you; tell me five things you see...?”

After Steph had calmed down a little and stopped catastrophizing, I asked, “Would you want to go on a date with him?”

“Maybe? He seems like a nice guy, and he looks good, but everybody looks good now because of the Venn machines. And he said nice things about my octopus-taur form and how I played chess.”

“I heard tentacled forms go over well with the guys,” Jada said knowingly, and Steph squeaked.

I shushed Jada and asked Steph, “When are you supposed to meet him?”

“Tomorrow afternoon at two.”

“Did he give you his contact information or ask you for yours?”

“Um, no. So I guess I can’t tell him I can’t come... I’d just have to not show up. And that would be mean. I guess I’ve got to go.”

“You don’t have to,” I reassured her, “if you don’t feel like it. But I think it would be good for you. I don’t think it’s likely to go so badly that you can’t go to the chess club meetings anymore. And remember, if he’s disrespectful or pushes your boundaries too much, you can leave early.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it, but I’ll probably go.”

 

* * *

 

She went. Late Sunday morning, she and Jada went back to the Venn machine and changed back into their everyday bodies; Jada venned her clothes into a slightly nicer blouse and skirt for the date, but nothing super fancy, as it was a fairly informal date at the student center. Steph hovered around the room, bouncing back and forth between the desk and the bed and standing by the chest of drawers and rummaging through it, unable to sit still for long. She hugged me and her own plushies several times, trying to calm down, without much success.

She left to meet Greg at fifteen till two and didn’t return for well over an hour. When she returned, Jada paused the episode of The Necessary Beggar we’d been watching and sat up straighter, asking: “How’d it go?”

“Pretty well, I guess? It was a close game, I don’t think he was deliberately letting me beat him, and afterward he asked me if I wanted to go somewhere off-campus next weekend.”

“What’s he like now that you’ve spent more time chatting with him?” I asked.

“Well, he told me some about his family and the extracurricular stuff he did in high school, chess club and the yearbook, and he asked me about myself, and he didn’t seem too freaked out when I told him about going to the school for the blind and getting my sight and learning to read and all.”

“Cool. What did you say about going on another date?”

“I said probably, let’s talk about it after class Tuesday. I wanted to think about today and decide whether I want to see more of him.”

“I figure he didn’t do or say anything creepy, or you’d have already decided,” Jada inferred. “And he didn’t exactly sweep you off your feet, either?”

“Yeah, it was nice, but not romantic. I guess he just wanted to get to know me better before asking me out for real and it wasn’t a real date?”

“It sounds like a real date to me,” I said. “At least the part after you quit studying and started chatting and playing chess. Did you eat or drink while you were doing that?”

“Yeah, we got sodas.”

“Well, then.”

 

* * *

 

So the weeks passed until Halloween. Steph went on another date with Greg the following Friday, off-campus at a sit-down restaurant, and then another a couple of weeks later. She got Jada to venn her into something a little more exotic each time, though with more mobility than the octopus-taur she’d been when he first asked her out, and told us that Greg had venned into variant human bodies with extra or unusually structured arms or legs, unnatural skin colors, and so on. Jada and I cuddled a lot and spent a lot of time on the phone with Britt and Lauren, planning our Halloween costumes. We couldn’t do much preparation on our end, since I couldn’t go in a Venn machine, but during the weekly informal Venn club meetings, Jada tried out some early versions of her Halloween venn.

Back when I’d still been pretending to be inanimate, Jada had once invited Steph to watch something with her. Steph had demurred, saying she had tried watching some movies not long after she’d venned into a sighted body, but found them too confusing with the moving camera angles and frequent scene changes. Not long after my second plushie split, I asked her if she’d ever seen any old movies, like the ones from the 1930s and 40s my parents had raised me on. “They don’t mess around with camera angles or jump cuts as much as modern movies,” I said. “They might be less confusing.”

“I haven’t seen a lot of movies from that era either,” Jada said. “You want to suggest some stuff? Hopefully not super racist?”

So I’d made a list of some of my favorite old movies, and we poked around online to figure out where to find them and find more recommendations, including some silent movies, many of which were public domain and on the Internet Archive. We torrented some of the ones we couldn’t find on the Internet Archive or Jada’s streaming services, and gradually got Steph used to cinematic conventions in a more gradual way than by throwing her in at the deep end with a recent action movie like her parents had apparently done. After a while, Steph started watching some anime with us, too.

And we studied. Steph spent more time studying than Jada, but Jada was no slouch. I wasn’t auditing classes from inside Jada’s bag like I’d done during my months with Carmen, but I listened to the lectures that Steph had recorded on her phone, and I read both girls’ textbooks and the supplemental reading and Jada’s handwritten lecture notes. I read a lot faster than either of them, whether because I’d always spent more time reading as I grew up or because of my semi-animate form, I don’t know.

Now that I could use my claws to type, I would sometimes use Jada or Steph’s laptop when they weren’t using them, reading ebooks or Wikipedia articles or looking up books in the university library catalog that I could ask Jada or Steph to check out for me. I was following up on the topics Jada and Steph’s freshman classes were covering, trying to make sure I was as prepared as possible for my own freshman year, as well as reading other nonfiction in areas I thought I might major in — biology, ecology, paleontology, anthropology, history.

 

---

---

 

The Translator in Spite of Themself, which was only available from Smashwords and itch.io for a while, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format as well. It's a first contact portal fantasy from the point of view of a sapient portal, with gender-bendy elements.

My new short story, "Carpet-Bound," is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed stories by trans authors for $8.

Mr. Ramsey was still female, but Mrs. Ramsey had switched back to female already, though her new girl body had blue skin like the guy body she’d worn for a couple of weeks and the body Mr. Ramsey was still wearing.

 

---

---

 

Meanwhile, back in Brocksboro, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey had switched sexes again, and their new bodies had skin and hair in matching shades of blue. I wasn’t sure how many times they’d switched by then; some were on their anniversary trips, or during shopping trips when neither I nor their kids were around, but after they’d told their kids about it, they’d switched several times, usually for just sixteen hours or a day. This one was a little longer than most, lasting a couple of weeks for Mrs. Ramsey and almost a month for Mr. Ramsey, and it was the first time they’d switched for more than a day since I started living with them openly. When I came home from work to find them still switched, I asked them what pronouns they wanted me to use.

“You can use whatever pronoun fits my current form,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “So ‘he’ for the next few days.”

“I guess that sort of makes sense,” Mr. Ramsey said. “At least, let’s try it that way, and if I get uncomfortable with it, I’ll let you know.”

They and Sophia (but not Bianca) were planning to spend a day visiting Caleb at UNC Greensboro and Meredith at UNC Chapel Hill, the second to last weekend in October, and they invited me to come with them if I could get the day off work. I reminded them of the Halloween trip I had planned with Britt, Lisette and Poppy and said I wasn’t sure I could get two Saturdays off so close together, but I’d try. As it turned out, I couldn’t get that day off, but it was easy enough to work around.

My month-long Venn from the weekend Jada had come home was going to expire at about eleven on the Monday before that visit, and since it wouldn’t be convenient for me to take that day off work, when I had several other days I wanted off later in the month, I asked Jada to put Lydia in the Venn machine the evening before.

“You’d better pop Desiree in the machine about then, too,” she said. “Otherwise I’ll be in class when her venn expires.”

So Sunday evening at six, we arranged to both be at our local Venn machines. Jada got to the head of her line before I did, and she called me and put it on speakerphone.

“Setting up the machine now... door’s open... okay, any last words, Lydia?”

“I regret that I have but a zillion —”

“Smart-aleck,” I said, and felt a rush of memories. Nothing super momentous like when I’d merged after one of me applied for jobs and did chores while the other started dating Jada and shared my first kiss, but a whole month of hanging out with people who, in my other life, I hadn’t seen in a month or had never met. After a few moments, I said, “Okay, thanks, Jada. I’ll miss you. I wish I could send you Lydia sooner, but it doesn’t make sense to mail her to you when I’ll be coming to see you in person in less than two weeks, less than a week after I need her to be in Chapel Hill.”

“Yeah, that sucks. Have Lydia say hi to Meredith for me.”

I got to the head of the line then, and snuggled Desiree one more time before warning Jada and popping her in the machine. Then Jada and I chatted on the phone for a few minutes as we walked back to her dorm and the Ramseys’ house.

A few days later, after work, Sophia and I went to the library, where she split me into Lauren and Lydia again, with our usual dragon-girl and plushie-dragon forms. I venned her into a form with two heads, one of them much smaller than a normal head and consisting only of a mouth to eat with; she would breathe and talk with the nose and mouth on her main head. Because the eating-head was so small, her torso didn’t have to be significantly wider than a normal girl’s torso to accommodate it, like other two-headed forms I’d seen or worn. She also asked for a pair of tentacles below her arms. It was a tricky form to get right, and we had to go through the line several times to refine it until she was satisfied.

The next morning, Lydia rode along with Sophia and her parents to visit Caleb and Meredith while I went to work.

 

* * *

 

Mr. Ramsey was still female, but Mrs. Ramsey had switched back to female already, though her new girl body had blue skin like the guy body she’d worn for a couple of weeks and the body Mr. Ramsey was still wearing. I sat on Sophia’s shoulder while Mr. Ramsey drove to Greensboro, so I could see out the windows. Sophia stroked my back with a tentacle while doing something on her phone with her hands.

We pulled up in front of Caleb’s house in Greensboro and everyone got out, Sophia cradling me in her tentacles while she rang the doorbell. One of Caleb’s housemates answered the door, a tall, lean white guy with messy brown hair; he wasn’t visibly venned, although we found out later, talking to Caleb, that he was actually older than my parents and had gone back to school after being rejuvenated, having dropped out the first time around. He was living with twenty-year-old undergrads because he’d recently gone through a costly divorce and was looking for housing when Caleb and his friends started looking around for a fourth housemate.

“Hey, we’re Caleb’s family. Is he awake yet?” Sophia had texted him when we were getting close, but he hadn’t replied.

“Yeah, I’ll check if he’s out of the shower yet,” the guy said. “Come on in and sit down.”

We went in and sat down, Sophia’s parents on the sofa and Sophia and I on one of the chairs. Two little boys in pajamas with abstract spiraling patterns suggesting they were venned were sitting about six feet from the TV and playing a first-person shooter of some sort; they said a distracted hi without putting down the controllers or taking their eyes off the TV. The tall guy went looking for Caleb, and Caleb came into the living room a couple of minutes later, looking fresh and clean, unlike the rest of the house.

“Hey, everybody. Y’all about ready to go? And, uh, which one of you’s Mom and which is Dad?” He paused. “And I guess I’d better not assume that you’re Sophia and the plushie in your lap is Lauren, either.”

“I’m your dad,” Mr. Ramsey said, “and you guessed right about Sophia and Lauren. Do you want to introduce us to your housemates or show us around before we go to breakfast?”

“The two brats trying to murder each other over there are Jerry and Mike — they’re usually taller — and the guy who answered the door is Rich. He’ll be gone to work by the time we get back.”

We went back out to the van, and drove to IHOP where everyone but me ate a respectable amount of pancakes. Sophia was disgruntled to find that, because her esophagus had no connection to her diaphragm, she couldn’t suck her tea through a straw and had to lift the cup to her eating-mouth, which was a little tricky at first as she had no eyes on that mini-head and wasn’t entirely used to the new body yet to make sense of what her proprioception was telling her about where her eating-mouth was. But after spilling a bit of tea and getting a syrupy bit of pancake on her top, she managed to get the hang of it. After cleaning the syrup off, she typed furious notes on her phone about ways to improve the form.

We talked about what Caleb was doing lately in and out of school, and he asked after Sophia and me and his parents.

“Are you spending a lot of time as a plushie lately?” he asked me.

“About half. Usually one of me is staying in Jada’s dorm room as a plushie while the other one is living with your parents as a dragon-girl, and working and all, but I don’t want to split up for more than a month at a time, so my self that was staying with Jada timed out and merged with me a few days ago, and then I decided to split for today because I had to work but I wanted to come see you and Meredith.”

“Well, it’s good to see you, even if I’m only seeing half of you. Sophia, what are you doing for your science fair project this year?”

When we got back to the house, all of Caleb’s housemates were gone; Rich had gone to work, and apparently (according to a text he’d sent Caleb) he’d given Jerry and Mike a ride to the Venn machine on his way to work. Caleb showed us around the place. There was a treehouse and play fort in the backyard, as it had apparently belonged to a family with young children at some point before the new owner turned it into a student rental. “That’s what gave Jerry and Mike the idea to try venning into little kids,” he said. “I’m gonna join 'em sometime when my schedule lets me.”

“You totally should,” I said. “My girlfriends and I have venned into little girls and used the playground at the Catesville Mall a couple of times. They have a block of time set aside for teens and grownups venned into kids, the last hour and a half before the mall closes. It was a blast.”

“I’ve been meaning to go do that sometime ever since I venned you and Meredith into little girls,” Sophia said. “I talked to Julianna about doing it, but she thought it was weird.”

“Maybe we can do it as a family sometime,” Mrs. Ramsey said. “Maybe when Caleb and Meredith are home for Thanksgiving or Christmas?”

“Not Thanksgiving, no thanks,” Caleb said. “You’re not getting me near a mall anywhere around Thanksgiving weekend. But maybe after Christmas.”

“Let’s plan on it,” Mr. Ramsey said.

After the tour, we sat around the living room chatting until Caleb had to leave for work. Then we left to visit Meredith.

 

* * *

 

It took another hour to get to UNC Chapel Hill. Sophia texted Meredith when we were getting close; she met us in the visitor parking lot near her dorm, and got in the van.

“Hey, everybody,” she said. “...Uh, which one of you’s Dad and which is Mom?”

They laughed. “Caleb had the same question,” Sophia explained.

“Well?”

Mr. Ramsey seemed like she was about to say something when Mrs. Ramsey put a hand on her shoulder. “See if you can guess,” she said. “If you can figure it out by the end of lunch, let’s see... we’ll take a load of laundry home and bring it back by the end of the day tomorrow.”

“You’re on!” Meredith said, her eyes lighting up.

“Do you want to guess which of us is Lauren and which is Sophia?” I asked.

“Hmm. You wouldn’t ask that unless it was a trick question. That’s totally the kind of body Sophia likes, and — oh, I see. Neither of you’s Lauren, the plushie is Desiree, right? And Lauren’s hiding somewhere...” She twisted her head around to look in the back of the van.

Sophia and I giggled. “Guess again,” she said.

“Hmm... I’m not gonna guess again until the end of lunch. What do I get if I guess right?”

“You’ll get your birthday presents a day early,” Sophia said.

“We’ll probably come see you the weekend before your birthday,” Mr. Ramsey said, “since the weekend after is so close to Thanksgiving.” (Her birthday was going to fall on Wednesday.)

“So how are you going to get me my birthday presents early?” Meredith asked me and Sophia, “if you’re only going to see me for a few hours the weekend before my birthday?”

“We’ll mail them so they arrive at your mailbox the day before your birthday,” Sophia promptly replied. I giggled.

“...Three days after my birthday party,” Meredith said slowly. “No thanks.”

We went to a nearby Greek restaurant that Meredith recommended. I’d talked with her on the phone several times, mostly in the first two or three weeks of the semester, but as freshmen weren’t allowed to have cars on campus, she hadn’t come home since the semester started. We had a lot to catch up on.

“Hunter came to see me last weekend, and we went to see a movie at the Silverspot,” she said. “And Caleb came to see me a few weeks ago, and took me out to eat, but otherwise I haven’t been more than fifteen minutes’ walk from campus since August. There’s a lot to do here; I’ve been to the meetings of like five different clubs, off and on, but I figure I’ll narrow it down to about two by midterms.”

“Are you involved in the Venn club?” Sophia wanted to know.

“Kind of. I don’t meet up with them every time, about every two or three weeks. They meet at the Venn machine near the planetarium every Saturday when it’s not raining...” She told us about what she’d venned into the last time she went (an okapi-taur), some of the people she’d met there, and what they’d venned into. She told us about the other clubs she’d gone to meetings of, and people she’d met there. She told us about her roommate, other girls on her floor, and people she’d met through her classes... just thinking about all those people she’d apparently made friends with in barely two months was indirectly triggering my anxiety, and I asked her if she wouldn’t mind me snuggling in her lap while she ate.

“Sure,” she said. “You won’t mind if I drip some tzatziki on you, will you... Lauren?”

I gasped. “You guessed it!”

She giggled. “You weren’t trying very hard to hide it, honestly.”

I shrugged my wings. “I guess so. Anyway, these venned plushie bodies are pretty impervious to stains, so drip as much food on me as you want.”

After Meredith had filled us in on everything that had happened to her lately — or at least everything she was willing to talk about in front of her parents — she asked how things had been going with us. I told her about merging memories with Lydia for the second time a few days earlier, Sophia talked about her science fair project, and we mentioned that Mr. Paget was opening a second restaurant. “He’ll be focusing most of his attention there for a while, so we’ll have a new manager at the original location,” I said.

“He’s the same guy I’ve been dealing with on the evening shift,” Sophia said. “A pretty decent guy, if not quite as friendly and approachable as Mr. Paget. I think it’ll be fine.”

 

---

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I started serializing my novelette "A Girl, a House and a Secret" on Scribblehub a few weeks ago, and I keep procrastinating on posting it to BigCloset. I'm not 100% sure I want to. BigCloset's interface is just so clunky compared to a modern site like Scribblehub, and it's getting to be a hassle selecting the categories, keywords, rating, character age, etc. for every chapter of a long story when I should be able to select them once for the story and make posting individual chapters really simple. So don't expect it on BigCloset any time soon, but maybe at some point. I've got three other stories scheduled to appear on Scribblehub in the coming months, which will appear in their entirety there at one chapter a week even if something happens to me, and once I finish the final drafts of my works in progress (four stories finished in first or second draft at the moment), I'll schedule them as well.

The Translator in Spite of Themself, which was only available from Smashwords and itch.io for a while, is now available from Amazon in Kindle format as well. It's a first contact portal fantasy from the point of view of a sapient portal, with gender-bendy elements.

My new trans mermaid short story, "Carpet-Bound," is available from itch.io in epub and pdf formats. But you can get more stories for your money by buying it as part of the Secret Trans Writing Lair Mermay Bundle, with eight mermaid and summer-themed stories by trans authors for $8. (It is scheduled to appear in my short story collection False Positives and Other Stories on Scribblehub in May 2024.)

“There are days I feel more robotic and days I feel more human. People tip more when my body is shaped like a female human, but they also expect me to act in a feminine way. Some days I can do that and some days I cannot.”

 

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Mr. Paget (who’d been spending more time male in recent weeks) had been trying for months to acquire another restaurant space near a Venn machine, and not long before this he had finalized the lease of a shopfront in Reidsville right around the corner from the Venn machine — the one that the city council had gone to a lot of effort to make attractive, putting up an awning, lockers, benches and so on. In the last few weeks he’d sometimes been absent, delegating things to the assistant manager for the morning shifts, supervising the renovation and hiring people for the new location.

The original location was now mostly being run by Mr. Buckholtz, previously the weekday evening shift manager, who I’d dealt with relatively little since I’d usually been working mornings and early afternoons since I graduated. He favored modified human forms with extra arms, legs, or facial features, and varicolored hair and skin, but he could sometimes be seen in furry, scaly, or cyborg bodies, and he was female or androgynous less than a quarter of the time, from what I heard. And the Saturday when Lydia went off to Greensboro and Chapel Hill with the Ramseys, Mr. Buckholtz was officially put in charge of Metamorphoses I while Mr. Paget presided over Metamorphoses II’s grand opening.

Things went pretty much as normal during the breakfast rush. During the lull between breakfast and lunch, though, Mr. Buckholtz called all the public-facing staff into his office one by one. I asked Jill what it was about after she came out.

“He wanted me to use other forms besides the mouse-girl more often,” she said. “He said if we can promise people they’ll always see something new when they come, they’ll come more often.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I said, continuing to fold silverware bundles into napkins.

A few minutes later, he called me in. He had four eyes spaced evenly around a bald head today, and white skin with a slight purple tinge.

“Lauren Wallace, right?” he asked, glancing back and forth between me and something on his computer screen.

“Yes, sir.”

“Coming up on six months working for us... you’ll be getting another raise in November.” (I’d gotten a small raise after three months.) “It says here you’re willing to venn into pretty much anything except a male body; is that right?”

“Well, I don’t like pure inanimate forms either — I mean, a living doll that can walk and talk is fine, but not a dress or a necklace. But inanimates woudn’t be any use for work, so I didn’t put them in the exclusions.”

“Of course, of course... What venn forms have you used for work? I’m trying to get to know everyone, especially people who’ve mostly worked mornings.”

I listed as many work forms as I could remember, including the chibi dragon, the cyborg dragon, the wolf-and-sheep-headed creature, and the long-necked two-headed dragon. Today I was just my usual purple-scaled dragon-girl self.

“And about how often do you change forms?”

“Well, it depends on whether I’m scheduled on a Monday or Friday, and whether I feel up to doing the two-headed act on a given day. It takes a level of concentration and energy I don’t always have. But I figure I change it up at least twice a week, sometimes as much as five times.”

“Good, good... Have you given any thought to your Halloween form?” I was scheduled for a morning shift on Halloween, the Monday after we returned from Greenville.

“I was thinking about another dragon form, a bit larger than usual, maybe seven feet tall, and kind of modeled on Maleficent’s dragon form from Sleeping Beauty. Big body, long neck and small head, relatively small arms... I’ll need to modify it a bit to make the arms strong enough to carry trays.”

“Good. Most kids will be in school during your shift, but some smaller kids might come in with their parents and we don’t want anything too scary until the evening shift. I’d like you to consider varying your forms more — not necessarily changing form more often, twice a week is okay for now, but using a wider range of forms, not just on special theme days.”

We talked about some other possible forms and he dismissed me. We got busy with the lunch rush before he had quite finished talking with everyone. Todd (who’d been a clunky-looking but surprisingly graceful Forbidden Planet-style robot for the last week) confided in his mechanical voice that Mr. Buckholtz had suggested he use sexy fembot bodies more often, as well as furry and scaly cyborgs.

“Does that bother you?” I asked.

“There are days I feel more robotic and days I feel more human. People tip more when my body is shaped like a female human, but they also expect me to act in a feminine way. Some days I can do that and some days I cannot.”

“If it bothers you, talk to Mr. Buckholtz about it. Or I could try to talk to him for you?”

“He did not require me to venn into a fembot on any particular schedule. I think I can accommodate him.”

 

* * *

 

At the end of lunch, Mrs. Ramsey asked Meredith if she was ready to guess which of her parents was which.

“I really wasn’t sure at first. But I noticed a couple of times that you,” tilting her head toward Mrs. Ramsey, “would put your hand on hers when she was about to say something, and she’d stop and think before speaking. And you,” looking at Mr. Ramsey, “you do that thing where you rub one thumb along the skin between your other thumb and your index finger.” Mr. Ramsey facepalmed. “So you’re Dad, and you’re Mom.”

“I guess we’ve got some laundry to do,” Mrs. Ramsey said.

We returned to Meredith’s dorm and went up to her room, where she introduced us to her roommate, Gianna. She had two pairs of eyes, one above the other, but the upper pair was closed the whole time we were in the room. We didn’t stay there long; Sophia and I chatted with Gianna for a couple of minutes while Meredith gleefully dumped a ton of laundry in her parents’ arms. After they put the laundry in the back of the van, we took a long walk around campus (or rather they walked, and Sophia and Meredith took turns letting me ride on their shoulders); we saw the bell tower, several libraries, a bunch of dorms and classroom buildings, the arboretum, the planetarium (it didn’t suit to go inside just then), and the Venn machine. As we passed by, the doors opened and two identical green kittens came out, to be immediately scooped up and cuddled by a short, stocky Hispanic girl with matching green hair.

After over an hour of walking, we returned to where we’d parked the van and said goodbye to Meredith. I hopped off Meredith’s shoulder into her arms, and we hugged before she hugged Sophia and handed me back to her. Then we were on the way home.

We hadn’t been home long when my other self came home from work. Once she’d rested a little while from being on her feet for hours, Sophia gave us a ride to the library and we merged. I could have gone into the machine by myself while Lauren stayed at home and rested, and Sophia and I suggested that, but Lauren said, “I’d like to go ahead and venn into tomorrow’s work form, and take time tweaking it tonight rather than rushing it tomorrow morning. You’ll understand when we get each other’s memories, but I think I ought to change forms more often.”

So we went in one booth, Lydia in Lauren’s arms, and merged. Sophia went into the other booth and said, “Okay, what do you want for tomorrow?”

“A robot dragon,” I said, gathering my thoughts and memories. “Kind of like Mecha Godzilla, but with wings, and with arms better suited for carrying trays.” (Bianca and I had started watching the Godzilla movies recently.)

We had to iterate that design a couple of times to get to where I had a good voice that didn’t sound too grating. A robotic-sounding voice was fine, but it had to be clear so the customers could understand me.

 

* * *

 

I changed forms about every other day after that, not wanting to disappoint Mr. Buckholtz just a few weeks before I was due to get a raise. He didn’t speak to me again about varying my forms, though he did speak to a couple of other people about wearing the same body too many days in a row, or going back to the same venns from their history too soon rather than doing something new. As Halloween approached, we started wearing monstrous forms more often, though they weren’t really mandatory except on the three days leading up to Halloween — two of which I’d be taking off to go to Greenville and see Jada. On the Friday before Britt, Lisette, Poppy and I would leave, I tried out a silly vampire form, with anime eyes, ridiculously large fangs, a red cloak and a fake Hungarian accent.

Then Britt picked me up after work. Between her and Lisette, she had the more reliable car, so we were going to Greenville in it. Lisette and Poppy were snuggling in the back seat. I got in the front passenger seat and we went to the Ramseys’ house to pick up my suitcase, and to say goodbye to Bianca and her parents (Sophia was still at work), and then we were on the road.

We listened to music on the way, taking turns connecting our phones to the stereo so we had a wide variety of music — Bulletproof Sombrero, Nightwish, the Ditty Bops, the Doors, They Might Be Giants, Caravan Palace, Fats Waller, Tuatara, and I don’t know who else. We stopped to eat supper in Greensboro, so it was around eleven when we finally got to Greenville and parked in the visitor lot, where Jada and Steph met us, as we’d texted Jada when we were getting close.

“Come on,” Jada said. “The Venn machine’s this way.”

We all gave Steph our phones, and the keys to Britt’s car (our luggage would stay locked in the trunk until the next day). Then we venned each other into tiny forms, about three inches high, wearing soft, snuggly flannel pajamas. Steph carefully put us all in a box lined with towels and carried us back to their dorm room, then set the box on Jada’s bed and tilted it carefully over so we could climb out.

Steph looked at us wistfully. “Y’all look really comfy there,” she said. “Maybe sometime you can venn me and Greg into little bitty bodies like that, Jada?”

“Sure,” Jada said, yawning. “If you can talk Greg into it, I’ll help with the logistics.

Earlier, Jada had laid a couple of her T-shirts on the bed for us to use as blankets — they would be easier for our tiny hands to pull on and off than the big sheets and blankets Jada’s bed was made with, which she’d pulled down to give a couple of feet of clear space at the head. Steph got out a bag of cotton balls that Jada had bought and tore some of them into smaller pieces for us to use as pillows. Then she got into her own bed while Jada, Britt and I snuggled together under the hem of one T-shirt and Poppy and Lisette snuggled a few inches away under another one. We chatted quietly for a while, but it wasn’t long before we fell asleep.

 

* * *

 

I woke up and yawned. There was dawn light coming through the curtained window, and Jada was propped on one arm, looking at me and smiling. She put a finger to her lips, and I didn’t say “Good morning” as I’d been about to, but looked around.

Britt was still asleep, one of her left arms sprawled across my stomach. A few inches further away (double the width of a king-size bed from my shrunken perspective), Poppy and Lisette were spooning, snoring softly with Lisette’s arms wrapped around Poppy.

I reached out and stroked Jada’s hair, and said very quietly, “Good morning, sweetie.”

She snuggled closer and we kissed. One thing would have led to another if we hadn’t been concerned about waking up Britt. She’d worked yesterday like me and Lisette and Poppy, but her job was perhaps more physically demanding than ours, and then she’d also driven for three hours. (Lisette and I had offered to help drive, but she’d declined).

“Let’s go somewhere more private,” Jada whispered. She wriggled out from under the T-shirt whose hem was covering us, trying not to disturb it too much, and I followed. I gently lifted Britt’s arm off me, then set it down softly after I wriggled out from under it and the T-shirt, and stood up, a little wobbly as the soft mattress didn’t give my feet solid support. Jada stood up too, and we walked around toward the pulled-back sheet and blanket eighteen inches away.

“What are you planning?” I whispered back as we approached the crumpled sheet and blanket.

For an answer, she bent down and heaved up the sheet. We were strong out of proportion to our size, but it still took her an effort, and I joined in to lift up the edge of the sheet and the blanket over it, revealing a deep cavern. She ducked inside and I followed; the sheet and blanket fell down behind us, and on top of us, knocking us down but not hurting. It was pretty dark, though not pitch black, and I hoped our giggles were muffled by the blanket and wouldn’t wake up Britt, Lisette, Poppy or Steph as we crawled deeper under the blanket until we got a point where the crumpling created a roomier cavern.

“What if they wake up and start looking for us?” I asked as she pulled off my pajama shirt.

“Wouldn’t that be exciting if Steph pulled off the sheets and found us like this?” she teased.

“No! That would be super embarrassing!” I instinctively covered my breasts as though Steph could see them.

“But it turns you on.” She pulled my hands away and felt the evidence.

“Kind of... I think it would be mean to Steph, though.”

“She wouldn’t really dig under the blankets for us, though,” Jada said. “She’ll figure out that if we’re not where she left us, we went somewhere nearby to find privacy. Lisette and Poppy, though... they might get the same idea, and just happen to stumble on the same cave...”

I squeaked and Jada laughed. “This might not be the best time, in other words,” I managed to say in between gasps as Jada worked her fingers into the waistband of my pajama pants.

“We won’t have a lot of other chances this weekend,” she said. “Pleeeaaaase?”

“Oh, all right,” I said, and started tugging her shirt off.

 

---

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My other free stories can be found at:

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Scribblehub is the best place to follow me these days; most things get posted there first and when I finish a story, I schedule all its chapters to appear on Scribblehub in their turn, so if something happens to me, updates on BC and TGS will stop but Scribblehub will still continue posting chapters until they're done.

I also have several ebooks for sale, most of whose contents aren't available elsewhere for free. Smashwords pays its authors higher royalties than Amazon. itch.io's pay structure is hard to compare with the other two, but seems roughly in the same ballpark.

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Jada was a little demon, only about eighteen inches tall, with short horns, bat-like wings similar to mine, short reddish-brown fur, and cute little hooves. I picked her up and gave her a piggyback ride with her legs around my left neck.

 

Britt was an angel of the same height, with feathery wings and mostly-human legs with bird-like feet, wearing a white robe. I picked her up, too, and she straddled my right neck.

 

---

---

 

Some little while later, we got dressed again and crawled through the narrow spaces out from under the blanket and into the now-brighter light.

“Looks like y’all had fun,” Poppy said. She and Lisette were leaning back against their T-shirt, which they’d crumpled up a bit until it was high enough to lean against. Britt seemed to still be sound asleep; she’d rolled over on her other side and was drooling adorably.

“Soooo much fun,” Jada replied instantly with a satisfied smile, while I tried to not show my embarrassment too much. I punched her lightly in the arm.

There was an enormous rumbling sound some distance away, and Jada said, “I think Steph’s awake. What about if I boost you up onto the pillow so you can see farther?”

So we went over to the pillow and I stepped into Jada’s cupped hands. She heaved and I jumped — remember, we were a lot stronger than normal humans relative to our size — and I went flying. For a moment I was afraid I’d go past the pillow and the head of the bed, hit the wall, and fall down behind the bed, but I came back down on the pillow, and after picking myself up (feeling even more wobbly standing on the pillow than on the sheeted mattress), I turned around and looked across the room.

Steph was just now sitting up, giving out another rumbling yawn as she did so.

“Oh, hey, you’re up,” she said. “Is everybody else up?”

“Everybody except Britt,” I said.

“Yo,” Britt said. From where I was standing, toward the back of Jada’s pillow, I couldn’t see the others.

“Okay, everybody,” I amended.

“Cool. Um, I’m gonna run down the hall to the restroom, okay, and then I’ll come back and fix breakfast and take you guys to the Venn machine.”

It was then that I realized I needed to pee too. I’ll gloss over the next bit because it’s kind of TMI, but Britt, Poppy and I needed Steph to help us in the restroom. I’ll just say that dangling over a sink the size of a swimming pool with no drain stopper and a drain wider than your waist while you plunge your hands into a stream of water wider than your head to wash them is kind of terrifying.

When we returned to the room, we found Jada and Lisette playing on the pillow like a bouncy castle.

“That looks like fun,” I said, and joined in. Britt and Poppy did the same a few moments later while Steph started getting breakfast ready.

She opened up the refrigerator and got out one cup of yogurt for herself, and another one for the rest of us. The five of us couldn’t eat a whole cup between us, and we couldn’t even reach the rim of it until she set one of Jada’s books next to the carton on either side, so we could stand next to it and reach in to scoop our handfuls of yogurt. Of course, the resulting mess necessitated another trip to the bathroom for all five of us, and another terrifying dangle over the sink to wash our hands and faces.

During breakfast, we talked about what to do in the next ten hours or so until the party started. Steph would want to start getting ready for her date with Greg about the same time we venned into our Halloween costume forms. Jada offered to take us on a tour of the campus, which would kill an hour or two, and suggested that after that, we watch one of the classic horror movies that were playing this weekend at the campus cinema.

So after we finished washing up, Steph packed us in the box lined with towels, carried us to the Venn machine, and set it up, then took us out of the box and set us on the sidewalk in front of the Venn machine one by one. Jada and I went in first, and changed each other into nagas. Then Jada venned Britt into a naga as well (still with four arms), and Poppy and Lisette venned each other into kangaroo-girls.

“I guess I’ll go back to the dorm,” Steph said once we were all full-size again. “I’ll see y’all later in the day.”

“Have fun,” Jada said.

So we followed Jada around, getting the hang of slithering. I’d never venned into a naga before, somehow, and Jada and Britt hadn’t done so in a long time. Poppy and Lisette hadn’t been kangaroo-morphs before, either, but they hopped along gamely enough. By the time we’d seen most of the central part of campus, and some more interesting outlying parts, we pretty much had our new locomotion down pat. It being the weekend before Halloween, there were a lot more people visibly venned than usual, Jada told us. “On a regular weekend you see maybe one person in fifty venned into something cool like this, but today it looks to me like it’s at least one in ten.”

“Yeah, about that,” I said as we passed a jackal-headed couple.

We ended our tour at the cinema about fifteen minutes before Tales from the Crypt was to start. At first, getting ourselves into theater seats was not easy, but we managed to coil our tails on them after a few tries, and settled in to watch (and grab each other in panic when the movie got scary, which it quickly did).

Afterward, we slithered to a nearby off-campus restaurant for lunch, and talked about the movie. Jada asked Poppy and Lisette about their motorcycling adventures, and we talked about the stuff Jada had been getting involved in on campus.

After that, we returned to the Venn machine to change into our costume forms for the party. We’d prepared them ahead of time, so they were in our recent history, and it didn’t take us long to change.

I was a two-headed dragon, but bigger than usual, tall enough that I had to duck slightly to fit into the Venn machine booth. I had black scales on my left and white scales on my right, and a long tail with a wicked-looking thagomizer. (The spines on the thagomizer looked sharp, but were actually rubbery and would bend back if they bumped into someone or something.)

Jada was a little demon, only about eighteen inches tall, with short horns, bat-like wings similar to mine, short reddish-brown fur, and cute little hooves. I picked her up and gave her a piggyback ride with her legs around my left neck.

Britt was an angel of the same height, with feathery wings and mostly-human legs with bird-like feet, wearing a white robe. I picked her up, too, and she straddled my right neck.

Lisette was a vampire biker; her venned form had more exaggerated fangs and longer fingernails than in her everyday body. Poppy was a motorcyborg, a sort of centaur with a small motorcycle for her lower half and a seat behind her torso for Lisette to ride on.

We went back to Britt’s car to get the rest of our luggage, the toiletries and costume accessories that we’d left in the car so Steph wouldn’t have to carry so much stuff to the dorm. When we got to the dorm, we didn’t try to get Poppy up the stairs to Jada’s floor, even though I might have been strong enough to lift her; she and Lisette used the ground-floor bathroom to change clothes while Britt, Jada and I went back to Jada’s dorm room, where we unpacked the costume accessories — a little toy pitchfork for Jada and a toddler-size halo for Britt — and put away the rest of the luggage. A few minutes later, we rejoined Poppy and Lisette downstairs. Lisette had changed into her biker leathers and applied some temporary tattoos. The Venn machine couldn’t produce a traditional biker’s outfit with all the patches and insignia, or tattoos that weren’t just abstract patterns. Poppy had changed from the abstract pattern T-shirt the machine had given her into a “Look Twice, Save a Life” T-shirt.

Once Jada gave me directions and we headed out, she started telling us more about the people from the queer group we might meet at the party. She’d told us about some of her new friends earlier, in phone conversations with me and Britt, or chatting with Lydia in her room, but now she gave us a thorough run-down of everyone she knew in the queer group, however casually they were acquainted. That took us halfway across campus to the student center, where the party was being held. When we entered the building (I had to duck my heads to get through the door, but the ceilings were high enough for me after that), we heard music coming from the party and followed it down the hall to where a few people were standing around chatting outside an open door. A couple of them waved to us.

“Happy Halloween!” said a girl venned as a spider-taur, with spidery fangs and eyes, wearing a corset on her human-ish torso. “You don’t have to introduce yourselves, we’ll be having a contest to see who can guess the most people’s identities accurately. But we’d like to know if you’re a member or a guest.”

“I’m a member,” Jada said, and showed her invitation. “These are my guests, friends who’re visiting me this weekend: my girlfriend,” (she patted my left head), “my other girlfriend, and our other friends.”

“Awesome! Okay, hang on a minute.” She gave us nametags that didn’t have names, just “Guest” or “Member” and a number. “If you think you’ve figured out who anybody is, write down their names and the numbers on their nametags, along with your name, and put it in the big jar on the table near the DJ. You can find paper and pens there.”

We continued into the room and saw about five couples dancing, three or four people sitting in the chairs along one wall, and a couple more browsing at the snack tables. We headed over to the snacks and picked up a few things to eat and drink; I took requests from Britt and Jada and handed them their snack plates and drinks. Then we started dancing.

Not many other people were venned as drastically as me or Poppy or the spider-taur who was greeting people, but most of them were venned in some way, or wearing really elaborate costumes. There was only one person that Jada recognized without difficulty, though by the time the party was half over, she had tentatively identified three other people by their speech patterns or mannerisms. After we’d danced for a while, we chatted with a couple of girls who were cosplaying as Bastet and Hathor, with cat and cow heads on mostly human bodies wearing the Venn machine’s best approximation of ancient Egyptian clothing, and some guys who’d venned into inventive monsters: a centipede-taur with eyes all over his bald head, and his boyfriend, a wolf-like robot or living statue with a lot of sharp pointy bits.

“Yeah, I’m doing a lot better lately,” Bastet said. “I’ve got a lot more worshipers and they’re not just giving room and board to my avatars, but sending pictures of their inscrutable deeds all over the world, and even becoming my avatars in their own persons.”

“All that worship must be tasty,” Hathor said wistfully. She was gaunt and pallid compared to Bastet’s healthy glossy fur and rounded curves. “People are treating my sacred animals like crap on an industrial scale. There’s some who do better, but not enough.”

Lisette pitched in with some disparaging comments about industrialized agriculture. I turned my left head to my right and said, “If I were to devour those inhumane farmers, would you object?”

“Yes!” my right head said. “Good people, bad people, they’re still people. No matter how tasty they are, we should only eat them if they ask nicely.”

My bad shoulder angel took the opportunity to goad me on. “Yes! These gods and monsters look very tasty, except for the robot wolf. Rend! Devour!”

My good shoulder angel gasped in horror and exclaimed, “No! It would be wrong! Besides, the gods are too ethereal to be filling anyway, and the vampire looks like she would rot in your stomachs.”

After we’d danced a while longer, when the party was about half over, the music changed to a low-volume instrumental track and the spider-taur said it was time for everyone to turn in their guesses about who was who. Jada and a few other people scrambled to write something down and put it in the jar. Then the music started up again louder and we danced while the spider-taur and Bastet tabulated the guesses, and then, after that song, they had everyone introduce themselves. Three of Jada’s four guesses were right, but a couple of other people had guessed five right, and one person guessed six.

After everyone’s identities were revealed, Jada introduced us to some of her friends. The spider-taur was Hope, a senior psychology major and one of the leaders of the group. Bastet and Hathor were Jaylyn and Karen; Karen was a freshman, and was in Jada’s World Civilizations class, while Jaylyn was a sophomore.

“So you’re Jada’s girlfriends?” Jaylyn said. “What kind of body do you wear when you’re not venned for a party like this?”

“I’m still a dragon,” I said, “only not so big and scary, about five-seven with purple scales, and I only have one head most days. I work at a restaurant that allows all kinds of venns.”

“Cool.”

“I’m mostly human, about five-ten with four arms,” Britt said. “I work for my dad’s car repair business. He usually has four arms too.”

“Awesome,” Karen said. “I need to get a job somewhere that lets you venn into whatever.”

“I got lucky,” I said. “My friend who’s worked there since they opened told me they were hiring again and recommended me.”

We talked about our jobs and the jobs we’d like to have for a little while, and then Jada introduced me to some more people, and despite my imposing draconic appearance — I was the tallest person at the party, and one of the most massive — my anxiety finally started getting the better of me. I excused myself “to go to the restroom,” and set Britt and Jada down on some of the chairs at the edge of the room, then went out in the hall and looked for a restroom with a handicapped stall big enough for me to hide and be alone for a few minutes to get a grip on myself.

I didn’t try to sit on the toilet; I wasn’t sure it could support my weight. I just leaned against the wall of the stall and took slow, deep breaths for a while, finally starting to feel more okay.

Then I heard Jada call out, “Hey, Lauren, you okay in there?”

“Hmm? Oh, yeah. Just needed to clear my head. Too many new people too fast.”

“Sorry about that. We can go back to the dorm early if you want. No big deal.”

I opened the stall door. Jada was riding on Poppy’s passenger seat — which shouldn’t have surprised me, because she was small enough that opening the restroom door would have been an issue for her little arm’s muscles.

“I don’t want to be the reason y’all bail early —”

“I wasn’t planning to stay all night anyway,” Jada said. “Come on, you don’t have to go back into the party room, just hang out in the hall with me while Poppy rounds everybody up.”

“Thanks.” I bent over and kissed her with my right head.

So I sat down in the hall outside the party with Jada in my lap, stroking her fuzzy fur between her horns and making her purr (which was a surprise to both of us; we hadn’t realized that this venn form had a cat-like purring mechanism). A few minutes later, Poppy returned with Britt and Lisette. Britt and Jada got on my shoulders again and Lisette got on Poppy, and we left to walk, or roll, across campus to the Venn machine to get ready for bed.

This time none of us were as small as before, since we didn’t have Steph to carry us. Jada was the size of a five-year-old, tall enough to reach doorknobs, though with four arms to make it obvious she was a venned adult. The rest of us were about eight to ten inches tall; small enough that the five of us could comfortably share Jada’s bed, but big enough that we wouldn’t have the same difficulties we’d had that morning. I’d venned Jada wearing a sort of baby-sling that she could carry several doll-sized people in, and she was strong enough to carry all four of us easily, although getting back to the dorm took a while on her short legs. By the time we got there, she was tired enough to go to bed right away. Britt and I snuggled up next to Jada at the head of the bed, and Lisette and Poppy took the foot, and most of them were asleep pretty soon. I was awake long enough to hear Steph come in, and sort of see her, though I couldn’t make out a lot of detail in the dark. I saw her look over at us and say, “Awwwww,” very softly before grabbing her pajamas and going down the hall to the bathroom to change. By the time she got back, I was asleep too.

 

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I have several pieces of short fiction available in epub and pdf formats on itch.io. Most of them are also part of ebook bundles where you can get a lot more trans stories for your money (look for the bit that says "Get this story and N more for $X -- View Bundle").

• "Carpet-Bound"
• "A Girl, a House and a Secret"
• “Smart House AI in Another World”
• "A Post-Scarcity Christmas"
• "Armored"

“So... Lauren, would you mind venning me into a plushie? And then you could change me back before you go home?”

 

“Sure,” I said, a little surprised but not entirely. “What kind of plushie? I’m not as good at venning people into living dolls as my friend Sophia, but I’ve gotten some practice at it lately.”

 

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The next morning I woke up to find Jada extricating herself from me and Britt so she could go to the restroom.

“I’ll come with you,” I said.

Jada took off the oversized T-shirt she’d slept in and put on her doll-sling blouse I’d venned her with, then put me in one of the slings and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I waited in the outer area while she used the toilet, and then she helped me with the toilet — I was big enough to sit on the edge of the seat, but I needed a little help from her not to fall in. By the time we got back to the room, Poppy and Steph were awake too.

“You guys are so adorable like that,” Steph gushed. “Is it okay if I give you a hug, Lydia?”

“It’s Lauren when there’s only one of me,” I said.

“Oh, right, sorry.”

“But yes, you can have a hug.”

Jada took me out of the sling and handed me to Steph, who hugged me very gently. After Jada had helped Britt, Lisette and Poppy in the restroom, we were about to go to the Venn machine and change into regular-size forms before going out for breakfast when Steph spoke up.

“Is it okay if I come with you?”

“Sure,” Jada said. “Do you want to help carry some of them?”

“Okay,” Steph said. She got her purse and put Lisette and Poppy in it, while Britt and I rode in Jada’s doll-sling.

“So how was your date with Greg last night?” Jada asked as we headed down the stairs.

“It was pretty nice,” Steph said. “We went to a club and he showed me how to dance.”

“We did a lot of dancing last night too,” Jada said. “And there was a contest to see who could identify the most people in their costume forms...”

We talked about what we’d done last night as Steph and Jada walked across campus. When we were getting close to the Venn machine, Steph changed the subject.

“So... Lauren, would you mind venning me into a plushie? And then you could change me back before you go home?”

“Sure,” I said, a little surprised but not entirely. “What kind of plushie? I’m not as good at venning people into living dolls as my friend Sophia, but I’ve gotten some practice at it lately.”

“Maybe a kitten? But whatever kind of critter you want to snuggle, I guess.”

“Okay. You can pick out the form from my history where I’m two dragon plushies, one a lot bigger than the other.”

So when we got to the machine, Lisette and Poppy venned each other into their everyday forms. Then, as nobody else was using the machine at that time of morning, Jada venned Britt into her everyday body, while Britt venned Jada into two plush triceratopses from her history. Then Britt went in the machine again with the larger triceratops plushie and venned Jada into her everyday body.

Steph and I went into the machine and I started navigating through the interface, looking for living kitten plushies, and picked one that looked cute. Steph meanwhile had said, “History,” and picked the form I’d asked for.

“Ready?” I asked. “You should push your green button first in case I’ve got this wrong.”

“Okay,” she said, and split me into two dragon plushies. I pushed the green button with a foreclaw of my larger body, and she turned into a little kitten plushie, about life-size for a kitten a few weeks old. I watched anxiously for a moment as the doors opened to see if she could move and talk.

“I think it worked,” she said, bending her head to look back at herself.

“Cool!”

We waddled out of the machine and Steph looked up in awe at Jada, Britt, Lisette and Poppy. “They’re all so big,” she whispered.

“Yeah, turning into something really small for the first time is a trip,” I agreed, speaking with my smaller plushie form. “Maybe Britt can snuggle you and me while Jada splits my big plushie body off as a dragon-girl?”

“Is that okay with you?” Britt asked Steph, bending down so she was not too far above eye level.

Desiree, who was snuggling in Britt’s arms, mewled, “Join the cute side, we have cuddles!”

“Okay,” Steph said, and Britt picked up her and my smaller body, while Jada set up the machine for another venn and went in with my larger plushie. She selected a practical everyday dragon-girl from my history, a little taller than average girl height, with small wings and only one head.

Britt handed Steph over to me when we came out of the machine. I cradled her in my hands, and we continued to the freshman parking lot and Jada’s car. We went to a Waffle House for breakfast; Lydia sat on the table between Britt and Jada’s plates, and Steph sat on my shoulder, while Desiree sat between me and Britt. Lydia got some syrup spilled on her, but Britt went and rinsed her off in the ladies’ room; it didn’t take long due to how stain-proof venned plushies typically were.

Toward the end of breakfast, we talked about what to do until Britt, Lisette, Poppy and I had to leave. We decided to watch another old horror movie and hang out in the common room at Jada’s dorm for the rest of the time. Jada checked the showtimes and we saw that Creature from the Black Lagoon would be playing in a little over an hour.

“Do you want to watch it with us?” I asked Steph.

“Maybe? It’s an old movie, so it won’t have a lot of jump cuts and stuff, right?”

“Yeah, I think it’s from the forties or fifties...” I looked it up on my phone. “1954. I haven’t seen it in several years; it’s scary, but not gross like modern slasher movies.”

“Okay, I’d like to see it.”

So we ordered more tea and coffee and sat there talking at the Waffle House (which was past the breakfast rush by then; we’d slept a bit late) until it was about time to go. The plushies sat on our shoulders during the movie. I was glad I hadn’t venned Steph into a real kitten, because I think her claws would have come out involuntarily at scary moments; I felt her kneading her soft paws against my shoulder scales anyway. Jada and I snuggled Britt on either side, with Desiree on Britt’s right shoulder and Lydia on Jada’s.

After the movie, we went back to Jada’s dorm and hung out in the common room, talking at first about the movie and then about various other things. At last, it was time to go. I gave Steph another good hug and handed her over to Jada to take back to the Venn machine, then kissed Jada goodbye and let Britt hug her. Lydia stayed with Jada too, of course, and Desiree came home with me.

The drive home was less frenetic than the drive down there had been; we were all a bit worn out, and Britt allowed Lisette to take a turn driving toward the end. Desiree was there to perk us up, though, singing along with the music with her squeaky voice and making up silly lyrics to the instrumental pieces.

After we dropped off Lisette and Poppy at their homes, Britt took me and Desiree home, getting out of the car for a few moments to hug us goodnight. We’d talked tentatively about our next date after dropping Poppy off; we were leaning toward venning into little kids at the mall playground again. Bianca was the only one home when I let myself into the house; Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and Sophia were at their church’s Trunk or Treat. I reheated some leftovers for supper, and Bianca and Desiree sat at the table with me and kept me company.

 

* * *

 

The next day was Halloween. I got Genevieve to venn me into the Maleficent-dragon form that Sophia and I had worked out a few days earlier, and worked an eight-hour shift. A fair number of people recognized who I was supposed to be, even though we hadn’t gotten the colors or proportions quite right — you rarely can when you’re trying to match an animated character.

My shift ended not too long before Joy’s Halloween party was supposed to start, and I got a ride to the Venn machine, and then to Joy’s house, with Anna and Genevieve, who were getting off around the same time. Sophia would be joining us after she got off work, and though I was a little worried about an anxiety attack such as I’d had during the queer group’s Halloween party, I figured I could get Sophia or Anna to run me home early if I had to.

For this party, I’d gotten Anna to venn me into a little naga, with my human part looking about six or seven years old and wearing a cute frilly dress that extended a couple of feet over my snake part. I’d enjoyed slithering around campus a couple of days earlier and I wanted to try being a naga again. Anna and Genevieve venned each other into panther-girls, with black fur all over and catlike features with whiskers. On the way to the party, we talked about the way Mr. Buckholtz was running things.

“I don’t like the way he’s pushing everyone to change bodies so often,” Anna said. “I don’t mind changing several times a week myself, but some people had a hard time finding a body that they’re comfortable with and that looks far enough from basic human, and making them change again and again is just gonna drive them away.”

“He’s let me be more insectoid at work than Mr. Paget did, so that’s one good thing about him,” Genevieve said, “but I see what you mean.”

“He told me I should try different forms besides dragons more often,” I said. “Which is okay, I guess? I did tell Mr. Paget I’d be fine wearing just about any female body, but after a while I wound up being a dragon pretty much all the time except for Furry Fridays. Getting out of that rut is probably a good thing.”

Joy and her boyfriend lived on the north side of town, not too far from Lisette and Poppy. The house was slightly smaller than Lisette’s house, and they shared the house with another couple, who had also invited their friends, so it turned out the party was more crowded than I’d expected. It seemed like Joy had invited more people than any of the other three hosts, but only about half of those were people I knew from Metamorphoses. And of course most people were venned into something different from their usual bodies, so I couldn’t recognize the people I did know unless I was close enough to read their nametags. All that contributed to making my anxiety get worse faster than it had at the queer group’s party at East Carolina, and having venned into a younger body didn’t help. (As a naga I was a lot bulkier than a human six-year-old girl, but most of it was trailing out along the floor, tripping people up when I wasn’t careful; I spent most of the party in a corner, resting on my coiled-up tail, so it wouldn’t get in people’s way.)

I was determined to push through my anxiety and enjoy as much of it as I could before I had to leave. I made myself talk to people, and got to know some of my co-workers better as well as making the acquaintance of some new people. But before long, it got to be too much.

Sophia had come in earlier — I’d recognized her because I’d helped her refine the venn she was going to use for the party a week earlier, a living doll whose torso was a transparent jar and whose head worked as a lid for said jar. Her torso was filled about a quarter full with candy and cheap party favors, and she kept inviting people to sample them. When I felt like I couldn’t stand the crowded atmosphere much longer, I went to look for her, starting where I’d seen her last. I looked all over the house and got my tail tangled up with people’s legs more than once before I finally found her coming back in from the back porch.

“Hey,” I said, “could I get you to take me home? You could come back here afterward.”

“Sure,” she said, picking up on my anxious expression. “I’m parked just down the street. Let me tell a couple of people where I’m going.”

She talked to several people on our way toward the front door, including Joy, Genevieve, and a guy I didn’t recognize. As we walked and slithered down the street toward where she’d parked her car, we passed some little trick-or-treaters with their parents going from house to house.

“Happy Halloween,” I said to them. The kids were young enough that the parents might be as young as they appeared, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they were venned slightly younger and better-looking than their natural bodies. All four were dressed as superheroes, though they were an eclectic mix from DC, Marvel, and My Hero Academia.

“Happy Halloween, Miss Snake!” the little Squirrel Girl said.

“Twick o’ Tweet,” the tiny Batman said, holding out his candy bag.

“No, Oliver,” the daddy said, “you say that when people open their doors.”

“Is it okay if I open my lid instead?” Sophia said, and lifted her head off her shoulders. The little kids gasped as Sophia bent down to let them rummage in her torso and pull out handfuls of candy. I’m guessing the adults hadn’t clearly seen what Sophia was venned into in the dark, but the little boy had.

“Those were some cute kids,” Sophia said as we continued on toward her car.

“Yeah,” I said with a happy sigh. “I’m glad they’ve got such cool parents. My parents didn’t believe in trick-or-treating.”

“Oh, that sucks,” she said. “I know a lot of the people at Crossroads don’t do Halloween; I’m glad Mom and Dad weren’t too influenced by that. Hey, maybe next year we can venn you into a little girl and take you trick-or-treating?”

“Next Halloween, we’ll be at different colleges a hundred miles apart.” We’d reached her car; she unlocked the doors and we got in. “But maybe Jada and I can venn into little girls and go trick-or-treating. We’d need somebody to pretend to be our mom, though. Or one of us could split and be both our mom and a little girl.”

“I hope that works out.”

We got to talking about the playground at the mall and our experiences venning into little kids there and elsewhere on the way home, and the residual tension from my anxiety attack at the party gradually gave way to a relaxed tiredness. As we passed through downtown on the way to Sophia’s house, she asked me if I wanted to go by the Venn machine to change into the body I’d work in tomorrow or go straight home.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I guess I should. Any suggestions?”

After we talked about it for a couple of minutes, I remembered a girl I’d seen at the party, who had fractal arms with little arms in place of her fingers, and decided to try something similar but weirder. And after two or three tries, Sophia venned me into a mostly-human girl with fractal heads. I had two smaller heads on either side of my main head, and my shoulders weren’t much wider than those of a normal girl of my height. Then there were smaller heads on either side of the little ones, and smaller ones again. The next day after work, Sophia looked at me with a magnifying glass and found seven levels before they got too small to see, though with the naked eye you could only see four or five. Seeing out of that many eyes was confusing at first, but I learned to close all the eyes of the smaller heads (below about level three or four), which were too small to contribute much visual acuity anyway, and make sense of the visual input from the higher-level heads.

I ate supper with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey after Sophia returned to the party. They took turns getting up and going to the door to greet trick-or-treaters, sometimes returning with a photo of cute kids in elaborate costumes. Then I snuggled into my futon with Desiree, telling her about work and Joy’s party until I was sleepy enough to doze off.

 

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My portal fantasy novel from the point of view of the portal, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords, in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io, and in Kindle format from Amazon.

You can find my other ebook novels and short fiction collections here:

The Bailiff and the Mermaid	Smashwords	Amazon
Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes	Smashwords	Amazon
When Wasps Make Honey	Smashwords	Amazon
Like Bees in Springtime	Smashwords	Amazon
A Notional Treason	Smashwords	Amazon
The Weight of Silence and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon
Unforgotten and Other Stories	Smashwords	Amazon