“It’s too late to back out. Even if I got on a train to Nebraska tomorrow, I’ve still been exposed to enough Raleigh rabbit pheromones that I’m going to go through puberty one way or another.”

You Could Go Home Again

part 2 of 16

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butteflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.

Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.

After we got unpacked, we walked over to the nearest dining hall for supper, and sat together. Most of the people we saw were Raleigh rabbits; I also recognized several other North Carolina neospecies from my research, and saw a handful of people from farther off, like Amy.

We sat down and talked for a few minutes about our high school experiences, what we planned to do in college, and so forth. After we’d been eating for maybe ten minutes a girl came over to us and said, “Mind if I sit here?” The dining hall was getting crowded and there weren’t a lot of empty seats left.

“Sure,” I said, and Amy nodded, her mouth being full.

The new girl was, I guessed from her height, the stripey pattern of her curly hair, and the bulge in her pants, a Cary hyena. She introduced herself as Radhika; her mother was from India, but she’d lived in Raleigh all her life. She was also a freshman, but lived in a different dorm from us. Amy and I told her a little of our own history, but by mutual consent didn’t tell her about our spat with the housing clerk.

A couple of Raleigh rabbits, both boys, sat down near us as well, but didn’t join in our conversation at first. But when their conversation hit a lull, one of them looked at me and said, “If you’re smart enough to start college at twelve, why didn’t you go to Duke or Harvard or somewhere?”

“I’m eighteen,” I said angrily, my ears trembling.

“Oh. Sorry.” He looked like he wanted to ask me something, but was too embarrassed or too polite to say it. After a few moments' hesitation, I volunteered the information he was probably curious about, and he said:

“Welcome back to Raleigh, I guess. Do you remember a lot about the city from when you were a kid?”

“A few things,” I said. “We lived in Garner and didn’t come into downtown much as far as I can recall.”

He nodded. “My family’s from Auburn, not far from there. I’m Katie Cartwright.” So a girl before the Divergence, apparently, but developed as a boy at puberty. Or maybe he’d been a girl until a short time ago; I didn’t want to ask.

“Joel Hampton,” I said. “And this is Amy Taniger, and Radhika Eames. We’re all freshmen.”

“My buddy Quill and I are sophomores,” he said. “Let me know if you’ve got any more questions after you get through with the orientation tour tomorrow,” and he wrote his contact information on a slip of paper and gave it to me. I thanked him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend much time with guys for a while yet. I needed to meet more girls, Raleigh rabbits in particular, to have any chance of developing as a boy.

That night, after talking on the phone with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler, I went down the hall to shower; I figured it would be less busy than in the mornings. The bathrooms in Alexander Hall were unisex, but I didn’t see any guys using it when I was in there, just girls, all but one of them rabbits. I blow-dried my fur — the dorm bathroom had a wonderful full-body blow dryer, much better than the hand dryer I’d used back home — and put on my bathrobe, and when I got back to the room, Amy had changed into her pajamas and gotten into bed.

“I’ll close my eyes while you dress,” she said, and she also pulled a pillow over her head. I dressed for bed and read for a few minutes before turning out the light.

The next morning after breakfast, Amy and I found ourselves in the same orientation tour group. There were about twenty people in the group, more than half of us Raleigh rabbits, about twelve or fourteen girls and six or eight boys (if you counted me as a boy). The leader of our tour group was a Greensboro tiger, and an RA in our dorm; he showed us around the campus and answered a lot of questions, and left us at the administration building where some of us needed to talk to people about changing classes or other things.

“Do you want to talk to the housing authority?” I asked Amy.

“Nah. Let’s see how things go for a few days. Or until we know how you’re changing. How long does that normally take?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. With kids going through puberty at the normal time it’s over two or three years; with adults changing because they’re in a group that doesn’t have the right sex ratio it can be just a few weeks. I wasn’t able to find anything about people like me; maybe there aren’t any.”

“If it takes you a year or more to change, are you going to know which way you’re changing before it finishes?”

“Oh, yeah. Probably within weeks. Maybe days.”

I didn’t see Amy again until that night, at the party in the common room of our dorm. I said hi to her, but I spent most of the party introducing myself to other people, mostly female Raleigh rabbits, and trying to get to know any of them who seemed at all interested in talking to me.

“So you grew up out in the middle of nowhere?” asked Sarah, a girl from Knightdale, an eastern suburb. “What do you think of Raleigh?”

“I haven’t seen much except for the campus, and I don’t remember a lot from when I was a kid. I vaguely remember going to the capitol and the natural history museum on elementary school field trips.”

“We can show you some things next weekend, maybe,” said her friend Rob. They’d gone to the same high school and were roommates. I guessed Rob had been a boy until the Divergence, but from what they said I gathered that she’d been a girl since puberty, and a pretty girly girl at that; she was dressed fancier than anyone else at the party, wearing a long dress with puffed sleeves, a silver necklace, and a tiara.

In our age group, kids who were prepubescent at the time of the Divergence, there was almost no correlation between names and sexes. A few people had changed their name when they entered puberty and saw what sex they were going to be, but most didn’t.

I chatted with Sarah and Rob for a little while. Then a guy came in and sat down between them, and they scooted aside on the sofa to make room for him; Sarah was now wedged up against my thigh. A few months later that might have been exciting; for now it was just uncomfortable. “Hi, girls,” the new guy said, and kissed both of them. “Who’s your little friend?”

“This is Joel,” Sarah said. “Joel, this is our boyfriend Rico.”

“Hi, Joel. I’d guess you’re a genius to graduate high school so early... do you do tutoring?”

“I’m eighteen,” I said. “I haven’t grown up all the way because I lived in Hebron, Nebraska where there aren’t any other Raleigh rabbits.” I was getting tired of explaining that.

“Huh. Why’d your parents move there?” Sarah swatted him on the arm and he looked at her in bewilderment.

“They died and my aunt and uncle adopted me,” I explained briefly. I’d already told Sarah and Rob about it in a little more detail. “I’ll see you guys later,” and I went to introduce myself to some more people.

Even though my goal was to meet a lot of female Raleigh rabbits and nudge my puberty toward the “male” setting, I wound up spending the last hour of the party hanging with Amy and George, a Nashville bat who was apparently the only person of his species in our dorm, maybe at the university. He had no eyes, and sensed things by echolocation. His family had moved to North Carolina a couple of years after the Divergence. He had a good sense of humor and we shared several interests; it was nice, too, to talk with someone who didn’t treat me like a kid, like too many of the Raleigh rabbits I’d met in the last couple of days.

Classes started the next day. Amy, George and I had compared schedules; I shared one class with each of them, English 101 with Amy and Biology 101 with George. We walked together to breakfast and then George and I walked together to Biology.

Dr. Wilson was a Cary hyena, not as tall and massive as Radhika (most older Cary hyena women weren’t as big as the younger women who’d gone through puberty after the Divergence) but taller and broader-shouldered than the average Raleigh rabbit of either sex. She spent little time going over the syllabus and other administrative details, but got straight into lecturing on different types of single-celled organisms. I’d gotten to class too late to talk to anyone beforehand, but after class I introduced myself to some of the girls I’d been sitting near. All were too busy to do much more than tell me their names before they had to go to their next class, and one was too rude to do even that.

I had Political Science next, with Dr. Ashton, a male Raleigh rabbit who used a wheelchair, then lunch. I didn’t see anyone I knew when I walked into the dining hall, so I found a table with more girls than boys (that wasn’t hard) and asked if I could join them. They were polite enough to let me sit there, but didn’t include me in their conversation. I watched and listened and learned a few things. I knew what flirtation looked like; I may have been asexual but I’d spent plenty of time around horny teenage Lincoln bison. But the thing where a girl leans over so her ears brush the boy’s ears was new to me. Was I going to be the brush-er or the brush-ee?

Amy came in while I was partway through lunch, and we waved to each other, but she didn’t try to sit near me. There wasn’t any more room at the table by then. I joined her after I finished eating and walked to English from there; we got there early enough that I could talk to a few people before class started. Radhika and Rob were also in that section of English, taught by Ms. Allen, a Durham bull. Durham bulls look a lot like Lincoln bison, but they’re generally taller and skinnier; Ms. Allen didn’t have horns but she had the distinctive facial features of a bull. (I wasn’t sure why they named the whole neospecies “bulls” when that’s a sex-specific name for male cattle, elephants and so forth. I found out later it’s because before the Divergence, Durham had a sports team called the Bulls — I can’t remember what sport they played. Of course almost all sports are local now, so most of the big city-based teams that played teams from other cities are all gone.)

Amy had somewhere else she wanted to go, so I walked with Rob back to our dorm, where I worked on homework until Amy got back and for a while longer. Except for brief greetings when she came in we were silent until near bedtime.

“Is it okay if I ask you something?” I asked, looking up from my biology textbook.

“Maybe,” she said. “What is it?”

“If you identify as female... does that mean that when you’re, um, — I think you said ‘in heat’? — that you’re attracted to other hermaphrodites who identify as male? Or...?”

She flushed, and for a moment I thought she was going to refuse to answer. “No. When we’re in heat we aren’t attracted to other people — we just want our flowers pollinated.” At first I thought that was a weird euphemism, but then she explained that Athens magnolias actually grow flowers for a few days each year, and they lounge around outdoors while insects and hummingbirds come along and pollinate them. “At least, if you’re old enough. My parents always made me stay indoors all during the blooming so I wouldn’t get pregnant. Even after scientists developed birth control pills that worked for us, they still made me stay indoors just in case.”

“Huh. So even when you’re — in heat, you aren’t attracted to other people?”

“No... we’re asexual, not aromantic. We can fall in love like people of other species, we’re just not obsessed with their bodies. I —” She broke off, and I didn’t press her. After a minute or two of silence I said:

“I’m scared. Of turning into a girl, or even a boy. I’ve done all the research, I have all the facts, but I still have no idea what it’s going to feel like. Looking at Rob and Sarah, and the way they hang onto Rico... I envy them and I’m scared of becoming like them. Does that make sense?”

“I guess. Why’d you come here, though, if you were afraid of — all that?”

“It... seemed like an important part of life. Something I should experience. And now — well, it’s too late to back out. Even if I got on a train to Nebraska tomorrow, I’ve still been exposed to enough Raleigh rabbit pheromones that I’m going to go through puberty one way or another.”

“I think you’ll do fine. Almost everybody goes through it, and it’s rough for some people, but... I think you’ll have an advantage, being more mature. You’ve done all the research, like you said.”

“Yeah. I hope it’s enough.”

By the end of my first week in college, I’d made the acquaintance of several dozen people and started to become good friends with a few. Unfortunately, most of those were foreigners; the only Raleigh rabbit I was really friends with was Rob, and that perforce meant spending time with Rico as well as Sarah. (Back in Hebron we called anybody who wasn’t a Lincoln bison — such as me — a “foreigner”, even if they were native to Hebron and just happened to be in Omaha or Kansas City on Valentine’s Day. That wasn’t the custom in Raleigh, which was a lot more cosmopolitan, but I found myself thinking of non-rabbits as “foreigners.” I tried not to say it out loud.)

Saturday after the first week of classes, Amy and I joined Sarah, Rob, and Rico on a trip to see more of the city. Rico was the only one of us who had a car; Sarah sat up front with him and the rest of us squeezed into the back. With new post-Divergence safety regulations that forbid manually operated cars, and the increasing fuel costs, not as many people can afford to own and operate cars; there aren’t a lot of cheap used cars around for young people to get started with like there were when Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler were growing up. I gathered that Rico’s family was tolerably well off.

He showed us the capitol, the cathedral, the convention center, and some historic buildings. I remembered some of them from when I was a kid, but most of it was new to me. Finally we stopped at a restaurant near a mall on the outskirts of the city, and then went to the mall itself.

Amy, Rob and Sarah wanted to shop for clothes. Rico looked down at me and said: “You want to go with them, kid, or hang with me? I’m going by the GameStop first, not sure where to after that.”

I was torn. I didn’t really want to go clothes-shopping; I’d always worn fairly simple boys' clothes and let Aunt Ellen do most of the shopping for me. But I didn’t want to spend hours one-on-one with Rico; that might seal my fate as a girl. And even if I didn’t care what sex I was, I wasn’t keen on spending more time with Rico, period. “I’ll go with them,” I said, and Amy looked surprised.

“Suit yourself,” Rico said, and kissed Rob and Sarah. “Give me a call when y’all are done.”

I learned more about girls' clothes in the next few hours than I’d learned in all my previous Internet research. I found out that Rob needed two different size bras for her upper and lower breasts, for instance; Amy looked as bemused at that as I did. She wouldn’t need a bra until and unless she got pregnant; Athens magnolias don’t develop breasts until they start lactating. Sarah tried on and bought a dress that had a high neckline, but two little peepholes, one between each pair of breasts; Rob preferred more modest garments. Sarah persuaded Amy to try on a dress with a low neckline, but she didn’t buy it, saying it looked silly without breasts to fill it out.

They persuaded me to try on a child-size skirt, but I declined to buy it. “I still don’t know if I’m going to be a girl; if I turn out to be a boy, this would be a waste of money.”

“Not necessarily,” Rob said. “Some boys wear skirts. But I guess it might not fit you for very long.”

“I hope so.” I didn’t know if I’d finish growing up once I hit puberty, or if my growth was permanently stunted by not starting puberty at the right age. My pediatrician back in Hebron had done some research and said it was anybody’s guess. That reminded me I needed to find a local doctor, somebody who knew Raleigh rabbit biology.

After visiting a shoe store and a jewelry store (Rob bought a pair of shoes; the others didn’t buy anything), we met up with Rico at the food court, where he was drinking a smoothie and playing a game on his tablet. Sarah and Rob sat down on either side of him and Amy and I sat across the table.

“You girls find anything good?” he asked.

“We’ll show you later,” Sarah said, and whispered something in his ear. He smiled.

“What about you?” I asked.

“Last Dragon to Avondale,” he said, holding up his tablet. “There are these dragons that live in the subway tunnels, and people ride them, but if you don’t treat them right they’ll eat passengers and driver both. You buy anything, kid?”

I was sick of him calling me “kid.” “No, I tried on some things but I didn’t want to waste money on stuff that probably won’t fit me when I’ve grown some more.”

“That’s good sense.”

We returned to campus, and Rico walked with us back to Alexander Hall, though he didn’t live there. I saw him go into the stairwell with Sarah and Rob as Amy and I turned to go down the hall to our room.

Sunday morning, I got up early and showered before going to chapel. I examined myself carefully before I turned on the water in the shower. Was there a little puffiness behind my nipples or was I imagining it? Being a girl wouldn’t be too bad, I decided; I’d mostly enjoyed hanging out with the girls yesterday. Except for the parts involving Rico. Why did Sarah and Rob like him so much? Or did they love him? What was that about, anyway? Some of the stuff I’d read suggested that sex made you like people you wouldn’t like otherwise. Other sources seemed to say that it made you like one of your friends a lot more than all the others. It was pretty confusing, especially when some of it was pre-Divergence stuff that might not apply anymore, or might apply to other neospecies but not to Raleigh rabbits.

Radhika was the only one of my new friends I saw at chapel. We chatted for a few minutes after the service, and then walked to the library together; both of us had some research to do for different classes.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked her.

“I had two boyfriends in high school, at different times. I broke up with the last one, Miguel, a few months ago... he was too clingy.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I had a vague idea what “clingy” meant from looking at some of the teen couples back in Hebron, and I was pretty sure some people would describe Sarah and Rob as clingy, but Rico didn’t seem to mind. She continued after a brief pause:

“Here, I’ve met several boys like me, and I asked Paul out. We went to dinner last night; I think we’ll go out again.”

“How do you know? I mean, how did you know you wanted to go out with him, and not one of the other Cary hyenas you’ve met here?”

“He’s smart,” she said; “he’s on a full academic scholarship. And we both like a lot of the same movies. And he is just a little taller than you — very cute, just the right size to sit in my lap. Next date, or no later than the one after that.” She smiled.

All the male Cary hyenas I’d seen were shorter than the girls, except for one librarian who’d been an adult at the time of the Divergence, but most of them were taller than me. If this was the Paul who sat in front of me in Political Science, he was just an inch or so taller than me, more than a foot shorter than Radhika.

We parted when we got to the library, and went in different directions to do our research.

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