“Let’s try it,” Ms. Paget said. “Joy and I are going to be chibis on Thursday, and I’d like to get some other volunteers to do the same. You don’t have to wear schoolgirl uniforms or anything; you can be chibi mice or chibi dragons or whatever, even chibi robots,” (nodding toward Todd, who was in one of his less humanoid robot forms today). “If it works out, we might make it a regular thing. Chibi Thursdays. Come in anime cosplay, or better yet venned into a chibi form, and get 10% off...”

Sorry for the late post. Since I'm over a week behind, I'm posting two chapters at once. I've scheduled all the chapters in advance to appear weekly on Scribblehub, so if you don't see the new chapter here when you expect it, check there.

Mr. Paget — or Ms. Paget, as she usually was around this time — encouraged the employees to venn into holiday-appropriate forms, like the many bunny-morphs I’d seen around Easter or the turkey-girl Jill had mentioned being for Thanksgiving, but lately she’d started doing other special events and promotions, too. One of her ideas that didn’t work out so great around this time was Chibi Thursdays. I was basically familiar with chibi art by that time due to watching a fair bit of anime with Jada and Britt, but some of the other staff were having trouble with the concept as Ms. Paget showed some of us a slideshow early one morning before the restaurant opened.

“Joy tells me she has some experience venning her friends into chibi forms,” Ms. Paget said, indicating an anime girl with pink hair who waved cheerily to the rest of us. She’d been hired not long after me. “Here’s where she venned me into a chibi form yesterday...” The slides of chibi art from manga and anime gave way to a photo of a freakily adorable little girl in a sailor fuku with a huge round head and huge eyes relative to her head, posing for the camera with the library in the background. Seeing someone with chibi proportions in real life was kind of unsettling, and I wondered if it might be entirely unsettling for people who weren’t familiar with chibi art.

“Your arms look pretty short,” Jill pointed out. “How are we supposed to carry trays like that?”

“And on short legs like that we’d have to trot around twice as fast and get tired out twice as fast,” Anna said.

“The arms are stronger than they look,” Joy said. “And you’ll have a lot of energy in that form, like a little kid.”

“A toddler will run you ragged for a few hours, and then collapse and nap for an hour or two,” Jill said. “I don’t know if an adult with a body like a toddler’s could work an eight-hour shift, much less twelve.”

“Let’s try it,” Ms. Paget said. “Joy and I are going to be chibis on Thursday, and I’d like to get some other volunteers to do the same. You don’t have to wear schoolgirl uniforms or anything; you can be chibi mice or chibi dragons or whatever, even chibi robots,” (nodding toward Todd, who was in one of his less humanoid robot forms today). “If it works out, we might make it a regular thing. Chibi Thursdays. Come in anime cosplay, or better yet venned into a chibi form, and get 10% off...”

“I’ll try it,” I said. It looked cute, if potentially impractical, and I didn’t think Ms. Paget would stick to it for long if it didn’t work well. So the following Thursday, I and several other people on the morning shift met up with Joy at the library and let her venn us into chibi versions of our usual work bodies. I got Jill to take a photo of me with my phone, and sent it to my friends. I got back squeeing responses from Meredith, Jada and Lily in the next few hours, and Jada asked if she could post my chibi photo on Facebook. I said sure, just mention Chibi Thursday at Metamorphoses.

It sort of worked, in the sense that we got a fair number of anime and manga fans coming in on Thursday afternoons and evenings for the next couple of weeks, but not so well because, as Jill and Anna had noted, chibi forms weren’t all that practical for serving and busing tables. We were stronger than we looked, true, but we still weren’t as strong as our usual full-size, more sensibly proportioned selves and tired out more quickly. After a couple of Thursdays where several of us had to take a break to go venn into a more practical shape, Ms. Paget cut it back to having just the greeter be in chibi form, and a few weeks after that she quietly dropped it.

Before that, we had the Fourth of July. Ms. Paget was an Uncle Sam, male for the first time in weeks, though he’d had to buy the costume at a store and venn into a body that would fit it. There were a couple of bald eagle morphs, a cyborg George Washington (Todd), and several furries with red, white and blue fur (but never in the stars and stripes pattern of an American flag; just getting the colors the right shades of red, white and blue at the same time was tricky enough, and a lot of people couldn’t manage it). Anna tried to get the scales of my dragon body to be red, white and blue, but the white was slightly silvery and the red a bit pink.

There were other promotions that were more successful: Cyborg Mondays and Furry Fridays. I preferred scaly forms, but I didn’t mind venning into a furry of some sort when I had a shift scheduled on Fridays. Ms. Paget gave a discount to customers who came in venned into cyborgs or furries on those days, as well.

I was still snuggling with little Jada every night, and seeing big Jada and Britt at least once a week. One afternoon, after hanging out with Britt at her house for an hour or so, I left little Jada with her while big Jada and I went to see a movie, then went for a walk around downtown Catesville, doing a little shopping and a lot of people-watching.

Carmen had only been home with their sister briefly before moving into an off-campus house in Greensboro with Serena and Bailey, and they’d extended an open invitation to come visit sometime that summer, but so far Meredith and I were having trouble making our work schedules line up with Carmen’s. We finally managed it toward the end of July, spending the better part of a day with them, playing video games at their apartment and going to an escape room where the employees were venned into monsters, which you had to “trick” in certain ways to get out.

I had my second therapy visit a few days after that. Ms. Ferreira and I talked mainly about my anxiety issues this time, tabling my family stuff for the next visit.

One morning in July, a month after Jada had split in two, I woke up and plushie Jada was gone. I had a series of texts waiting for me saying Jada had woken up early in the morning with an influx of memories and wanted to get together to talk about it as soon as we could. “Right after work,” I texted back.

Jada took “right after work” seriously. She was there to pick me up from work when I got off. I texted the Ramseys to tell them I wouldn’t be home for supper, and Jada and I went to eat at the Mexican place on Catesville Road.

“So what was it like, merging all those memories?” I asked. “The most I’ve ever merged was about two weeks’ worth, and those experiences weren’t nearly as divergent.”

“It was a trip,” Jada said. “Being your plushie was wonderful. I want to do it again. Snuggling with you wasn’t as good as making out when we have organic bodies,” she added, bringing a warmth to my cheeks that hopefully didn’t show through the scales, “but it was a lot better than not seeing you for days at a time.”

“You need to calm down and think before you do anything about that,” I said. “I’ve heard about how people can get addicted to almost any form if they stay that way long enough and people treat them nicely while they’re like that. I won’t venn you into a plushie again for at least... um, let’s say a week. And I hope Britt won’t, either — I’ll talk to her about it.”

I hadn’t exactly gotten addicted to being a dragon statue, but it hadn’t been long before I was used to it and didn’t miss being human nearly as much as I’d expected. And I hadn’t gotten nearly as much affection as a statue as Jada had as a plushie. I was pretty sure plushies had a more sensitive “skin” than animate ceramic statues, too.

“Would you say the memories of being a plushie are more vivid than the memories of being human for the last month?” I added after chewing a mouthful of food.

“Maybe? Probably not. Not much really stands out from being a plushie, except that time you and Meredith took me with you to see your friends in Greensboro. But it was a lot nicer overall. No highs like the times we made out on our dates, but no lows like the terrible day at work I had a couple of days ago.”

“After you go to college, you’ll be able to get a more fulfilling job than working the cash register at Food Lion,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m not giving that up. I just want to be your plushie at the same time.”

“Maybe later,” I said with a smile. “For now, let’s do some stuff that a plushie can’t do.”

“I like the sound of that,” she replied with a lascivious wink.

* * *

By this time, I had already heard back from the colleges I’d applied to back in April, and was beginning to hear back from some of the ones I’d applied to after graduation, as well as a couple of scholarships and grants. After I’d gotten the job at Metamorphoses, something to put on the applications that would make me look more creditworthy, I’d started applying for loans as well, though I didn’t want to rely entirely on loans if I could help it. So far I’d been accepted to Mynatt Community College, East Carolina University, and Winston-Salem University, and I was strongly leaning toward East Carolina if I could get enough scholarship and grant money. So far, I’d been turned down for two scholarships and one grant, and gotten another one that would just cover textbooks. I’d done the math on how much I’d be able to save over the next year, and the only place it would cover tuition without more grants or scholarships would be Mynatt Community College.

In late July, the Ramseys spent a long weekend visiting their relatives in Georgia who’d visited them last Thanksgiving. They asked me not to have guests over while they were gone, so although Jada suggested we use the opportunity for a rare bit of privacy that weekend, I regretfully refused. “They’ve been too good to me,” I said, “taking me in and helping me with my ID change and charging me a ridiculously low rent. I want to respect their wishes.”

So instead, Saturday evening after work, Britt, Jada and I met at the library. Britt venned me and Jada into tiny forms, a couple of inches high, and took us home in an open shoebox lined with an old pillowcase. Once we got to her house, we sat on her lap, chatted with her and watched a couple of movies on her laptop. When she went to bed, she put us back in the shoebox and set it on her dresser. Jada and I made love for the first time and slept blissfully tangled up in each other. The next morning, Britt took us back to the Venn machine to venn each other into our everyday bodies before we had to go to work.

I’d been meeting up with Mom every week or two and talking to her on the phone at least once a week, often twice. I still hadn’t seen Dad since that evening at the church back in April, and I hadn’t seen much of Nathan since he’d moved into a house in Mars Hill with several other guys, though he’d come to visit Mom and Dad (and me) not long after I graduated.

Mom came by the Ramseys’ to see me one evening when Dad was working late. It was three or four days after Jada’s plushie venn expired, a couple of hours after I’d gotten off work.

“I wanted to tell you in person,” she said; “we’ve found a house. And it’s closer to your father’s office than we were thinking we could afford. Not far from downtown Durham. A lot of people are leaving Durham lately, since so many people have venned into healthier bodies and several of Durham’s major employers are hospitals and clinics. I hear Duke is converting some of its hospital space to apartments and offices.”

“So you’ll be living an hour and a half from here.”

“Yes. We’ll be moving as soon as we can sell our house here. We’ve got a buyer lined up, but there are things that could still go wrong between now and the closing, which should be in a couple of weeks if all goes well.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t have a job in Durham yet, though I’ve applied to a number of places,” she said. “So until I find one, I could come back here to see you on some days when I don’t have interviews.”

“But I can’t come to see you. It wouldn’t be reasonable to ask the Ramseys or one of my friends to drive me that far.”

“I’m sorry. But that long commute is really doing your father in. I’ve tried to talk him into venning for his health — what Erin did for me has worked wonders — but he won’t hear of it.”

I shook my head in amazement at Dad’s stubbornness. “I’ll miss seeing you, Mom. Let’s talk on the phone more often to make up for it.”

“Yes, let’s do that. I’ll keep working on him, Lauren. I hope he’ll come around soon. Maybe by Thanksgiving we can all be together.”

“I hope so, too.”

* * *

At the beginning of August, Caleb moved into a house in Greensboro with his friends, and turned over his bedroom to me. He took his bed and other furniture with him, so Britt and I borrowed her dad’s truck and went shopping. I bought a futon at a furniture store in Catesville and a small bookshelf and chest of drawers at the PTA thrift store. Then I started moving in the boxes of books from my bedroom at Mom and Dad’s house, which we’d stashed in various places around the house (mostly in the storage room and garage) after I got them back.

Sleeping in my own bedroom behind a closed door for the first time since I’d run away from home was utterly sublime. I gradually started decorating the bare walls, trying not to spend too much so I could save as much for college as possible. Jada had split in two again by then, and little plushie Jada advised me about where to hang the pictures and posters that big Jada and I had bought at thrift stores on our dates. I tried to put them where Caleb had already messed up the wall with his tacks and tape.

After some mild confusion when I talked about the two Jadas with Britt or Meredith, one night when we were snuggling but hadn’t fallen asleep yet, triceratops Jada said she wanted me to call her something else, and let her big self who was about to go off to college keep using their first name.

“What do you want me to call you?”

“Make up something cute,” she said. “Like a little girl who’s just gotten a triceratops plushie for Christmas.”

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I don’t want to start treating you like just a toy rather than my girlfriend. Part of my girlfriend. I can help you brainstorm new names, but you need to be the one to decide.”

So we talked about names for a while, and she finally decided on using her middle name, Desiree (with no acute accent). She then wanted to know my middle name, which I’d somehow never told her, so I did.

“Lydia’s a sweet name,” she said. “Kind of old-fashioned, but not in a prim and prissy way.”

Not long after that, Britt, Jada and I got together for our last date before Jada went off to college. We drove to Greensboro for an early dinner and then went to a concert by Bulletproof Sombrero at the Blind Tiger. It was the first concert I’d ever been to that wasn’t some obscure Christian band playing at a church, and I was super excited even while I was melancholy about Jada going off to college three hours away. The band had a lot of energy, dancing on stage in a silly way that showed they didn’t take themselves too seriously, and I only realized afterward how much I’d danced in unconscious response to the music when I felt how exhausted my muscles were. Work the next day would be hell, but it was worth it.

On the drive home, Jada asked me, “Would you consider splitting for a month and coming to college with me as a plushie?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I wish you’d asked me earlier so I could think about it longer. Are you sure you’d want me to be a plushie, though? You’ll want to make a good impression on your roommate, whoever she is, and she might think you’re childish if you come to college with a plushie dragon or whatever.”

“I don’t care what she thinks,” she said. “And she’d find out you’re my venned girlfriend sooner or later.”

“That could be a problem,” I said. “I’d have to keep a low profile and pretend to be inanimate until you get to know your roommate and know she’s not gonna rat you out to the housing administration for having an unauthorized third roommate.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Well, let me know — anytime in the next couple of days.”

“Anyway, what I was going to say was that you could venn me into an anime-style figurine or something. She’d know you’re a weeb, but she’s gonna find that out pretty soon anyway, and it wouldn’t make a bad first impression like a plushie might.”

“But I couldn’t snuggle a hard plastic figurine. That would be the main point of bringing part of you with me; if I just want to talk with you, I can call you on the phone.”

“Besides,” Britt said, “what if Jada’s roommate is into anime too and she asks what show you’re from?”

“Okay,” I said. “If you don’t mind the risk of looking childish in front of your roommate, let’s meet up at the library after work tomorrow. I don’t want to stay out any later tonight while we go through all that trial and error we went through splitting you into a plushie and a human. Come to think of it, I’ll try to get Sophia to split me. She’s a lot better at making animate dolls than any of us.”

* * *

So the following day after work, Jada, Sophia and I met up at the library. Desiree came with me. Sophia venned me into two animate dragon plushies of different sizes, giving me sight, hearing, speech and mobility on the first try. That venn was for a month, so if for some reason Jada couldn’t bring me home to merge with my other self and re-split within a month, the plushie would vanish and my selves would merge. I used a Venn timer app to figure out when the moon would return to the same phase and the Venn would expire, and was reassured it would be early in the morning a month later — a little earlier than I would normally wake up to get ready for work, assuming I was working that day, but not so early that waking up from a memory merge would be a disaster for my sleep schedule, or so late that the sudden memory merge would distract me while I was working.

Then after waiting in line again, Jada venned my larger plushie self into my everyday dragon-girl body. Jada and Desiree merged, and then I re-split them using forms from their history. We kissed goodnight, and my plushie self went home with Jada while Desiree went home with my dragon-girl self. I was finally going to see her home, I realized, though I wouldn’t really get to know her grandma and sister. I was supposed to pretend to be inanimate when other people were around until Jada was sure she could trust her roommate — something I was quite familiar with from my fourteen months as a statuette.

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