“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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