“Most of you already know Jeffrey Sergeyev,” Ms. Turner said in a loud voice. “She will be using the girls' facilities from now on, as I explained Friday. Please be courteous to her.”

“Ignore the bit where she called me ‘she’ and ‘her’,” I said to the girls nearest me.

---

A House Divided

by Trismegistus Shandy

Part 7 of 7

---

This short novel is in the same setting as my earlier novelette “Butterflies are the Gentlest.” They take place simultaneously, but there are no characters in common; I reckon you could read them in either order. I’m calling the setting itself “the Valentine Divergence”; if anyone else wants to write stories in this setting, feel free.

An earlier version of this novel was serialized on the tg_fiction mailing list from December 2011 to January 2012.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Feel free to repost or mirror it on any noncommercial site or list. You can also create derivative works, including adaptations to other media, or new stories using the same setting, characters and so forth, as long as you mention and point to the original story and release your own stories or adaptations under the same license.

---

With their work schedules, it wasn’t unusual for me to go all day sometimes without seeing Mom, or Dad, or both. When I was little, they would arrange their schedules so one of them was always off work when I was home from school, which often meant they didn’t see much of each other during the week. But in the last couple of years, since they trusted me to take care of myself at least for a few hours after school, they would try to both work the same days so they could both be off at the same time.

Not so much since Mom went back to work after the change. They didn’t have full control over their work schedules, of course; they often had to work inconvenient times to cover for co-workers who covered for them at other times, or in crises when they needed more nurses or paramedics on duty than usual. So I didn’t put it together right away. But while I was eating breakfast with Dad before school Friday morning, I realized I hadn’t seen Mom and Dad at the same time since we got home from church last Sunday, and the only time I saw them together during the previous week was when Dad and I went to see Mom at the hospital. Either one was working while the other was off, or Dad was out running errands — errands that took longer than they should — while Mom was at home, or Dad was working in the yard while Mom did stuff in the house. They must have talked together about me and my problems at school sometime, but I didn’t know when; obviously not at mealtimes, and not in bed at night since Dad started sleeping in the guest bedroom. I started worrying even more about them; were they systematically avoiding each other, or was it just bad luck with work schedules the last couple of weeks? And if they were avoiding each other like that, could they stay married? And if not, what would happen to me?

I still couldn’t bring myself to ask Dad outright about that stuff during breakfast. And by the time I got through the first couple of periods at school, I was worrying more about my own problems. This was the last day I was excused from P.E., and unless something changed over the weekend, Coach Renfrew would probably make me use the girls‘ locker room and shower next Monday. Weird, right? Two months ago, the idea of going in the girls’ locker room — or being ordered to do so by the coach — would be like “Please don’t throw me in that brier patch!” But now, well, it was like it would be the last irrevocable stage of becoming a girl, socially. And without any of the benefits of being a girl, like in one of those vaguely perverted manga where a guy gets turned into a girl. Just the worst of both worlds, being seen as an ugly girl by the guys and as a peeping Tom by the girls.

By this time I was trying to avoid drinking much with breakfast and lunch, and then avoid dehydration by drinking a couple of big glasses of water as soon as I got home after school. But I still needed to go to the bathroom a couple of times Friday. The first time, between study hall and lunch, wasn’t too bad — there were a couple of other guys in there when I went in, and they looked at me oddly but didn’t say anything. When I came out of the stall after doing my business, a centaur who was just coming in called me a bitch and said I should go to the girls' room, but I just ignored him and washed my hands. He went into the stall I’d vacated. (A male Marietta centaur can pee standing up just fine, of course; but the way they’re built, it’s tricky for them to use a urinal built for old-style human males without risk of messing up their clothes or getting pee on the floor. Eventually the school and most other public places around Marietta installed trough-urinals designed for centaur males in their men’s rooms, but at this point the centaurs were using the stall toilets whenever they were available.)

The second time, just before American History, I ran into Mr. Meredith, who was just zipping up his pants and heading for the sink when I walked in.

“Jeffrey,” he said, before I could go into the stall, “I saw your name mentioned in a memo from Ms. Turner. She said that you’re supposed to use the girls' restrooms.”

I had known something like this would happen eventually, and I’d rehearsed a response. I managed to remember most of what I’d planned to say.

“My parents and I are disputing her arbitrary ruling, sir,” I said, though really nothing more had happened since Mom’s wussy talk with the principal Tuesday. “As you can see, I’m still male in general appearance, which makes it inappropriate for me to use the girls' facilities.”

A couple of centaur guys walked in while I was talking, and they took the last couple of unoccupied stalls.

Mr. Meredith frowned. “I sympathize. But for the moment, that is school policy, and I have to enforce it even if I don’t agree. Please leave.”

I stood there for a second or two, and then walked out. I stood in the hall, kids rushing past me in both directions, thinking for several seconds about trying to hold my bladder all through sixth period and the bus ride home — and regretfully walked into the girls' restroom.

Just my luck: it was pretty crowded. All the stalls were occupied, there were three girls at the sink, two centaurs and a chameleon, and a wolf and another centaur were standing around waiting for an empty toilet stall. All of them reacted to my entrance.

“Yah!” — “What are you doing here?” — “Get out!” — “Pervert!” — “Hi, Jeffrey.”

“Hi, Kelly,” I said to the only girl I recognized, the chameleon — she was in my P.E. class. “Ladies, believe me, no one regrets my presence here more than I do, but I have no choice; I am under orders from Mr. Meredith, who is under orders from the principal.”

“It’s okay,” Kelly said, “I know him. He’s really a girl, kind of. The nurse told us that he’s going to be showering with us when he’s well enough to come back to P.E.”

“You’re not helping,” I said. “It’s true that I have to sit down to pee, since Valentine’s Day, but that’s about all I have in common with you. The school nurse and the principal seem to think that girls are defined by the plumbing facilities they require — I suggest you add your complaints to mine, and perhaps we’ll get somewhere.”

As I spoke, the centaurs who’d been washing their hands or freshening their makeup or whatever stomped out, glaring at me as they passed. The door of one of the stalls opened and Lindsey Babcock came out.

“Jeffrey!” she said. “Are they making you use the girls' bathroom now?”

“I’m afraid so,” I said. The wolf who’d been waiting stepped into the stall behind her, giving me a strange look as she closed the door.

“So what’s up with you?” the other centaur asked. “Kelly said you’re sort of a girl? You don’t look like one.”

“I’m not,” I said. “But I’m no longer male, strictly speaking — nobody who was in Athens on Valentine’s Day is either male or female.”

“Oh, yeah. I heard about that. So you’ve got a vagina, but no breasts?” she asked.

“It’s not really a vagina,” I insisted, but Kelly was saying: “Yeah, the guys in our P.E. class were talking about it after they saw him in the showers.”

“All right,” the centaur girl said, “I don’t like it, but if they won’t let you use the guys' bathroom, I’m not going to kick you out.”

Not helping. Lindsey washed her hands and listened in, but didn’t say anything more for the moment.

“What do you mean, it’s not really a —?” Kelly asked, and then interrupted herself: “I’m sorry. Are you okay? They said you hit your head pretty bad —”

“I was just bruised,” I said. “They excused me from P.E. this week, but I’ll probably be back Monday. I’ll be showering with you unless I can get the principal to change his mind by then — it would help if you and the other girls in the class all complain and get your parents to phone the principal too...”

“I guess it’s okay,” Lindsey said. “I mean, I’ve noticed you don’t stare at girls' breasts like other guys do. You’re not going to stare at us in the locker room, are you?”

“I’ll try not to,” I said, “but I’d rather —”

A sophomore wolf girl came out of a stall, and the centaur went in after her. “What’s he doing here?” the wolf asked, and bared her teeth.

“It’s okay,” Kelly said, “he’s like an honorary girl, everything but boobs.”

“No ovaries or womb either,” I added hastily. “I’m neither one nor the other, biologically, but I’m still a guy psychologically.”

“Hey, if you think like a guy then you shouldn’t be showering with us,” Kelly said.

“That’s what I keep telling the principal, but —”

“I heard some of what y’all were saying,” the wolf interrupted. “I think she should show us what she’s got before we let her do her business in here.”

“Gross!” Lindsey said, and stuck out her tongue. When a Valdosta frog sticks out her tongue at you, you know you’ve been tongue-stuck-out at.

“Not going to happen,” I insisted. “And don’t call me ‘she.’”

“Whatever,” the wolf said. “I’ve got to get to class.” She ran out without washing her hands.

I took the next open stall, without giving the astonished centaur sophomore coming out of it time to say anything. I was late to class, but Mr. Meredith didn’t say anything about it.

---

I had a fair amount of homework to do that weekend, but I procrastinated Friday evening, going over to Will’s house to play video games after school and then staying up late chatting with Latisha. Late Saturday morning I dragged myself out of bed to go to the bathroom, then sat down at my desk and looked at the pile of papers and textbooks confronting me. I decided to procrastinate a few minutes more, and checked my email and IM.

Latisha was on IM.

obsidian14: are you there? have you checked your email? read it now!

I had several new emails, including one from Uncle Mike and one from Latisha. The subject line on the one from Latisha just said: “OMG read this!!!!”. The one from Uncle Mike was more helpfully titled: “Hermaphrodites, not neuters”. I opened both of them.

Uncle Mike had sent me a link to an article in that morning’s Athens Banner-Herald. I clicked on it, and read about how a couple from Athens on their honeymoon — honeymoon? what was the point of getting married anymore, for us? — had gone camping in the Florida Everglades, where something about the environmental conditions had apparently triggered a metamorphosis. They’d grown huge white flowers in their crotches, right above the pseudo-vagina, and the flowers lasted several days before the petals fell off. And when they returned home to Athens and doctors examined them, they found that they had wombs — both of them, the former man as well as the former woman.

And apparently, both of their flowers had both pistils and stamens. Thanks, Ms. Killian, I know what that means.

I opened Latisha’s email. She’d sent me links to that newspaper article, and to an article in the Flagpole, the Athens alternative weekly, and a couple of blog posts talking about it — one guy was posting from a motel in Valdosta, where he and his wife were staying the night on the way to the Everglades to “try to reproduce the experiment.”

I sat there reading for a few minutes before I remembered that Latisha was online waiting for me to reply. I switched to the IM window.

scribbler371: ok, i read those articles. wow.

obsidian14: it’s pretty awesome. i went and woke mom and dad up and told them as soon as i checked my google alerts this morning.

scribbler371: yay google

obsidian14: they were pissed until they woke up good and understood what i was saying

scribbler371: and then?

obsidian14: mom started dancing, and dad smiled and kissed her. and they shooed me out of their bedroom. and i went and emailed you. what have you been doing?

scribbler371: sleeping late.

obsidian14: so what do you think?

scribbler371: i’m still taking it all in. i was just barely getting used to being neuter, and now i’m apparently a hermaphrodite. i don’t think that’s going to change the principal’s mind, but it’s worth a try.

obsidian14: cause you’re both a guy and a girl, not neither one. and so am i! hey, maybe i could tell him i want to use the guys' bathroom.

scribbler371: better not

obsidian14: j/k

scribbler371: so i guess now you’ve got a lot of extra work to do on your report

obsidian14: oh yeah. i’m gonna email you some more interview questions in a little while, before i send them to the people i interviewed before. tell me what you think about them?

scribbler371: okay

obsidian14: and hey, can i interview you now that you’re out?

scribbler371: sure. i’ll go through those questions you sent earlier and answer them.

obsidian14: thx

scribbler371: so what do you think it was? the banner-herald just said “environmental conditions”, and the flagpole was talking about insect pheremones and stuff — they said there were a bunch of athenians going to beaches in florida since the changes and the heat down there didn’t trigger this metamorphosis

obsidian14: i don’t know. it might be it’s more humid in the swamp than on the beach? or the salt air hinders it? thing is why in florida, and not in athens? do we have to be like migratory birds, going south to mate?

scribbler371: maybe the weather in athens will be right for it later in the year

obsidian14: maybe. it’s kind of weird and scary, though. we might grow those flowers any time and then we could get pregnant whenever a bee or butterfly lands on our flowers...

scribbler371: now that’s a scary thought

obsidian14: catholics aren’t going to be allowed to use bug spray

scribbler371: yeah, drugstores are gonna keep bug zappers and flypaper behind the counter like condoms

obsidian14: and beekeepers are gonna be really popular.

scribbler371: eww. human-flower honey? wouldn’t that be cannibalism?

obsidian14: no, it would be like milk. there was a company that made ice cream from human women’s milk but the government made them stop.

scribbler371: i bet they won’t allow people to sell honey made from human flowers either.

obsidian14: ohh...

scribbler371: what?

obsidian14: i think mom and dad just turned the thermostat up. way up.

---

Mom had to work that Sunday, so Dad and I went to church by ourselves. We talked with Mr. and Mrs. Barnes after service; I said I felt pretty much recovered, and we decided I’d go visit some people after school Tuesday with Mr. Barnes and some others Thursday with Dad.

Monday arrived, and I still didn’t have a solution for P.E. When I arrived at the gym, the coach and the nurse were both waiting for me.

“I heard you’ve been ignoring school policy and using the boys' restrooms,” Ms. Turner said. “I came here to make sure you understand that we’re not going to ignore you and let you do whatever you want.”

“You need to use the girls' locker room,” Coach Renfrew said. He looked like he wasn’t sure he agreed with Ms. Turner, but wasn’t going to disagree with her in front of me.

“My stuff is in my locker in the guys' locker room,” I pointed out.

“I’ll go with you to get it,” he said.

“The girls don’t want me showering with them,” I said as we walked toward the door of the locker room. “Y’all are going to be in hot water with their parents by this time tomorrow.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Ms. Turner came by and gave the girls a talk after class last Friday. I think most of them understand your situation now.”

“You know about what they just discovered over the weekend?” I said. “We’re not neither male nor female like we thought, we’re both.”

“Yes, Latisha told me a few minutes ago. I’m afraid it doesn’t change anything.”

When we walked into the locker room, everybody stared at me. Before anybody else could say anything mean, Tyrone said: “Hi, Jeffrey. Good to see you’re well again.”

“Jeffrey is just here to get his things out of his locker,” Coach Renfrew said. “As Ms. Turner explained Friday, he will be using the other locker room from now on.”

“Makes sense,” someone muttered.

Even though nobody was naked, they all seemed a little tense while I was getting my stuff out of my locker; nobody took anything off while I was there and a couple of guys who’d been partway through changing put their gym shorts on over their jockeys in such a hurry that they stumbled over their own feet. I could see they didn’t want me there any more than the girls wanted me showering with them.

Ms. Turner was waiting for us outside the boys‘ locker room, and she walked with me across the gym to the girls’ locker room.

“This will be a little awkward at first,” she said, “but it’s really what makes most sense. I’m sure you know that, even if you won’t admit it to yourself.”

I didn’t reply. We walked in.

“Most of you already know Jeffrey Sergeyev,” Ms. Turner said in a loud voice. None of the girls were naked, but a few were in their underwear, and one was in the process of changing into a sports bra; she kept her back turned to us. “She will be using the girls' facilities from now on, as I explained Friday. Please be courteous to her.”

“Ignore the bit where she called me ‘she’ and ‘her’,” I said to the girls nearest me.

“Jeffrey, find an empty locker and get changed. I’ll be back near the end of class before you shower.” Ms. Turner left the room.

“Take your stuff and go change in yonder behind a curtain,” one of the girls said, pointing to the showers, “not here in front of us. We’ll figure something out about the actual showering later.”

“That’s a good idea,” I said, starting to move in that direction. “If you all ask your parents to phone the principal and complain, we won’t have to put up with this for more than a couple of days —”

“A couple of days is too much,” Teresa Tapley said angrily. She had four arms, and was still struggling into her imperfectly modified T-shirt. “What about if you just don’t shower after P.E.? The kids in the rest of your classes can put up with your sweat stink for as long as it takes us to get the principal to change his mind. You can tell them we wouldn’t let you near our showers and the coach wouldn’t let you into the boys' showers.”

“Yeah,” Kelly said. “I mean, Jeffrey’s a nice guy, and I know the nurse says he doesn’t have a guy’s equipment anymore but he says he still thinks like a guy. He shouldn’t be looking at us while we change clothes, much less shower.”

“Stop being silly,” Latisha said. “I’ve been trying to tell you — we just found out we’re hermaphrodites, not neuters. That means Jeffrey’s got as much right to be here as I do —”

Or as you have to be in the boys' locker room, I thought.

“— And my brother’s been showering with the senior girls for a month now, and they’ve gotten used to it. It’s a stupid policy, sure, but you don’t have to be crybabies about it.”

“Thanks, Latisha,” I said. “I’ll go change in one of the shower stalls — we can talk more about this later.”

By the time I came out of the shower stall in my gym clothes, all the girls had finished changing and left the room except for Latisha. I stashed my regular clothes, towels and toiletries in an empty locker and went out into the gym with her.

I don’t even remember what we did in gym that day, I was so distracted. We might have been playing Coach Renfrew’s new mutant volleyball game, we did that a lot, but I’m not sure. No, it was probably his mutant basketball, because the teams were mingling chaotically instead of staying on opposite sides of a net. I do remember that a couple of guys who bumped into me in the course of the game said “Watch where you’re going, bitch,” or worse things. It was an active game, whatever it was, and I was as sweaty as I ever get when I went off to the locker room with the girls.

Ms. Turner must have gotten held up by a crisis with an actual sick or injured student, because she didn’t come back to chaperon like she’d said. I walked into the locker room to find Teresa and a couple of like-minded girls standing in the doorway between the locker area and the showers.

“You’re not coming in here,” Teresa said. “Change into your long pants and get out of here.”

I wondered if that might be a good idea. Latisha spoke up before I could decide what to say:

“You must not want me in there either,” she said. “I’m as much a guy as he is. If he can’t shower today, I can’t.”

“Suit yourself,” Teresa said with a shrug. Four arms and as many breasts made for an impressive shrug.

“Oh, come on,” Lindsey said. “When Jeffrey said he still thinks like a guy, he means he still likes violent video games and superhero comics and stuff like that. But he doesn’t look at your breasts instead of your face when he’s talking to you, like most guys. Look; Jeffrey and I are going to undress and go in yonder to the showers, and we’re going to have a conversation, and he’s going to maintain eye contact with me the whole time. Right, Jeffrey?”

“Right,” I said, and swallowed hard. I started taking off my clothes as she did.

“Ms. Turner’s a bitch, isn’t she?” Lindsey said as she pulled her T-shirt off.

“Cast-iron,” I said. “On a power trip.” I took off my T-shirt, then my shoes and socks.

“I bet she’s sleeping with the principal,” Lindsey said, taking off her sports bra and her shorts.

I thought about that while I took off my gym shorts. “You might be right. She does seem to have more influence over him than you’d expect from her official position...” I took a deep breath, stood up and pulled down my underwear. I made sure I was standing facing Teresa and her cronies, not toward the wall of lockers, and I took a long pause before I wrapped a towel around my waist and headed toward the showers beside Lindsey.

“No,” Teresa said, but she was starting to look uncertain. Lindsey ignored her, and said to me, “Why do you reckon she’s got it in for you and Latisha’s brother?”

“Probably just a power trip,” I said, keeping my eyes on hers. It wasn’t all that hard. “She sees an excuse to meddle with our lives for supposedly medical reasons, and she gets bored sitting in that clinic all day with not as many students getting sick since the changes...”

Finally Teresa’s friends moved aside and Lindsey and I walked into the showers. We kept gossiping about the nurse and the principal until a free shower opened and I stepped into it, nodding casually to the chameleon girl coming out of it.

I hadn’t actually maintained eye contact with Lindsey at every moment. I looked at my shoes while I was untying them, and I think I did glance over her body briefly. But we managed to convince the girls that I wasn’t going to be ogling them all the time; things were a lot easier after that. Still, enough of them complained to their parents, who complained to the principal, that by Tuesday of the following week he backed down — more than a week before Dr. Ceccato finally gave me a note saying I was psychologically a guy and should be treated as such.

Going back to the boys' showers was hard at first. Three or four guys were pretty mean about it, calling me names and joking about how I wasn’t pretty enough and they weren’t desperate enough... And at first I got stared at as much as the Waycross possum with two penises had been when the class was first put together. But I pretended it didn’t bother me, and eventually the bullies stopped picking on me except when they were really bored.

That Monday, when I got home from school, I had a pleasant surprise. Nobody was home, but there was a note on the refrigerator:

“This is the first day your father and I have both had off work in a while. We’re going out to dinner and a movie. There’s leftover vegetable stew and curried chicken in the refrigerator. — Love, Mom.”

I whistled and went to my bedroom. Latisha was on IM.

obsidian14: you and lindsey were awesome. i wish i’d thought of that.

scribbler371: you were pretty cool too. and honestly, if it were you, i’m not sure i could have kept my eyes on your face the whole time.

obsidian14: flatterer. :) really?

scribbler371: i don’t know.

I thought hard about whether I wanted to say this, and how.

scribbler371: i mean, i don’t obsess over your body the way i did over some girls i had a crush on before the changes. but i care about you a lot more than about lindsey. she’s nice, but she’s tyrone’s girl, and a different species from me. from us.

obsidian14: so you could be casual about her, but maybe not about me?

scribbler371: yeah. maybe?

obsidian14: you weren’t staring at me when i was naked, either.

scribbler371: not staring at your boobs and crotch like a horny teenage guy would. but i was glad to see you. not sure if that makes sense?

obsidian14: yeah. i was glad to see you too. it’s like, i wasn’t hot and excited about it, but it was nice to... um... get to know you a little better?

scribbler371: that’s it.

obsidian14: man, life is weird. did i tell you my dad bought a humidifier yesterday? :)

---

I’ll spare you Latisha’s gossip about her mom and dad’s experiments with the thermostat and the humidifier. They didn’t work; it was several years before scientists figured out why we “Athens magnolias,” as they’ve started calling us, will flower in the Everglades or the Okeefenokee in the early spring, or in north Georgia along about July or August, but not indoors in a temperature and humidity-controlled room. It’s a combination of several triggers — the temperature and humidity, but also the presence of suitable pollinators, as the Flagpole article had speculated.

When Mom and Dad learned about this, they dropped their plans to send me to live with Uncle Mike; they didn’t want any chance of me getting pregnant. Latisha and I both flowered on the Fourth of July weekend that summer, and spent a miserable three days indoors, forbidden by our parents to go outside or open a window. Mom and Dad hung several bug zappers outside every window and door of our house — and then nailed the window of my room shut. Latisha’s parents lay sunbathing in their back yard, letting the bees and butterflies pollinate them, while their children stayed inside in their separate bedrooms until their flowers faded and fell off several days later. Being in bloom and not getting pollinated was so agonizing that I didn’t even think about the fireworks and cookout I was missing until later; it was a whole year of teenage horniness compressed into seventy-two hours, and I could hardly think of anything except Latisha, naked, with bees and butterflies crawling in and out of her blossom... and then fluttering over and crawling into mine. But when it was over, I could think straight again, and was glad I hadn’t gotten pregnant, as I might have if I’d been pollinated by one of the same bees or butterflies that had visited Mr. and Mrs. Bailey’s flowers a couple of miles away, or if I’d been in Athens where almost any bee or butterfly of the species attracted to us would visit multiple people’s blossoms during our flowering. (It was another two weeks after that heat wave hit Atlanta before Athens, Danielsville and Hartwell experienced the right weather to trigger everyone who hadn’t already flowered while traveling to the Everglades or Okeefenokee or somewhere.)

Latisha and I celebrated our freedom by going to a movie together a couple of days later. I took a county bus that went by her subdivision on the way to the mall, and saved a seat for her; she smiled as she sat down beside me.

“I am so glad that’s over,” she said.

“Hell yeah,” I said. “I hope it’s only once a year.”

“Probably so; nobody’s reported flowering more than once since the change.”

Latisha had gotten an A+ on her extra credit report on the Athens magnolias — it was twice as long and thorough as Ms. Killian had asked for, three or four pages longer than mine on the Huntsville telepaths and ten pages longer than Tyrone’s on the Valdosta frogs. It had brought her up to an A- for Biology, and a B+ on her overall GPA for the year. I hadn’t done quite as well, but Ms. Killian didn’t fail me outright for lying about what species I was and my parents didn’t ground me for getting a C. Latisha had kept following the research on Homo athenanthus during the summer; she said she was thinking about double-majoring in botany and reproductive biology at UGA.

“You know,” I said after a pause, “I kind of feel sorry for the species that are in heat all the time.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I know what you mean. I know it’s not so intense all the time for them as it is for us when we’re in bloom, but still — I remember it being pretty bad, sometimes, when I was Homo sapiens. Worrying about whether boys would notice me, and obsessing over them — scared of sex and wanting it at the same time — I’m glad I don’t have to deal with that very often now.”

“Yeah. Don’t take this wrong, but I’m glad your sexiness only distracts me from your beauty for a few days a year.”

“You know just what to say to a girl,” she said with a grin, and squeezed my hand.

We looked out the window for a while, and chatted about inconsequential stuff the rest of the way to the mall. The movie was an awful mess, but kind of fun. They’d been most of the way through filming it when the changes happened, apparently, and the producers decided to change the story so that it happened just before and after Valentine’s Day. But of course they film scenes out of order, based on when various sets and locations are available, so some of the scenes early in the movie, when the characters were still Homo sapiens, had to be filmed when the actors no longer were, and adjusted in post-production by not entirely convincing CGI. In the later scenes, the plot took a total left turn as the changes threw ten kinds of monkey wrench into the characters' romantic and heroic and villainous plans; most of the actors had become Hollywood capybaras, but there were three other California and Nevada neospecies among the main characters and a dozen others among the minor characters. Latisha and I both laughed so hard our rib muscles hurt.

After the movie, we went to the ladies' room. By the end of the school year, I’d decided Mom was sort of right; I wanted the flexibility to use whichever public restroom had a free toilet stall at the moment. And by then, both Latisha and I looked androgynous enough that we could get away with using whichever restroom we wanted. Her breasts had gradually atrophied to nothing, and my face had softened to where strangers occasionally called me “miss,” especially when I went a little too long between haircuts. By that time it didn’t bother me much.

We hung out at the mall for a while, and ran into Arnie and Tara and some other centaurs we knew from school when we were getting gelati at the food court.

“We missed y’all at the fourth of July party,” Arnie said.

“Sorry,” I said. “We were both... indisposed.”

“I hope you’re feeling better,” said Kirsten.

“All better,” Latisha said. “It’s just something Athens magnolias get this time of year.”

“Why do they call y’all magnolias?” one of the guys asked. Latisha giggled; Arnie blushed; Tara looked annoyed.

“Let me explain,” I said, and whispered in his ear.

---

When I got home, walking the last few hundred feet from the bus stop, I found Mom and Dad working together in the front garden. Along about Easter, Mom had gone insane with her spring planting; she’d planted not only the annual flowers she’d usually done, along the edge of the sidewalk and driveway and mailbox, but had plowed up almost all the lawn and planted a zillion different kinds of vegetables. Dad and I helped, sometimes. Now they were weeding the patches of tomatoes and okra, Dad wearing nothing but shorts and Mom nothing but a skirt. Sure, her breasts weren’t on her chest anymore, but it still felt a little weird to see her going bare-chested in hot weather.

“Did you have a good date?” Mom asked.

“Yep,” I said. “The movie was unintentionally funny — funnier than at lot of movies that are supposed to be comedies.”

“Latisha seems like a nice girl,” Dad said. “I hope you don’t — You know why we had to keep you inside until it was over, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “When I’m in my right mind I know I’m not old enough to have a baby. Latisha knows it too. Ignore everything I said for the last three days, I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m sorry I screamed those things at you...” This was getting awkward. “Hey, let me go change and I’ll come help you with this.”

“Thanks,” Mom said. “I’ll get a hug after you change into your gardening clothes.”

Mom and Dad never told me exactly what had happened between them, but over the years I picked up hints here and there from things I overheard. I think that day when I came home from school and found Mom crying and Dad off running errands, they’d tried to have sex, maybe for the first time since the changes, and it was a horrible failure. Then Dad started sleeping in the guest bedroom, and they avoided each other for a while. I worried that they were going to get a divorce, but they didn’t believe in divorce, and they did believe in each other. After a few weeks of giving each other plenty of space, they tried again to see how much affection they could give each other without making each other frustrated with almost-but-not-quite-right sexual signals; it turned out to be just enough.

Most of the drawings and paintings I did before I was seventeen or eighteen look embarrassingly crude to me now. I threw away a lot of them, except some that I gave Mom that she won’t give up. But the earliest painting that I’m still proud of is a portrait I did of Mom and Dad for their twentieth anniversary. Dad is standing next to Mom, and they have their arms around each other; they’re in our front garden, looking off at the sunset to the viewer’s left. And you can tell from their expressions that, barring accidents, they’re going to be standing there together in twenty years, and in forty, never mind that they were sitting on different sides of the change-region boundary that Valentine’s Day. They won’t let a little thing like being different species divide them.

I have the best parents in the world.

The End

 

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If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format.

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