“Wake up! It’s Christmas morning! You just missed Santa Claus!” Mrs. Ramsey called out from the hallway.

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.

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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