“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.”

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.)

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