The envelope was hand-addressed in my dad’s handwriting, which got my hopes up even though he deadnamed me, but inside there was no handwritten or even printed letter.

Mom and I talked on the phone again a couple of nights later, more about my gender identity and sexual orientation. She’d apparently been talking with Mrs. Ramsey during her lunch breaks about what Episcopalians thought about LGBT+ people, and she was a little less gobsmacked about it after having a couple of days to think about it, but was still having a lot of trouble with the idea. Not that she was completely reconciled to the idea of my being trans, either, but she was desperate not to do or say anything that would push me to cut contact again. I sent her a photo Meredith had taken of me and Jada during the study group meeting at Lily’s house, thus dropping the other, smaller bombshell — that Jada was black. She didn’t say anything about it; she wasn’t as racist as you might expect from someone of her age and background, but I’m pretty sure she had some work to do to process that, too. I still didn’t say anything about snuggling with Britt.

Saturday, I worked on weekend homework in the morning, then on job applications and chores for a while. In the evening after work, Jada came to pick me up and we went out to supper at an Italian place downtown that I’d often eaten at with Mom and Dad and Nathan. Kissing was better when both of us had human lips and tongues. And afterward, we venned each other into tiny dragon-girls. I taught her how to fly, and we flew around the neighborhood until a few minutes after sunset, then perched in one of the old oak trees overlooking the library parking lot and cuddled for a while.

We talked about a lot of things that night, and I told her more about my history — how I’d figured out I was trans, and venned into a girl a few times with Meredith, and got caught, and hid with Meredith and Sophia until I was eighteen. She told me how she and her sister had ended up living with her grandmother, but she’s asked me not to talk about it in my memoir, so I’ll honor her wishes.

Afterward, we had a little trouble changing back. Jada plucked a leaf from the tree, and we got in line and waited, but the next couple who got in line didn’t see us standing there and almost stepped on us before we yelled at them, at which they apologized profusely. Once we got to the head of the line, Jada looked up at the display expectantly and waited.

“Huh,” she said. “I read that if you’re too short to reach the regular interface, it would shrink down to your eye level so you could.”

“That’s only the inside interface,” said one of the guys in line behind us. “I don’t know why they made the inside interface adapt to shrunken people and not the outside, but oh well. You want me to start up the machine for you?”

“Let me try this first,” Jada called back, and fluttered up into the air. She tried to hover in front of the interface and feed in the leaf, but our wings weren’t really built like hummingbirds’, and our fluttering was a bit chaotic, such that it was impossible to hover in one place or go in a straight line for very long.

“Yeah, I guess we could use your help,” Jada said. Jada held up the leaf and the guy bemusedly bent down and took it from her, then started the machine and fed it into the slot.

“How long?”

“A year,” Jada said.

“Okay.” The guy pressed the sun button and waited while Jada and I trotted into either booth, calling “Thank you” over our shoulders just before the doors closed on us. We soon had each other changed back into our everyday bodies, and she took me back to the Ramseys’ house.

* * *

Caleb came home from UNC Greensboro that weekend, and the house got more crowded for the next few months. He was planning to split the rent on a house not far from campus with three other guys; they had already made arrangements to move in after the current renters moved out later in the summer, and he told me I was welcome to have his room after he moved most of his stuff out. “I can sleep on the sofa bed when I come to stay a few days at Thanksgiving and Christmas and things like that,” he said. I thanked him fervently.

A few days later, when I came home from school, Mr. Ramsey told me I’d gotten something in the mail. The envelope was hand-addressed in my dad’s handwriting, which got my hopes up even though he deadnamed me, but inside there was no handwritten or even printed letter. There was a check, and photocopies of a couple of bank statements showing how much there’d been in my old bank account when Dad had closed it and transferred the money into his and Mom’s account. That was it. I was glad to have the money, so I could start contributing more to the household, but at the moment I felt like I would have rather had a letter from Dad. Or any other kind of communication that wasn’t so impersonal as a check and financial documents.

I was gradually getting used to the way the Ramseys did things, all the little differences between one household and another that you don’t think about until you spend an extensive time living with someone else. I’d noticed some differences when I’d been living with them secretly, but a lot more differences jumped out now that I was helping with the cooking and cleaning, and eating family meals with them. They routinely cooked brown rice rather than white, for instance, and when they cooked meat or eggs, they usually greased the pan with canola oil rather than Pam spray like my mom used. They weren’t as concerned about washing whites separately from colored fabrics, except for a few formal clothes. I realized that most of their clothes had been through the Venn machine at some point, being tailored to fit their new bodies, and the colors on venned clothes never run.

Instead of each person having a set of chores they were responsible for all the time, everybody did some of everything — cooking, cleaning, taking out the trash, yard work, grocery shopping, basic car maintenance — on a rotating schedule. They’d worked me into the schedule within the first couple of days, and before long I was helping with pretty much everything. I even helped out a little with Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey’s business, helping get things ready to mail out to people who’d bought them.

In early May, I buckled down to working on term papers, letting Sophia venn me into a living doll during the first weekend in May so I could sleep less and spend more time researching and writing. Jada and I got together after she got off work the second Saturday in May; she split me into two living dolls, then venned the larger one into a human girl so my human self could go on a date with her, while my doll self went home and worked on term papers.

On Sunday, the human part of me went to church and ate out with the Ramseys and some friends from their church while the doll part stayed home and continued to write. During the next few days, my human self went to school while the doll self stayed home, studied, and wrote term papers. We didn’t merge back until the following Thursday evening when Meredith and both of myselves stopped at the library on the way home from Lily’s house; I had some tests on Friday that I wanted the benefit of both selves’ studying for.

Merging five days’ worth of memories was more dizzying than merging nine hours’ worth. I realized that in doll form, my intense study habits from the fourteen months as a dragon statue had come back to a large extent; that self had spent very little time relaxing, either recreational reading or fuguing out, figuring she could get the benefit of my human self’s better psychological balance when we merged. She did, but the cost was that I was rather subdued and un-talkative for the rest of that evening, despite the Ramseys’ questions about how splitting and merging felt. Sophia was planning to do some splitting experiments herself at some point, but she didn’t want to complicate her doll experiment with that, so she’d decided to stay a doll as much as possible for a full year — until the end of the summer after her junior year — only changing back temporarily for holiday meals. “Next year I’m going to split in two for a week or two at a time and merge back before quizzes and tests,” she told me.

Taking those tests was a slightly surreal experience at times, as some questions might trigger contradictory proprioceptive memories of having two completely different bodies while studying the material. But not so much that I couldn’t answer the questions fairly promptly.

That had worked well enough that I let Sophia split me into a human and a doll again the next day, planning to have the doll self focus on studying for finals for the next couple of weeks — but not at the expense of everything else, I resolved. My human self spent that Saturday evening with Jada and Britt at Britt’s house snuggling and watching anime. I still hadn’t been to Jada’s house.

I got my new driver’s license in the mail that week. Even though I wouldn’t do much driving for a good while after that, since I didn’t have a car and the friends who gave me rides mostly preferred to drive their own cars, it felt really good to see my girl photo, my real name, and the correct gender marker on my license.

Then, Tuesday evening of the week before finals, Sophia came home from work and told me, “We’ve got an opening!”

“What?” I said (my human self, I mean, who was washing up after supper when Sophia walked in; my doll self was in Sophia’s room reading). “You mean Metamorphoses is hiring?”

“Yeah! You should totally apply!”

“I’ll be there first thing tomorrow. Remind me what time they open?”

“Nine o’clock — but we’ll be at school... Oh.”

“Right.” We went down the hall to Sophia’s room and told my doll self about the job opening.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll go in and apply tomorrow while you’re at school.”

“You can use me as a reference,” Sophia said enthusiastically. “Mr. Paget will want to know what kinds of things you’ve venned into in the past and what you’d be comfortable venning into for work, as well as your regular work experience...”

* * *

Wednesday morning, Meredith drove Sophia and my human self to school, dropping off my doll self at Metamorphoses on the way. It was still over an hour before the restaurant opened. I sat on one of the benches out front, reading, until the first employees arrived to open up.

“Good morning,” said a short, mousy (literally) girl, her ears and tail twitching. “We don’t open for another half hour.”

“That’s okay, I’m here to apply for a job and my ride had to drop me off early.”

“Oh, that’s fine. I’ll let Mr. Paget know when he gets here. Meanwhile you can sit inside if you like.”

“Thanks.”

So I sat and chatted with the mouse-girl, who introduced herself as Jill, while she and a couple of other co-workers got the restaurant ready to open. After a few minutes, feeling uncomfortable sitting around while they worked, I pitched in, wrapping sets of silverware in napkins and so forth, which was how Mr. Paget found me when he arrived.

Mr. Paget, that particular day, was a tall, broad-shouldered man with auburn fur and cat-like ears and whiskers, but no tail. He wore a navy blue business suit, and greeted each of the employees by name until he came to me.

“Sophia?” he asked tentatively. “Isn’t this a school day?”

“This is Sophia’s friend Lauren,” Jill put in. “She’s here to apply for the job.”

“Already making yourself useful, I see,” he said approvingly. “Let’s meet in my office in about fifteen minutes. I have a couple of things to do first.”

He asked me a lot about my venning history, as Sophia had told me to expect. I listed pretty much everything I’d ever venned into, and told him I was comfortable with all sorts of bodies as long as they were feminine or at least androgynous.

“A dragon-girl, hmm? I don’t have many staff who like venning into reptilian forms. Would you mind meeting me at the library in a little while and letting me see your history?”

“In principle, I don’t mind, but we’d have to wait until after school and meet up with my other self. I’m split in two right now, and I’m the secondary body, so if I go in the Venn machine I’ll vanish and my other self will suddenly get all my memories for the last few days, which could be distracting.”

“Tell me more about splitting. I’ve heard about it, but haven’t tried it yet.”

So I told him how it worked, how it felt, and what I’d used it for so far, being rather vague about my dates with Jada and Britt.

“That’s intriguing,” he said. “I’ll have to try that sometime. Anyway, what hours would you be available?”

“Pretty much any time you’re open, I think? My other self and I were planning to re-merge the night before our final exams, but we can split in two again right after we merge, so one of us could work any time while the other’s in school. The only constraint might be when one of the Ramseys could give us a ride, if the weather’s too bad to walk this far.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were still in school. You’ll be graduating in a couple of weeks, I suppose?” I’d told him I was eighteen when he asked my age near the beginning of the interview.

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you have immediate plans to go to college?”

“I’m planning to work and save money for at least a year before I start college. I hope I’ll be able to start in the fall of next year.”

“I’ll have to ask a lawyer to be sure, but I don’t think I can have one of your selves working here while the other one is in high school. It might be different since you’re over eighteen. But that will only be an issue for a couple more weeks.”

“Then I’ve got the job?” I asked, gobsmacked after so many weeks of looking without finding anything.

“Not quite,” he said. “You’re the best candidate I’ve seen yet based on your venning history, although your work history is kind of short. I’ll talk to your references and interview a few more people, and call you back in a couple of days. I’d like to hire someone by Friday afternoon so they can work Saturday and Sunday mornings — will you be available then?”

“Of course.”

My new novel, The Translator in Spite of Themself, is available in epub format from Smashwords and in epub, mobi, and pdf formats from itch.io.

My other free stories can be found at:

• Scribblehub
• DeviantArt
• Shifti
• TGStorytime
• Fictionmania
• Archive of Our Own

I also have several ebooks for sale, most of whose contents aren't available elsewhere for free. Smashwords pays its authors higher royalties than Amazon. itch.io's pay structure is hard to compare with the other two, but seems roughly in the same ballpark.

• Smashwords
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