Joel is eighteen, and just about to start college. But he hasn't gone through puberty yet because he grew up in isolation from others of his species. He's looking forward to growing up and developing a gender and a sexual orientation, though he's a bit apprehensive that he might be a girl; that could take some getting used to.
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". It begins about nine years after "Butterflies are the Gentlest" and two years before "Nora and the Nomads", but it has no characters in common with any of the earlier stories. I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
“And be sure to tell us as soon as you know how you’re changing,” Aunt Ellen said, an anxious look on her face.
“Of course.”
“And... if you develop into a girl, be sure to remember everything I told you.”
part 1 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". It begins about nine years after "Butterflies are the Gentlest" and two years before "Nora and the Nomads", but it has no characters in common with any of the earlier stories. I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
“Be careful,” Aunt Ellen said, hugging me tight. “And call or write us as soon as you get settled in, and at least once a week for a while after that.”
“I will,” I promised, and when she let go, I started to shake Uncle Tyler’s hand. He grabbed me in a hug instead, and I hugged him back, careful to avoid his horns.
“If you don’t want to talk to us at the same time every week, I understand,” he said, with a glance at Aunt Ellen. “But do keep in touch.”
“And be sure to tell us as soon as you know how you’re changing,” Aunt Ellen said, an anxious look on her face.
“Of course.”
“And... if you develop into a girl, be sure to remember everything I told you.”
“I will,” I said, my ears twitching with embarrassment. Just then there was an announcement over the loudspeaker:
“All aboard!”
“I’ve got to go. See you at Christmas!” And I gripped my cane and climbed the stairs to the train, pausing in the door to wave to Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler. They waved back, and even before I found a seat, the conductor was closing the door behind me.
I sat down between a family of Lincoln bison, probably mother and grandmother with two cute little kids, and a Chicago tripod who looked to be about my age. I guessed she was female from the way she was dressed, though with Chicago tripods it’s hard for an outsider to tell the sexes apart.
“Hi,” I said to them. “I’m Joel.”
“I’m Karen,” the tripod said. “I’m going to New Orleans — this is my second year at Tulane University. Where are you going?”
“I’m changing trains in New Orleans to go to Raleigh — this will be my first year at NC State. Are you from Chicago?”
“Originally, but my family moved to Minneapolis a few years after the Divergence. Um... is it okay if I ask what you are? I’ve never seen anyone like you.”
“I’m a Raleigh rabbit,” I said. “There aren’t many of us in the Midwest... I’m the only one in my town, or in all of Nebraska as far as I know.”
“Oh. So you’re going home, then?”
“Pretty much. I was born in Lincoln, but my family moved to Raleigh when I was a baby, and I lived there until the Divergence.” I hesitated; I liked her, but I wasn’t ready to talk about what happened next with a stranger.
The day of the Divergence, a lot of people lost control of their bodies while they were transforming, and were too much in shock right afterward to know what they were doing. There were tens of thousands of car crashes and dozens of plane crashes — that was one of the reasons we were riding a train instead of a plane like in the old days. And when we all changed, I was in the car with my parents. I was young enough that I don’t remember where we were going or why; probably something routine, or it would have stuck in my memory better. But when we were all paralyzed for a few seconds while our bodies changed, my dad lost control of the car and we veered across the divider line into an oncoming truck.
When I woke up in the hospital, I couldn’t remember what had happened just before I lost consciousness; I didn’t remember the transformation itself, or the crash. I was confused and frightened more by my changed body than by the fact that my right leg was in a cast and raised up with chains. The first thing I noticed was the thin grey fur on my arms; then I felt myself all over, under the hospital gown, and noticed the long tall ears sticking up through the bandages on my head, and the smooth absence where my penis and testicles had been.
I think I must have screamed. A nurse came running in and said, “Oh, good, honey, you’re awake.” I stared at her: she had fur and long ears like I’d felt on my own head.
“What happened to me?” I asked. “Where’s my mom and dad?”
“You were in a car accident,” she explained. “Do you not remember? You hurt your head, so you might forget some of what happened.”
“But why do I have fur? And why do you have fur, too, and those ears...?” I was assuming I must have lost my boy parts in the accident that injured my leg.
“We don’t know, honey. Lots of people changed earlier today — maybe everybody in the world. People around here got fur and long ears, and... and little boys and girls changed more, they don’t seem to be boys or girls anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
In reply she gently lifted up my gown to expose my crotch, and helped me prop up on my pillows so I could see.
“We don’t know why, but it seems like every boy or girl younger than about eleven or twelve lost their boy or girl parts. We hope they’ll grow back when you’re older, but we don’t know yet.”
“Oh. But where’s my mom and dad?”
“They were hurt in the car accident too.” Apparently telling me my parents were dead was above her pay-grade; she let the chaplain, who came around the next morning after the doctor had examined me, tell me about that. And he told me they’d been in touch with my aunt and uncle, who were coming to get me as soon as they could.
But travel was difficult in the first few days after the Divergence, with planes grounded and roads blocked with thousands of wrecked cars. It took Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler over a week to come get me; I had no visitors all that time, except for the nurses and doctors and the chaplain, who came to see me several times.
They never could completely fix my leg and hip; I still have a bad limp, and walk with a cane. It took me a long time to get over my parents' death, but I loved Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler, and was glad I hadn’t ended up in an orphanage.
I didn’t tell Karen any of that, but we shared stories of what it was like to be of a minority neospecies in a high school where most of the students were native to the local change-region. Seventy percent of the kids in Karen’s high school had been Minneapolis turtles; ninety-five percent of the kids in my school had been Lincoln bison, and almost all the rest were Omaha sheepdogs, except for me. I’d been asexual since the change, and probably wouldn’t have felt any attraction for people of other species even if I were still male, but I still thought of myself as a boy by default and mostly hung out with boys, who tended to share more of my interests than girls. But as my friends got older and got interested in girls, I felt left out of their conversations more and more.
“Man, that must have been rough. There were ten tripods in my school, but six of us were girls, and one of the guys was a real creep; I dated all three of the other guys at different times, but I broke up with the last one not long after graduation, since we were going to different colleges and I didn’t feel all that strongly about him. And then there was this xenophile, a St. Paul elk, who kept asking me out even after I’d told him I wasn’t interested...” She shook her head.
“There weren’t any xenophiles at my school,” I said. “Or at least none that were open about it.” Xenophilia was pretty rare as far as I knew, a lot rarer than being gay, but in a small town like Hebron xenophiles were even more likely to keep quiet about their predilections than gays. I’d been doing a lot of reading about sexual orientations and kinks in the last few months, as I was looking forward to finally entering puberty and wondering what sex and orientation I’d end up with. After a few moments' thought I asked: “Why didn’t you go to college in Chicago?”
She shrugged. “There are a fair number of us tripods in New Orleans — more than in Minneapolis, actually. There’s enough at Tulane and UNO for a decent dating pool. And I want to try living somewhere warm for a while. What about you? I’m guessing you’re looking forward to finally meeting some girls of your species?”
“Yeah,” I said, glancing away from her. “I can hardly wait.” I’d glossed over the fact that I was prepubescent and asexual; I’d just told her there weren’t any other people of my species at Thayer Central High. She probably thought all Raleigh rabbits were as short as me; I hadn’t grown an inch since I was twelve.
She shook her head. “Good luck. And don’t get so obsessed with girls that you fail your classes.”
“I hope not.” I had no idea what my sex drive was going to be like, but from what I’d read, mature Raleigh rabbits tended to have a stronger sex drive than the average old-style human.
Our conversation drifted to other, more innocuous topics, and then petered out. Karen took out a tablet and started reading, and after looking out the window at the passing countryside for a while I did the same.
Karen and I got out at New Orleans and said goodbye. I went to the nearby hotel where I’d reserved a room, and returned to the station the next morning to board the train that would take me to Atlanta. When I looked around the car, I saw (among people of a dozen neospecies, some of which I’d never heard of) three Raleigh rabbits, two women and a man. They were all a lot older than me, in their thirties or forties, but I sat down next to them and introduced myself.
“Hi, Joel, I’m Rachel,” said one of the women, who had lighter fur than mine, almost white. “Are you traveling by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going to NC State — as a freshman.”
“You don’t look old enough to be starting college,” the man said.
“I’m eighteen,” I said. “But I haven’t started puberty because I’ve lived in Nebraska since I was a child, and there weren’t any other rabbits around to trigger it.” Unconsciously I took a deep breath; it must have already started, though I couldn’t feel it yet, my body finally absorbing the pheromones of other Raleigh rabbits and starting to grow up.
“Oh! That must have been terrible,” said the other woman. “What were your parents thinking?”
“My parents died in a car crash,” I said, “and I was raised by my aunt and uncle. They’re Lincoln bison. I don’t blame them for not relocating to Raleigh when they adopted me, their jobs and all their friends were in Hebron. And it wasn’t that bad, I was able to make friends with some other kids even though I was different.” I wasn’t sure why I told her things right away that I hadn’t wanted to talk with Karen about; maybe she gave off a motherly vibe. It was a powerful experience, meeting people of my own kind for the first time in nine years.
“But still — to be going through puberty while you’re dealing with leaving home and living on your own for the first time... I can’t imagine how hard that will be. Here,” she said, pulling a card out of her purse, “call me if you’re having trouble and need to talk to someone.”
The card read “Terry Davenport — Counselor,” and had her contact information in smaller type; it was a Raleigh address.
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess the school has counselors too, though.”
“Yes, that might be more convenient. Still, if you don’t feel comfortable with whoever the school assigns you, feel free to call me.”
The man introduced himself then, as Jason Davenport.
“Were you changing trains in New Orleans or staying here for a while?”
“I had some business meetings in town, and my wives took a few days of vacation to join me,” he said. I nodded; I’d heard that a lot of Raleigh rabbits were polygamous, since the sex ratio wasn’t even. The odds were about seventy-thirty that I’d develop as a girl, but it depended a lot on who I hung out with. If a group of people who spent most of their time together had too many or too few of one sex, some of them would change; if I spent most of my time at college with girls, there was a decent chance I’d develop as a boy. I wasn’t sure how strongly I wanted that; I was used to wearing pants, but there was no reason I couldn’t keep doing that if I were a girl, and I’d long since gotten used to not having a penis. Either a penis or a vagina would have to be a big improvement on my nerveless little pee-hole.
Rachel and Jason started watching a movie on her tablet, but I kept talking with Terry for a while; she asked me more questions about growing up in isolation from others of my species, and gave me some advice about dating.
“Don’t,” she said. “Not for a while after your body settles down in your new sex, at least. Maybe spring semester, or next fall might be even better. I know you’re eighteen, but if you’re like most people going through puberty, you won’t be sure of your sexual preferences for some while after your body starts developing. Homosexuality is rarer among Raleigh rabbits than in some neospecies, but it’s not unheard of...”
“Yeah, I’ve been reading about stuff. I think I sort of know what to expect.”
“And... are you going to be okay if you develop as a girl? It looks like you identify as a boy.”
I shrugged, my ears twitching. “Well, yeah. I was a boy before the Divergence and I guess I’ve been acting like a boy ever since even though I know I might turn out to be a girl.”
“Your aunt and uncle should have encouraged you to explore your gender more, to try different things and see how you liked them. That’s what we generally encourage parents to do nowadays, since we don’t know what sex children will be when they grow up and we can’t be sure they’ll stay the same sex their whole lives.”
I nodded. “What about you? Have you always been the same?”
She shook her head. “I was a man until the Divergence and for a while afterward. I was married, and my wife was running some errands in a neighboring change-region when the Divergence happened; she became a Cary hyena.”
I’d done some reading about the other neospecies that I might meet in the Triangle area, and I gasped at the implications. “Oh.”
“Yeah, our marriage didn’t last long after that. And I was working in an office where more than half of us were male; I changed, and my orientation changed too though it took me a while to realize it. I dated one of the guys from my office who remained male, but we didn’t click. A year or so later I met Jason and Rachel, and I joined their marriage a few months after that.”
I took that in silently. It wasn’t any of my business to ask about their sexual practices, though I had some clinical curiosity about it. “What about your... gender identity? Did that change too?”
“Gradually, to some degree. I’m still have the same interests, pretty much the same personality, but after I fell in love with Jason I started experimenting more with clothing and jewelry, trying to look nice for him. Don’t feel like you have to do the same if you become female, though. It’s up to you whether and how fast you change your presentation.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
I spent the night at a hotel in Atlanta, and got on another train to Raleigh the next morning. The Davenports were on the same train; I waved to them and Terry waved back, but there wasn’t a free seat next to them. There were a few other Raleigh rabbits around, though, and I found a seat near some who looked to be near my age, a girl and a boy. I introduced myself, but they didn’t seem interested in talking to me, and after chatting a little bit with the man on the other side of me — an Allatoona otter who was going to Washington, DC on business — I took out my tablet and read for a while before taking a nap.
I woke up when the train stopped. I was in Raleigh for the first time since I was nine, when I was discharged from the hospital and I got in Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler’s car for the two-day drive to Nebraska. The young people sitting next to me had already grabbed their luggage and gotten off by the time I was completely awake; I grabbed my backpack and my cane and made my way to the door and down the stairs to the platform.
I looked around for signs pointing me to the shuttles, and saw the Davenports making their way toward the parking deck. Terry saw me and said something I couldn’t hear to the others, then came over to me. “Don’t forget what I said. Call me if you need someone to talk to, and good luck with college. And puberty.”
“Thanks.”
A few minutes later I found the NC State shuttle, and got on. I looked around; I recognized the girl and boy who’d sat next to me on the train, and another person who’d been in our car, of a species I wasn’t familiar with. He or she looked pretty much like an old-style human; she had long hair and wore an ankle-length skirt, so I guessed she identified as female, though she had very small breasts or none, and her hips and waist weren’t very pronounced.
“Hi, I’m Joel,” I said as I sat down in an empty seat across the aisle from her.
“I’m Amy,” she said, confirming my guess. “Are you a freshman?”
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
“Can I ask why you picked NC State?”
“I wanted to go to school a good distance away from my family,” she said. “Close enough I could visit for holidays without breaking the bank, far enough my parents wouldn’t drop in all the time without notice. And close enough there might be a few people of my species in the city, if not at the same school.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “I grew up here, but I’ve lived in Nebraska since —”
Just then the shuttle driver got on and spoke up loudly. “Okay, we’re fixing to leave for the NC State campus. I can stop at any of the dorms, or at the administration building. Who needs to stop where?”
I dug through my backpack for my registration packet. While I was doing that, the girl and boy sitting in front of us called out the names of different dorms, and Amy said: “Alexander Hall.”
“I’m in Alexander Hall too,” I said, finding the paper I wanted.
The shuttle driver made a couple of notes on a pad, then sat down and told the shuttle where to go.
Amy and I chatted a little more on the way to the dorm. The driver stopped at the other kids' dorms first; when he let us off, Amy got a couple of big suitcases out of the shuttle’s luggage compartment.
“Don’t you have anything else?” she asked, eying my backpack.
“I shipped everything else to the dorm,” I said. “The UPS tracking system said it’s already arrived; I just hope the university hasn’t misplaced it.”
We walked up to the dorm entrance and found the registration area. The desk clerk was a female Raleigh rabbit, probably just a little older than us, with dark grey fur. I let Amy get herself checked in first; she got her room assignment and waved goodbye to me as she headed down the hall to our left.
“I should have a big package to pick up,” I said, after I’d given the clerk my name. “And I’ll need help getting it to my room.”
She looked me up on her computer and said: “This says we already put your package in your room. You’re in 114, by the way... for now.” She eyed me curiously. “If you or your roommate change sex, we’ll move one of you.” She gave me a keycard, a sheet of dorm rules, and an invitation to a dorm party the following evening.
“Okay.” I looked at the signage and saw that 114 was down the hall to the left, and went that way.
But when I stepped into the open door of 114, I had a surprise. “You!”
Amy was unpacking one of her suitcases on the right-hand bed. There was a big packing crate on the left-hand side of the room, one Aunt Ellen and I had packed and shipped a week ago.
“Oh, hi, Joel. You’re on this hall too?”
“I’m in this room — or so they said.”
“That can’t be right. Let’s go complain about it.”
“That’s my stuff in that packing crate right there.”
“Then I’ll ask them to move me to a different room, so you don’t have to move all that stuff. It looks heavy.”
“It is...” We walked back down the hall to the clerk’s desk, Amy going slow to match my pace. There were several Raleigh rabbits checking in at the desk, and we waited our turn.
“You made a mistake,” Amy said when we got to the head of the line, “you put Joel and me in the same room.”
The clerk looked stuff up on her computer and said: “Oh, I think I see why they did that. You’re registered as a hermaphrodite, and Joel Hampton is registered as asexual. Is either of those incorrect?”
Amy and I looked at each other appraisingly. I was wondering what she had had under that skirt; there wasn’t an obvious bulge in front. “No, that’s right,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m biologically hermaphrodite, but I identify as female. And Joel — I had the impression you identify as male?” she asked, turning to me.
“More or less,” I said, and shrugged. “So far. But I guess I’ll probably be a girl in a few weeks.”
The clerk said: “I’ll make some calls, but it’s probably too late in the day to get a change made. If Mr. Hampton develops as a male, we’ll certainly move him to the other hall, but for now... just try to make the best of it, please?”
“All right,” I said. “I guess we can keep our backs turned while the other one’s changing, at least for a day or two.”
Amy looked dissatisfied, and said: “Who do I need to talk to if they won’t let us change roommates?”
“The housing authority — here, I’ll give you the number. But talk to whoever’s on duty here first, tomorrow afternoon.”
Amy and I walked back to our room, casting curious glances at each other. “So,” she said, “asexual... do you mean you’re not attracted to anybody sexually, or that you reproduce asexually, or...?”
I waited until we were inside the room with the door closed before I answered. “I’m sexless myself,” I said, sitting down on the bed next to my packing crate, “and not attracted to anybody, like you said, but most people of my species are male or female. Like that girl at the desk, and those kids on the bus. It’s because I grew up in isolation, and Raleigh rabbits need exposure to other rabbits' pheromones to start puberty.”
She stared at me. “Oh. And you said you’d probably be a girl in a few weeks?”
“I don’t know — kids start out asexual and develop as boys or girls depending on what pheromones they’re most exposed to when they get to the right age. I’m not sure how it’s going to work for me since my puberty’s so delayed. But seventy percent of Raleigh rabbits are female, so yeah, I’m more likely to be a girl.”
“And yet.” She looked me up and down, probably thinking of the comfortable loose jeans and T-shirt I’d worn on the train. “Well, like you said, we can keep our backs turned while we change until we get the housing authority to listen to us.”
“Is it okay if I ask you what kind of hermaphroditism the clerk was talking about?”
She flushed. “Yeah, I guess so, since I asked you... Athens magnolias are hermaphroditic when we’re in heat, which is only for a few days every summer. The rest of the time we’re asexual... kind of like you, maybe. We don’t have any reproductive organs except when we’re mating or pregnant.”
“Oh. Then maybe we don’t need to change rooms.”
She sighed. “Maybe. Let’s see how this works out.”
I opened my crate and started unpacking, and Amy unpacked the rest of her stuff.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“It’s too late to back out. Even if I got on a train to Nebraska tomorrow, I’ve still been exposed to enough Raleigh rabbit pheromones that I’m going to go through puberty one way or another.”
part 2 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butteflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
After we got unpacked, we walked over to the nearest dining hall for supper, and sat together. Most of the people we saw were Raleigh rabbits; I also recognized several other North Carolina neospecies from my research, and saw a handful of people from farther off, like Amy.
We sat down and talked for a few minutes about our high school experiences, what we planned to do in college, and so forth. After we’d been eating for maybe ten minutes a girl came over to us and said, “Mind if I sit here?” The dining hall was getting crowded and there weren’t a lot of empty seats left.
“Sure,” I said, and Amy nodded, her mouth being full.
The new girl was, I guessed from her height, the stripey pattern of her curly hair, and the bulge in her pants, a Cary hyena. She introduced herself as Radhika; her mother was from India, but she’d lived in Raleigh all her life. She was also a freshman, but lived in a different dorm from us. Amy and I told her a little of our own history, but by mutual consent didn’t tell her about our spat with the housing clerk.
A couple of Raleigh rabbits, both boys, sat down near us as well, but didn’t join in our conversation at first. But when their conversation hit a lull, one of them looked at me and said, “If you’re smart enough to start college at twelve, why didn’t you go to Duke or Harvard or somewhere?”
“I’m eighteen,” I said angrily, my ears trembling.
“Oh. Sorry.” He looked like he wanted to ask me something, but was too embarrassed or too polite to say it. After a few moments' hesitation, I volunteered the information he was probably curious about, and he said:
“Welcome back to Raleigh, I guess. Do you remember a lot about the city from when you were a kid?”
“A few things,” I said. “We lived in Garner and didn’t come into downtown much as far as I can recall.”
He nodded. “My family’s from Auburn, not far from there. I’m Katie Cartwright.” So a girl before the Divergence, apparently, but developed as a boy at puberty. Or maybe he’d been a girl until a short time ago; I didn’t want to ask.
“Joel Hampton,” I said. “And this is Amy Taniger, and Radhika Eames. We’re all freshmen.”
“My buddy Quill and I are sophomores,” he said. “Let me know if you’ve got any more questions after you get through with the orientation tour tomorrow,” and he wrote his contact information on a slip of paper and gave it to me. I thanked him, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend much time with guys for a while yet. I needed to meet more girls, Raleigh rabbits in particular, to have any chance of developing as a boy.
That night, after talking on the phone with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler, I went down the hall to shower; I figured it would be less busy than in the mornings. The bathrooms in Alexander Hall were unisex, but I didn’t see any guys using it when I was in there, just girls, all but one of them rabbits. I blow-dried my fur — the dorm bathroom had a wonderful full-body blow dryer, much better than the hand dryer I’d used back home — and put on my bathrobe, and when I got back to the room, Amy had changed into her pajamas and gotten into bed.
“I’ll close my eyes while you dress,” she said, and she also pulled a pillow over her head. I dressed for bed and read for a few minutes before turning out the light.
The next morning after breakfast, Amy and I found ourselves in the same orientation tour group. There were about twenty people in the group, more than half of us Raleigh rabbits, about twelve or fourteen girls and six or eight boys (if you counted me as a boy). The leader of our tour group was a Greensboro tiger, and an RA in our dorm; he showed us around the campus and answered a lot of questions, and left us at the administration building where some of us needed to talk to people about changing classes or other things.
“Do you want to talk to the housing authority?” I asked Amy.
“Nah. Let’s see how things go for a few days. Or until we know how you’re changing. How long does that normally take?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. With kids going through puberty at the normal time it’s over two or three years; with adults changing because they’re in a group that doesn’t have the right sex ratio it can be just a few weeks. I wasn’t able to find anything about people like me; maybe there aren’t any.”
“If it takes you a year or more to change, are you going to know which way you’re changing before it finishes?”
“Oh, yeah. Probably within weeks. Maybe days.”
I didn’t see Amy again until that night, at the party in the common room of our dorm. I said hi to her, but I spent most of the party introducing myself to other people, mostly female Raleigh rabbits, and trying to get to know any of them who seemed at all interested in talking to me.
“So you grew up out in the middle of nowhere?” asked Sarah, a girl from Knightdale, an eastern suburb. “What do you think of Raleigh?”
“I haven’t seen much except for the campus, and I don’t remember a lot from when I was a kid. I vaguely remember going to the capitol and the natural history museum on elementary school field trips.”
“We can show you some things next weekend, maybe,” said her friend Rob. They’d gone to the same high school and were roommates. I guessed Rob had been a boy until the Divergence, but from what they said I gathered that she’d been a girl since puberty, and a pretty girly girl at that; she was dressed fancier than anyone else at the party, wearing a long dress with puffed sleeves, a silver necklace, and a tiara.
In our age group, kids who were prepubescent at the time of the Divergence, there was almost no correlation between names and sexes. A few people had changed their name when they entered puberty and saw what sex they were going to be, but most didn’t.
I chatted with Sarah and Rob for a little while. Then a guy came in and sat down between them, and they scooted aside on the sofa to make room for him; Sarah was now wedged up against my thigh. A few months later that might have been exciting; for now it was just uncomfortable. “Hi, girls,” the new guy said, and kissed both of them. “Who’s your little friend?”
“This is Joel,” Sarah said. “Joel, this is our boyfriend Rico.”
“Hi, Joel. I’d guess you’re a genius to graduate high school so early... do you do tutoring?”
“I’m eighteen,” I said. “I haven’t grown up all the way because I lived in Hebron, Nebraska where there aren’t any other Raleigh rabbits.” I was getting tired of explaining that.
“Huh. Why’d your parents move there?” Sarah swatted him on the arm and he looked at her in bewilderment.
“They died and my aunt and uncle adopted me,” I explained briefly. I’d already told Sarah and Rob about it in a little more detail. “I’ll see you guys later,” and I went to introduce myself to some more people.
Even though my goal was to meet a lot of female Raleigh rabbits and nudge my puberty toward the “male” setting, I wound up spending the last hour of the party hanging with Amy and George, a Nashville bat who was apparently the only person of his species in our dorm, maybe at the university. He had no eyes, and sensed things by echolocation. His family had moved to North Carolina a couple of years after the Divergence. He had a good sense of humor and we shared several interests; it was nice, too, to talk with someone who didn’t treat me like a kid, like too many of the Raleigh rabbits I’d met in the last couple of days.
Classes started the next day. Amy, George and I had compared schedules; I shared one class with each of them, English 101 with Amy and Biology 101 with George. We walked together to breakfast and then George and I walked together to Biology.
Dr. Wilson was a Cary hyena, not as tall and massive as Radhika (most older Cary hyena women weren’t as big as the younger women who’d gone through puberty after the Divergence) but taller and broader-shouldered than the average Raleigh rabbit of either sex. She spent little time going over the syllabus and other administrative details, but got straight into lecturing on different types of single-celled organisms. I’d gotten to class too late to talk to anyone beforehand, but after class I introduced myself to some of the girls I’d been sitting near. All were too busy to do much more than tell me their names before they had to go to their next class, and one was too rude to do even that.
I had Political Science next, with Dr. Ashton, a male Raleigh rabbit who used a wheelchair, then lunch. I didn’t see anyone I knew when I walked into the dining hall, so I found a table with more girls than boys (that wasn’t hard) and asked if I could join them. They were polite enough to let me sit there, but didn’t include me in their conversation. I watched and listened and learned a few things. I knew what flirtation looked like; I may have been asexual but I’d spent plenty of time around horny teenage Lincoln bison. But the thing where a girl leans over so her ears brush the boy’s ears was new to me. Was I going to be the brush-er or the brush-ee?
Amy came in while I was partway through lunch, and we waved to each other, but she didn’t try to sit near me. There wasn’t any more room at the table by then. I joined her after I finished eating and walked to English from there; we got there early enough that I could talk to a few people before class started. Radhika and Rob were also in that section of English, taught by Ms. Allen, a Durham bull. Durham bulls look a lot like Lincoln bison, but they’re generally taller and skinnier; Ms. Allen didn’t have horns but she had the distinctive facial features of a bull. (I wasn’t sure why they named the whole neospecies “bulls” when that’s a sex-specific name for male cattle, elephants and so forth. I found out later it’s because before the Divergence, Durham had a sports team called the Bulls — I can’t remember what sport they played. Of course almost all sports are local now, so most of the big city-based teams that played teams from other cities are all gone.)
Amy had somewhere else she wanted to go, so I walked with Rob back to our dorm, where I worked on homework until Amy got back and for a while longer. Except for brief greetings when she came in we were silent until near bedtime.
“Is it okay if I ask you something?” I asked, looking up from my biology textbook.
“Maybe,” she said. “What is it?”
“If you identify as female... does that mean that when you’re, um, — I think you said ‘in heat’? — that you’re attracted to other hermaphrodites who identify as male? Or...?”
She flushed, and for a moment I thought she was going to refuse to answer. “No. When we’re in heat we aren’t attracted to other people — we just want our flowers pollinated.” At first I thought that was a weird euphemism, but then she explained that Athens magnolias actually grow flowers for a few days each year, and they lounge around outdoors while insects and hummingbirds come along and pollinate them. “At least, if you’re old enough. My parents always made me stay indoors all during the blooming so I wouldn’t get pregnant. Even after scientists developed birth control pills that worked for us, they still made me stay indoors just in case.”
“Huh. So even when you’re — in heat, you aren’t attracted to other people?”
“No... we’re asexual, not aromantic. We can fall in love like people of other species, we’re just not obsessed with their bodies. I —” She broke off, and I didn’t press her. After a minute or two of silence I said:
“I’m scared. Of turning into a girl, or even a boy. I’ve done all the research, I have all the facts, but I still have no idea what it’s going to feel like. Looking at Rob and Sarah, and the way they hang onto Rico... I envy them and I’m scared of becoming like them. Does that make sense?”
“I guess. Why’d you come here, though, if you were afraid of — all that?”
“It... seemed like an important part of life. Something I should experience. And now — well, it’s too late to back out. Even if I got on a train to Nebraska tomorrow, I’ve still been exposed to enough Raleigh rabbit pheromones that I’m going to go through puberty one way or another.”
“I think you’ll do fine. Almost everybody goes through it, and it’s rough for some people, but... I think you’ll have an advantage, being more mature. You’ve done all the research, like you said.”
“Yeah. I hope it’s enough.”
By the end of my first week in college, I’d made the acquaintance of several dozen people and started to become good friends with a few. Unfortunately, most of those were foreigners; the only Raleigh rabbit I was really friends with was Rob, and that perforce meant spending time with Rico as well as Sarah. (Back in Hebron we called anybody who wasn’t a Lincoln bison — such as me — a “foreigner”, even if they were native to Hebron and just happened to be in Omaha or Kansas City on Valentine’s Day. That wasn’t the custom in Raleigh, which was a lot more cosmopolitan, but I found myself thinking of non-rabbits as “foreigners.” I tried not to say it out loud.)
Saturday after the first week of classes, Amy and I joined Sarah, Rob, and Rico on a trip to see more of the city. Rico was the only one of us who had a car; Sarah sat up front with him and the rest of us squeezed into the back. With new post-Divergence safety regulations that forbid manually operated cars, and the increasing fuel costs, not as many people can afford to own and operate cars; there aren’t a lot of cheap used cars around for young people to get started with like there were when Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler were growing up. I gathered that Rico’s family was tolerably well off.
He showed us the capitol, the cathedral, the convention center, and some historic buildings. I remembered some of them from when I was a kid, but most of it was new to me. Finally we stopped at a restaurant near a mall on the outskirts of the city, and then went to the mall itself.
Amy, Rob and Sarah wanted to shop for clothes. Rico looked down at me and said: “You want to go with them, kid, or hang with me? I’m going by the GameStop first, not sure where to after that.”
I was torn. I didn’t really want to go clothes-shopping; I’d always worn fairly simple boys' clothes and let Aunt Ellen do most of the shopping for me. But I didn’t want to spend hours one-on-one with Rico; that might seal my fate as a girl. And even if I didn’t care what sex I was, I wasn’t keen on spending more time with Rico, period. “I’ll go with them,” I said, and Amy looked surprised.
“Suit yourself,” Rico said, and kissed Rob and Sarah. “Give me a call when y’all are done.”
I learned more about girls' clothes in the next few hours than I’d learned in all my previous Internet research. I found out that Rob needed two different size bras for her upper and lower breasts, for instance; Amy looked as bemused at that as I did. She wouldn’t need a bra until and unless she got pregnant; Athens magnolias don’t develop breasts until they start lactating. Sarah tried on and bought a dress that had a high neckline, but two little peepholes, one between each pair of breasts; Rob preferred more modest garments. Sarah persuaded Amy to try on a dress with a low neckline, but she didn’t buy it, saying it looked silly without breasts to fill it out.
They persuaded me to try on a child-size skirt, but I declined to buy it. “I still don’t know if I’m going to be a girl; if I turn out to be a boy, this would be a waste of money.”
“Not necessarily,” Rob said. “Some boys wear skirts. But I guess it might not fit you for very long.”
“I hope so.” I didn’t know if I’d finish growing up once I hit puberty, or if my growth was permanently stunted by not starting puberty at the right age. My pediatrician back in Hebron had done some research and said it was anybody’s guess. That reminded me I needed to find a local doctor, somebody who knew Raleigh rabbit biology.
After visiting a shoe store and a jewelry store (Rob bought a pair of shoes; the others didn’t buy anything), we met up with Rico at the food court, where he was drinking a smoothie and playing a game on his tablet. Sarah and Rob sat down on either side of him and Amy and I sat across the table.
“You girls find anything good?” he asked.
“We’ll show you later,” Sarah said, and whispered something in his ear. He smiled.
“What about you?” I asked.
“Last Dragon to Avondale,” he said, holding up his tablet. “There are these dragons that live in the subway tunnels, and people ride them, but if you don’t treat them right they’ll eat passengers and driver both. You buy anything, kid?”
I was sick of him calling me “kid.” “No, I tried on some things but I didn’t want to waste money on stuff that probably won’t fit me when I’ve grown some more.”
“That’s good sense.”
We returned to campus, and Rico walked with us back to Alexander Hall, though he didn’t live there. I saw him go into the stairwell with Sarah and Rob as Amy and I turned to go down the hall to our room.
Sunday morning, I got up early and showered before going to chapel. I examined myself carefully before I turned on the water in the shower. Was there a little puffiness behind my nipples or was I imagining it? Being a girl wouldn’t be too bad, I decided; I’d mostly enjoyed hanging out with the girls yesterday. Except for the parts involving Rico. Why did Sarah and Rob like him so much? Or did they love him? What was that about, anyway? Some of the stuff I’d read suggested that sex made you like people you wouldn’t like otherwise. Other sources seemed to say that it made you like one of your friends a lot more than all the others. It was pretty confusing, especially when some of it was pre-Divergence stuff that might not apply anymore, or might apply to other neospecies but not to Raleigh rabbits.
Radhika was the only one of my new friends I saw at chapel. We chatted for a few minutes after the service, and then walked to the library together; both of us had some research to do for different classes.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked her.
“I had two boyfriends in high school, at different times. I broke up with the last one, Miguel, a few months ago... he was too clingy.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I had a vague idea what “clingy” meant from looking at some of the teen couples back in Hebron, and I was pretty sure some people would describe Sarah and Rob as clingy, but Rico didn’t seem to mind. She continued after a brief pause:
“Here, I’ve met several boys like me, and I asked Paul out. We went to dinner last night; I think we’ll go out again.”
“How do you know? I mean, how did you know you wanted to go out with him, and not one of the other Cary hyenas you’ve met here?”
“He’s smart,” she said; “he’s on a full academic scholarship. And we both like a lot of the same movies. And he is just a little taller than you — very cute, just the right size to sit in my lap. Next date, or no later than the one after that.” She smiled.
All the male Cary hyenas I’d seen were shorter than the girls, except for one librarian who’d been an adult at the time of the Divergence, but most of them were taller than me. If this was the Paul who sat in front of me in Political Science, he was just an inch or so taller than me, more than a foot shorter than Radhika.
We parted when we got to the library, and went in different directions to do our research.
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“It’s official,” I told Amy when I got back from the shower. “I’m going to be a girl.”
“Oh,” she said, and then she came over and sat next to me on my bed. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I... I think so. It’s something to have the uncertainty out of the way. I don’t know how much longer it’s going to take before I have to start wearing bras and, um, and tampons. And start noticing boys.” Or maybe girls, but that wasn’t likely.
part 3 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
By the end of my second week of school, I was sure. The puffiness behind my nipples was too marked to be my imagination, and I was pretty sure the pee-hole between my legs was getting longer if not deeper.
“It’s official,” I told Amy when I got back from the shower. “I’m going to be a girl.”
“Oh,” she said, and then she came over and sat next to me on my bed. “Are you going to be okay?”
“I... I think so. It’s something to have the uncertainty out of the way. I don’t know how much longer it’s going to take before I have to start wearing bras and, um, and tampons. And start noticing boys.” Or maybe girls, but that wasn’t likely.
“I wish I could help more, but... I don’t really know what you’re going through. I’ve never worn a bra or had a period. I guess our blooming is kind of similar, but it’s only once a year, not once a month.”
“For Raleigh rabbits it’s every six weeks. One advantage we have over old-style humans.” I laughed nervously.
“Probably Rob or Sarah can help you.”
“Yeah. I’ll go talk to them — when Rico’s not around.”
But first, I got up and ate breakfast early, when the dining hall was almost empty, so I could go by the clinic before Biology. Katie Cartwright was sitting in the waiting room, a bloody makeshift bandage around his hand.
“What happened?” I asked, sitting next to him.
“Freak accident,” he said. “I cut my hand trying to open a package of batteries. How are you settling in? Ah — Joel, right?”
“Classes are going pretty well, and I’ve met several cool people.”
“That’s good. You join any clubs yet?”
“No... I wanted to make sure I’m able to keep up with my classes before I get involved with anything like that.”
“Probably a good idea. Don’t study so hard you forget to enjoy life, though. What are you here for?”
“Um, I haven’t decided on my major yet —”
“No, I mean in the clinic,” and he waved his bandaged hand.
“Oh.” My ears twitched. “Uh, just a general checkup. I haven’t had a physical back home in quite a while, and I’ve never seen a doctor who was familiar with Raleigh rabbit biology, so...”
“Yeah, better let them check you out. No telling what growing up in isolation might have done to you.”
The nurse called him back then, and I waited a while longer, studying, before she called me.
“What seems to be the trouble?” she asked, starting to check my vital signs. She was a Greensboro tiger.
“Well... my puberty was delayed because of growing up in isolation from other Raleigh rabbits. Now that I’m here, it seems to be finally starting, and I wanted to have you check and make sure it’s working right.”
The nurse drew several vials of blood, weighed me, and measured my height. I’d put on half an inch and several pounds since the last time I measured myself back in Hebron.
When Dr. Mathers came in — a female Raleigh rabbit — she listened to my story, then asked me to change into a hospital gown so she could examine me. She felt the puffiness around my nipples, and looked carefully at the space between my legs.
“You look like a child of about twelve or thirteen who’s developing into a girl,” she said. “If you were a child, I’d expect you to have your first period in three to six months. But at your age... I can’t tell. I want you to come in once a week to have your height and weight measured, and for blood tests, to make sure the hormone levels are right.”
“Okay, I will. Is there anything else I need to do?”
“Not yet. Once your vagina is fully formed, you should start wearing a pad just in case your period starts sooner than we expect. And once I have two or three weeks' worth of blood test results, I may decide to start you on hormone shots if the levels don’t look right. I’ll order an ultrasound in about a month to see if your internal organs are forming correctly. But for now let’s see if nature takes care of everything.
“Another thing. I don’t think it will be safe to put you on birth control until after you’ve finished puberty, or at least until we have more data on how your puberty is proceeding. So if you want to become sexually active soon after your vagina is fully formed — which I don’t recommend —”
“I won’t,” I hastily interrupted. “I’m not planning to date, much less have sex, until at least a few months after I finish puberty.”
I was late to Biology, so I didn’t call Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler with the news right away. After English, I told Amy, Radhika and Rob what the doctor had said.
“Welcome to the club,” Rob said, and gave me a hug. “Do you want to go shopping again this weekend?”
I hesitated. Did I want to start wearing girly clothes just because I was developing girl parts? “Let’s wait a few weeks,” I said. “I’ve already grown half an inch and if I buy stuff now it won’t fit when I’m finished growing.”
“You’ll probably have to buy new things several times in the next two or three years,” she said, “if you grow as much as a young teen does and at the same rate.”
“Well, I’m going to keep wearing what I’ve got while it fits. When I outgrow it, we can go shopping.”
“Deal!”
That evening, I left Amy studying in our room and went out for a walk in front of the dorm. When I was out of earshot of anybody, I called home.
“Joel? How are you doing?”
“Pretty well, Aunt Ellen. I — um, I went to see the doctor today, at the school clinic. She examined me and did some blood tests, and... she said I’m developing into a girl.”
There was a long silence at the other end of the line. When I was about to fill it, Aunt Ellen said: “Oh, Joel, I’m sorry. I know you wanted to be a boy.”
“It will be okay,” I said. “I’ve got friends here who will help me through it. One who’s been through the same thing — well, not the long delay and isolation part, but she was a boy until the Divergence and then she developed as a girl a few years later.”
“I’m glad you’re making friends there, Joel. I wish we could come see you, but...”
“I’ll see you at Christmas. Maybe I’ll be wearing bras by then.”
“Remember what I told you. I can’t make you do something you don’t want to do, now, but I think you’ll be happier if you listen.”
“I will, Aunt Ellen.” I’ll try, I thought. But maybe once my new girl hormones got through with my brain, I’d find it hard to remember and pay attention to Aunt Ellen’s warnings about boys and sex. Or to my own observations of how boys — Lincoln bison boys, anyway — acted around girls.
She called Uncle Tyler to the phone and we chatted for a few more minutes before I hung up and went back inside.
Two weeks later, I’d grown another half inch in height and a couple of inches in the hips. Some of my shirts were getting tight in the shoulders, and there was only one pair of pants I could fit into anymore. I had to go shopping.
Rico gave Sarah, Rob and me a ride to the mall again. Amy didn’t come with us; she had a test to study for. Rico dropped us off and said he’d meet us for supper.
“Come on,” Sarah said. “Macy’s is having a sale, let’s start there.”
At first I just got a few T-shirts that were too big for me, but not ridiculously big; stuff I could grow into. I tried on some blouses that fit better, but I didn’t want to spend that much money on stuff I’d probably outgrow within weeks at the rate I was going. But when it came to covering my legs, Sarah and Rob had good arguments for going with skirts.
“If you buy a pair of pants, they’ll be too tight on you pretty soon. But a skirt that’s long on you now will be just right when you finish growing; you can adjust the waist.”
When I still balked at it, they pointed out that some Raleigh rabbit males wore skirts — a lot of adults who transformed soon after the Divergence refused to change their clothing style just because they’d changed sex, and the custom had started to spread to some of the neighboring change-regions. I’d never seen a man of any neospecies wearing a skirt in Hebron or Lincoln, but if it was okay around here, okay... besides, I was soon going to be a girl now and should get used to it.
So I wound up with three ankle-length skirts, which were a little loose and needed a belt, and then bought a discounted pair of tennis shoes (my old shoes were starting to pinch by then). I ditched my too-tight pants and wore the denim skirt out of the store. I bought new panties, too; I didn’t need bras yet, but it probably wouldn’t be much longer.
“You’re looking kind of cute there, kid,” Rico said when we found him at the food court a few hours later. “I might say pretty if my girlfriends weren’t standing right here.”
Rob swatted him on the arm; Sarah rolled her eyes. My ears were twitching something fierce; I sat down opposite him. Were his eyes glancing at my little baby breasts? I’d noticed boys doing that to girls back home, but... now it was happening to me. I felt like I was going to cry, and I didn’t want to do it in front of Rico.
“I’m going to the restroom,” I said, and walked off. Rob came with me. I hesitated between the restroom doors, and then followed Rob into the ladies' room.
It was the first time I’d entered a ladies' room. I’d always used the men’s room back home, and for the first few weeks at college — though the restrooms in the dorm and some of the others on campus were unisex. But my breasts were getting just big enough to notice; I couldn’t hide the fact that I was becoming a girl.
I managed to avoid bursting into tears until I was sitting in a stall. The stream of pee was getting wider and messier every day as my pee-hole widened and deepened; I needed more toilet paper to wipe than I used to. It was another reminder of what was happening to me.
“Are you okay, Joel?” Rob asked from the next stall.
“I guess. No, not really. It’s just too much all at once.”
After we flushed and washed our hands — and I’d washed my face — she put her hands on my shoulders and turned me to face her. She looked me up and down and said: “You’re going to be a beautiful girl.”
I started to cry again. She went on: “And it’s going to be awesome. You’ll really like being a girl once you get over the shock. If you don’t have two or three boys asking you out within a week after you start needing bras, I’ll buy you a new dress.”
“I’m not sure I want that,” I said. “I’m — maybe it was a mistake to come here. I should have gone to school in Nebraska where I’d be safe...”
“What are you worried about?”
“Being attracted to boys. Not being able to control myself. Sex. Getting pregnant. STDs...”
She hugged me. “You’re seeing a doctor at the clinic every week, right? Ask them to prescribe you birth control before your system’s finished changing. And be sensible, make sure your guy’s protecting you. You’ve nothing to worry about if you take reasonable precautions.” She took a tissue from her purse and wiped my eyes. “And if you want advice about boys, once you start feeling attracted to them, you know who to ask.”
“Thanks.”
“Come on, let’s go back and eat.”
“I — okay. But can you punch Rico in the arm if he looks at my breasts again?”
She laughed. “I’ll make him regret it.”
A couple of weeks later, Dr. Mathers was able to get a speculum several inches into my new vagina. She sent me over to Raleigh General Hospital for an ultrasound, which confirmed that my ovaries and uterus were forming and looked normal. What wasn’t normal was how fast this was happening; after a slow first couple of weeks, I seemed to be going through several years' development in a few months. I needed A-cup bras by Halloween, not to keep my breasts from wobbling but to keep the nipples from showing. As with some other girls including Rob, my lower breasts were a little bigger than the upper ones, but not (not yet anyway) a full cup size difference.
I still wasn’t feeling any attraction to boys, and I knew there was a slight chance I might end up attracted to girls; sometimes I’d look at the people sitting in front of me in class, or at the next table in the dining hall, wondering “Is he attractive? Is she?” I could tell that some people were good-looking, but none of them made my nipples hard or my crotch wet any more than a beautiful butterfly or a beautiful waterfall.
One Saturday near the end of October, I went shopping again with Amy and Radhika. Rob and Sarah were going somewhere with Rico, but Radhika had a car. It was so old it had a steering wheel and an emergency switch to operate it manually if the self-driving software failed. I was outgrowing some of the stuff I’d bought a few weeks earlier, including my new shoes. And worse, I was getting too tall to use my cane without leaning over; I needed a longer one. With puberty changing the shape of my hips, my old injury was aching worse than usual and I really needed the cane all the time, not just on rough ground or stairs.
A couple of days later, I met Katie coming out of the library. “Joel? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” I said self-consciously.
“I see you decided which way to go. You look nice.”
“Thanks,” I said. I wondered what he meant by “decided” and decided it was a joke.
“Have you thought about joining any clubs yet?”
“Yeah, I went with the science club on a trip to the natural history museum weekend before last.” George had gotten involved with the science club his first day, and had invited me to join; I took him up on it after I got my first couple of exam grades and decided I could afford to take some time from studying to socialize more.
“Well, the science fiction and fantasy society is having a Halloween party Thursday night. Costumes, of course, but they don’t have to be fancy. You might enjoy that.”
Was he inviting me on a date? Rob had predicted that guys would start asking me out soon after I started having to wear bras.
“I might come,” I said, and we stood there looking at each other for a few more seconds before he said: “Well, I’ll see you around if I don’t see you there.”
So it wasn’t a date per se, or he’d have been more definite. But I decided I’d go to the party anyway.
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“I thought I was getting used to the idea of being a girl, but... I guess I wasn’t as used to it as I thought.”
“Hmm. You said you’d wanted to be a boy. Why do you care which you are?”
“I was a boy before the Divergence. And... I’ve lived as a boy ever since, even though I technically wasn’t. My aunt and uncle and all the kids at school treated me like a boy, and the idea of being a girl is hard to get used to even though I’ve known for a long time that it might happen.”
part 4 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is set in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
I told my friends about the Halloween party; Amy, George and Radhika said they wanted to come, but Rob had other plans with Sarah and Rico. We brainstormed about costumes, and scrounged up bits and pieces from the things we’d brought and things we ran out and bought at the last minute. Radhika and George, whose families lived nearby, went home to find stuff for their costumes and for mine and Amy’s. On Halloween, Amy and I returned our dorm after supper and changed, then met up with George in the lobby of Alexander Hall. Radhika and Paul were waiting for us.
Radhika was wearing a warrior princess outfit, with fake chainmail over a bikini and a plastic sword as long as her arm. She was also wearing a tiara she’d borrowed from Rob. Paul — I’d outgrown him in the weeks since the semester started, so he was now the shortest of us — was wearing a bushy beard and plastic plate-mail with a helmet, and an ax at his side. The effect was spoiled somewhat because he was sitting in Radhika’s lap.
George was wearing an officer’s uniform from one of the old pre-Divergence Star Trek shows, with a plastic visor that covered the smooth space where most other species have eyes. He said his dad used to wear the uniform to conventions back in the day; he’d adjusted it to fit him better.
Amy and I were dressed as characters from post-Divergence serials; she was India West, a spy from an obscure serial produced in Athens (she’d shown me a couple of episodes and it was fairly good). I was Ed Crenshaw, a girl about the age I appeared to be, from “Shifting Alliances,” a Raleigh-based dramedy I’d been watching for several years. She (and the actor who played her) was kind of like me; she’d been a boy before the Divergence. I wore my denim skirt and a glittery T-shirt with green ribbons on my head, Ed’s signature outfit from the show. Maybe I was cheating by not wearing a science fictional or fantastic costume, but I suspected I wouldn’t be the only one. (“Shifting Alliances” had some fantasy elements now and then, but not every episode.)
We walked together to the student center, where the science fiction and fantasy society was hosting the party.
“Nice costumes,” I said to Radhika and Paul. “Are you just generally a warrior princess and a dwarf, or some specific characters I should recognize?”
“Nobody in particular,” said Radhika. “What about you?”
“I’m Ed Crenshaw from ‘Shifting Alliances,’” I explained.
“I’ve seen a few episodes,” Paul said. “A friend of mine in high school was a big fan, but I couldn’t get into it... I didn’t like the way it portrayed the hyena characters.”
I nodded. “I guess the first season was kind of problematic that way. They’ve done better in later seasons, though.”
We went into the student center and looked around. The party was supposed to be in a big meeting hall, but it looked like it had spilled into the lobby; there were people in costume standing around talking, and couples and triads sitting on the couches making out.
We went into the meeting hall where the main party was. Radhika saw someone she knew and went off to talk with them, and Paul went with her. Amy, George and I headed over to the refreshments table; after I got a plate of cheese and crackers, and looked around the room again, I saw Katie nearby. There was a girl with him, a Raleigh rabbit; they were dressed in matching uniforms, probably from some TV show or vid serial I wasn’t familiar with. I went over to say hi.
“Oh, hi, Joel,” Katie said as I approached. “This is my girlfriend, Madison.”
“Hi,” Madison said. “Oh, I know, you’re that girl from ‘Shifting Alliances’ — I love that show. Have you seen the latest episode?”
“No, I’ve gotten behind trying to keep up with classes.”
“I won’t tell you about it, then. But it’s a good one.”
“So how are you doing?” Katie asked. “You adjusting okay?”
“Yeah, I think so. It was... a little bit of a disappointment, at first, but I knew what to expect, so it wasn’t a big surprise.”
“This is the person I told you about,” Katie said to Madison; “she grew up a long way from any other Raleigh rabbits and didn’t start puberty until she came here for college.”
“Oh! You didn’t start until the end of August?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The doctor says it’s going faster than normal.”
“I’ll say... Um, what did you mean by disappointment?”
“Oh,” I said, looking intently at my shoes, “I was kind of hoping I’d be a boy. But, like I said, I knew it wasn’t likely.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a girl.”
“I didn’t say there was.”
We talked about “Shifting Alliances” for a little while — mostly me and Madison, with Katie pitching in now and then. After a few minutes I said I’d talk to them later, and circulated to talk to other people. I found George talking to a couple of Raleigh rabbits, also dressed in Star Trek uniforms but from a different era of the show, and he introduced me to them. Of course they thought I was a child prodigy who’d started college early. I was getting really tired of explaining myself to every Raleigh rabbit I met, and I decided to have some fun with these two. “Yeah, I graduated when I was twelve, but I took a year off to start a business before I started college.”
“Really? What kind of business?” asked Larry, the guy of the pair. I noticed George was looking really amused, but he didn’t laugh out loud and give me away.
“We made alternate reality games. I sold the company for a little over a million dollars not long before I started school.”
“Wow!” said Bill, Larry’s girlfriend. “But with that kind of money and smarts, why are you going to school here?”
“I’m just messing with you,” I said, and I explained why I really looked the way I did. From Bill and Larry’s expressions I wasn’t sure if they thought it was any more plausible than my first story.
A few minutes later I went to the ladies' room. When I sat down and pulled down my panties, I saw a few drops of blood on the pad. I was numb with shock and sat there staring at the blood for I don’t know how long after I’d finished peeing. At some point I wondered if I should change it for a fresh pad, but it didn’t look like much blood yet and I figured it could stand to absorb some more. Finally I wiped and pulled the panties back up.
Madison came in while I was washing my hands, and looked at me in the mirror. “What’s wrong?”
How could she tell? “Nothing — I, um, I just started my period.”
She was silent a moment. “Oh. And — it’s your first one, right?”
I nodded. She rummaged in her purse. “Do you need to borrow a pad or tampon...?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ve been wearing one — a pad, I mean — ever since Dr. Mathers said it could start any time. But it’s still kind of a shock.”
“I know,” she said. “I guess more so for you, because you’re older than most girls are when they have their first period.”
“I thought I was getting used to the idea of being a girl, but... I guess I wasn’t as used to it as I thought.”
“Hmm. You said you’d wanted to be a boy. Why do you care which you are?”
“I was a boy before the Divergence. And... I’ve lived as a boy ever since, even though I technically wasn’t. My aunt and uncle and all the kids at school treated me like a boy, and the idea of being a girl is hard to get used to even though I’ve known for a long time that it might happen.”
“Well, you might be a boy again sometime or other. I was a boy for several years, and changed into a girl after I started college.”
“Was it hard? I guess maybe not, if you were a girl before the Divergence...?” I was pretty sure “Madison” used to be a girl’s name, from the books I’d read and the vids I’d seen, although I’d never met a girl with that name back in Hebron.
“Being a little girl is very different from being a grown woman. Yeah, it was a lot to get used to, but I adjusted pretty quick. So will you, I think.”
“Thanks.”
We left the restroom and split up; I got some more refreshments and then joined Radhika and Paul where they were talking to some other friends, whom they introduced me to. There was a Charlotte porcupine going around with a camera and taking pictures of everyone in costume; he took pictures of me and each of the others, asked us who our costumes were supposed to be, and made notes about it on his tablet.
Later on the officers of the science fiction and fantasy society got up on a platform and made announcements. They awarded prizes for the best costumes in several categories — I didn’t win any, not that I would have expected to with my mundane costume even if I’d known about the contest. Radhika and Paul won for best couple, though, and when the chairman of the contest jury called for them to come up and get their prize, they were nowhere to be found. Radhika later told me they’d left early to make out.
A little while after that, I started getting tired, and looked around for Amy or George or somebody who lived in our dorm to walk back with. I didn’t see them at first, and circulated to get a better view (I was still shorter than most people there, though a couple of inches taller than when the semester started). While I was looking for them, I ran into the couple in the Star Trek uniforms I’d met earlier, Larry and Bill.
“Have you seen George?” I asked them. Larry shook his head, but Bill said:
“I think he was going to the restroom — at least I saw him heading in that direction.”
“Oh, thanks.” I was about to go out to the lobby and wait outside the men’s room for him, but Larry held a hand up.
“Just a minute, if you don’t mind?”
“Okay, what is it?” My hip was aching from standing up for so long, and I was putting more weight on my cane than usual.
“We liked that little hoax you played on us; you’ve got a wicked sense of humor. Are you going to be at next week’s meeting?” When they announced the costume contest results, the club officers had also invited everyone to the next regular meeting of the science fiction and fantasy society.
“Um, maybe. I don’t know.” I wanted to go find a chair or sofa where I could see the restroom doors, and sit down until George came out.
“We’d like to see you there. And... maybe you’d like to join us for dinner tomorrow? We’re going to Jasmine Mediterranean Bistro, across the street from the main library.”
I gaped at him. “Is this a date?”
“If you like,” he said, and Bill put in:
“We know you look young, but you said you were eighteen, so...”
“Um, thanks, but — I don’t think I’m ready to start dating yet.” After a brief pause, I blurted out: “Maybe next semester?”
“Maybe then. I hope we’ll see you at the meeting next week.”
“Maybe. Thanks.” I hobbled out of the meeting hall to the lobby and was glad to find an empty chair. I didn’t see George come out of the men’s room, but fifteen or twenty minutes later he and Amy found me and we walked back to our dorm.
When I woke up the next morning, my pad was soaked completely through with blood and my panties were spotted as well. I threw the disgusting thing away, reminding myself I should change it every night before going to bed. I’d been so tired and achey when we got back from the party that I’d just crashed without thinking of it.
I went and showered first thing, and put a clean pad in my panties when I got back to the room. Amy returned from the shower just a minute or two later, while I was digging through my clothes figuring out what else to wear. Since I’d started developing as a girl, Amy had stopped being so modest around me, and as she often did now, she took off her bathrobe before she took a pair of panties out of her drawer and put them on.
“Oh,” I said, “I thought you might want to know... I started my period yesterday.”
“What? When?”
“I first noticed during the party, when I went to the restroom. I didn’t want to mention it in front of George, and then by the time we got back here I was so tired I forgot.” I didn’t mention that I’d forgotten to change my pad before bed.
“Are you okay about it?”
“I think so. It was kind of a shock, last night, but... well, I knew it was coming.”
She shook her head. “I’m glad I don’t have to go through that. My older sister said I was really lucky not to go through puberty until after the Divergence.”
The next time I went to clinic, Dr. Mathers brought up the topic of birth control again. “It would be safe for you to start using it now,” she said. “You’re not finished growing, but your reproductive system is fully formed and functional, so you could get pregnant.” Again I told her I wasn’t ready to date, much less have sex.
Three weeks, an inch and another shopping trip later, Radhika invited me to come to her parents' house for Thanksgiving. She pulled her car up to my dorm Wednesday afternoon after classes, and came in to help with my luggage — though I didn’t have a lot, just two changes of clothes, toiletries and my tablet. My hip wasn’t hurting as bad as it had been around Halloween, but it was still worse than it used to be before all these changes; I was glad to let Radhika carry my bag.
Radhika’s family were all Cary hyenas except for her older brother, who was a Raleigh rabbit. She told me about them on the drive out to her parents' house. So when a young Cary hyena, just a little shorter than me, came out to meet us, I said: “You’re Gary, right? I’m Joel.”
“Can I help bring in your stuff?”
“Sure, my bag’s in the trunk.” I walked up to the door while Radhika and her little brother were getting the stuff out of the trunk — my little suitcase and three big bags of Radhika’s laundry.
“Hi. Are you Radhika’s friend Joel?” Radhika’s mother was not as tall as her daughter but still a good eight inches taller than me.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Hmm. When she told us she was inviting a friend whose family lived in Nebraska, I thought you’d be of one of those western neospecies.”
“Oh... I guess she didn’t tell you much?”
“No, just your name. Come in and sit down...”
I followed her into the living room and sat down at one end of a sofa. A man came in, probably Radhika’s dad I figured, and Mrs. Eames introduced me to him: yes, that was her father.
Cary hyenas are one of the neospecies where you can still see what “race” people used to be before the Divergence. With Raleigh rabbits, Omaha sheepdogs and a lot of others it’s hard, sometimes impossible to tell, but with Cary hyenas their skin color didn’t change and their facial features didn’t change so much as to obscure those kinds of clues. Radhika’s dad was what they used to call African-American when I was little, and her mom was from India; her skin was a little darker than his, and she was a few inches taller than him, though not nearly as much taller as Radhika was compared to Paul.
Radhika and Gary came in lugging those bags, and Radhika directed him to put my suitcase in her bedroom. Then they took the laundry bags downstairs to the utility room, and came back upstairs after starting a load to wash. Radhika sat down next to me on the sofa and Gary took another chair.
“Lauren called and said he would be here soon,” Mrs. Eames said. “That is Radhika’s brother,” she added, turning to me. “He is a Raleigh rabbit like yourself.”
“Yes, she told me about all of you. Thank you so much for inviting me.”
“You’re very welcome; any friend of Radhika’s is welcome here. But she did not tell us very much about you, except that your family lives too far away for you to travel easily.” She gave Radhika a reproving glance.
“I live in Hebron, Nebraska — it’s a small town southwest of Lincoln. My aunt and uncle, and my grandparents, are all Lincoln bison... my parents were Raleigh rabbits like me, but they died right after the Divergence. A car crash.”
Mr. Eames nodded solemnly. “We lost people in accidents that day, too. My sister and her husband, and several friends.”
Just then the doorbell rang, and Mrs. Eames jumped up to answer it. “That is Lauren, I think.”
She returned a few moments later with a tall, good-looking Raleigh rabbit carrying a suitcase. “Hi, everybody,” he said. “Who’s this pretty girl?” My ears quivered and I couldn’t say anything. Radhika spoke up:
“This is my friend Joel. Be nice to her.” I could hear an implicit “or else.”
“I’ll be on my best behavior. You go to NC State with her?”
“Yes — I just started in September. My family lives a long way off, so Radhika invited me to have Thanksgiving dinner with you.”
“I’m glad you’re here. You brighten up the scenery considerably.”
“Hey, knock it off,” Radhika said. “You’ve got enough girlfriends.”
“Yes, and they all wanted to spend Thanksgiving with their families, and none of them wanted me spending Thanksgiving with one of the others.” I wondered how many girlfriends he had; using “all” rather than “both” implied three or more, and I’d heard rumors of male Raleigh rabbits with five or six wives or girlfriends, though I’d never met anyone with more than two.
“...Besides,” Lauren said after a brief pause and a grin at me, “you’re too young for me.”
“No, I’m not,” I blurted out, and then regretted it. “I mean, not that I want to be your girlfriend, but I’m not as young as I look. I’m eighteen.”
Mrs. Eames noticed I was uncomfortable and glared at Lauren. “We can eat supper any time you are ready. Are you all hungry?”
We were, and we got up and filed into the kitchen to serve our plates. It was a fairly simple supper; they were saving the fancy stuff for the next day’s dinner. Lauren asked me a little bit more about myself, and I told him what I’d told the others before he arrived, but not much more. Then Mr. and Mrs. Eames asked both Radhika and Lauren a bunch of questions about what they’d been doing since they were last home, and I was thankfully able to fade into the background for a while. I learned a little more about them than Radhika had told me on the drive over there, such as that Lauren had three girlfriends, Urmila, Bob, and Zach; that Urmila worked for the same company as Lauren, while Bob and Zach were seniors at UNC; that Gary played soccer for the boys' team at his high school; that Mr. Eames was a respiratory therapist at Duke Hospital, and Mrs. Eames was a software tester for a company in Chapel Hill.
I had started to notice some attraction to guys in the weeks since my first period; mostly to a guy who sat one row in front of me in Political Science, who had really nice shoulders. I don’t remember what his name was at this point; I never got to know him. I still couldn’t stand Rico, but I could begin to see why Sarah and Rob found him attractive — though not why they actually wanted to be his girlfriends. But until now it hadn’t been as visceral as when I found my eyes drifting back toward Lauren again and again during supper; those ears, those arms, that smile... My nipples were getting hard, and I couldn’t attribute it to the cold like the first couple of times I’d noticed that happening.
After supper, we played board games and card games until bedtime. First all six of us played a round of Fluxx, which I’d never heard of, a crazy card game where the rules are constantly changing and it’s impossible to guess how close you or anyone else is to winning. Twice I thought I was about to win and the rules changed so I was nowhere near winning. Gary won, and thus, by a house rule, he got to pick the next game. Since he wanted to play a board game that was for four players at most, we split into two groups of three, and I was careful to get into the group that didn’t have Lauren in it. I was still kind of distracted, though, glancing over toward the other table at Lauren’s butt and shoulders.
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Later, when we were getting ready for bed, Radhika said: “So, has my brother made another conquest?”
“No,” I said, my ears twitching. “He’s... I guess he’s kind of hot, but he’s too old for me.”
part 5 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
“If you don’t want to share the bed,” Radhika said, “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No, it’s your room,” I protested. “And I wouldn’t mind sharing, except...” I looked up at her. “Is there really room for both of us?” The bed was bigger than the single beds we had in the dorm, but I wasn’t sure we’d both fit in it without squeezing. Radhika was pretty tall, and wide in proportion.
“Let’s try it,” she said, “and I’ll get my sleeping bag out of the closet if you aren’t comfortable.”
I went to the bathroom to change into my nightgown (there was no sense in buying more pajamas until I finished growing), and she’d changed into her pajamas by the time I got back. We laid down, and I found there was more room in the bed than I’d thought; I had several inches between me and Radhika on one side, and me and the edge of the bed on the other. “This is fine, I guess.”
“Good night.”
I woke up during the night with something hard poking into my thigh. It was too dark to see what it was, but I could figure it out: Radhika had rolled over in her sleep and her clitoris was sticking through her pajamas into my nightgown. I squirmed over to give her more room and eventually got back to sleep.
(I’d never seen a Cary hyena naked, what with the bathrooms at the dorm being unisex so everyone wore a bathrobe or towel on the way to and from the shower, but I’d seen anatomical diagrams when I was researching Triangle-area neospecies before I went off to school. Female Cary hyenas have a clitoris that’s as big as the average penis of a male Cary hyena, and it’s hollow — it opens up when they’re aroused. It’s the reason they’re named for hyenas, not because they eat carrion or anything.)
The next morning, I got up early so I could shower before anyone else. Mrs. Eames was already up, getting the turkey in the oven, though she went back to bed before I was out of the shower.
Later on, after she got up again, I helped her out in the kitchen, getting things ready for dinner. Radhika, Lauren and Gary all helped out too. Gary and I set the table a little before noon, and then we sat down to dinner. Due to bad planning, I found myself sitting between Radhika and Lauren; I felt my face getting warm when he sat down next to me.
“So, Joel,” he said after we’d passed all the plates and bowls around and served our food, “did I understand you right — there weren’t any other Raleigh rabbits in the town where you grew up?”
“No — none in all of Nebraska as far as I know. I never saw any when I went to Lincoln or Omaha for shopping or concerts or whatever. And a couple of times when I went on web forums for Raleigh rabbits I asked about rabbits living in the Midwest, and the closest people who responded were in Illinois.”
“So is that why you look so young?”
“...Yeah, I didn’t start puberty until I came here for school.”
He gave me an appraising glance. “It’s going pretty fast, then. You look about fourteen or fifteen, I guess...?”
“Yeah, the doctor said it was going five or six times faster than normal. I need to buy new clothes every few weeks.” I didn’t mention needing to replace my cane, as well.
“She was shorter than Paul by a couple of inches when I met her, and now she’s an inch taller,” Radhika put in.
“I still haven’t met this Paul,” Lauren said. “What’s he like?,” and I was thankful for the change of subject.
After we put away the leftovers and cleaned the table, we went out and watched a soccer game at Gary’s high school: two teams of Cary hyena girls. I didn’t know enough about sports to be sure, but I thought they were playing by slightly different rules than the Lincoln bison use in the Lincoln change-region. The home team won, which made Gary and his family pretty happy.
“Back before the Divergence,” Radhika’s dad said on the way back to the house, “we would have been watching college football on TV this afternoon.”
Radhika shrugged. “I like this way better. I actually know some of the girls on our team. Why did people care so much about athletes they didn’t know, back in the day?”
“They were going to the same college we went to,” Mr. Eames said. “Or they were going to the college we would have liked to go to, or that other people in our family went to, or something.”
“But what about pro athletes?” Lauren asked. “I mean, if you lived in a big city, maybe you’d care about the team that was based in that city. But why would people in Raleigh care about teams from Atlanta or Miami or wherever?”
“Good question,” Mr. Eames said. “Especially since the athletes in those big-city teams came from all over, not particularly from the local region. So there might have been a guy from the Triangle area, maybe even Cary, on an Atlanta or Miami-based team.”
Gary had something else on his mind. “Did you see that Tarika Andrews? She’s something else — that last goal she made, wow!”
“Which one was she?” I asked.
“Number fourteen,” Radhika supplied. “The one who made the last goal in the game, and also a couple of earlier ones.”
“Yeah, she was good.”
“And hot!” Gary added, then gave his parents an embarrassed glance. Mr. Eames smiled.
“You hoping she’ll ask you out?” Radhika asked.
“I wish,” Gary said. “But she’s got her pick of boys. I doubt she’s ever noticed me.”
“It can’t hurt to talk to her.”
After we got back to the house and washed the dishes, I called Aunt Ellen and talked with her a while. She and Uncle Tyler were at Grandma and Grandpa Kritzer’s house for Thanksgiving, and she passed the phone around so I could talk to everybody.
A little later, we all played another round of Fluxx. I won, much to my surprise, and Radhika said: “You pick the next game.”
“Um...” I looked over the shelf of games for a couple of minutes, and picked out Blokus, which I’d never played, but which looked like a geometry matching game of some kind.
“Good choice,” Lauren said. “That’s one of my favorites.” Uh-oh.
Blokus was for up to four players, so Radhika and Gary joined me and Lauren, while Mr. and Mrs. Eames went for a walk. Radhika and Lauren taught me how to play, and we played two rounds; Radhika won the first, and Gary won the second. We heated up and ate some leftovers during our second game.
Later, when we were getting ready for bed, Radhika said: “So, has my brother made another conquest?”
“No,” I said, my ears twitching. “He’s... I guess he’s kind of hot, but he’s too old for me.”
“You didn’t think so yesterday,” she said with a grin.
“No, I meant... aargh. I didn’t want him to think I was just a kid. But I don’t want to date someone as old as him either.” He was five years older than me and Radhika.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You might have distracted him a lot tonight — he was way off his game, he usually wins at Blokus — but he’s not going to go after another girlfriend who’s barely of age, not when he’s already got three.”
I’d distracted him?
Friday, Radhika, her mom and I went shopping at some stores in downtown Cary. I didn’t really need anything new; I hadn’t yet outgrown the stuff I’d bought the previous weekend, but I tried on various things, wondering when I’d stop growing and could start wearing pants again. I didn’t buy anything for myself, but I bought Christmas presents for Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler and several friends. I was at first surprised to see that the women’s' restrooms in Cary had urinals, but then I remembered that female Cary hyenas could pee standing up. (I hadn’t seen them doing that before because the unisex bathrooms in the dorm didn’t have urinals.)
That afternoon, we met up with Lauren and Mr. Eames at Gary’s high school, and watched his team play another boys' team from Apex High School. They lost by a narrow margin, and everybody commiserated with Gary about it afterward.
“You did good,” Radhika said; “it wasn’t your fault the team lost.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “We were good, I can’t see where we made any big mistakes, but I guess they were better.”
Two of Lauren’s girlfriends, Urmila and Bob, came over that evening for supper and stayed the next couple of nights. Zach had gone to her grandparents' house in Asheville for the weekend. Once they were around, Lauren stopped looking at me so much — I wasn’t much to look at beside them, with Urmila having that black fur with white patches at the tips of her ears, and both of them (especially Bob) having breasts way bigger than mine. That was a relief at first, but after a while I realized I was feeling disappointment, too, and an impatience for my body to finish developing. Paul came over for supper, too, though he didn’t spend the night.
Saturday morning while we were getting dressed, Radhika asked me: “Do you want to stay another day?”
“I thought you were going to stay until Sunday afternoon?”
“Yeah, I’m planning on it, but I could give you a ride back to the dorm if you’re exhausted from hanging out with my family by now. They can be a bit much, I know, especially when Lauren’s girlfriends are staying over...”
“No, I’d like to stay if it’s okay.”
“Sure, Mom and Dad said it was fine.”
So I stayed another day. Lauren and his girlfriends went out to a movie that afternoon, and Gary went over to a friend’s house, but I spent the day hanging out with Radhika and sometimes with her parents. She showed me the first three or four episodes of a comedy produced in Wake Forest whose cast was mostly Cary hyenas, with a couple of characters from neighboring change-regions. It was pretty good; I bet anybody of a species with fairly standard psychology would find most of the jokes funny, though there were a few jokes that depended on peculiarities of Cary hyena sexuality or culture and didn’t seem funny even when Radhika explained them. But I didn’t appreciate the way the Raleigh rabbit characters were portrayed, especially in the second episode where a girl is trying to date a guy who already has two girlfriends. It reminded me of Paul’s complaint about “Shifting Alliances.”
“Has Lauren seen this show?” I asked, and she nodded. “What did he think?”
“He likes it pretty well, though he doesn’t watch it regularly, just when I tell him the new episode is unusually good.”
“Hmm. How long has he been dating those three girls?”
“He’s been friends with Urmila since middle school, when they were both girls. He changed into a guy after they started high school, and they started dating not long afterward. They added Bob and Zach after they went to UNC; I don’t remember now which came first.”
We watched another couple of episodes, and then Lauren, Urmila and Bob came back from their movie and ate supper with us. Bob took more of an interest in me than she had the previous evening.
“So Lauren tells me you just started puberty a couple of months ago?”
“Almost three months now. Yeah.”
“And you were a boy before the Divergence... did your, um, aunt and uncle tell you you might grow up to be a girl? Or was it a surprise?”
“They didn’t tell me. I found out on my own, doing research, several years ago.”
“You seem to be doing pretty well with it, from the way you’re dressed and all.”
“Thanks. Actually, the main reason I’m wearing skirts is that I’m growing so fast I can’t afford to buy pants, I’d outgrow them too fast. Skirts last longer. This one was ankle-length when I bought it in September. But when I stop growing I want to start wearing pants again.”
“That’s cool. Girls can wear whatever we want, though there are sometimes advantages to dressing a particular way.”
“You were a boy before the Divergence, too, right?”
“Yes, and for a year and a half afterward, until I went from middle school to high school. It was kind of a shock at first — more the realization that I was attracted to guys than the having girl parts, because I’d already seen several of my friends changing right after the Divergence.”
“Well, I’m not having that kind of trouble with my orientation changing, because I wasn’t attracted to anybody before, and I had no idea what orientation I’d end up with afterward... and I was already used to peeing sitting down... but wearing a skirt and bras, and having people treat me as a girl, was a lot to get used to.”
“And periods?” She smiled wryly.
“Period, singular, so far. Also not on my list of fun things.”
“It’ll be plural before long.”
“Yeah, probably just before Christmas if they’re on a regular schedule. But the doctor said they might be more frequent at first until my body stops growing so fast.”
“Ouch! My sympathies.”
“I’ve got my fingers crossed.”
Lauren, Urmila and Bob disappeared into Lauren’s room not long after supper and didn’t come out until morning. Mrs. Eames threw them a disapproving glare as they excused themselves, and Mr. Eames sighed and shook his head gently. “We can’t live their lives for them,” he said quietly to her; I don’t think he thought I heard him.
Next morning, we all went to church. Mrs. Eames, Bob, Urmila and Radhika all wore really nice dresses; I felt kind of underdressed in my black skirt and white shirt, especially since I didn’t have anything but tennis shoes to wear with them. My feet were still growing so fast I couldn’t afford more than one new pair of shoes at a time, and even one was straining my bank account; those last three shopping trips had used up most of the money I’d saved up from my summer jobs the last couple of years. And services at the chapel on campus were pretty informal. But nobody stared at me, so after I’d been there a while I relaxed and felt more at ease. It was a big church, and most of the people were Cary hyenas; I think I only saw three or four other rabbits besides me, Lauren and his girlfriends, and a similar number of Durham bulls and Chapel Hill trinocs.
After church, we all went out to lunch at a fancy restaurant. I had to go to the restroom before we ate, and Bob came with me. I gave a curious glance at a hyena woman standing at a urinal, remembering how I used to be able to do that when I was a little boy, and went into a stall. Afterward, while I was washing my hands and Bob was brushing the fur at the tips of her ears, I worked up the nerve to ask her:
“How’d you get together with Lauren and Urmila? I mean, they were already together when you met them, right? Did they ask you out or did you ask them?”
“Yeah, them and Zach as well, though Zach had only been with them a few months. Lauren and Urmila have been together since high school —”
“Yeah, Radhika told me.”
“Well, I got to be friends with Zach first; we met when we both joined the gaming club our first semester at UNC. Then Zach started dating Lauren and Urmila early the next year, and she introduced me to them, and we hung out a lot for several months before they invited me on a real date.”
“Oh... thanks.”
“You dating yet?”
“Not this semester, anyway. I just wanted to pick your brain about it, since you seem to have more experience than some of the girls I’ve met at school.”
“You’ve made some friends at school, right? Not just Radhika, she’s nice but she doesn’t know how things are for us rabbits...”
“Yeah, I’ve got several other friends, some of them rabbits. But they’re less experienced than you, like I said.”
“Give me a call sometime if you want more advice,” she said, and gave me her phone number. “But I’m getting hungry. Let’s go eat.”
Radhika and I went back to the campus that afternoon, and she helped me bring my bag in to the dorm. Amy was already back from her grandparents' house; she wanted to know about our Thanksgiving “revelry,” as she called it, and told us some of what she’d done with her family, especially her cousins — she seemed to have a lot of them. I felt a little jealous of Amy and Radhika’s big families; my mom was an only child, and my dad only had one brother, Uncle Tyler. He and Aunt Ellen didn’t have any children of their own, so I was the only one of my generation.
I continued to notice more attraction to guys over the last few weeks of the semester. Dr. Mathers advised me to start wearing a pad again just a week or two after my first period, in case the next one started early because of my accelerated puberty, and it turned out to be a useful precaution when I found my crotch getting wet while I was idly staring at a guy sitting at the next table during supper one evening. I was grossed out when I realized that; I changed my pad as soon as I got back to the dorm, and curled up in the bed reading for the rest of the evening. Amy seemed to sense something was wrong, but I didn’t want to talk about it; she wouldn’t understand.
The next evening I dug through my stuff until I found Terry Davenport’s business card, and called her.
“Terry Davenport speaking.”
“Hi, Terry. Um, this is Joel — Joel Hampton — we met on the train from New Orleans to Raleigh back in September...”
“Oh, yes, I remember you. How are you doing? I gather from the sound of your voice that you’re developing as a biological female...”
“Yeah, and it’s going pretty fast — the doctor says I’ll probably be full-grown by Spring break at this rate.”
“Are you still identifying as male?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, I still feel like a guy in some ways, maybe, but it’s less every week — there’s just too much female stuff in my life. I have to wear skirts because I can’t afford to keep buying new pants every month, as fast as I’m growing, and I have to wear bras or my nipples will show, and I had my first period a month ago, and I’m definitely attracted to guys. That’s kind of why I called you; I kind of freaked out last night when I realized I was staring at a guy and my, um, my body was reacting to him. More than to any of the other guys I’ve seen since I started growing girl parts.”
“I see. There are other options, you know; if you aren’t comfortable with your breasts you could bind them with bandages instead of wearing bras.”
“That sounds like it would be uncomfortable.”
“For some people, it’s a choice between physical discomfort and psychological discomfort. It’s your choice, if your breasts or the fact that they need support are making you uncomfortable.”
“Maybe I’ll try it; I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”
“I’m glad to listen. As for being attracted to men... I know it’s a shock right now, but it will probably feel natural to you pretty soon.”
“I guess. I mean, I’d probably be freaking out almost as much if I’d turned into a male and had my first, um, erection while I was looking at a girl. It’s just kind of weird and, frankly, pretty gross...”
I could almost hear her smile. “It is, isn’t it? It’s a good thing we evolved with a sex drive, or we’d be too disgusted with ourselves to propagate the species.”
“Yeah, that’s what worries me. If I’m getting — wet, looking at and thinking about guys, I’m probably going to start wanting to — to have sex with them, pretty soon. I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Then don’t. Especially don’t let anyone pressure you into it. Has anyone asked you out yet?”
“Just one couple, so far.” That reminded me that Rob owed me a dress; she’d bet me a new dress that two or three guys would ask me out within a week after I started wearing bras, and there’d been only one, Larry. But did I want a dress? “I think I still look too young for most guys... somebody told me recently that I look about fifteen.”
“You should definitely wait, then. And — ah, maybe ask some of your female friends for advice about other ways of relieving the pressure. I’d rather not give you advice about that over the phone, for obvious reasons.”
My face got warmer. “I might ask somebody about that, yeah... or look stuff up on the Internet.”
“Good idea. I’m an old fart and looking stuff up on the Internet isn’t the first place my mind goes with things like this.”
I laughed. “Thanks. I don’t want to keep you too long, but you’ve been a big help.”
“Any time. Thanks for calling.”
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“It’s okay if you call me a boy and ‘he’,” I said. “Or girl and ‘she’, either way. I’m wearing skirts for now but I think I’ll go back to pants when I stop growing and can buy stuff that will fit me long-term.”
part 6 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Rob or Sarah would probably know some useful things, I figured, but I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to talk about it with them. And I wasn’t sure I ought to do it in any case — Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler raised me to think it was wrong. But if it was the only way I could avoid jumping in bed with some guy... maybe it would be okay.
I held out for another week. The last morning of the semester, I walked into the bathroom and met a guy coming out of the shower wearing a towel and nothing else. When I got into the shower, I found I was already wet before I turned on the water, and tentatively put a finger where nothing but Dr. Mathers' speculum had been before. It was pleasant, and definitely helped “relieve the pressure” as Terry had put it, but it wasn’t as spectacular as I’d heard it could be. A few days later, after looking up stuff on the Internet and not finding much Raleigh rabbit-specific stuff, I worked up the nerve to ask Rob or Sarah about it; I climbed the stairs to their floor, rested a minute on the landing, then walked down the hall to their room and knocked.
I heard low voices from inside, a bump like someone had run into some furniture, and a slightly louder exclamation that I couldn’t quite make out but sounded like a curse, then laughter from someone else. Then Rob opened the door just a crack; she was wearing a bathrobe.
“Hi, we’re kind of busy.” From somewhere behind her I heard Rico’s voice, and Sarah’s, speaking in low tones.
“Oh,” I said, my ears twitching. “I’ll come back later.”
But I didn’t. Not for quite a while.
The following day, I boarded the train to Atlanta on the first stage of my trip home. Or was it home anymore? I was pretty sure I’d want to settle in Raleigh after I graduated, and I might get an apartment there even before I graduated, in the last two or even three years of school. But Nebraska was where all my surviving family lived; it was where my parents were buried. I’d wait until I got there, I decided, and see if it still felt like home.
Amy and I took the shuttle to the train together and found seats next to each other. There were just a handful of Raleigh rabbits in our car, including the boy and girl who’d been on the train with me on the way to Raleigh in the fall, who hadn’t wanted to talk with me then. I’d seen them around campus a couple of times but hadn’t shared any classes with them or learned their names. They were friendlier this time, introducing themselves as Tracy and Yolanda; apparently they lived in Lithonia, near Atlanta, and had been the only Raleigh rabbits in their high school, except for their own younger siblings.
“Man,” I said, “my own high school experience would have been totally different if there’d been even one other Raleigh rabbit in my school. Or even in the next town over, going to a rival school.”
“Where do you live?” Tracy asked, and I told them.
“Oh, wow! Is the rest of your family telepaths?” Yolanda asked excitedly.
“Uh, no. My aunt and uncle and my grandparents are Lincoln bison. I guess you’re thinking about the North Platte dreamers?”
“Yeah, I think so. I just remembered that one of the only telepathic neospecies in North America live in Nebraska or Kansas somewhere.”
“Both, I think; their change-region sprawls across the state line and into a little corner of Colorado, but most of it’s in Nebraska.”
“Do you know a lot of them?”
“No, none. Hebron’s fifty miles east of the change-region border, but there’s nothing to see in that change-region except cornfields, and we’ve got all the cornfields we want around Hebron. If we want a little excitement we go east, to Lincoln or Omaha, and if we want a lot of excitement we have to leave Nebraska entirely.”
“Huh. Wouldn’t it be exciting to hang out with telepaths? They must be interesting people.”
“Probably to each other, I guess. I worked in a convenience store last summer, and we had two or three North Platte dreamer families come through at one time or another, but my job didn’t exactly have a lot of scope for extended conversation with the customers.”
“Too bad,” Yolanda said. “I want to be an anthropologist — I’m planning to go to grad school at Duke after I finish at NC State — and I want to do my thesis on one of the telepathic neospecies. Probably the North Platte dreamers, since they’re a lot less studied than the Brooklyn or Huntsville telepaths. Or the Kelowna nomads, from western Canada.”
Meanwhile Amy and Tracy had been talking about other stuff — from the little I overheard, Tracy said there were several Athens magnolias in their high school back home, and he was friends with one of them. Yolanda volunteered the fact that her younger sister Oliver was also Tracy’s girlfriend, but they hadn’t slept together since Tracy turned eighteen. “Oliver’s going to turn eighteen during the Christmas break, so we’ve got a big surprise planned for her birthday,” she confided in a low voice.
“TMI!” I replied, and changed the subject.
I traveled alone from Atlanta to New Orleans and New Orleans to Lincoln; there weren’t any Raleigh rabbits in the car, or anybody of any neospecies I knew well, until we got to Topeka and some Lincoln bison got on. When we got to Lincoln, I got down from the train and looked around; I didn’t see Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler, so I dialed Aunt Ellen’s cellphone and told her where I was.
“We’re almost there,” she said. “Give us a few minutes.”
I got a porter to help me with my suitcases and met Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler at the circular driveway. I realized I was now a little taller than Aunt Ellen, and almost as tall as Uncle Tyler. (Lincoln bison are generally shorter and stockier than Raleigh rabbits.)
“Why’d you bring so much stuff?” Uncle Tyler asked as he hefted the suitcases into the trunk.
“I’m afraid I’ll outgrow a lot of these clothes by the time I go back to school, and I want to get some use out of them while I still can.” And one of the suitcases was mostly Christmas presents.
“Makes sense.”
He and Aunt Ellen didn’t make any comment on my being female, or wearing a skirt, for the first few miles of the way to Hebron. They asked me how my trip went, and what my grades for the semester were, and so forth, and told me some of the news and gossip around Hebron while I’d been gone. Then we fell silent for a few minutes, until Aunt Ellen said: “Pull over, honey. I just thought of something we might need to go back to Lincoln for... Joel, do you have any nice dresses to wear to church?”
“Um, no, ma’am. I’m still growing so fast, I didn’t want to buy anything too expensive until I quit growing. I’ve generally worn one of my nicer skirts and tops to chapel, or that Sunday when I went to church with Radhika’s family.”
“The boy’s got sense,” Uncle Tyler said, and then hastily: “Girl. Sorry.”
“It’s okay if you call me a boy and ‘he’,” I said. “Or girl and ‘she’, either way. I’m wearing skirts for now but I think I’ll go back to pants when I stop growing and can buy stuff that will fit me long-term.”
“That does make sense,” Aunt Ellen said, “but let’s take a look around and see if we can find a nice dress that doesn’t cost too much.”
“All right,” Uncle Tyler said, and told the car to drive to a mall on the west side of Lincoln. “I hear and obey.”
Aunt Ellen swatted him gently.
A few hours later, when we were on the road to Hebron again, I called my friend Carl to see if he was home from school yet.
“Yeah, I got home last night. And Ron was supposed to get home sometime today, but I haven’t talked to him since yesterday. You want to get together?”
“Yeah, sure. Maybe tomorrow after church; I’m too wiped out from traveling to meet up tonight.”
Carl was going to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Ron was at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. I was closer friends with Carl than Ron, but had been pretty close to both of them throughout middle school and high school. These last few months, though... I’d exchanged emails or social media messages with them several times near the beginning of the semester, but the more I developed as a girl and the more friends I made at NC State, the less reason I found to talk with them; I didn’t feel comfortable talking to them about the messy details of female puberty. I didn’t want to lose touch entirely, though, so I was hoping to meet up with them several times during the break.
The next morning after my shower, I tried an experiment. I took a package of Ace bandages I’d bought at a drugstore near the train station in New Orleans and bound my breasts, then put on my loosest shirt. I’d outgrown all the shirts and blouses I bought in September and October and the ones I’d bought loose just after Thanksgiving were starting to get a little snug, but I hadn’t bought any the previous evening, thinking I could get another week or two of wear out of the ones I had. The bandages couldn’t hide my breasts completely, not without a looser shirt, though they did look less conspicuous. In the end I decided it was too uncomfortable to be worth it, with no other Raleigh rabbits around, and I switched to the pair of bras I’d bought in Lincoln the evening before. They weren’t designed for Raleigh rabbits, so I had to do some cutting and gluing on the shoulder straps of the bra for my lower breasts. I was also afraid that Aunt Ellen would be upset if I didn’t wear the dress she’d bought for me, so I put it on though I didn’t quite feel comfortable wearing it, or letting her spend her money on it — it was only a little loose, and I’d probably outgrow it within a month.
I’d gotten up early to allow time for all that, so we were still in time for Sunday school. Ron walked in to the Sunday school classroom just a few minutes after me. He’s an Omaha sheepdog, several inches taller than me or our friend Carl, and heavier-set than the average sheepdog.
“Joel?” he asked, as though there might be another Raleigh rabbit in town.
“This is me,” I said, and made a strong effort to maintain eye contact, though I wanted to look away.
“You look... huh. You’re pretty different from that photo you sent me.”
Back when I’d told Ron and Carl by email that I was starting to develop as a girl — no messy details, just the basic fact — Ron had asked me for an updated photo for his phone contacts, and I’d had Amy take one of me. That was probably before I started wearing a bra, though. The ones I’d bought yesterday evening in Lincoln were B cups.
“Yeah, the doctor says I’m growing a lot faster than normal. Normal for a thirteen to fifteen year old, that is; she’s not sure what’s normal for someone who didn’t start puberty until they’re eighteen. She’s never seen anybody like me before.”
“Huh. I mean, you told me, and you even sent that photo, but... seeing you with, um, and in a dress...”
“It’s still me,” I said with a sigh. “And the dress is because of Aunt Ellen; she wanted to buy me at least one nice dress for church, and I let her... I usually wear more casual stuff.”
He nodded. “Jeans and T-shirts, I guess?”
“I wish,” and I explained about how I was growing too fast to wear jeans.
“Man, that sucks.”
Mrs. McLeod, the Sunday school teacher, called us to order then, and we didn’t talk any more until after class. Then Ron said, as we walked from the classroom to the sanctuary, “Carl texted me about getting together this afternoon at Mary’s Cafe. You coming?”
“Yeah, we talked last night. I’d like to go home and change into something more comfortable first, though.”
“Yeah, I imagine so. How’s life at NC State?”
I told him a little of what had been going on with me, mainly classes and clubs, and a little about the friends I’d made there. “How are you liking MU?”
His face lit up. “It’s a great school. Really diverse; Missouri’s got more neospecies than most states with a similar population — twenty-two change-regions and only a bit more than six million people. And all of them are represented at Mizzou, plus a lot of people like me from other states.” (Nebraska has only six, and that’s if you count two change-regions that lie mostly in South Dakota and Wyoming, plus the little sliver of the Mississippi-Missouri change region along the banks of the Missouri.)
“Are there a lot of Omaha sheepdogs? Have you met any girls?”
“Yes and yes,” he said briefly. He’d never had as many dates in high school as Carl, and only one steady girlfriend, who lasted all of six months before breaking up with him several weeks before prom. Of course the local dating pool for Omaha sheepdogs was pretty small. After an awkward silence, he said: “I’ve been on three dates. Two of them with the same girl, even. I hope she’ll want to go out again when I get back.”
“That’s awesome. What’s her name?”
“Lindsey.”
“Do you have a photo of her?”
“...No. Um, what about you...? Have you been on any dates yet?”
“No... I’m definitely attracted to guys, I’ve figured that out by now, but I don’t think I’m ready to date yet. Probably not until my body’s finished changing, or almost finished.”
“Ah, I see. You’re not quite all there yet?”
“No, all the parts are in place, I’m just not full-grown.” I debated mentioning that I’d started my second period on the train from Atlanta to New Orleans, but decided that would probably squick him out.
The organist started playing the entrance hymn about then, and we shut up until after the service. Afterward, he said he’d pick me up in half an hour, after I had a chance to change clothes. I went home with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler and changed into a more comfortable skirt and loose T-shirt, and my tennis shoes. (Aunt Ellen had also insisted on buying a pair of dressy shoes — and I’d insisted on flats instead of heels, after I warned her repeatedly that they would probably only last me a few weeks. We’d gotten them one size too big, and I’d worn two layers of socks with them.)
“Have fun and don’t stay out too late,” Uncle Tyler said when Ron pulled up in front, and Aunt Ellen added: “Call us if you’re going to be out past ten.”
“Sure,” I said, and went out to meet Ron and Carl.
“Wow,” was all Carl was coherent enough to say at first.
“You should have seen him earlier, dressed up for church,” Ron said, and then, to the car’s console: “Destination: Mary’s Cafe. Go.” It started moving.
“Man, I mean you told me you were turning into a girl, but it didn’t really connect until I saw you just now,” Carl babbled on.
“Stare all you want and get it over with,” I said with a slight smile and a decided twitch of the ears. “Where’s Julia? Is she going to join us at the cafe?”
“She’ll be around later on. Her little sister’s birthday is Tuesday, and they’re having the party today, but she said she’d be free by two or three.” Carl’s girlfriend Julia had gone to UNL with him; they’d been together since junior year.
We got a table at Mary’s Cafe, one of the very few restaurants in town, and ordered drinks and appetizers. I had a very un-girlish appetite with my freakishly rapid puberty, and I devoured a bowl of chicken tortilla soup, a large order of French fries, a club sandwich and some jalopeño poppers. This excited comment from Carl and Ron, to which I replied simply, “I’m a growing girl.”
“Are you all girl, then?” Ron asked. “Inside, I mean — in your head? Earlier you said you weren’t comfortable wearing a dress, you did just it to please your aunt.”
“I don’t know. I haven’t changed inside as much as I’ve changed outside, I’m pretty sure of that, but I have changed some... how much I don’t know.”
Once we’d blunted the edge of our appetites and slowed down eating, we talked about other things, our experiences of school, new people we’d met there, new movies and vid serials we’d seen, new books we’d read. I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t found time to play any new games what with being busy with school and meeting new people. (Except Fluxx and Blokus; I guess those count as games. But most of my new friends weren’t gamers, except George, and he played only the audio games that were coming out of the new Nashville game studios. I’d tried to play one of them with him; Raleigh rabbits have better hearing than most neospecies, but I don’t have a Nashville bat’s instinctive ability to interpret echoes into information about my surroundings.)
Julia came by later on, after we’d finished off our entrees and were snacking on a second round of appetizers. Ron got up and came around to my side of the table (we were in a booth by the window), while Julia sat down beside Carl and they nuzzled. Julia is a Lincoln bison, a couple of inches shorter than Carl, with black hair and beard. She was wearing red polish on her horns, which contrasted nicely with her hair, and a little red ribbon in her beard.
It was a little after that that I noticed something odd. When Carl and Ron had been sitting across from me, they’d naturally both been looking at me. Carl had been pretty frankly staring at me, on the drive over there and when we first sat down, but he got over being gobsmacked eventually and starting looking at other things and people; looking out the window, glancing at the people at other tables and the waitress bustling from one table to another. But Ron kept looking mostly at me — which seemed natural enough while he was sitting across from me, but started to seem odd when he was sitting right next to me.
I thought it was probably my imagination, or if not, he was just still having trouble getting used to how much I’d changed. I was having trouble, and I’d had more than three months to gradually get used to it; here I was dumping it on him all at once.
Julia was surprised to see how I’d changed, too, and asked me a few questions about how it felt to be growing up as a girl, and so fast. Her questions and my answers were pretty vague at first, but after my second Cherry Coke and her first Diet Coke, we made the obligatory group trip to the restroom, and she asked me some more pointed questions. I had some for her, too.
“How are you and Carl doing?” I asked. “It looks like you’re still pretty tight.”
“Yeah,” she said happily. “I was a little worried when we went off to college, but we’re definitely still together. He’s got a wandering eye, but as long as that’s the only part of him that wanders I’m okay with it.”
“You were gone a long time,” Carl remarked when we returned to the booth.
“We were talking about you,” I said truthfully. Julia glared at me, which suggested I shouldn’t have been so honest.
After Julia had eaten, we all went over to Ron’s house to watch a couple of movies and play some games on his big screen. The first movie was a parallel world adventure from Sundberg Studio, an Omaha-based studio that had made several of our favorite movies growing up. The cast was mostly Omaha sheepdogs with several Lincoln bison, a Mississippi mudcat, and two North Platte dreamers — it represented their telepathy with italics subtitles. The second movie was one of the increasingly rare Hollywood movies that got exposure nationwide; it had come out back in September but I’d been too busy studying to go see it. (Nearly all the pre-Divergence classics we still watch were produced if not filmed in Hollywood, but nowadays, who wants to watch a steady diet of stories about Hollywood capybaras and other southern California neospecies? Their casting is more diverse than it was right after the Divergence, and they’ve got more money to spend on special effects than most of the local studios that have sprung up around the country, but they still have a higher bar to clear to get people of other neospecies to watch their movies.) This one was a tragedy based on a true story, about a professor from Pakistan who was visiting Western Kentucky University on Valentine’s Day. He formed family bonds with the other people of his new species, but the State Department kept trying to deport him and finally succeeded. He pined away and starved almost to death before a big petition campaign got the government to let him back in to the U.S., but by then he was too sick to travel, and died soon afterward.
We ate supper with Ron’s parents, and then Julia took Carl home, and Ron took me home.
I'm not getting a lot of comments on this story so far. If I get at least three comments on this chapter, I'll try to post the next chapter a few days early.
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“Look,” I said, “I know this is a shock to you, and maybe I’m expecting too much for you to get over it in a day or so. God knows it’s taken me several months to get used to the idea of being a girl... But what about if we pause the game, and you just stare at me for as long as it takes for you to get it out of your system? Instead of, you know, glancing at me out of the corner of your eye and then trying to pretend you weren’t looking.”
part 7 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This novel is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Monday evening, I went over to Grandma and Grandpa Hampton’s place with Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler. They were surprised to see me like that — I think Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler had procrastinated on telling them I was developing as a girl until the last minute. Grandma seemed pleased that I was dressing well; she asked if Raleigh rabbit girls wore earrings (a few do, but not as many as among Lincoln bison or some other neospecies), and had some other suggestions about making myself look nicer. Grandpa didn’t have much to say to me or anyone else; I was worried he was upset with me, but it wasn’t like I could do anything about turning into a girl. I couldn’t even dress like a boy unless I had money to burn.
Tuesday, Carl was busy doing boyfriend-girlfriend things with Julia, but I hung out with Ron and played video games for a few hours. I asked him to tell me some more about Lindsey, but he seemed oddly reluctant to part with any details. “She’s nice,” he said. “I don’t know her that well yet, but we both like Ken Liu; that’s how we met, I saw her checking out his latest book at the library.”
I’d suspected something was up Sunday afternoon, and by Tuesday evening I was sure of it. When we were playing games and Ron’s eyes should have been on the screen, they were too often on me instead, and it was throwing him off his game. I finally confronted him about it when we took a break.
“Look,” I said, “I know this is a shock to you, and maybe I’m expecting too much for you to get over it in a day or so. God knows it’s taken me several months to get used to the idea of being a girl... But what about if we pause the game, and you just stare at me for as long as it takes for you to get it out of your system? Instead of, you know, glancing at me out of the corner of your eye and then trying to pretend you weren’t looking.”
He looked down at his lap, mumbling something incoherent.
“I didn’t quite catch that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said a little louder. “I’ll try not to look at you like that... it’s just...” He shut up.
“No, I wasn’t being facetious. Really, stare at me all you want, just get it over with.”
Again he mumbled something I couldn’t make out, but he looked at me this time. I looked him in the eyes and smiled encouragingly. But I realized his eyes weren’t on mine, they were a little lower down. On my breasts... well, he wasn’t used to me having them. Still, it was kind of creepy; if he were a Raleigh rabbit it would be more understandable, maybe flattering, but from an Omaha sheepdog...
“I’m still me, remember. Let me know when you’re done staring and we can get back to me kicking your ass at Road Hog Mountain.”
“Yeah, let’s do that.” And he picked up the game controller to unpause it, but as he did, he shifted uncomfortably on the sofa, and I glanced down... and saw he had a huge bulge in his pants. Involuntarily I squirmed away from him a couple more inches.
“Are you a xenophile?” I asked in a low voice.
He flinched and looked at me in horror.
“Don’t tell anyone, please?”
“...I won’t. Oh... but, you understand I’m not, right? I like guys, but only Raleigh rabbit guys.” I paused. “At least, as far as I can tell. It’s all still pretty new to me.”
“I know you’re not... I mean, I didn’t really expect you to be. Even though you grew up here with nobody else of your species around, and some people say that causes xenophilia...”
“Maybe for some people. But I didn’t go through puberty until I was surrounded by Raleigh rabbits, remember.”
“Yeah. Please promise you won’t tell anybody, especially not Carl, or my parents?”
“Of course. I promise. But... oh. That’s why you said you didn’t have any pictures of Lindsey to show me.”
He nodded and smiled weakly. “She’s a Mississippi mudcat. She’s pretty, even on land, and the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen in the water.”
“Do you really not have any pictures of her?”
“No, I just didn’t want to show you. Here,” and he pulled out his phone and brought up a head-and-shoulders shot of a girl with mud-brown skin, no hair, ears flat against the sides of her head, and whiskers like a cat or catfish; she looked like she was laughing.
“She’s pretty.”
“Yeah.”
We were quiet for a minute or so, and then I said: “Let’s get back to the game,” and he agreed.
Later, when he was giving me a ride home, I asked him: “So... I kind of gathered you were attracted to me?”
“Yeah. It’s not something I can help, but I’ll try not to stare at you like that again.”
“If you’re a xenophile, why are you attracted to me now when you weren’t before?”
He shivered a little. “You weren’t so pretty before. And, um... you didn’t have breasts.”
“So that’s it, huh?”
“As far as I can tell... and I’m still figuring this out... I’m attracted to girls of any species that has breasts. Chicago tripods don’t do it for me, for instance.”
“Or Athens magnolias,” I added.
“Who?”
“Amy, my roommate at NC State — I think I mentioned her? She’s an Athens magnolia; they don’t have breasts except while they’re nursing a baby.”
“Oh. Yeah, I probably wouldn’t be attracted to her either.”
There was a lull in the conversation, and I hesitantly asked: “What about guys who have breasts?”
He didn’t respond right away. Eventually, he said: “I don’t know. I haven’t met any. Do you know where there’s a neospecies where the guys have breasts?”
“I can’t remember where they live offhand, but yeah, I’ve heard about them.” I was regretting asking that question; it was way too personal, and I’d had enough of people asking me too-personal questions in the last few months.
“Well. I guess I’ll find out eventually.”
“What about Lindsey? I mean, if it gets serious you’ll either have to tell your parents, or not invite them to the wedding...”
“Man, that’s way too far off to think about yet. We haven’t done anything but kiss yet.”
“Sorry.”
“No problem.”
We reached my house and he let me out, but didn’t come inside.
A couple of days later, Julia invited me to join her and a couple of friends for a girls' day out. “We’re going to Lincoln to do some shopping and maybe see a movie, if you want to come,” she said on the phone, and I said I’d be glad to come. It was time to replace some of my shirts and blouses that were getting too tight.
Julia came by my house a little after nine, with two other Lincoln bison girls in the car. I got in the back seat, Julia told the car where we wanted to go, and we were off.
“So, Joel, I think you know Leanne and Teresa?”
“I’ve seen you around, yeah.” We’d all gone to Thayer Central High together, though I hadn’t really gotten to know any of them except for Julia, because she was Carl’s girlfriend.
“Joel?” Leanne asked. “Wow, you look different.”
“Everybody keeps saying that. I wonder why.”
Teresa laughed. I was afraid I’d have to answer a barrage of questions from Leanne and Teresa about how I’d turned into a girl, but I guess Julia must have filled them in on the basics, because they didn’t ask. We talked about school for a while — Leanne was going to the University of Nebraska with Carl and Julia, but Teresa was going to Loyola in Chicago. Leanne and Julia talked about their boyfriends for a while; Teresa wasn’t dating anybody at the moment, though there was a Lincoln bison in her Calculus class that she was trying to get to notice her. I said briefly that I wasn’t ready to start dating.
It was a long drive from Hebron to Lincoln, and when conversation died down, Julia put on some music and she, Leanne and Teresa sang along. I didn’t know most of the songs, but when a song came on that I knew, I tentatively joined in. It was about as fun as a long car ride can be.
We pulled into the parking lot of a mall outside Lincoln just before eleven, and started seriously shopping. I tried on a bunch of shirts and blouses and bought three that were just a little big on me, and got another pair of bras that fit my new size. When the other girls wanted to go to a jewelry store next, I said I’d go to the bookstore and meet up with them later, but Leanne said: “Come on. You wouldn’t try on dresses because you said you’d outgrow them too fast, but you won’t outgrow a necklace or a bracelet.”
“Yeah, but I can’t afford that stuff, I’m having to buy new clothes so often what with outgrowing them so fast.”
“Some of it’s not as expensive as you probably think,” Teresa said. “And you don’t have to buy stuff just because you try it on.”
I’d run out of excuses and had to give them my real reason. “Look, I don’t actually want to wear jewelry. Even if I could afford it. I may be female but I don’t want to be that feminine.”
“Go easy on her,” Julia said. “She’s new to all this.”
We met up at the food court an hour later. Julia was wearing a new silver necklace; the others hadn’t bought anything. I’d bought a new novel by Mira Grant.
Lincoln was only a little more diverse than Hebron; we saw more Omaha sheepdogs around the mall than we saw at home, and a handful of North Platte dreamers, but only two people of other species. One was a Chicago tripod, the other was something I didn’t recognize. I had Mississippi mudcats on the brain after Ron’s revelation about his new girlfriend, but I didn’t expect to see any here, so far from the Missouri — nearly all of them live within a few miles of one of the big rivers.
“So,” Leanne said to me when we’d eaten a few bites, “you said you don’t want to wear jewelry... you don’t want to be the kind of girl who wears jewelry?”
“Yeah, that.”
“So what kind of girl do you want to be?”
I was stymied. Not that I hadn’t been thinking about it, but a lot of my thoughts were hard to put into words. “I guess I’m still getting used to the idea of being a girl, period. I want to take it slow. Maybe I’ll wear jewelry someday, but not any time soon.”
“What about makeup? Do Raleigh rabbit girls use it?”
“Maybe some do? Not many, I think; it doesn’t go well with fur.”
“I don’t think any of the Omaha sheepdogs I know use it,” Teresa said.
“Yeah, some dye their fur, but that’s not the same thing,” Julia said. “Do Raleigh rabbits do that?”
“I’ve seen a few, but it’s pretty rare. About as rare as shaving part of your fur; I’ve seen maybe two or three kids on campus that do either, and one or two people off-campus.”
“What would you wear if you had more money to spend on it, and you wouldn’t outgrow it in a few weeks?” Leanne asked.
“A lot of jeans and T-shirts, and a few nicer things to wear to church or job interviews or whatever. What do they call them, those outfits like men’s business suits but tailored for women?”
“Pant suits,” said Teresa.
“Yeah, I’ll probably buy one or two of them once I stop growing.”
“No reason you can’t try some on now, to get a feel for the kind of thing that looks good on you, even if it doesn’t make sense to buy them yet.”
“And you should try other things too,” Leanne said; “several different styles of dresses, for instance. You won’t know you don’t like them until you try them.”
“No, thanks.”
After lunch we hit several more stores, but I didn’t buy anything more, though I tried on a couple of different pant suits and several different styles of jeans and other pants, wondering how long it would take before I could actually buy and wear them. The tops of those pant suits were either way too big for me or were too tight across my lower breasts; stuff made for the local neospecies wouldn’t fit most Raleigh rabbits. One suit, I realized only after I’d tried it on, had a little round hole in the chest designed for a North Platte dreamer’s middle arm; on me it served as a boob window, which I didn’t like at all, even though Leanne said it looked good on me.
The other girls went to a salon to have their horns buffed and polished; while they were in there I went by a game store, but didn’t buy anything there either.
We ate supper at a Mexican restaurant nearby, and got back to Hebron an hour later.
Saturday, we visited my parents' graves. We had a little walk up a hill from where we parked the car, and though the slope wasn’t steep, my hip was aching by the time we got to the Hampton family plot. My parents were buried there, along with a couple of great-uncles and aunts, great-grandparents and other remoter ancestors. I stood between the graves for a while, thinking, Uncle Tyler right behind me and Aunt Ellen a little further off. It was almost ten years since they’d died, but I’d be thousands of miles away when the actual anniversary of their deaths rolled around. I felt like I should do something more besides just visit their graves, but it was the wrong time of year for flowers in our garden, and I wasn’t sure I could afford to buy them from a florist.
I wondered, not for the first time, what might have happened if my parents had lived. Would my dad have married a second wife? Or would he have changed into a woman, and her and Mom married some guy together? Or split up and married different guys? Maybe none of those things; some couples who’d been together since before the Divergence were still monogamous, but among young people it was considered selfish for a woman to want one man all to herself. And whatever might have happened to them, whatever they would have done, I’d have grown up in Raleigh, and gone through puberty at the usual time in the normal context — surrounded by people who were going through the same confusing experience at the same time, instead of people to whom puberty was old hat, for whom dating and sex were routine things they’d figured out years ago.
I hated the way my thoughts were drifting into self-pity, and I tried to focus on memories of my parents from way back. Oddly enough, the first that came to mind was a Nebraska-associated memory: of Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa Kritzer’s house, when I was about five or six. I had woken up early, gone and looked over my presents with awe, and then dragged Mom and Dad out of bed to “show them what Santa Claus brought me.” I remember excitedly pointing out one toy after another to them, and then asking Dad how the robot worked. (It wasn’t a Transformer, but one of the cheap knockoffs. I was too young to be class-conscious about that, the way I was a few years later when I was in second or third grade and had friends from school over who didn’t think much of my off-brand toys.)
That led to a memory of the plane ride to Nebraska, how Mom let me sit in the window seat, and I craned my neck to see out while the plane was taking off, and then took off my seat belt once they said it was okay so I could stand by the window and see better. I remember Mom’s arm around me, holding me steady as the plane jiggled and jostled in the slight turbulence.
I’d probably never ride a plane again; they were more expensive these days, with fuel costs so high, and probably wouldn’t be very comfortable for me with my bad hip.
“You about ready to go?” Uncle Tyler asked.
“I guess so,” I said, and we started back down the hill.
That evening, Carl hosted a little Christmas party at his house. There were only about eight or ten kids there, mostly our age but with a couple of younger siblings who were juniors or seniors in high school — Carl’s little sister, Ted’s little brother, maybe someone else I’ve forgotten. Most of them hadn’t seen me since I’d been back, but all of them remembered how I looked before — I really stood out in our homogeneous little high school — even if they couldn’t remember my name.
After a while, Carl put on some music and we started dancing. Andrew, a Lincoln bison I didn’t know well, asked me to dance, and after some brief hesitation I joined him. I decided nobody would think I was a xenophile because I danced with someone of another species at a party like this where there wasn’t anybody else of my species around. (I hadn’t gone to any of the big dances in high school, for obvious reasons.) It was a little awkward, since I’d rarely done any dancing before because of my bad hip, but once I got over my anxiety it was fun. And that gave me an idea.
There were only two Omaha sheepdogs at the party besides Ron, and they were boyfriend and girlfriend, Will and Macy. Ron had danced once with Macy, but every other time she was dancing with Will, naturally enough, and Ron was sitting out the other dances. I went up to him and said, “Want to dance?”
He looked panicked and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. I said in a low voice, “Nobody will know. Nobody’s going to think I’m a xenophile because I danced with Andrew when no other Raleigh rabbits were around, so why would they think that about you?”
“Are you sure you want to?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
So we danced. It was a loud fast song, so we didn’t have our arms around each other or anything, and I don’t think either of us knew what we were doing, but it was fun. I kind of regretted it afterward when my hip was aching worse than usual, though.
We sat down when the next song began. I saw Leanne talking with her boyfriend Ted, and they were glancing over at me and Ron. I was worried that I’d done something wrong, that Ron’s secret was going to be out because of me. But then Ted came over and said to me (ignoring Ron), “Do you want to dance?”
“Sure,” I said, and got up. We danced through the end of that song, and then I asked: “So, were you asking Leanne for permission to dance with me, or was she telling you to ask me to dance?”
“Um... she told me I should dance with you. Since there aren’t any guys like you around.”
“Thanks,” I said, and walked with him back over toward where Leanne was sitting with Teresa. “Thanks for letting me dance with Ted,” I said.
“No problem,” she said, and to Ted, “Let’s take the next slow dance, sweetie.”
I went back and sat with Ron, and we chatted about inconsequential things for a while. When the party was almost over, I gave Carl and Ron their Christmas presents, and also gave out little things I’d bought at the last minute for Julia, Leanne and Teresa.
If I get four or more comments on this chapter, I'll try to post the next one in three or four days rather than the usual week. I'm not 100% sure I'll be able to, though; I'll be traveling, and time and Internet access may be in short supply.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“I’m not an expert on Raleigh rabbit body language, but I’ve been here long enough to figure out that when your ears are twitching like that, something’s wrong. You’re nervous about something.”
part 8 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Grandma and Grandpa Hampton came over to our house on Christmas day. Grandpa was a little less stiff around me than he had been when we visited a few days ago, but he wasn’t exactly relaxed either. He unbent enough to say “Thank you” when he opened his present from me, but that was about it.
We ate dinner after we opened presents; most of the conversation was Aunt Ellen and Grandma talking about mutual friends of theirs. Uncle Tyler and I talked some about some old movies we’d been watching since I’d been home, but Grandpa didn’t say much, and rarely met my eye.
After dinner Aunt Ellen, Uncle Tyler and I bundled up and went for a walk. When we got back, we watched a couple of Christmas movies, one pre-Divergence classic, Meet John Doe, and one from just a few years ago, from Sundberg Studio, with a bison and sheepdog cast. It was set in a small town on the border of the Omaha and Lincoln change-regions, and the main characters were a family that had been divided into different species. The parents had been trying to hold their marriage together, but when they finally gave up on it, nine months after the Divergence, they agreed to put off separating until after Christmas. Their children, who were also different species, overheard this conversation and hijinks ensued.
Grandpa went to bed before we started the second movie.
Next day, we drove to Lincoln to visit Grandma and Grandpa Kritzer. It was the first time they’d seen the new me, but they were more cheerfully accepting of me than Grandpa or even Grandma Hampton. They showed us the snow-sculptures they’d been making, some of which had partly melted but which were still recognizable, and when we got too cold to stay out any more, we went in, drank hot chocolate, and played games for a few hours. I told them, especially Grandma, a lot about what I was going through, but steered clear of the squicky details.
After dinner, we opened our presents to each other, and then Aunt Ellen, Uncle Tyler and I got back in the car for the ride home.
I had a week before I had to leave for school, and I saw Carl, Ron, Julia and Leanne several more times. We ate out, met at each other’s houses to play games and watch movies, and when it was a bit less cold than usual, went for walks.
I weighed and checked my height once a week while I was in Nebraska, as Dr. Mathers had requested, but I found that though I grew a little bit in the first week, I stopped growing after that. I didn’t think I’d reached my full growth, and concluded that my puberty had gone on hiatus while I was thousands of miles from the nearest Raleigh rabbit pheromones. When I returned to Raleigh, I confirmed that this was correct; my first clinic visit after my return to school showed a slight height increase since the previous week in Hebron.
Carl and Julia said they’d give me a ride to the train station in Lincoln, since it was convenient for them on their way back to university. They arrived early on January 3, and Uncle Tyler helped me carry my suitcase out to the Julia’s car. I hugged Uncle Tyler and Aunt Ellen, and said goodbye, and soon we were on our way.
Ron had already left to go back to MU the day before. I wondered if he was planning to meet up with Lindsey before school started back, but I didn’t have a chance to ask. On the drive to Lincoln, Carl, Julia and I talked for a while, mostly about a movie we’d seen a few nights ago, and then listened to music. My tastes didn’t overlap a lot with Julia’s, but we both liked Bulletproof Sombrero, and they had just released a new song, which we all sang along to multiple times.
They let me out at the train station, and Carl helped me get my suitcases to the luggage area.
As I got on the train, I remembered what I’d been thinking a few weeks earlier. Was Hebron still home? Or was Raleigh? Or neither?
I still didn’t know.
When I changed trains in Atlanta, nobody I knew from school was on it. I found out later that Amy had already returned to school a day earlier; I don’t know what Tracy and Yolanda did. In Charlotte several people I had seen around campus but didn’t know boarded the train; we shared the campus shuttle when we got to Raleigh. Amy was out when I returned to the dorm, but I could see from the partially unpacked suitcases that she’d been there recently.
After eating supper, I walked around familiarizing myself with the buildings where my Spring semester classes would be. I was pretty tired when I got back to the dorm; Amy was there, but we didn’t talk about our Christmas vacations for very long before I fell asleep.
I still shared one class with Amy that Spring semester, namely World History 111. Yolanda was in that section as well, and we chatted for a while after class before going to lunch together. Later in the day I had Biology 102 (George was also in that section), and Calculus, which Rob and Rico were also in. They sat together, which privately I thought was a bad idea; if I had a boyfriend I would be afraid of getting too distracted if I sat next to him in class. Or behind him. Or of distracting him, if I sat in front of him; the only safe thing to do would be to sit on opposite ends of the same row.
Not that I wasn’t getting distracted anyway, by random good-looking guys who happened to be sitting in front of me in whatever class. Sometimes including the professor; Dr. Santucci, who taught World History, was a Raleigh rabbit, and more than once I got so caught up in the smooth sound of his voice that I forgot what he was actually saying.
One afternoon toward the end of the first week of classes, after I’d missed half of Dr. Malik’s Calculus lecture and dampened my panties daydreaming about the guy who sat in front of me, I talked to Rob after class.
“I kind of need to talk to you,” I said in a low voice.
“Sure,” she said a bit louder, and gesturing toward Rico, “Want to join us for supper?”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’d like to talk without him around.”
“Oh,” she said, her voice dropping. “Advice about boys?”
“Sort of,” I said, ducking my head a little.
“Later on, then, at mine and Sarah’s room. I can get rid of her for a while too if I need to —”
“Maybe... it’s probably okay if she’s there too.” I’d be more comfortable talking about it with just one person, but maybe Sarah would have good advice that Rob wouldn’t think of, and I didn’t want to be responsible for Rob kicking Sarah out of their room for a while.
I wound up eating supper with Rob, Sarah and Rico, but after supper, Rob told them she had some studying to do that evening. “No more sugar until tomorrow, honey,” she said, and kissed Rico one more time, her ears rubbing against his.
Rico glanced at Sarah, who looked indecisive for a few moments before she said: “Sorry, Rico, but I’d probably better study a while too. Tomorrow night we can do something special.”
“See you tomorrow, then,” Rico said, and went off toward his dorm. I followed Rob and Sarah back to our dorm, and as soon as we were on the walkway, out of earshot of anybody else, Rob told Sarah that I’d wanted advice about boys.
“Kind of sort of,” I said. “I’m still not quite ready to start dating, but... let’s talk about it in private.”
I paused at the bottom of the stairs, dreading the ascent and the ache in my hip getting worse. I thought about inviting Rob to my dorm room instead, but then I realized Amy might be made pretty uncomfortable by our conversation — not that it was going to be comfortable for me, or probably for Rob either.
“Are you coming?” Sarah asked, and Rob said: “Oh, do you need us to slow down?”
“No, go on ahead, I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, and started up the stairs.
When I got to their room, Rob was holding the door open for me; Sarah was at her desk, taking her tablet out of her purse. I took off my coat and sat at the foot of Rob’s bed; she sat in the chair at her desk but turned it around to face me.
“So what do you want help with?”
“Uh... like I said, I’m not ready to start dating yet. I think it’s probably still too soon. But I’m definitely getting to the point where hot guys are a distraction. The last few days especially, I’m having trouble paying attention in class because I find myself focusing on one of the guys that sits in front of me — or Dr. Santucci.”
“Nothing wrong with your taste in men,” Sarah said. “He is kind of hot for an old dude.”
“Not helpful,” I said with gritted teeth. “What I wanted to ask — one of the things — was, how do you keep from getting so distracted? Especially by older guys like Dr. Santucci, who I would never date even if I thought I were ready to start dating?”
“It’s a hard problem,” Rob said. “Maybe worse for you because you’re going through this so fast, so it’s hitting you all at once instead of gradually like for most girls. Or boys, I guess. You’ll gradually get used to it and learn to work around it and control it somewhat, but it’s always going to be there. If you can’t look at Dr. Santucci without getting distracted, try just looking down at your tablet and listening to what he’s saying.”
“His voice is a big part of the problem,” I mumbled. She nodded and went on:
“That’s the main thing — if you find yourself looking too hard at a guy you don’t want to date, and thinking too much about him, just try to look at and think about something else.”
“That might not be enough,” Sarah put in, looking up from her tablet. “You say you’re not ready to date, but these feelings mean your body disagrees. It’s ready to date, ready to have sex, ready to have babies.”
“Oh God,” I said, and she continued without a pause:
“You can try to just ignore that, but it makes more sense to fool it into thinking you’re giving it what it wants, one way or another.”
“How do you mean?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I knew already.
“You could have sex, but use birth control. Your body thinks you’re getting ready to have babies and it’s happy. And if you’re with a decent guy, you’re happy too.”
Rob intervened, seeing my ears twitching even more than before. “Or, you know, if you’re not ready for that, you could jill off. Have you tried that yet?”
“Yes,” I said in a small voice. “It was... um, it was pleasant, but not spectacular? I mean, I had the impression that it could be, well. The best thing ever, more or less.”
“It’s never going to be as good by yourself as with someone else,” Rob replied, “but if you know what you’re doing it can be pretty amazing.”
“Do you want us to show you how?” Sarah asked.
“No!” I exclaimed. “I mean, thanks, but no thanks. If you could just tell me...”
“It would be easier to show you,” Sarah said with a smile, and at Rob’s reproving glance she added: “But sure, we can just tell you if you’d rather.”
Half an hour later I came into our dorm room and found Amy lying in bed reading. She looked up as I came in and said: “What’s wrong?”
“What do you mean? Nothing’s wrong.”
“I’m not an expert on Raleigh rabbit body language, but I’ve been here long enough to figure out that when your ears are twitching like that, something’s wrong. You’re nervous about something.”
“Or embarrassed,” I said. “Yeah. But nothing’s actually wrong. I was just, um, talking with Rob and Sarah about girl stuff, and it was really embarrassing, but I think it was helpful.”
“Oh.” She was silent a moment, then said: “I hope you’re doing okay. I wish I could help more.”
“You’ve been a big help already. But, yeah, sometimes I need to talk with girls of my own species.”
“I guess so. Athens magnolia biology is pretty different from yours. But try me sometime; I might have more to offer than you think.”
“All right...” And I told her some of the problems I’d been having concentrating in class, because my mind kept wandering to the hot guys sitting in front of me instead of the lecture.
“Yeah, I don’t know what that’s like exactly — being distracted from studying by sex. Because our blooming is always in the summer, when school’s out anyway. But it’s hella distracting anyway; nobody gets anything done for those three or four days. Businesses shut down, the non-magnolias in the police and fire departments work overtime, everybody lounges around getting pollinated unless they’re underage and their parents shut them up indoors. And being in bloom and not getting pollinated? Not fun at all.”
I nodded sympathetically. She went on: “Some of us tried to relieve the pressure,” (my ears twitched when she used the same euphemism Terry had used) “but I found out, on my first blooming, that fingers are too big and rough... our flowers want really delicate handling. After that one of my friends told me to use Q-tips next time, and that was better, but still not really satisfying. Not as good as getting pollinated by real insects is supposed to be.”
“Yeah... that’s kind of what Rob and Sarah said. Not about pollination, but about sex and, um, masturbation.”
“Don’t take what I said about Q-tips too literally. I mean, fingers might work fine for most species...”
“Yeah... Rob had some other suggestions too. Listen, I need to study for a while now. Thanks for your help.”
She got the hint.
I didn’t try out Rob and Sarah’s practical advice for several days. First, I tried Rob’s other advice about ignoring attractive guys by focusing on something else, and that helped a bit, but not as much as I’d like. Then one evening when Amy was at the library, I slipped under the covers with no clothes on, and tried out some of the things Rob and Sarah had suggested. It was... pretty satisfying. A lot better than the last time I’d tried it, before the Christmas break. I fell asleep like that before Amy returned to the room.
The next morning, I had a problem; I didn’t want to get out of bed to get my clothes on while Amy was around. She looked at me curiously and said: “Aren’t you coming to breakfast?”
“I didn’t sleep well,” I lied. “I might take a nap and just eat a nutrition bar before class.”
“Okay.”
Once she was gone, I got up, put my bathrobe on, and went to the shower. I was less distracted in my various classes that day, so I chalked last night’s experiment up as a success, though I still felt guilty about it. I got into the habit of getting myself off two or three times a week, when I knew Amy was going to be out of the room for a while, and it seemed to help.
A couple of guys in my classes asked me out on dates, and I told them, as I’d told Larry, that I wasn’t ready to date yet. “I haven’t been a girl for very long,” I told Haley, who was in my Biology 102 class.
“That’s okay,” he said, laughing nervously. “I know what you mean. I’ve only been a guy for a few months myself... I had to change rooms back in October.”
“Maybe ask me again in a few months?” I suggested. He seemed like a nice guy, to the extent I knew anything about him at all.
“I might. Thanks.”
On January 25, my friends threw a birthday party for me in the common room of Alexander Hall. Most of them gave me books or movies, knowing that clothes probably wouldn’t fit me for very long.
Rob and Sarah had been there since the start, but Rico came in an hour after the party started, after I’d opened my presents and we’d eaten most of the cake.
“Happy birthday,” he told me. “This is your nineteenth, right?” He glanced at Sarah, who nodded.
“Right,” I said; “thanks for coming,” though I wasn’t all that happy to see him. I put up with him for Rob and Sarah’s sake, and I was grateful to him for giving us rides to the mall a couple of times last semester, but he still grated on me. At least he hadn’t called me “kid” this time.
Rico left with Sarah just before we sat down to watch one of the movies I’d been given, but Rob stayed to watch the movie and help clean up afterward. While we were cleaning up (they wanted me to sit down and relax, but I insisted on helping some), she said to me: “So, this is a big milestone. Are you thinking about starting to date now?”
“Probably soon,” I said. “I was thinking about waiting until my body finished changing.”
“That might be a while.”
“At the rate I’m going, Dr. Mathers says it should be just a few more weeks.”
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“You were probably confused by being kissed. I understand that can be pretty distracting for people of your species.”
part 9 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
As Valentine’s Day approached, there were commemorations all over the world; it was the tenth anniversary of the Divergence. I hear that in Australia and New Zealand, Valentine’s Day is still a romantic holiday for lovers; they were on the night side of the planet when the Divergence happened, and didn’t have many fatal accidents. But in the Americas, western Europe and Africa, Valentine’s Day is a day of remembrance like Memorial Day.
So the city of Raleigh was having a big memorial ceremony on Valentine’s Day, and so was NC State. But there were scientific symposia going on, too; Duke, UNC and NC State all had a symposium on some aspect of the Divergence, and they scheduled them on different days in Valentine’s week so people could go to all of them if they wanted. I went with George and the science club to the one at UNC, which was about the sociological effects of the Divergence. One of the professors gave a talk on the amendments to the Voting Rights Act after the Divergence, and how after the next census they redrew the congressional district lines to match change-region boundaries as much as possible; the goal was to make sure as many neospecies as possible had a chance to have one of their number elected to Congress, though it was impossible to represent all of them at once since there were half again as many neospecies as there were seats in Congress, and some neospecies had less than half the population of the smallest congressional district. But what she’d discovered was that those districts formed around a low-population change-region, with pieces of two or more higher-population change-regions added to make up the numbers, tended to elect more moderate candidates, since a candidate had to appeal to people of multiple species to get elected.
Another professor talked about a study of hapax cliques in high schools — small groups of friends who were the only member of their species in the school. George and I both found that one really interesting, as it more or less matched our experiences in school. The presenter said that such cliques are more likely to form in small-town schools deep within a change-region than in bigger-city schools that are near a change-region boundary, which made sense. George’s high school was square in the middle of the Raleigh rabbit change-region, though it was still a lot more diverse than Thayer Central High.
The next day, there was a symposium on the biology and sociology of North Carolina neospecies at NC State. There was one on the gradual reversal of gender roles in Cary hyenas; apparently the younger you were at the Divergence, whichever sex you were, the more likely you were to think of women as dominant or more important. Their culture was in a transitional near-egalitarian state; in a couple more generations the professor thought it would be matriarchal. And Dr. Wilson, whom I’d had Biology from last semester, gave a talk on the patterns of sex changes among Raleigh rabbits. She posed a puzzle for us at the beginning of the talk:
“If you put a hundred Raleigh rabbit women on a desert island, and come back a year later, how many women and how many men will you find?”
Someone raised their hand and when she called on them, said: “About seventy women and thirty men.”
“But why and how?” Dr. Wilson asked. “If all hundred women are exposed to nothing but female pheromones, why don’t all hundred of them change into men? And why wouldn’t the hundred men, being exposed to nothing but male pheromones, all change back into women, and so forth?”
It seemed that some Raleigh rabbits had a predisposition to respond more easily to shifts in the pheromone mix they were exposed to, to be quicker to change sex when exposed to an imbalanced mix of pheromones. She showed us some graphs from a longitudinal study she and her colleagues had been working on since the Divergence; the number of times someone changed sex had a bimodal distribution. Out of 1204 adult subjects, 409 never changed sex, and 514 changed sex three or more times — thrice was the second-most common number of times that adults someone changed sex, after zero. 61% of the ones who changed sex exactly once were former men who changed in the first couple of months after the Divergence.
“Furthermore,” she said, “in looking at younger people who went through puberty after the Divergence, we’ve found a correlation between the age at which someone starts puberty and how likely they are to change sex later in life. Those who start puberty at age eleven or earlier are forty-one percent more likely to change sex within five years than those who don’t start puberty until age thirteen or later.”
I wondered how that applied to me. Would I be more likely to change sex later because I was developing so fast, or less likely because I started at a later age?
The next day was Valentine’s Day, and the scientific symposia gave way to memorial services. There was a small one early in the morning in the chapel, and a larger one later in the afternoon at the stadium. Radhika and I both went to the early service at the chapel; the chaplain asked everyone to name the people they remembered who’d died on Valentine’s Day, or shortly afterward because of their injuries. When it came our turn, Radhika named several people; I figured two of them were her aunt and uncle that Mr. Eames had mentioned at Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t sure who the others were. I named my parents: “Rod and Lynn Hampton.” A lot of people were crying by the end of the ceremony — not just me. I was too wrung out to go to the other memorial service later in the day; Rob told me later that they had different people each read out a section of a big list of names they’d compiled ahead of time. There were faculty, students and alumni who’d died on Valentine’s Day, plus family and friends of current faculty and students.
I’d started growing again once I returned to school, and over the next couple of months I reached my full growth: another two inches of height, slightly larger breasts (still B cup, but a different manufacturer’s notion of a B cup), and slightly wider hips. Most of my skirts still fit, but I had to replace some of my shirts and blouses. The oldest skirt that still fit me came to mid-calf, though it had been ankle-length when I bought it.
When I went two clinic visits in a row without any measurable change in my height, and only normal fluctuations in my weight, Dr. Mathers said I was about done. “Your breasts may continue to grow a little more,” she said, “but probably not much, and you’ll probably be stable like this for some years if you don’t change sex due to a different mix of pheromones.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking that in. “Um — could you prescribe me the right kind of birth control for our species?”
“Yes,” she said, and asked me what pharmacy I used. I hadn’t needed one since I arrived in Raleigh, so she just sent the prescription to the nearest pharmacy just off-campus. She went on to explain how to take the pills. “Be sure your partner uses protection as well. Sexually transmitted diseases are rarer since the Divergence, since everyone who had an infectious disease was cured when they were transformed, but they’re still around.”
I skipped World History to take the bus to the pharmacy, and took my first dose later that day. I told Amy and Radhika about it later on, at supper.
“So, are you going to go back to one of the boys who asked you out earlier, and tell him you’re ready now?” Radhika asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Soon, maybe? But Dr. Mathers said I’d have to be on the, you know,” dropping my voice, “pills for a while before they’d take effect.”
“You don’t have to be ready for sex to be ready for dating.” In a lower voice, “Paul and I are not having sex, but we are having a lot of fun together.”
My face got hot, and I said: “You’re right. I wouldn’t want to have sex on the first date or two anyway, so I might as well start dating now, or pretty soon...” I looked around the dining hall thoughtfully.
After I finished eating, and bussed my tray, I walked over to where Larry and his girlfriend Bill were sitting. I’d seen them a couple of times since Halloween, at meetings of the science fiction and fantasy society, but I didn’t have any classes with them. “Hi,” I said. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Sure,” Larry said, “but we’re almost done.”
“That’s okay,” I said, sitting down and laying my cane across my lap. “Um... a few months ago you asked me if I wanted to have dinner with you, and I said I wasn’t ready to start dating yet...?”
“Yes?”
“Well... I’m ready now. If you still want to.”
Larry glanced at Bill, who gave him a barely perceptible nod. “We’d love to. Will you join us for dinner this Friday evening at Tupelo Honey Cafe?”
“Okay,” I said. “Where and when should we meet?”
Friday evening, after Calculus, I walked back to my dorm and took a shower, then changed into my nicest skirt and blouse. I didn’t have any nice shoes to go with them; the dress shoes Aunt Ellen had bought me before Christmas didn’t fit anymore, so I just put my tennis shoes back on and went down to the lobby to wait for Larry and Bill.
They arrived about fifteen or twenty minutes later. Larry was sharply dressed in a white button-up shirt and pressed white slacks, which contrasted strongly with his dark grey fur. Bill’s fur was lighter, and she wore a dark grey knee-length sleeveless dress. It had two little peepholes between her pairs of breasts, like the dress Sarah had bought back in September. Both of them wore shoes nicer than mine, and I wondered if maybe I should have tried to squeeze into that dress Aunt Ellen had bought me... but probably I’d outgrown it by now, and what I really wanted was to start wearing pants. It was only two days since Dr. Mathers had confirmed that I’d finished growing, though, and I hadn’t had time to buy more clothes yet.
“Are you ready?” Larry asked.
“Sure,” I said, leaning on my cane a little as I stood up. I walked with them out to Larry’s car, and he opened the front right door for me. Bill got in the back seat, and Larry in the other front seat.
“How have you been doing in the last few months?” Larry asked, after he told the car where to go. “I saw you at the January meeting, but didn’t get a chance to speak with you.”
“I’ve grown a lot more,” I said. “But it’s stopped now... the last couple of times I went to clinic, my height and weight hadn’t increased. And, um, let’s see: I went home to Nebraska for Christmas, to my aunt and uncle’s house, and saw both sets of grandparents too, and several friends from high school.”
“None of them are rabbits, right?” Bill asked.
“Right, I’m the only one in Hebron. Maybe the only one in Nebraska; I’ve never seen any in Lincoln or Omaha either. All my relatives and most of my friends are Lincoln bison, but one of my best friends is an Omaha sheepdog. What about you? I guess you saw your families at Christmas?”
“Yeah,” Larry said. “Bill’s family lives in Knightdale, and mine is in southeast Raleigh. She went to visit her family first, then came to my parents' house after Christmas.”
“Knightdale?” I asked, wondering why that sounded familiar, and then I remembered. “Do you know Rob Lewes or Sarah Pratt? They went to high school in Knightdale.”
“I knew a girl named Greg Lewes; maybe Rob is her sibling or cousin or something?” Bill speculated. “She had several younger siblings, but I don’t remember their names.”
“Yeah, Rob’s mentioned an older sister named Greg — she went to Emory. That’s her.”
When we got to the restaurant, Larry came around to the right side of the car and opened the door for me, though I already had it partly open, and offered me his arm. I didn’t take it right away; I put my cane on the ground and leaned on it as I stood up. When he saw that, Larry opened Bill’s door and helped her out, though she probably needed the help even less than me. Then I remembered seeing guys opening doors for girls in old movies, and I realized Larry wasn’t being condescending to me because I was handicapped, but... what was the word they used to use?... chivalrous, because I was a girl. When Bill took Larry’s left arm, I took his other arm, but didn’t lean on it. We walked into the restaurant, which had doors wide enough for all three of us to walk abreast.
A Chapel Hill trinoc waitress seated us — we sat around a square table, with me and Bill facing each other and Larry to my right. She gave us menus and took our drink orders, and I studied my menu for a while.
“Have you eaten here before?” I asked them.
“A couple of times,” Larry said. “The shrimp and grits is good.”
“I like their fried chicken salad,” Bill volunteered.
My appetite had fallen off sharply in the last few weeks as my growth slowed down and stopped, so when the waitress came back, I ordered the chicken salad, as did Bill.
“So,” I said. “Tell me some more about yourselves, maybe?”
“Let’s see,” Bill said. “Larry told you my family lives in Knightdale. We’ve lived there since before I was born, but my parents moved here to the city from a small town in western North Carolina. We were all safe at home on Valentine’s Day, thank God, and neither of my parents changed sex so they’re still together... I have two older siblings, and they’re both male right now, but Rick was a girl for several years. I’ve been a girl since I was thirteen, and I’m majoring in business; I think I’ll probably work for several years before going on to an MBA program.”
“I’ve always been a guy,” Larry said, “well, except for a couple of years being asexual after the Divergence. My family’s been in the Raleigh area for several generations, at least on my dad’s side; my mom’s parents died when she was in her early teens and she doesn’t know much about their background. I’m majoring in computer science. Bill and I met and started dating freshman year... we’ve talked, and decided we’re open to adding one or maybe two more girls.”
“Oh. Um, this is just the one date so far — I mean, I like both of you, but...”
“Sure, we want to get to know each other better before we commit to anything,” Bill said with a smile.
I smiled back, but couldn’t think of anything else to say for a few moments. Then I said: “So, you two were wearing Star Trek uniforms at the Halloween party... are you both really into it?”
“Bill is, more so than me,” Larry said. “I’ve watched a lot of episodes, but I’m not an expert like Bill.”
So we talked for a while about the latest attempt to reboot Star Trek and why it was such a disaster. (I said it was because it was still an alternate history that diverged from ours way before the Divergence; it’s hard to care about a future that can never happen. Bill thought it was bad casting, and Larry said we were both right.) That carried us through the waitress bringing our meals and us eating about half of them, by which point we had moved on to our favorite post-Divergence shows.
After a while Bill said she needed to visit the ladies' room, and she caught my eye when she said it in a way that made me think it was code for “Let’s talk without Larry around.” Come to think of it, I could stand to empty my bladder as well. We went into separate stalls first, but when we’d washed and dried our hands, Bill said: “So, how far do you want to go tonight?”
“I’m not ready to have sex yet,” I said, alarmed. “I mean, I just started on birth control a couple of days ago, and...”
“Don’t worry, we don’t want to do that yet either. Not with someone we’ve just started dating. I mean about kissing Larry or letting him touch your breasts, things like that.”
My nipples got hard thinking about that. I wondered what it would feel like, and I was on the verge of saying “yes, please,” but I chickened out. “Um, just kissing, I think? Maybe more next time.” I’d enjoyed the conversation during dinner and I was already pretty sure I wanted there to be a next time.
“Okay. Is French kissing okay?”
I was flummoxed, although I’d covered this in my research — months ago when it was a clinical question with no immediate relevance. Now I couldn’t seem to think straight. “Um, a little bit of tongue maybe? Or, no, maybe not just yet.” I hated myself right afterward for sounding wishy-washy, but Bill nodded.
“Okay, that’s fine. We’ll take it slow, okay? Is it all right if I hug you?”
“Sure,” I said, and we hugged before we went back to the table.
I don’t know how Bill told Larry what we’d decided — she didn’t say anything where I could hear her, and she and Larry weren’t alone together until after they’d escorted me back to my dorm. But after we went back to the campus, and got out of the car (Larry opening our doors for us again, though we didn’t need the help), Larry put one arm around my shoulder, and I thought for a moment: Bill didn’t get a chance to tell him what I wanted; he’s going to fondle my breasts or something... but then he pulled me a little closer to him and leaned over. I felt his ears brush mine and felt a little tingle up and down my spine; then his lips were on mine, just for a few moments, and then they weren’t.
“We had a wonderful time tonight, Joel. Let’s talk again tomorrow or the next day, shall we?”
“That would be good,” I said, and then: “Let’s do this again, okay?”
Larry glanced at Bill for a moment before he said: “Yes, let’s do that. We’ll talk tomorrow or Sunday about when and how. For now, let’s get you back to your dorm.”
He and Bill walked with me back to Alexander Hall, and even to the door of mine and Amy’s room. Larry kissed me again, and Bill gave me a hug; the kiss wasn’t as exciting the second time, but it wasn’t as bewildering either. I had the presence of mind to think about what it felt like and wonder if it would be better or worse if he put his tongue in my mouth. Maybe next time.
They started off down the hall, holding hands, as I got my keycard out and opened the door.
“So how did your big date go?” Amy asked.
“Pretty well, I think. We’re going to go out again, but we haven’t figured out exactly when yet.”
“So tell me about it!”
So I told her about all of it, pretty much — how Larry had opened the door for me and how I’d been resentful of the unnecessary help at first because I thought he was doing it because of my handicap, and then realized it was because I was a girl and just felt weird about it; how Bill had summoned me to the ladies' room to ask me how far I wanted to go, and how Larry seemed to know exactly what I’d told Bill even though she hadn’t said anything; and how I felt when Larry kissed me, both times.
“I bet they were using hand signals or something,” Amy said.
“I guess so. I wonder why I didn’t think of that.”
“You were probably confused by being kissed. I understand that can be pretty distracting for people of your species.”
“Yeah,” I said, not meeting her eyes.
“I’ve kissed a lot of people,” she went on, and I jerked my head slightly in surprise. “Since it’s not sexually exciting — nothing is, except being in bloom and getting pollinated — we do it all the time with friends and family, about as casually as other species hug or shake hands. But I expect it’s different for you.”
“Yeah... my Grandma Kritzer used to kiss me on the cheek, until I was about eleven or twelve, but then she stopped. I’ve never kissed anybody on the lips until now.” I paused, thoughtfully, and asked: “Do Athens magnolias put their tongues in each other’s mouths?”
“No! That sounds gross. Did he do that to you?”
“No; Bill asked if I wanted him to, and I said no, but maybe next time. I’ve read about it and it’s supposed to make the experience more intense but, yeah, it sounds kind of gross.”
“But then, so does sex.”
“Kind of.”
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
“How far do you think you want to go this time?”
“I still can’t have sex,” I said. “But... I wouldn’t mind if Larry put his hands on me, in some more exciting places than my hands and shoulders... and I’d like to touch him more too...?”
part 10 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Late the next morning I was sitting at my desk, doing calculus homework, when Bill called. (Amy was out.)
“Hi, Bill.”
“Hi, Joel. You said you’d like to go out with us again; how about next Saturday? The Witherspoon Cinema is showing Carrot and Stick at four, six and eight; we could go to whichever showing suits you best, and have dinner before or afterward.” That was the movie theater in the student center. I’d heard of Carrot and Stick, but hadn’t seen it; it was a science fiction movie filmed in Raleigh.
“That would be cool,” I said. “Any of the showings should work for me... maybe let’s see the movie at six, and eat afterward?”
“All right, we’ll see you in the lobby of your dorm at five-thirty next Saturday. And I hope we’ll see you at the sf society meeting too?”
“Probably; it depends on whether I feel ready for Friday’s tests before Thursday evening.”
I studied for a while longer and was about to go to lunch when I heard a knock at the door. I got up and answered the door; there were Rob and Sarah.
“We were just about to go to lunch,” Rob said. “Want to come with?”
I walked with them, a little faster and easier than I would have a few weeks earlier. My hip was bothering me less since I’d stopped growing; the problem wouldn’t ever go away, but it wasn’t any worse now than it was during the years when I wasn’t growing any.
“So,” Rob said, “Radhika told me you’d decided to start dating.”
“Yeah... I went out with Larry and Bill last night. Do you know them?”
“What, already?” Sarah said. “You don’t waste any time once you make up your mind.”
“I don’t think I know them,” Rob said.
“Bill went to the same high school you did — she said she knew your sister Greg.”
“Oh.” Her brow furrowed and the tips of her ears bent slightly in concentration. “Yeah, there were several people named Bill at my high school, but I can’t remember Greg being friends with any of them.”
“She didn’t say they were close friends, just that she knew her. Anyway, we went out to dinner and talked, and then they brought me back to the dorm.”
“Did he kiss you or anything?” Rob asked.
“He kissed me twice, near the end... nothing else, except he held my arm, and Bill’s, when we were walking in and out of the restaurant.”
“Good for you,” Sarah said.
Rob didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said: “I’m glad you enjoyed it. I was planning to ask you if you wanted to join us and Rico for dinner sometime, after you decided you were ready to start dating... I hope it works out with Larry and Bill, but let me know if it doesn’t.”
“Um, no thanks. I like you two, but I’d rather not spend any more time with Rico than I can help, and I definitely don’t want to go on a date with him.”
“Why not?” Rob asked, surprised.
“You remember last fall when he was always calling me ‘kid’?”
“Oh. — Yeah, I guess that could be pretty annoying.”
“And it’s not just that, but that’s the main thing I can articulate. He just rubs me the wrong way.”
“Too bad. I would have liked it if we could be co-girlfriends, but if you can’t get along with Rico, it wouldn’t work.”
During lunch, they pumped me for more details of my date with Larry and Bill, and I told them pretty much everything I could remember, including Amy’s speculation that Bill and Larry used hand signals to say that I wanted Larry to kiss me and not much else. Sarah and Rob looked at each other.
“We should totally do that, next time we go out with somebody new,” Sarah said.
“Let’s see, maybe this means kissing,” making a gesture like a not very tight fist, the thumb flexing out away from the index finger, “and this means touching your breasts and this means thighs,” Rob nattered.
“Do you really want to have another co-girlfriend?” I asked. “I’d think sharing a boy with one other girl would be enough.”
“It depends on if we can be friends with the girl, and things like that,” Sarah said. “Since the three of us have been together we’ve gone out with a third girl twice, but it hasn’t worked out yet.”
“And sometimes Rico wanted to ask somebody out but we nixed it,” Rob said, “and once we wanted to ask somebody but he wasn’t interested. A couple of months ago I asked him if I could ask you out once you were grown up and ready to start dating, and he said go for it.”
“Did he.”
“He likes you a lot more than you like him. Maybe you should give him another chance?”
“I’ll think about it. But I’ve got another date with Larry and Bill next Saturday.”
“Have fun,” Sarah said.
I went back to the dorm and finished my calculus homework, then studied for little a while longer and rewarded myself with watching the new episode of “Shifting Alliances.” Amy came in when it was about over, and I paused it.
“I’m just about done with this, if you want to do something together,” I said. “I’ve finished my weekend homework.”
“Alas, I have devoted the morning to fun and must now plunge into study and homework,” she said. She looked happy.
“What did you do?”
“I met a friend... a new friend, someone I’ve talked to online but hadn’t met before today. You remember I said, when we first met, that I’d come here because it was far enough from my parents they wouldn’t drop in all the time, but close enough to my change-region that I’d probably find a few other people of my species in town?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there aren’t any other Athens magnolias at NC State, but I found someone who goes to UNC, and had brunch with them. I enjoy hanging out with you and Radhika and George, but it was so nice to talk with someone of my own kind.”
“I know the feeling,” I said. “Meeting other Raleigh rabbits after nine years in Hebron... I love my aunt and uncle and my friends back there, but it was like water in the desert. What’s this person’s name?”
“David. They’re just over a year older than me; they went to UNC for pretty much the same reason I came here, to get a good distance away from family they love but don’t want to see too often.”
I picked up on something a little odd about the way she’d spoken about David. “This David was a guy before the Divergence, right?”
“Yes, but they’re gender-fluid now. Most Athens magnolias our age or younger are some kind of non-binary; I’m kind of an outlier, identifying so strongly as female even though I was a little girl when the Divergence happened. Most of the magnolias with a strong gender identity were older teens or full-grown on Valentine’s Day.”
“I guess that makes sense. What’s David like?” Amy was the only Athens magnolia I’d ever met, though I’d done a little online research about them after she told me how they reproduce.
“They’re really smart — they took so many AP classes they started as as a sophomore, and they’re probably going to graduate in another year. They’re in pre-med, planning on specializing in nephrology in medical school.”
“Cool.”
I put on my headphones before I unpaused the latest episode of “Shifting Alliances.” Amy settled down to studying, and rather than distract her by watching another TV show or something, I went out for a walk.
Sunday, after chapel and breakfast, Radhika and I went shopping. It was the first chance I’d had to go shopping since Dr. Mathers confirmed I wasn’t growing any more, and I was excited to finally start wearing pants again. I tried on a bunch of pairs, both jeans and nicer dress pants, some tight and some loose, but I couldn’t afford as many as I wanted; I’d depleted my savings too much with buying new shirts, blouses, skirts, shoes, and a longer cane — not to mention textbooks and other basics. I bought four pairs of pants; if I wanted to go a week without washing clothes, or wearing the same thing twice without washing, I’d have to keep wearing skirts three days a week. Radhika thought I should buy some nicer shoes, but I didn’t think I could afford it; the cheapest ones that I thought looked okay would cost so much that I could have only bought two pairs of pants, and I wasn’t willing to forgo the pants.
I was wearing jeans when I went to the science fiction and fantasy society meeting Thursday evening. Larry and Bill got there a few minutes late; when they arrived I was talking with George. I waved to them as they came in, and they came over toward us.
“Hi, Joel,” Larry said, and Bill smiled at me. “I really enjoyed having dinner with you Friday night; I’m looking forward to Saturday.”
“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it too,” I said. “You know George, don’t you?”
I sat with Larry and Bill while we watched a film, a first contact story where the aliens were obviously intelligent (looking at the tools they used) but didn’t use any kind of language that the various human neospecies in the explorer ship could recognize at first. When it was over and I got up to stretch my legs, I saw that Katie had come in a bit late, and I went over to talk to him.
“How are you doing? I haven’t seen you since last semester.”
“Mostly okay,” he said. “Madison and I broke up when he changed.”
“Oh! I hadn’t heard about that. When was it?”
“Right after the semester started; it took about a month, but we broke up as soon as she knew she was changing.”
I remembered what Dr. Wilson had said in her presentation at the symposium, and then what Madison had said at the Halloween party. “Madison was a boy once before, right?”
“Yeah, she was a girl for a few years, then a guy for the last three years of high school, and a girl again when she started college. That’s when we started dating.”
“So I guess he’ll adapt to it pretty quick this time.”
“Yeah, he still had plenty of guy clothes in his old bedroom at his parents' house, and most of them still fit. He told me a couple of days ago that he’s been on a couple of dates but he’s not seeing anyone regularly yet.”
“What about you?”
He looked at me speculatively. “Nobody yet. Are you offering?”
“Um, no... not right now. I’ve got a date Saturday with Larry and Bill — do you know them?”
“Yeah, they’re good people.”
We talked some about the film, and agreed we wanted to see more from the Portland studio that made it. The cast was pretty diverse; Oregon has more neospecies than some other areas of similar population, and I gathered from a couple of lines in the film that one of the neospecies in the film was kind of like Raleigh rabbits, at least in having a really unbalanced sex ratio. Katie said he was going to look them up and let me know if there were any movies about them.
Saturday, Amy left about four to go visit her friend David in Chapel Hill, and I spent some time showering and getting dressed for my date with Larry and Bill. I was ready in plenty of time, so I studied for a while before they showed up to escort me to the theater.
Carrot and Stick was a fast-moving, exciting movie, but there were a couple of plot holes I noticed soon afterward, when the adrenaline flood subsided and I could think straight again. When we went out to Larry’s car and started for the restaurant, I said: “So, I get why the time travelers framed him — they wanted to discredit him so they could change history, keep him from getting elected and making those laws they didn’t like. But if they could change one of themselves into a copy of him, why didn’t they just replace him permanently instead of framing him? They couldn’t go back to their own time, so why not all change into copies of important people and replace them, and change history that way?”
“That might have made more sense,” Bill said. “Maybe they didn’t have enough detailed knowledge of the past to effectively impersonate their target.”
“They knew exactly where he was going to be and when; the replacement followed the same schedule the original would have followed right up to the point where he shot the rival candidate at the debate. He fooled the guy’s family and everyone who knew him for two days, why not longer?”
“Maybe they wanted to get rid of both major candidates so a dark horse could win,” Larry said. “But it wasn’t very clear.”
“Supposedly they wanted to make a martyr of the other guy, so there’d be more popular support for his ideas,” Bill said. “But with that kind of technology they could have discredited their victim in any number of ways — having him get caught in bed with a prostitute or something — without killing the guy whose ideas they liked.”
“That’s how you know they’re the villains,” Larry said. “If they were reasonable time travelers, they could just show the guy some advanced technology and future history books and prove to him that his policies would have terrible consequences. Either he’d drop out of the race or he’d change his policies, and the crisis is averted without killing or kidnapping anybody.”
We ate at a slightly less fancy place than the first time, and when Larry opened the door of his car for me after dinner, he kissed me; this time he put his tongue in my mouth. I was flustered, trying to remember what I’d read, and after a moment’s hesitation I put my tongue in his. It felt weird, but kind of exciting. When they left me at my dorm a little while later, and I changed into my pajamas, I found my crotch was damp. Since Amy wasn’t back yet from her date (if that was the right word) with David, I took the opportunity to “relieve the pressure” according to Rob and Sarah’s advice, and fell asleep not long afterward.
I didn’t go out on a formal dinner date with Larry and Bill for a couple of weeks after that, because we had midterms to study for, but I started sitting with Larry and Bill at lunch and supper, and sometimes we’d hold hands — Larry’s left-handed, so Bill and I took turns sitting to his right so we could hold each other’s non-dominant hand while we ate. Sometimes, but not every meal, Larry would kiss me and Bill would hug me when we were done eating lunch and about to go off to different classes, and after supper some days they escorted me back to my dorm.
I still ate breakfast most days with Radhika and Amy. They teased me a little about dating Larry and Bill, and I teased Radhika back about Paul, but I wasn’t sure what to say to Amy about David. She’d told me once that Athens magnolias could fall in love, but they didn’t get obsessed with their lover’s body like people of species who were in heat all the time like Raleigh rabbits or Cary hyenas. Was she in love with David or was she just friends with them? I had a feeling it might be hard for an outsider to tell with Athens magnolias, even if I saw them together, which I didn’t until several weeks later.
I was definitely getting obsessed with Larry, including his body. When I first went over to their table and asked if they still wanted to go out with me, I remember thinking that he was good-looking and seemed nice, but after kissing him and holding hands with him several times, I was about ready to see and feel more of that wonderful body. But Dr. Mathers said I needed to be on the birth control medicine for several weeks longer before it would be fully effective. On Friday after my last midterm, I was walking back to my dorm with Bill — Larry had something else to do, he said. Bill said: “Do you want to go out and do something nice now that exams are over?”
“Sure — dinner, a movie, things like that?”
“I’m not particularly interested in what’s showing at the Witherspoon Cinema right now; there are a couple of semi-interesting things showing at the Regal Cinema in Garner, though. What about look up their schedule and let us know which of those movies you’d like to see?”
“Okay... I can do that as soon as I get back to the dorm.”
“Another thing. How far do you think you want to go this time?”
“I still can’t have sex,” I said. “But... I wouldn’t mind if Larry put his hands on me, in some more exciting places than my hands and shoulders... and I’d like to touch him more too...?”
She smiled knowingly. “I’ll let him know. Breasts and outer thighs, maybe? Or right close to your crotch, or on the outside of your panties, or...?”
“Um... let me think about it a minute?” I was slightly embarrassed, but not nearly as flustered as I’d been when we talked in the restroom at the Tupelo Honey Cafe. Maybe I was getting the hang of this dating stuff.
When we got to the dorm, I told her what I’d decided. We looked up the Regal’s showtimes on my tablet and decided on a movie, subject to Larry’s approval, and picked a restaurant near the theater that had good ratings.
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“If you go off and leave her alone while you dance, maybe you don’t deserve her.”
“She’s still my girlfriend even if we’re not glued at the hip every minute. Go away.”
part 11 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Larry and Bill picked me up in the early afternoon so we could get there in time for a matinee showing. Amy was spending the day with David again; she hadn’t seen them much in the week leading up to midterms.
Sins of the Father was more tightly plotted than Carrot and Stick, but still gave us a lot to talk about during dinner. There was a supervillain who died, sort of, in a battle with several superheroes; but he had a regeneration power, and after he got blown up, the largest pieces of him regenerated into little babies with none of his memories. Different hero couples adopted the babies; then, after the opening credits, it skipped to seventeen years later when the boys were almost adult and were starting to find out about each other and their mysterious past.
During a romantic scene about halfway through when one of the young regeneration-clones was meeting with a girl he wanted to go out with, the daughter of another hero couple and the adoptive sister of one of the other clones, Larry and I kissed, and he slid his hand under my blouse, which I’d untucked after the lights went dim. I’d been wearing pants as often as I could, resorting to skirts only when I didn’t have time to wash my limited supply of pants, but tonight I’d worn a skirt so Larry could put his hand under it. There were some advantages to skirts, I decided. Of course he gave Bill a good amount of attention too; at one point when he was making out with her, I decided to rub his neck and shoulders, and he seemed to like that.
I missed a lot of the movie that way, but it was worth it.
We weren’t so public in our displays of affection at dinner, but we held hands a lot when we didn’t need both hands for eating. We pieced together the parts of the movie we’d missed; I filled in the bits where Larry was making out with Bill, and Bill filled in the bits where Larry was making out with me, and we decided it was a pretty good movie that we’d like to see again. After a while conversation drifted to other movies the lead actor (who’d played all the regeneration-clones) had been in, and how versatile he was, and then to other topics.
When we got done with dinner and walked out to the car, Bill stretched her arms and said: “It’s early yet, and I feel like dancing. How about y’all?” Then she glanced at my cane and immediately looked contrite. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t think —”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I can dance a little when my hip’s not too bad, and today is a good day. Where do you want to go?”
We went to a club over on the other side of Raleigh that they’d been to before. It was close to the border of the Cary change-region (which extended into the Raleigh city limits on the west side), and about a third of the patrons were Cary hyenas. The music was loud and fast, and trying to keep up with its pace wasn’t good for my hip; after dancing through one song with Larry and Bill, I said I needed to sit down for a while.
“You go ahead and dance some more,” I said, when they offered to join me. “I’ll join you again after a couple more songs.” We argued a little, but I insisted they not sit out because of me, and they gave in.
I ordered a Cherry Coke and sat down at a small table where I could see Larry and Bill dancing. They looked good together; I wondered if we’d ever get to the point where I was as close to them as they were to each other. They were spending a lot of time together without me, I knew; probably not just having sex but talking about mutual friends I didn’t know, or about me, whether they wanted to keep dating me and maybe stay with me long-term, or break it off...? I tried not to speculate about that. Judging from today, I figured they wanted to keep me around. I remembered what it had felt like to have Larry’s hand on my breast, on my thigh... Even my shortest skirt was too long to make that convenient, but Larry was resourceful.
I probably had a blissful smile on my face that looked like an invitation to the guy who sat down across from me, blocking my view of Larry and Bill. “Hi,” he said. “Are you here by yourself?”
“No,” I said. “I’m with my boyfriend and girlfriend; they’re right over there,” pointing past his shoulder.
“Oh,” he said, “sorry,” and he got up again. But the next guy who sat down wasn’t as easily rebuffed.
“They left you all alone here?” he said after I told him I was there with Larry and Bill. “You look like you could use some company.”
“I was tired and needed to rest, and having you around isn’t restful. Please go away.”
“Don’t be like that,” he said, but then Larry’s hand was on his shoulder, and as the other guy turned around, Larry said:
“Leave my girlfriend alone.”
My heart raced when I heard him call me his girlfriend. I guess in hindsight it’s obvious that’s what I was, after three formal dates and a bunch of holding hands in the dining hall. The other guy — he was taller than Larry, if maybe not in as good a shape — sneered and said: “If you go off and leave her alone while you dance, maybe you don’t deserve her.”
“She’s still my girlfriend even if we’re not glued at the hip every minute. Go away.”
“I got every right to be here —”
“In the club, maybe, but not at this table. Go.”
I was afraid they were going to fight, but I noticed a bouncer coming toward us, and so did the big guy. He stomped off, muttering vile insults under his breath.
As soon as he was gone, Bill and Larry sat down on either side of me; Bill hugged me and Larry stroked the fur between my ears. I realized I was trembling.
“Are you okay, sweetie?” Bill asked.
“Yeah, I think so. I was scared for a minute there, though.”
“Is this the first time anybody’s hit on you like that?”
“Kind of. It’s not the first time somebody was attracted to me and I wasn’t attracted to them, but he’s the first guy who was mean and condescending about it.” Gradually I stopped trembling; I leaned over against Larry, feeling the fur of his neck against the back of my head. He put his arm around me, not on my breasts or thighs but just around my shoulder.
“We can go now if you want,” Larry said.
“No... I don’t want to let that bastard scare me off. Let’s dance some more.”
A slow song had just come on, and we danced in a semicircle, with my left arm linked with Larry’s right, and his left arm linked with Bill’s right. I had my cane with me, but I didn’t need it while I could lean on Larry. It was fun and romantic, after a few tense moments early on when my feet got tangled with Larry’s and I almost fell, but after several minutes of that my hip was aching again, and we left. In the car on the way back, we all squeezed into the back seat so we could cuddle.
Bill and Larry walked with me to my dorm, and then Larry walked Bill back to her dorm.
I’d been asleep when Amy came back from her date or visit or whatever with David. The next morning, while I was getting dressed for chapel and Amy was just waking up, she asked me: “So how was your date?”
I eventually told her all about the creepy guy who hit on me and wouldn’t go away until the bouncer was heading toward us, but when she asked that, the first thing that came to mind was: “Larry called me his girlfriend!”
“Oh. I guess that might be a big step. This was your third date, right?”
“Yes... not counting the times we just ate together in the dining hall.” I finished putting on my shoes and said: “I’ve got to go; I’ll see you later.”
I told Radhika and Paul some of what had happened after chapel, as we walked together to breakfast. He said, as we were looking for an empty table: “That kind of thing has happened to me, too. A couple of times in high school, and once here, before I started dating Radhika... a girl hit on me and wouldn’t take no for an answer, until I asked an adult for help or some other girl intervened.”
“Huh, I never realized that happens to Cary hyena guys. There’s no average height difference in male and female Raleigh rabbits, but this guy happened to be taller and heavier than me or Larry either one.” We found a table and sat down.
“You’re probably not in much danger in a situation like that,” Radhika said, “even if it’s uncomfortable. If Larry weren’t there, you could have yelled for help and the bouncer would have come even if he hadn’t already noticed what was going on. But if you were alone somewhere... even here on the campus after dark... you should probably learn to defend yourself. I don’t know if you could learn a martial art with your bad hip, but you could carry pepper spray or something.”
“I guess I could hit someone with my cane,” I said, lifting it a bit above the level of the table. “But I don’t really know how to use it effectively.”
“Yeah,” Paul said, “but pepper spray might work better. I started carrying some after this one time in high school —” He stopped abruptly and looked thoughtful.
“I’m trying not to be alone after dark if I can help it.”
“Good plan,” Paul said.
Amy came in and joined us then, and I told her what I’d told Paul and Radhika. She exclaimed over it, and we talked about methods of self-defense, and then about romance. Paul and Radhika had some advice about taking things slow with Larry, and told us some funny stories about their first few dates; Amy was quiet until I asked her, “So how was your date with David?”
“It wasn’t a date,” she said hastily. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?” Radhika teased, and I added:
“You were out even later than I was.”
“It’s a long ride back from Chapel Hill, and the buses don’t run all that often after ten,” she protested with a slight smile. “Okay, I guess it was sort of a date. Not like the things you guys do on dates, all touching each other in your erogenous zones and stuff —”
Now it was our turn. Dark-skinned Cary hyenas like Radhika don’t show embarrassment as obviously as Raleigh rabbits, but my ears were twitching and Paul was turning red.
“— but, I don’t know, maybe I’m falling for them. With us it’s kind of hard to tell where friendship leaves off and love begins; you can’t tell from physical cues, because we also hug and kiss people we’re just friends with and it doesn’t get any more physically exciting when we’re in love. Last time —” But then she shut up, looked away for a moment, and changed the subject.
It was Spring break, and I couldn’t really afford to go much of anywhere on my own, but after going home to visit her family Sunday, Radhika suggested we go down to the coast, just for the day Monday. We couldn’t afford to stay overnight in a hotel, but sharing the cost of gas for Radhika’s car was manageable. Amy and I rode in back, Radhika and Paul up front. I had plans with Larry and Bill again later in the week, but David had gone to visit friends in Atlanta for Spring break.
I’d gone to the beach on one of the barrier islands a couple of times with my parents; I remember finding a lot of seashells, and seeing sandpipers and seagulls, and digging up sand-fleas, and once a crab, which Mom shooed me away from before it could bite me. When we’d unpacked the stuff Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler had packed up for me while I was in the hospital, I found a jar full of small seashells, most of them broken; little pieces of the sea and of the past.
We parked at a public beach on a barrier island that had been hit less hard than some by the big hurricanes of recent years. Radhika and Paul went swimming, but Amy didn’t like the temperature of the water, and I hadn’t bothered to buy a swimsuit when I knew I would only be able to use it once before I outgrew it. Amy and I went for a long walk along the beach, then took the weight off our feet at a seafood restaurant right by a fishing pier.
While we were walking back to the car, a family of Atlantic seals came swimming in from the ocean and flopped down on the shore not far from us. They were naked, of course, but you couldn’t see their genitals; I think males have them enclosed when not in use for better hydrodynamics.
“Hi,” said the biggest one of the four, probably a male. “Nice day, isn’t it?”
“You guys been out at sea long?” Amy asked.
“A couple of hours; we’re teaching the little ones to catch fish.” The children were adorable; they would have appeared to be about three or four years old if they were Lincoln bison, but I couldn’t tell how old Atlantic seals that size might be. With no external genitals, I couldn’t tell what sex they were.
“Did you catch lots of fish?” I asked one of the children. They nodded solemnly.
“I caught two fish,” one of them said. “One of them was this big,” and he spread his flippers improbably far apart. Their mother chuckled.
“We’re also teaching them how to lie like fishermen,” she said, and the little one indignantly spluttered.
We talked for half an hour or more — I was glad of the rest, because my hip was starting to ache and we still had half a mile to go to the car. Then they decided the little ones had had enough rest and swam out to sea again, mother and father flanking the children in the middle.
The following Sunday, after Larry got back from a vacation with his parents and younger siblings, I went on another date with Larry and Bill; we ate lunch at a restaurant near campus, then after considering and rejecting the movies on offer at the Regal, we went back to Bill’s dorm room to watch a movie on her computer and make out. Bill’s roommate wasn’t going to be back from vacation until pretty late, she said. Bill and I leaned up against Larry as we all sat on Bill’s bed, and he stroked our thighs and leaned over and kissed us a lot during the movie. After it was over, I let him take off my blouse and bras and touch my bare breasts. That felt good, but I wasn’t ready to go any further. I went back to my dorm and left Larry and Bill alone together; it was still early enough that I felt safe walking back by myself.
After that, I got busy on the term papers I’d been procrastinating about, and didn’t have as much time to spend with them, or my other friends, as I would have liked. I saw Bill and Larry only at lunch or supper in the dining hall for a few weeks, and outside of our dorm room I mostly only saw Amy at breakfast, or in class. She was cracking down on homework and term papers too, and we didn’t have as much time to chat as before; I don’t think she spent as much time with David as she wanted to either.
I made my travel arrangements for going home after finals, and shipping most of my stuff to Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler’s house. I’d try to find a summer job in Hebron, to replenish my depleted savings, and next semester, now that I’d gotten used to college and knew how much time I needed for studying, I wanted to try to get a part-time job here in Raleigh. If I earned enough that way, maybe I could share an off-campus apartment with some friends next year or the year after. I looked forward to seeing Ron and Carl again, and Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler, but I didn’t want to go several months without seeing Larry and Bill, or Amy, or Radhika, or Rob. I could stand to go years without seeing Rico, though.
One Thursday in April, when I’d finished the first draft of one term paper and made good progress on the other, I decided I had enough free time to go to the science fiction and fantasy society meeting. Bill was there, but Larry was busy studying, she told me. We watched a short pre-Divergence film and then broke up into small groups to talk; I chatted with George, who’d come in late when the film was almost over, and Katie, and later on with Bill.
“I’ve gotten out from under the worst of the term paper craziness,” I said. “If you and Larry aren’t too busy we could do something this weekend, maybe?”
“I’ll talk to him,” she said. “But he’s pretty swamped right now. Maybe weekend after next... or we might not have much time until after finals. How long are you going to be around after your last final?”
“Another couple of days,” I said; “I need to pack up all my stuff to be shipped back to Hebron and get UPS to pick it up.”
“We can help you with that.”
“Thanks.”
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“I’m ready,” I said firmly, though I wasn’t quite sure I was. I’d been on the birth control pills long enough for them to be effective, anyway, and if I didn’t do it now, I wouldn’t have the chance for months. Of course, once I was thousands of miles from the nearest Raleigh rabbit pheromones, I might not want to anymore... but I wasn’t thinking about that.
part 12 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
I finished my Biology project not long after that, and then did a second draft of my World History term paper. And by the time I finished that, it was time to start studying for finals in earnest. I missed the last meetings of the science club and the science fiction and fantasy society for the year, and didn’t hang out with my friends much except at mealtimes; I think most of them were as busy as I was. And then it was finals week, and though I’d been studying hard for more than a week, I didn’t feel at all prepared.
I did okay, though; when our final grades were posted, I had B’s in World History and Biology and a C in Calculus. Amy had done pretty well too; we hugged each other hard after we saw what our grades were.
A couple of days earlier at breakfast, Larry and Bill had suggested that we go out and celebrate the Friday evening of finals week. We hung out some Thursday evening, after my last final, and they helped me pack my crate to send back to Hebron, but they had to excuse themselves after an hour or so to go study for their Friday morning finals.
Then Friday evening, we went to a nice restaurant, as good as any they’d ever taken me to and better than some, and ate and talked and laughed, and then went dancing again. My hip was doing better lately, and I was able to dance more than last time; though I couldn’t keep up with Bill and Larry’s gyrations during the loud, fast-tempo songs, I had a lot of fun.
And then we all squeezed into the back seat of Larry’s car on the way back to the campus; Larry put his arms around both of us, and I leaned into him and felt really good, even though he wasn’t touching anything more exciting than my shoulders at the moment. When we got back, we went to Larry’s dorm; his roommate had had his last final on Wednesday and was already gone. There was some chaos where his roommate had left behind trash that Larry hadn’t taken out yet, and where Larry had pulled everything out of the drawers and cabinets and piled it in stacks on the desks and his roommate’s bed to sort and pack it, but Bill and I didn’t mind.
“Are you sure you’re ready?” Bill said. “We can do this next fall if you’d rather.”
“I’m ready,” I said firmly, though I wasn’t quite sure I was. I’d been on the birth control pills long enough for them to be effective, anyway, and if I didn’t do it now, I wouldn’t have the chance for months. Of course, once I was thousands of miles from the nearest Raleigh rabbit pheromones, I might not want to anymore... but I wasn’t thinking about that.
“All right. How do you want to do this?” Larry asked. “Do you want me to do it with Bill first, while you watch and get yourself ready?”
“Umm... yeah, that might be a good idea.” I started nervously working on unbuttoning my blouse, and though I’d hardly taken my eyes off Larry in the car or on the way to his dorm, now I couldn’t meet his eyes, and kept glancing around the room.
And while Bill and Larry were sitting on the side of the bed, taking each other’s clothes off, and I was dragging my feet taking off my own, my eyes fell on some stuff lying on the desk.
A couple of pairs of handcuffs, and a whip.
I’d read a little about BSDM back when I was doing my due diligence — when I was asexual and saw it all in clinical terms. It seemed a little creepy to me then, and even though there were supposed to be safe ways of doing it that wouldn’t cause any actual injury, it seemed dangerous too. Even if it was perfectly safe when you did it right, I’d read enough to know that people didn’t always think clearly or act rationally when they were having sex or really wanted to have sex, and so how could people know in advance that they’d take those safety precautions when they were horny and in a hurry?
When I thought about it later, I realized that Larry and Bill probably weren’t going to use those things on me that night, or even later on without asking my permission first. Larry had never kissed me or touched me on any part of my body without asking permission first (usually through Bill). But at the time... I just freaked. I started buttoning my blouse up again, and stammered, “Um, actually, I think maybe I’m not ready after all. You guys go ahead without me and I’ll see you later.”
Bill looked over at me, then her eyes met Larry’s, and she looked at me again, saying: “You can stay and watch if that would make you feel more prepared next time.”
“Um, no thanks... bye.” I hadn’t buttoned my blouse up all the way, and I hadn’t tucked it back into my skirt, but I was decent, and I got out of the room as fast as my limp would let me. Bill and Larry had both undressed far enough that they couldn’t follow me quickly; if they had just thrown on a couple of bathrobes they could have caught up with me before I left the dorm, but they were in the middle of foreplay and weren’t thinking any more clearly than I was. And once I left Larry’s dorm, I didn’t go straight back to Alexander Hall; I headed toward the library and browsed the stacks aimlessly for a while before I picked up a book and sat down in a study carrel to read for a while. I stayed for a couple of hours, until Larry and Bill might have gotten to my dorm, not found me there, and gone back to Larry’s dorm.
Later on, Bill told me they’d gotten dressed and looked around for me, but not seeing me in the lobby downstairs or anywhere in sight when they stepped out of the dorm, they hadn’t gone any further.
When I got back to our room, Amy had just been back from her date with David for a little while. “How was your date with Larry and Bill?” she asked.
I didn’t answer for a moment. I hadn’t been able to concentrate much on the book I’d picked out, what with thinking about what I’d seen and what it implied, and having second thoughts about running out without asking to talk with them about the handcuffs and whip. I’d almost gone back to apologize, but I decided I’d better wait a while; it would be awkward to knock on the door when they were in the middle of sex, especially if they were using those toys.
“Oh, it was pretty good,” I said. “We had dinner at a really nice restaurant, and then went dancing for as long as my hip would hold out.”
“Still not ready to go any further?” she asked. “I don’t blame you.”
“Um, no... I thought I might be ready by now, but next fall will be better.”
A woman from UPS, a Cary hyena, came and picked up my crate of stuff to ship to Hebron. All I had left was my cane and a little backpack with a change of clothes, toiletries, and my tablet. Next morning, Amy and I both took the shuttle to the train station. Amy was checking her phone a lot that morning, and texting somebody several times, including right after we got on the train.
When we stopped in Durham, another person got into our car. At first I thought they were an unusually tall male Cary hyena, but then I realized that the white stripe in their hair was bleached, not natural, and it wasn’t as curly as most Cary hyenas' hair. Amy smiled and waved at them, and they came over and sat down next to us.
“David, this is my roommate Joel. Joel, this is David.”
“Hi, David. Amy’s told me about you.”
“And she mentioned you a couple of times, too. You’re going to... Kansas, right?”
“Nebraska. Don’t worry, I get Southern states mixed up too; I’ve gotten the ones we pass through on this trip pretty straight, but I’m hopeless on most of the others.”
David was wearing tight pants where Amy usually wore a skirt, but they wore more jewelry than Amy did, two rings in each ear and a bracelet on their right arm. They were wearing open-toed sandals, which I wished I’d had the money to buy on my last shopping trip; the weather was getting pretty warm, and it would soon be downright hot in Nebraska. Maybe Aunt Ellen would take me shopping, or I could bum a ride to Lincoln with Julia or Ron after I got a summer job and earned some money.
We chatted some on the way to Atlanta, but mostly David and Amy talked — about their plans for the summer, mostly. David lived in Athens and Amy lived in Commerce, a small town a little way north of there; they’d be taking the same bus from Atlanta as far as Athens, where Amy’s parents would come pick her up at the bus station. And they had lots of ideas for later in the summer... I sighed, thinking I really should reply to the email I’d gotten from Bill yesterday, but not sure how yet.
When Aunt Ellen picked me up in Lincoln (Uncle Tyler had to work), I asked her: “Is it okay if we go by a store and buy a couple of pairs of shorts, maybe some sandals? We were still having nippy weather the last time I went shopping, just after I reached my full growth; but it’s getting warm now and it’ll be hot soon.”
So we did that, and got home fairly late, after Uncle Tyler had already eaten supper. When he stood up from his easy chair to greet me, I saw that I was now a little taller than he was. He sat with us during our supper, listening to me talk about school and the trip home and asking some questions.
“So are you still dating that boy — Larry, I think you said was his name?”
“Yes, I went on a date with him and Bill just a few days ago, after finals.”
“With two boys at once?”
“No, Bill’s a girl — she’s Larry’s other girlfriend.”
He pursed his lips and lowered his head. That would be a deferential gesture from a Raleigh rabbit, but it’s more confrontational when a Lincoln bison points his horns at you. “I’m not happy about you dating a boy who has another girlfriend.”
“Uncle Tyler, remember there are a lot more Raleigh rabbit women than there are men. If some of the men didn’t date or marry two or three women, there wouldn’t be enough to go around. Larry and Bill are both really nice, and they haven’t pushed me to go any farther than I was ready to.”
I could see the question in Uncle Tyler’s eyes: “And how far was that?” But he didn’t ask it out loud, so I didn’t answer.
We were quiet for a few minutes, and then Aunt Ellen said: “Jacob, in the Bible, had two wives, and King David had a whole bunch.”
“That’s the Old Testament,” Uncle Tyler said. “The New Testament sets a higher standard.”
“Some of those rules from the Bible apply to any sentient creature,” I said. “But some of them only make sense for old-style humans, or people that are mostly like them. I mean, it’s easy for Lincoln bison to keep doing things the old way. You don’t change sex now and then like us, and you have the same number of men and women. And you’re attracted to each other all the time, not just once a year like Athens magnolias. And your thoughts are private, unlike North Platte dreamers. And you don’t have so much fur that you can’t stand to wear clothes in hot weather, like Omaha sheepdogs. Other species have to do things their way.”
“Maybe in some areas,” he said. “But most of what’s right and wrong is right or wrong for everybody.”
“Sure. Murder’s wrong for everybody, and I guess stealing. And breaking promises. And, umm...” I tried to think of more examples, but couldn’t at the moment, though I thought of plenty later.
After Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler went to bed, I got out my tablet and read Bill’s email again, and started writing another reply to it, which I deleted ten minutes later without sending it.
I got together with Carl, Julia and Ron a couple of times in the next few days, and started and discarded several more replies to Bill. When Ron was giving me a ride over to Carl’s house, where we were going to watch a movie and play some games, I tentatively asked him if he’d gotten back together with Lindsey after Christmas break.
“Yeah,” he said, his face breaking into a smile only partially obscured by his fur. “We’ve been going out together all semester. I’m going to visit her in Kansas City later in the summer.”
“Do your parents know about her?”
“Not yet.” He sighed. “I guess I should tell them before I go see her, huh?”
“Maybe you don’t have to, but... I don’t know. It could make things easier or it could be harder.” I wondered if xenophilia was something that was wrong for everybody, like breaking promises, or okay for some people, like polygamy. I didn’t want to condemn Ron without thinking it through a lot — not when I knew Uncle Tyler felt the same way about me dating Larry and Bill.
And putting off replying to Bill’s email for so long was definitely wrong. Just as I was thinking that, Ron said: “What about you? You mentioned in one of your emails that you were about to go on a date, but you never replied to my next email, and I forgot to send you another one...”
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember why I didn’t reply... things were getting pretty busy with exam prep and term papers about then.”
“Yeah, for me too. But anyway, how’d that date go? Did you go out with the guy again?”
So I told him a lot about my relationship with Larry and Bill, but left out some details about how far we’d gotten, and didn’t say much about our last date just after finals. We got to Carl’s house about then, and I told Carl some of what I’d told Ron, but not everything.
That night I finally made myself write a reply to Bill and send it. The wording was far from perfect, but if I kept trying to write the perfect reply, I’d never send it.
“I’m sorry I took so long to reply. I had to think about this a lot. I’m sorry I ran out on you like that. I wasn’t just nervous about having sex, though that was a big part of it.
“Just before I ran out, I saw the handcuffs and whip lying on the desk. And I should have known that you wouldn’t use them on me without asking permission first, like you asked before Larry kissed me or used his tongue or touched me anywhere. But I freaked out and panicked and ran. I’m sorry. I don’t think I want to use that stuff, but if you ask me later if it’s okay, I promise I’ll think about it before I say yes or no, I won’t just say no instinctively.
“If you and Larry aren’t mad at me, I’d like to see you again in the Fall, and maybe go out again? But maybe we should take things slower. I thought I was ready and I obviously wasn’t. Maybe I’ll be ready after this summer, but I feel like when I’m away from other Raleigh rabbits, my sexual maturity is on hold, even though I’m becoming more adult in other ways.
“Don’t reply right away, talk to Larry and think about it. I know I don’t deserve a quick reply anyway, after I put off answering you for so long.”
I read it over and wasn’t satisfied with it, but I made myself send it anyway. I knew if I started revising it I’d get frustrated that I couldn’t make the words say what I meant and delete it. After that, I went to bed, hugging my second pillow and lying awake for a long time before I slept.
Just a couple of days later I had a reply from Bill:
“Of course we forgive you. We want to see you again, and if you like, to go out again. We can take it as slow as you want.
“And if you’re not comfortable with bondage play, you’re not, and that’s fine. We’re not going to ask you to do something you’re not comfortable with; now that you know we’re into that (but not ONLY into that) you can tell us yourself if you ever want to try it — we won’t mention it again. I’m sorry you had to find out that way.
“Keep us posted about how you’re doing, and we’ll see you in August.”
I applied at several places, and by the end of my second week in Hebron I had a summer job. Aunt Ellen gave me a ride to and from the supermarket before and after going to her own work, and by mid-July I had enough money to go shopping in Lincoln with Julia and her friends. I got more shorts and long pants, and was able to finally retire my skirts from everyday wear — I’d still wear them to church, and maybe on dates, but not otherwise. Leanne tried again to get me to buy some jewelry, but though I went to the jewelry store with them and tried on a couple of things, I still didn’t buy any. I wasn’t as adamantly opposed to wearing it as I’d been a few months ago, but my money didn’t go a long way with girl clothes and I’d rather buy two or three pairs of pants or blouses than one piece of jewelry.
Ron met me for supper after I got off work one Thursday, and told me he was about to tell his parents about Lindsey, just before he left to go visit her for the weekend. I wished him luck. Sunday at church, people were gossiping about it; I wasn’t sure how, since I couldn’t see why either Ron or his parents would tell anyone. Maybe his mom confided in a friend and the friend told somebody who told somebody.
A couple of days after Ron got back from Kansas City, he picked me up after work and we went over to Carl’s house.
“So, how did your parents take it?”
“Not well. But, you know, they didn’t throw me out of the house, so not that terribly either.”
“I’m not sure if you heard, but somebody told somebody — it wasn’t me, but somehow people at church knew about it.”
He shivered. “Not good. If a few people at church know, everybody in town will know in a week.”
In fact, when we got to Carl’s house, we found that Carl had heard about it from Julia, who’d heard about it from some girls who went to our church.
“Dude, why didn’t you tell me?” he asked Ron.
“Three guesses and the first two don’t count.”
“I’m not going to judge you. You should know that.”
“Thanks. I didn’t really think you would, but... I didn’t want to put you to the test if I didn’t have to.”
“So what’s she like? Julia said she’d heard two different rumors, and wasn’t sure if either of them were true.”
“Her name’s Lindsey; she’s a Mississippi mudcat, and beautiful as the day is long. Especially when she’s swimming, but even on land she’s more graceful than most people. She has great taste in books and movies...”
He showed us some recent photos of Lindsey, and of him and Lindsey together, from his trip to Kansas City. In one photo they were naked and soaking wet, wading in shallow water — probably in a bend of the Missouri. Carl looked a little uncomfortable when he saw that, even though normally the sight of a naked person of another species isn’t any more interesting than a naked dog or cat.
Eventually we settled down to watch a couple of movies. One was a recent Sundberg Studio movie that Carl had seen with Julia a while back, and had recommended to us. Another was a movie Ron had brought back from Kansas City, that he’d seen with Lindsey; the cast were mostly Mississippi mudcats, with several other Kansas and Missouri neospecies. I thought about downloading a copy of Sins of the Father and bringing it to our next movie night.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
I got the phone call just after lunch, and I was late to my next class, sitting in a restroom stall until I got my tears under control. I couldn’t concentrate to pay attention to my afternoon classes anyway; I might as well have skipped them.
part 13 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
I was exchanging occasional social media messages and phone calls with Amy, Radhika, Rob, Yolanda and George that summer, as well as Bill. At the end of Spring semester Amy and I had talked about being roommates again next Fall, because we got along pretty well. But then a couple of weeks after I started overhearing customers at the supermarket gossiping about Ron being a xenophile, Amy dropped a bombshell on me.
“I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch, but I’m transferring to UNC so I can see more of David. I’ll still come visit friends at NC State sometimes on weekends. I guess you’ll have to look for another roommate.”
So I immediately emailed Radhika and Yolanda to see if they wanted to share a room with me; I knew Rob would be rooming with Sarah again. Then, after further thought, I replied to Amy:
“I’m sorry I won’t see you as often, but I’m glad things are going so well between you and David. Go girl!”
I thought long and hard about asking Bill if she’d be my roommate, and decided against it. I felt like, even though they’d forgiven me for running out on them, things were still precarious between us; and it would be awkward to be roommates with Bill if we broke up. Besides, she’d be a junior and I’d be a sophomore; the university might not let us room together anyway.
Radhika emailed me back the next day saying that she had already agreed to room again with Lucius, her roommate from last year. “We’re not close friends, but we get along well enough as roommates; neither of us minds the other one’s mess. I’ve seen how neat you and Amy keep your room, and I’m afraid we’d drive each other up the wall.” Yolanda replied two or three days later saying she’d be my roommate, though, and we informed the housing authority.
One Sunday afternoon in early August, Ron and I went out to lunch after church; Carl was on a date with Julia. “Things have been kind of bad at home since I told my parents about Lindsey,” he said. “They want me to stop seeing her, and transfer to the University of Nebraska.”
“Can they make you?” I asked. “I mean, are you dependent enough on them that you can’t go to Missouri on your own?”
“I’ve got a decent scholarship, and loans... but I was getting some extra help from Mom and Dad. Things’ll be tight without that, but I can manage. If I defy them and go back to Mizzou, though, I’m not sure I’ll be welcome if I want to come back here next summer.”
“So is it worth it?”
“To stay with Lindsey? Yeah. I hope Mom and Dad won’t make me choose between them and her, but if they do, it’s going to be her.”
“Yeah. It would be their own fault if they didn’t see you any more, not yours.”
“How about you? How much have you told them about your boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“Enough. Uncle Tyler wasn’t too happy with it, but he didn’t make trouble like your parents are doing.” I hadn’t told him or anybody about that incident at the end of our last date. “I hope you can smooth things over with your parents without breaking up with Lindsey, but... if you can’t, I want you to keep in touch if you’re not living in Hebron anymore.”
“Will do.”
I got my housing assignment — I was rooming with Yolanda in Carroll Hall, not too far from where Amy and I had been last year — and confirmed my class schedule for the Fall semester. Soon we were packing a crate with my things to ship to my new dorm, and not long after that, I was on the train.
I had been exchanging emails and texts with Yolanda, and we arranged for her to get in the same car of the same train that I was taking to Raleigh. Her boyfriend and sister were with her.
“Hi, Yolanda. Hi, Tracy. Who’s this?”
“My little sister and co-girlfriend, Oliver. Oliver, this is Joel.”
“Hi.” Oliver looked askance at me; I wasn’t sure why she took such an instant dislike to me, but I could tell she did. She sat down on the opposite side of Tracy from Yolanda and me, and talked pretty much only with Tracy for the rest of the trip — I had the impression she might have been mad at Yolanda about something, too.
Amy and David got on our train a few minutes later, not long before we left the Atlanta station. Amy and I hugged, and she asked me if I’d found another roommate.
“You’re looking at her,” I said, glancing at Yolanda.
“Good. I’m sorry I took so long to tell you like that —”
“No problem, we still had a couple of weeks before the housing registration deadline. How are things going with you and David?”
“Really well.” They were holding hands, I noticed. “I got a job in Athens so I could eat supper with David almost every evening after we got off work. And last weekend we went to Six Flags...”
Amy and David got off at the Durham station to take a bus to UNC in Chapel Hill. A little while later, the rest of us were in Raleigh, and on the NC State shuttle. Tracy and Oliver were in different dorms; Tracy got off first, and then Yolanda and I got out at Carroll Hall. Yolanda gave Oliver a quick hug before we got off.
“Text me after you get settled in,” she said. “We could eat supper together if you want.”
“Maybe,” Oliver said. “See you later.”
We registered at the front desk, then found our room. Carroll Hall was organized into suites, five bedrooms with two beds each sharing a common bathroom. All the people in our suite were girls, which meant people were more casual about going to and from the showers with no clothes on than they were with the unisex bathrooms in Alexander Hall. They had my crate in a storage room, and I had to get the R.A. and a couple of Cary hyena girls to help move it to our dorm room (and to get it open, while they were there).
“I’m glad you asked me to be your roommate,” Yolanda said while we were unpacking. “Oliver was nagging at me trying to get me to agree to be her roommate, and I didn’t want to room with her; I thought if she hangs out too much with me she won’t meet enough people her age. She’ll be with me and Tracy enough as it is without rooming with me.”
“Wouldn’t it be convenient, though, rooming with your co-girlfriend?” I asked, thinking of Rob and Sarah. “It’d be easier to find a place to make out with Tracy, anyway.”
“Don’t worry about that. Tracy’s got the same roommate as last year, and he was pretty understanding about going to the library or somewhere when me and Tracy wanted some alone time.”
That explained why Oliver had taken such a dislike to me, and why she was mad at Yolanda.
I texted Radhika, George, Bill and Larry once we got settled in and were about to go over to the dining hall. Radhika texted back to say she and Paul were having supper at a restaurant off-campus, and I didn’t hear back from George for several hours, but Bill said they’d be there soon as well.
Yolanda and I got our trays and, having looked around and not seen anybody we knew, found a table with some free space. Tracy and Oliver came in a few minutes apart, and sat down on the other side of Yolanda from me. Then Bill and Larry came in; I waved to them, suddenly apprehensive. They waved back, and went and got their trays before they came over to our table. I stood up to greet them as they approached.
“It’s so good to see you again,” Bill gushed as she hugged me. Then she stood aside and I met Larry’s eyes. My ears twitched.
“I’m glad to see you too. I’m... sorry about last time — I didn’t —”
“Shh, it’s okay. Nobody blames you,” said Larry. “Let’s eat.”
Larry sat between me and Bill, but he didn’t touch any part of me but my hand, and that only briefly now and then, during supper. I introduced them to Yolanda, Tracy and Oliver, and we had a pleasant chat, but didn’t get into anything important. I could still sense some tension between Yolanda and Oliver, and the tension between me and Larry and Bill was too thick to cut with a knife — even if it was mostly on my side.
After supper, Larry asked if I wanted to go for a walk, and I told Yolanda I’d see her back at the dorm later on. Larry offered to take my arm, and I moved around to the other side of him so I could still hold my cane in my dominant hand. Bill took his other arm and we walked around the central part of campus for a while, not saying much at first. Then when we were some distance away from possible prying ears, Larry said:
“If you want to take things slower than we did last time, that’s fine. I’m not going to assume you want to do something just because we’ve done it before. You’ll need to tell me again... not necessarily verbally, if you’re feeling tongue-tied. You could tell me by doing the same — or equivalent — thing to me.”
I nodded, then worked up the courage to speak. “Thank you. That sounds good.” Then, when we sat down on a bench to rest a few minutes later, I non-verbally told him that I wanted him to kiss me.
It turned out that Bill and Larry’s dorms were closer to one of the other dining halls than to the one near Carroll Hall and Alexander Hall. I didn’t find out they were trekking halfway across campus to eat with me for several days. They tended to mostly eat lunch with me, since Bill had early afternoon classes near the dining hall I usually ate lunch at, and sometimes supper; they didn’t always get up early enough to meet me at my dining hall for breakfast. We took it slow, as we’d planned; we didn’t go beyond kissing and holding hands for several weeks.
Ron emailed me the following weekend:
“Things are going great with Lindsey, pretty well with school, and terrible with my parents. I had a big argument with them when I told them I was going back to Mizzou, and another big argument just before I got in the car and drove off to school. I called last night to see if they’d cooled down, and after Dad asked if I was still seeing Lindsey and I said yes, he said ‘Call back after you drop her,’ and hung up on me.
“I’m going to get a job in St. Louis and try to get an apartment here after sophomore year. Maybe with Lindsey, if we’re still together by then.
“How are things going with you?”
The next Thursday, I went to the science fiction and fantasy society’s first meeting of the year, and saw Katie for the first time since spring.
“Oh,” I said in surprise, “you’ve changed.”
“Yeah,” she said, “I guess there were a few too many guys at the store I worked at this summer. Maybe I’ll change back now that I’m in school again, but I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Are you back with Madison?”
“I called him up after I was finished changing,” she said, “but he’s got two girlfriends now, and thinks three would be too many.”
“He moves pretty fast, then. Seems like you ought to have first dibs, you were together before he got with them.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“I know.”
I wondered if it might suit for her to join me and Larry and Bill. But I felt like my own position with them was precarious enough, and I’d make it more so if I asked Larry if we could invite another person on one of our dates. After vacillating about it a while, I said nothing.
Katie told me she’d found a couple of radio plays featuring a cast mostly of Corvallis jerboa, a neospecies that had a cameo role in an Oregonian film we’d seen last semester. “Their social dynamics are a lot like ours; they’ve got about three women for every man. They don’t change sex, though. One of the plays I found is a romantic comedy; the other one’s urban fantasy, and we’re going to be playing it at next month’s meeting.” George perked up at that; he’d been trying to get the entertainment committee to use more radio plays and fewer films.
Amy was as busy with classes and homework as I was, and didn’t come over to NC State to see her old friends until the third weekend after school started. We hung out in the student center for a while, then went to dinner in Radhika’s car.
By then I was starting to have a suspicion. When I showered that morning before Yolanda and I went to meet Amy and Radhika, I was pretty sure my clitoris was a little bigger than usual. A few days later I noticed that my bras were a little loose, especially the upper one. I went to the clinic and had blood tests done, and Monday of the following week they called me with the results: I was turning into a male.
A year ago that would have been great news. Now, when I was patching things up with Larry and Bill and things were going so well? It was devastating. I wondered if Katie had felt the same way when he realized he was turning into a girl, last summer. Had he ever been a girl before — since before the Divergence when she was prepubescent, I mean? I didn’t know; we’d always talked about movies and books, rarely about our pasts, and more about my past than his.
I got the phone call just after lunch, and I was late to my next class, sitting in a restroom stall until I got my tears under control. I couldn’t concentrate to pay attention to my afternoon classes anyway; I might as well have skipped them. At supper, I sat with Larry and Bill, and they could tell something was wrong right away.
“I’ll tell you guys later,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about it here,” glancing around at the other people at our table, most of whom I didn’t know well.
We went for a walk after supper. Larry held my hand, and that was nice, but it also hurt because it reminded me of what I was about to lose.
“What’s wrong?” he said. When I still didn’t say anything right away, he added: “You can tell us, we won’t judge you.”
“It’s not something I’ve done wrong,” I said, “but it’s going to mess everything up anyway... I’m turning into a guy. I just got the blood test results.”
“Oh.” We walked on in silence for a few moments. “I’m sorry. Do you want to keep dating until your changes are farther along?”
“Is it okay if we do that? I mean, I’d understand if you didn’t want to...”
“We aren’t going to dump you when you need a friend,” Bill said, and Larry continued:
“It’s not going to work romantically long-term, of course, but we’ll still be here for you. And we’ll break it off gradually if you want.”
Suddenly I had a wild impulse. “Make love to me,” I said. “Before it’s too late. Tonight, if we can get one of our roommates to leave us alone for a few hours, or in the next few days anyway...?”
Larry asked, “Are you sure you’re ready?,” and Bill said:
“Not tonight. I feel like you’re not in the right frame of mind to make this decision. If you still feel that way tomorrow, let us know.”
“I will.”
“Then we can do it then. It will let us talk to our roommates and give them more warning.”
They both hugged me hard, and Larry and I kissed several times before I went into my dorm and told Yolanda the bad news, that I’d be moving and she’d probably get a new roommate she didn’t know.
That night, and the next morning, I had second thoughts about what I was planning. Maybe it was a bad idea to have sex with Larry just before we broke up; it might make it harder to lose him. But the rest of me didn’t listen to the part that had reservations. I was regretting not taking more advantage of being a girl while I was one, wishing I’d done this months ago. Better late than never, I figured. I told Larry and Bill at supper that I still felt the same way, and Larry nodded.
“Let’s go over to my dorm,” he said. “My roommate will be out until late.”
My heart was beating hard as I walked hand in hand with Larry, Bill on his other side, toward Larry’s dorm. But I was determined not to back out at the last minute this time.
His dorm room was empty, as he’d said. It was on the third floor of a building with no elevator, though, and after two flights of steps I started to wish I’d asked Yolanda to leave us alone in our dorm room for a few hours. They stopped and waited for me while I rested before going on up the last flight of stairs. When we got to the room, and Larry unlocked it and let us in, he said: “You look kind of wiped out. Do you want to rest a while before we do anything?”
“A little while,” I said, my hip aching, and sat down on the side of the bed he’d indicated. “I guess we could start taking off our clothes or whatever? I’ll wait on my pants until my hip gets a little better, but I can take the other stuff off now...”
“No hurry,” he said, sitting down beside me and putting his arms around me. “We’ve got several hours before Marta gets back.” He kissed me, and while we were fencing with our tongues, Bill sat down on the other side of me and kneaded my shoulders, which were tense. “Now how do you want to do this?” Larry asked.
“Um, I don’t know... you’re the expert... just, no handcuffs and stuff, okay?”
“Of course.” He kissed me again, and then started unbuttoning my blouse.
I’m not going to go into details. He took it slow, from undressing to pulling out. Bill kept rubbing my back and neck for a while, but she must have gotten out of the way at some point — the bed wasn’t that big. Later on I felt someone rubbing my feet, and I think it was probably her. Larry and Bill made love after he’d satisfied me, and we lay there all squeezed into the narrow bed for a while, not saying much.
After a long while Larry’s phone pinged, and he asked me to reach over to the desk and hand it to him. I did, and after reading a text, he said: “I hate to break up the party, but Marta is on his way back. We’d better get dressed, although you can stay for a little while after he gets back if you want.”
I looked at the time on his phone and gasped. It would be hard to get enough sleep before morning. “No,” I said, “I guess I’d better go as soon as I get dressed. I wish I could stay longer.” There was more in it than what I said overtly: I wished we could be together longer. But we knew this was the last time as well as the first. My vagina was already starting to close up, and a few more days' development might make this impossible. And there was no sense prolonging the inevitable.
I showered when I got back to Carroll Hall, before I went to bed. Yolanda was already asleep. I lay in bed awake for a while, thinking of how wonderful it had been and how we would never do it again. I finally started crying over how unfair it was, and found dried tears clumping up my facial fur in the morning.
If you've enjoyed this and the other free stories I've posted here, you may also enjoy these novels and short fiction collection -- available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors higher royalties than Amazon.
“It’s...” My face felt hot and my ears were twitching. “I want to be friends. It’s just...” I couldn’t say it.
part 14 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
Sorry for the long delay on this chapter. I was out of town the day I normally would have posted, and by the time I got home, I got distracted and forgot to post right away.
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
A few days later my vagina was so narrow I could barely get a pinky into it, my clitoris was about as large as my penis had been when I was a little boy, and I had an empty scrotum waiting for my ovaries to turn into testicles and move into it. I’d reported my change to the housing authority when I got the blood test results, and the Friday after my first and last time with Larry, they told me where they wanted me to move to.
It was on the fifth floor of Carroll Hall, but since Carroll Hall had elevators, that was okay. I had a room to myself, the ninth boy in a suite that had only four occupied rooms with two guys each up to then. “If another girl in Carroll Hall changes sex this semester, you’ll get a roommate. Or more likely, early in the spring semester. For now, enjoy your single,” the housing clerk told me. Yolanda and several of the girls from my suite helped me move my stuff on Saturday morning, and I settled in and unpacked that afternoon. I was awkwardly in-between; my breasts were still large enough that I had to wrap a towel around my torso on the way to and from the shower, and I had pee spraying out of the end of my clito-penis as well as from the remains of my vulva, but I couldn’t get aroused by people of either sex.
I still ate lunch and supper pretty often with Larry and Bill, but not almost every meal like before. Bill hugged me sometimes, but Larry and I didn’t kiss or hold hands again after that night.
Within another week, my testicles had descended, my vagina had closed up, and my penis was fully formed though not full-size yet. I still had A-cup breasts, though, and was glad I hadn’t gotten rid of my old bras when I gave the old clothes that didn’t fit me to Goodwill. Then one day when we got up from the table after supper, and Bill gave me a goodbye hug, I felt my penis get stiff and squirm around inside my pants, which barely had room for it even at normal size. I was mortified, but Bill didn’t seem to notice — since my breasts were still noticeable, I think she still thought of me as a girl, and so did I until that moment. I hastily said I needed to get back to the dorm and do some homework, and excused myself.
Once I got back to my room, I took off my pants and waited until the damn thing subsided before putting them back on. It took way too long.
The following Saturday I finally had a chance to shop for underwear and pants with room in the crotch for my new equipment. I didn’t buy any new shirts, though; those still fit, even if the cut and colors were a little feminine, and I couldn’t afford to buy more than absolutely necessary right then. Radhika gave me a ride to the mall and we did our shopping together, in the racks of pants for Raleigh rabbit men and Cary hyena women — both of us needed pants with wide hips and a loose crotch. (Adult Raleigh rabbits' skeletons don’t change when their fleshy bits grow and shrink and shift around; so our men have a wide pelvis, in case they become women later on and need to give birth.)
While we were shopping, I got a call back from a convenience store near campus I’d applied at; they asked me to come in for an interview. I’d been job-hunting ever since the start of the semester, but so far I hadn’t found something I was capable of that fit my school schedule. I got Radhika to drop me off at the convenience store after we were done shopping, and took the bus back to campus after the interview. I got the job.
The next day, during lunch (I was sitting with Radhika, Paul and George), Yolanda came over with her tray and sat next to me. “Hey,” she said. “I’ve hardly seen you since you moved out. How are you doing with the whole boy thing?”
“Kind of okay, I guess,” I lied. “I went and bought new pants yesterday, the old ones don’t fit anymore.” My A-cup bras were loose now, but I still needed them to keep my nipples from showing.
“You don’t look that okay.”
“...No, not really. Not entirely. I’m still messed up about losing Larry and Bill.”
“Are you still friends with them?”
“Yeah, but it’s not the same. It’s kind of awkward hanging out with them now, and... um... being attracted to Bill instead of Larry.”
“Huh. Yeah, I imagine so. None of us,” gesturing toward Tracy and Oliver who were sitting at a nearby table, “have ever changed since puberty; I was afraid one of us would change once we got to college among more people, but it hasn’t happened yet. That would be awful, even if you’ve only been with them for a few months.”
“Seven months. A good seven months, but it’s over.”
“Well,” she said, “did you go to Professor Wilson’s talk at the symposium? About how and why we change?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, with you developing so fast at puberty, and then changing so soon afterward, I figure you’re going to change again eventually. Maybe you can get back together with them then.”
“Maybe. But probably they’ll get over me and get together with a girl who’s more likely to stay a girl. And what if I fall in love with a girl, only to turn into another girl just when we’re getting serious? If I’d known seven months ago I was going to turn into a boy so soon, I’d never have gotten involved with them...”
“You said it was a good seven months.”
“Yeah. Maybe it was worth it even if it couldn’t last.”
A few days later, I went to the science fiction and fantasy society meeting. I came in a little late; the lights were only dimmed slightly, not turned off, and people were sitting around listening to the radio play Katie had told me about. I found an empty seat near the door, sat down and listened. I was a little confused, having missed the first few minutes, but I soon gathered that the main character was a witch and a private detective, and was investigating some murders that had been committed by magic when suddenly one of her co-wives was murdered in the same way. Once I figured out who was who and what was going on, I got caught up in it and enjoyed it; hearing the voices and not seeing any images, I could imagine that the main characters were Raleigh rabbits like me.
After it was over, I went over to the refreshment table. Larry and Bill came over there a few moments later.
“Hi,” I stammered. “How are you two doing?”
“We miss seeing you,” Larry said. “I know we can’t... be what we were, but we still want to be friends. Have you been avoiding us or is it just bad luck with our schedules?”
“It’s...” My face felt hot and my ears were twitching. “I want to be friends. It’s just...” I couldn’t say it.
“It’s awkward, I guess,” Bill said. “Being with us and remembering how things used to be.”
“...Yeah, that’s part of it.” I didn’t want to tell them what really felt most awkward: being attracted to Bill, and knowing she was Larry’s girl.
And I wasn’t.
So I tried to change the subject, talking about the radio play we’d listened to, and classes, and so forth. We wound up chatting for most of the rest of the meeting, but it was an effort to keep my eyes fixed on Bill’s eyes, and Larry’s, instead of Bill’s breasts.
It was silly; I’d had breasts nearly as good until recently, and still had breasts of a sort if somewhat undersized. But I’d seen before how boys couldn’t easily avoid looking at girls' breasts, and now I was experiencing it from the other end.
Near the end of the meeting I excused myself and said I wanted to talk to some other people. I’d seen Katie chatting with George, and went over to talk to them. She looked at me for a moment and said, “Joel? So you’re changing too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I first noticed about three weeks into the semester; I guess I’ve got another week or two before it’s finished. Thanks for bringing that radio play, by the way; it was really good.”
“Sure was. If you want to listen to the other one I mentioned, the romantic comedy, let me know.”
“That would be good.”
The following Saturday after work, I was studying when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it and saw Katie.
“I brought that radio play I told you about,” she said, “and the one we listened to at the meeting, too.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Come in.”
She handed me a flash drive and sat down on the bed I wasn’t using. “They’re in the root directory,” she said.
I plugged the flash drive into my laptop and easily found the radio plays she’d mentioned. “Got 'em, thanks,” and I ejected the flash drive and gave it back to her. “Are you in a hurry to go somewhere?”
“No, I guess not.”
“So, have you listened to this one just recently or do you want to hear it again? I was just about to knock off studying and take a break for a while...”
She looked at me appraisingly. “Sure... I first listened to it back in July, but I wouldn’t mind listening to it again; it’s really good.”
So I plugged the external speaker into my laptop and started playing Hexangle.mp3. It was set at Reed College in Portland, where Corvallis jerboa were apparently a minority among the Salem pangolins and Portland squid; the main character was a freshman girl who was being courted by two different guys, one of whom had one girlfriend already and the other, two. She liked the second guy better, but his current girlfriends disagreed about whether they wanted to have another co-girlfriend, and kept alternately sabotaging her and helping her impress their boyfriend... Katie and I laid back on the different beds and nearly laughed our lungs out.
“You’re right, that was really good,” I said when it was over. “I really needed a laugh.”
She nodded. “I had a feeling you might.”
We were quiet for a minute, then she said: “Well, I guess I’d better go.”
“See you later. This was fun; thanks.”
“Later.”
I got back to studying, but it took me a while to start concentrating.
The next time I talked with Yolanda, at lunch a couple of days later, she told me that Oliver had moved in with her. “She wasn’t getting along that well with her roommate, and I didn’t want to take my chances on the university assigning me some random person who’d just turned into a girl, so I said yes. It’s working okay so far.”
“I’m glad to hear it. I was worried that you two were quarreling because she wanted to room with you and you wanted to room with me.”
“Yeah, but just for a few days at the beginning of the semester. That was over weeks ago.”
“Good.”
“Well, I’d better not stay here too long. I think Tracy’s getting jealous of me spending time with you now that you’re a guy.” She laughed and waved at Tracy and Oliver where they were sitting a few tables away.
“I don’t want to mess things up between you,” I began, but she said: “I’m just messing with you. Tracy’s cool with it. — Besides, I want to have a backup plan in case Tracy turns girl.”
I laughed nervously.
Amy came to visit the following Saturday, and she had big news which she hadn’t wanted to share by phone or email.
“David and I got engaged!” she told us, showing off her ring.
“Wonderful!” Radhika said. “I expect you’ll be very happy together.”
“Congratulations,” I said, and George and Yolanda said congratulatory things as well.
Amy was sympathetic about me turning into a guy and having to break up with Larry and Bill. “But, hey, at least you got a single room out of it.”
“Yeah,” I said with a weak smile. “At this point anybody who’s going to change this semester already has, so I probably won’t get a roommate until January or February.”
Later on, as we were sitting around talking after lunch, I asked her: “So what does marriage mean for Athens magnolias? I mean, are you promising you won’t get pollinated except by insects that just pollinated David, and vice versa?”
“No,” she said. “We can’t control that, although we can improve the odds of it by staying close to each other when we’re in bloom. We’re promising to live together and help raise each other’s children.”
“That makes sense. Are you both planning to have kids?”
“Only one of us is going to go off birth control at a time, so we don’t have too many babies to take care of at once. But yeah, we’ll take turns. I’ll probably have the first one since David will be in medical school.”
“When are you getting married?” Yolanda asked.
“Next summer. But we’re not going to start having kids until after we graduate from college.”
The rest of us started talking about whether we could plan to be in Athens next June. It would be easy enough for Yolanda, but a longish trip for me or Radhika or George.
At the next science fiction and fantasy society meeting, I saw Katie again. “Are you about finished changing?” she asked.
“Yeah, almost.” My chest was still a little puffy where my breasts had been, but my nipples were down to male size, and my penis and testicles had stopped growing.
“Good. It’s not much fun being in-between.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So what have you been reading or watching that’s cool...?”
We chatted about books and vids for a while, and then she said: “Would you like to do something this weekend?”
“Maybe. What about watching a movie or listening to another radio play? George just gave me a bunch of them, several post-Divergence serials from Nashville, and some old ones from the 1930s, like that War of the Worlds show that people thought was real.”
“Cool! I’ve heard about that but I’ve never heard it. Your dorm room?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring snacks.”
“Okay, cool. Um, what about Saturday afternoon, a couple of hours after I get off work? That’ll give me time to get some studying done beforehand, and you time to get back to your dorm before dark.”
“See you then.”
It was only later that I realized I’d agreed to a date. It had taken me months to get used to being a girl, and now it was taking me just as long to realize that I was a boy now; while I’d been talking with Katie, it had been as though we were two girls talking, planning to hang out together. But a boy and a girl... that put a different spin on it. Maybe it was because Katie wasn’t as immediately attractive as Bill, or some other girls, that I could forget I was a boy (or almost a boy) when I was with her.
I thought about inviting another person or two to come over and hang with us Saturday afternoon, to keep it from being a date. I didn’t really want to start dating again so soon after breaking up with Larry and Bill, but I didn’t want to hurt Katie’s feelings, either, by backing out after I’d agreed to hang out with her. I liked her; I just wasn’t sure I liked her that way, and even if I wanted to date her eventually, now wasn’t the time.
But my room wasn’t that big, and it would get crowded if I invited more than one other person. I invited George, and then Radhika, but both of them had other plans. I thought briefly about inviting Yolanda, but rejected the idea almost immediately; I didn’t want to make trouble between her and Tracy. And as for Larry and Bill... I couldn’t invite just one of them.
So Saturday afternoon, I was almost finished with my weekend homework when Katie knocked on my door. I let her in; she had a bag of chips and a bag of pretzels, and a couple of drinks — one of them was a Cherry Coke. She was observant.
“Should I put these on your desk?”
“Sure,” I said. There wasn’t much of anywhere else to put them.
We opened the chips and drinks and ate a few bites while we talked about what to listen to. We decided on the Mercury Theater War of the Worlds broadcast, followed by the first couple of episodes of The House on the Corner.
Katie laid down on what would have been my roommate’s bed with the bag of pretzels, and I laid down on mine with the bag of chips, and I dimmed the lights, then started playing The War of the Worlds. We could easily imagine the effect of that if you tuned into it a few minutes late, if you lived back before the first Mars probe and thought there might be sentient life there, who could come calling any time... creepy even now, and it must have been terrifying back then.
The House on the Corner was creepy and weird in another way. A new family moves into the big house on the corner, and everyone in the neighborhood thinks they’re nice, if a bit strange. Nobody can agree on what neospecies they are; the people in number 48, who are Knoxville bears, report that they look completely different from how the Murfreesboro owls in number 33 see them. And the various Nashville bats all perceive them to be different shapes, and nobody can get a straight answer out of the new neighbors themselves. By the end of the second episode we got some more clues about what they really were, but I won’t spoil it; go listen, it’s good, even if Nashville bat radio drama takes some getting used to. The echolocation soundscaping is mostly lost on a low-end sound system like the little external speaker I plugged into my laptop, but the bit that gets through is still a distraction from the dialogue and other sound effects until you learn to tune it out. Of course, hanging around George had helped us learn to ignore echolocation clicks.
After the second episode of The House on the Corner, I turned the lights back up. “That was good,” I said, “at least I thought so. How did you like it?”
She responded with some speculation about where the series was going and what the new neighbors really were; our theories were all over the map, and one of them turned out to be fairly near the truth, but it wasn’t one we took seriously at the time. But yes, she liked it too. We chatted for a few more minutes, and then she said she’d better get back to her dorm. I opened the blinds and saw it was sunset, and remembered how nervous I’d been walking alone in the dark as a girl, and offered to walk with her back to her dorm.
“Thanks,” she said, and patiently kept to my slow pace halfway across campus to her dorm. If she’d walked at her briskest pace alone, she’d probably have gotten there before it was completely dark.
I said good night to her in the entrance lobby of her dorm. I think she might have wanted me to kiss her, but I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t.
Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in ePub format and from Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.
Katie had told me some about her family during our dates, and I pieced together more from what people said during the weekend. Katie’s dad had stayed male for the first five years after the Divergence, and he and Katie’s mom had married Gus a year or so afterward, who’d been his best friend, and changed into a woman right after the Divergence. Then five years ago, Katie’s dad became female as well, and rather than break up the family, they decided they’d all stay together and find another man, and if they took too long to find one, maybe one of them would turn male. They married Katie’s stepdad Iris a little over a year later, and things had been stable since then except for a couple of the children changing sex when starting a new grade.
part 15 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
After that I felt less stressed about hanging out with Katie, though I still didn’t feel ready to start dating again, and tried to invite other people along when Katie suggested doing something together. We went out to dinner with Radhika, Paul and George the following Friday, and talked a little about The House on the Corner, though not much. George had listened to the whole series, and Radhika and Paul hadn’t heard it at all, so we couldn’t go into plot details; it was mostly just us recommending it to Radhika and Paul, and them replying with recommendations of their own. George came over to my dorm Saturday afternoon and listened to episodes three through five with us, though he’d heard them a couple of times before.
After George left, I offered to walk Katie back to her dorm again, though it wasn’t as late as it had been last time. For the first few minutes we speculated about where The House on the Corner was going. Then, when we got to a little garden spot with benches about halfway between central campus and her dorm, she sat down on a bench and I gratefully joined her. My hip wasn’t bothering me as much these days as it had during puberty, but a rest halfway through a long walk was always welcome. The sun was setting, and I figured it would be full dark by the time I got back to Carroll Hall.
Then Katie put her hand on mine, and I tensed up a little. I wasn’t ready for this — or was I? Katie and I had been hanging out for three weeks, and it had been more than six weeks since I broke up with Larry and Bill...
“Do you want to just keep hanging out and being friends,” she said, “or are you just not sure how to be with a girl as a boy?”
“Um, can it be both? For now, anyway? I mean —” I stopped, flustered. After a few moments' thought I said: “Did you go to the symposium back in February, the one on North Carolina neospecies?”
She stared at me, the tips of her ears bent in thought. “That’s a way to change the subject. Yeah, I went to part of it.”
“Particularly Dr. Wilson’s talk about Raleigh rabbits, and how some of us have a lot stronger tendency to change sex than others?”
“No, I missed that one.”
“Well, basically, some Raleigh rabbits have a genetic predisposition to change sex really easily, whenever there’s a slight imbalance in the pheromones they’re exposed to, and some are really resistant and won’t change unless there’s a big imbalance and it stays imbalanced for a while. And some are in between. Anyway, since I went through puberty so fast, and changed sex so soon afterward, I figure I’m probably in the first category — I’ll probably change sex pretty often compared to most people. So... what if we start dating, and then I change again next semester or the semester after that? It’s almost certain to happen sooner or later.”
She was quiet a moment, and said: “I might change too. This last summer was the second time I’d changed sex, not counting the Divergence and puberty; I developed as a girl and then changed into a boy junior year of high school. But just because something can’t last forever doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.”
“If you’re sure...” I squeezed her hand back. “Then let’s do something without George around next Friday, okay?”
She smiled. “Yes, let’s do exactly that.”
I’d usually seen Katie wearing jeans and T-shirts — sometimes boy-cut jeans with a loose crotch. “Waste not, want not,” she said; none of the clothes she’d worn back when she was a girl the first time fit her anymore, and she didn’t want to buy a whole new wardrobe at once. But on our first real date, she wore a new skirt and blouse.
“You look really nice,” I said when I met her in the lobby of her dorm.
“Thanks. You’re looking sharp, too.”
Neither of us had a car, so we took a city bus to an Indian restaurant Katie recommended that was right near a bus stop. We held hands as we walked from the bus stop to the restaurant and again after we sat down in the waiting area. We’d eaten lunch or supper together several times in one of the dining halls during the last week — sometimes Katie would come over to the dining hall near Carroll Hall, and sometimes I’d go to the one near her dorm, but usually she visited mine because I walked so much slower.
A waitress came and seated us at a booth a few minutes later. I propped my cane in the corner of the booth and studied the menu.
“The tandoori chicken is pretty tasty,” Katie said.
“I expect I’ll try it, then.” But I studied the rest of the menu before I made up my mind. I was nervous about how this was supposed to go, and trying to remember how Larry had acted toward me during our first couple of dates. I didn’t have a senior girlfriend to act as go-between and ask what the junior girlfriend wanted, and I didn’t have a car door to open for Katie, and I wasn’t sure if she’d like that sort of thing anyway. Anyway Katie was more experienced at this from both ends; I wasn’t sure how many dates she’d been on as a girl between, I’d guess, ages thirteen and sixteen, but probably more than I’d been on in the seven months I was with Larry and Bill.
Why not just ask her?
“So,” I said, “I’ve never been on a date as the guy before. And not that many as a girl, and I’m not sure how typical they were — how typical Larry and Bill are. How do you want to do this?”
“We can talk about whatever while we eat,” she said. “And we can kiss after dinner. And then we can cuddle while we listen to the next couple of episodes of The House on the Corner. How’s that?”
“Sounds good,” I said, though I wasn’t sure what all she included under the heading of “cuddling.” Did she want me to touch her breasts, or just put an arm around her shoulders, or what? I decided I’d ask later, when we were alone, not here in the restaurant. “So, I’ve got to take History 201 next semester. Which professor did you have for it...?”
When I’d paid for dinner, and we got up from the table, I put my arm on her shoulder and tugged gently. She leaned over toward me and we kissed. It was good; not as exciting as the first time I’d kissed Larry, but good. We kissed a couple of times more, sitting on the bench at the bus stop, and again on the bus.
Then we were back at my dorm room, and I put on episode six of The House on the Corner to play. Katie took off her shoes and laid down on my bed, squeezing close to the wall to give me room. I took off my shoes and laid down next to her.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked in a low voice as the opening credits music played.
“Just hold me,” she said, and I put my arm around her shoulders.
We talked for a while between episodes six and seven, speculating about where the show was going, whether the family in the house on the corner were aliens, or people from a parallel world where the Divergence happened differently, or what. Katie thought they were nonhumans native to Earth who predated the Divergence — elves or fairies or something, who thought it was safe to come out of hiding now that humanity had diversified so. I was leaning toward the aliens theory, but I admitted that the evidence supported her view nearly as well.
After episode seven, I walked with her back to her dorm, and we kissed again goodnight.
Somehow, once I was dating Katie for real, I found myself more at ease with Larry and Bill, and could relax and be friends with them. Sometimes they ate supper with me and Katie at the dining hall near Carroll Hall. I didn’t see Rob or Sarah as often as I used to; I didn’t share any classes with them that semester, and I think Rob was a little reluctant to spend too much time with me now that I was male, or Rico might be jealous. I still saw George, Radhika and Paul fairly often, and did stuff with them when I wasn’t doing boyfriend-girlfriend stuff with Katie.
Katie and I went on some kind of date almost every week for the remainder of the semester, except when we were studying for finals and working hard on our term papers. Even then she helped me out with studying for the classes she’d already taken. Radhika invited me to spend Thanksgiving with her family again, and I said I’d let her know in a couple of days, but right after that Katie said she’d gotten permission from her parents for me to spend Thanksgiving with them.
By then we’d moved on from holding hands and kissing to touching in more intimate places, though we still hadn’t had sex. I think Katie might have been ready, but I wasn’t. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Katie’s stepdad pulled up in front of Carroll Hall, having already picked up Katie and her suitcase and bags of laundry, and I got in his car. He asked me about myself, and I told him about my family and my history, and how I’d almost made up my mind about my major and expected to declare by the beginning of next semester, and so forth.
It didn’t take us too long to get to the Cartwrights' house in Auburn. After grilling me about myself for a few minutes, Katie’s stepdad started asking her how she’d been doing since her last visit home, which I gathered was more than a month ago. Apparently she hadn’t told them she was dating me until she asked them if I could spend Thanksgiving with them, saying that my family lived too far to travel, etc.
The Cartwrights‘ house wasn’t much bigger than the Eames’ house, but it had a lot more people in it; besides Katie’s stepdad, mom, dad, and stepmom, there were more kids than I could keep track of at first. It wasn’t until supper that they were all sitting still at once and I could count them: two high school girls, one boy in middle school, and two asexuals, one about six and one about three.
Katie had told me some about her family during our dates, and I pieced together more from what people said during the weekend. Katie’s dad had stayed male for the first five years after the Divergence, and he and Katie’s mom had married Gus a year or so afterward, who’d been his best friend, and changed into a woman right after the Divergence. Then five years ago, Katie’s dad became female as well, and rather than break up the family, they decided they’d all stay together and find another man, and if they took too long to find one, maybe one of them would turn male. They married Katie’s stepdad Iris a little over a year later, and things had been stable since then except for a couple of the children changing sex when starting a new grade.
I shared a room with Katie’s little brother Alice; there was a second bed in the room, which apparently belonged to his brother when one of his older siblings was male. At the moment both of them were female. Katie had a room to herself, but her various parents kept an eye out and made sure I didn’t go near it.
I got to know Alice a little better than Katie’s other siblings, sharing a room with him; he was thirteen, and had a big shelf full of dolls or action figures representing most of the three hundred and seventy-one neospecies found east of the Mississippi. “I’ll have all of them in another year,” he said, “and then I’ll start in on the western neospecies.”
“What about Mississippi mudcats?” I asked. “Do they count as eastern or western?”
“Both,” he said, “but I’ve already got them, look here,” and he pointed to one of the four-inch figures on a lower shelf. I bent down and looked, not wanting to pick it up — I wasn’t sure if it was a toy or a collectible. It wore a little swimsuit, which I was pretty sure most real Mississippi mudcats didn’t bother with when swimming. Its skin was a little darker than Lindsey’s. Most Mississippi mudcats have skin darker than they had before the Divergence, but some of those who were African-American before got a little lighter.
He asked me bluntly why I used a cane, and I told him about the car accident my parents died in, and how the doctors hadn’t been able to fix my broken leg and hip quite right. Then he asked me about the neospecies that lived in Nebraska, and I told him something about Lincoln bison and Omaha sheepdogs, and a little about North Platte dreamers.
About then, one of his female parents — it took me a while to get them straight — called us to supper.
At supper, I met the rest of the family who hadn’t been there when we arrived, and was introduced to them, though it took me a couple of days to get everyone’s names straight. Katie’s dad had just gotten back from a last-minute grocery run, and she and Katie’s mom and stepmom wanted to hear all about me. Katie and I told them how we met, and how we started dating, and so forth, and I told them how I’d lived in Hebron most of the time since the Divergence, but kind of glossed over the fact that I hadn’t gone through puberty until I went off to college. Water under the bridge, and I’d had enough weird reactions to that news already, back when I couldn’t avoid some explanation for why I was so undersized and young-looking.
“So you’re the only rabbit in your family?” Katie’s dad said. “That’s too bad. All my brothers are different species, but we’re fortunate that Kathy and I and the kids were all in the same change-region on Valentine’s day, even if Kathy was out running errands at the moment and Katie was visiting a friend. I was frantic, hearing about all the accidents on the news, and not able to get through to them because the network was so clogged.”
“I did get in an accident,” her mom said, “but it wasn’t too bad; I and another car behind me were already slowing down at a stop light, and he ran into me while I ran into the car that had already stopped at the light. None of us were too badly hurt, but we were so confused...! And then we waited a long time for the cops before we realized they had worse problems to deal with, and decided to just exchange insurance information and go home. But it took a while because of all the wrecks blocking the roads.”
So that led to everyone telling about where they were and what they were doing when it happened, at least everyone who was old enough to remember; and Katie’s dad filled in for Alice, who’d been with him at the time. “She was really scared,” she said, “and she didn’t seem to recognize me at first, until I spoke. My voice hadn’t changed... She was already using the potty on her own by then, we’d gotten her out of diapers just a few months earlier, and so it was a while before we realized she’d become asexual — we didn’t think to look until we heard on the news about all the other kids.” Alice’s ears were twitching, and I felt bad for him; Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler didn’t tell embarrassing stories about me as a child as often as Carl or Ron’s parents, but I’d been on the receiving end often enough to know what it was like.
“I was too embarrassed to tell y’all anything,” Katie’s sister Tom said. “You were so worried about Mom, and everything was so weird I didn’t want to bother you with this other weird thing.”
“When I saw I was asexual I thought it was another thing that got messed up in the accident,” I said. “I got a concussion and couldn’t remember the transformation or the wreck, but I knew I must have been in an accident because the last thing I remember we’re in the car, and the next, I’m waking up in a hospital with my leg in traction.”
At this point Katie’s stepmom Gus asked if we could talk about something more appetizing, and we changed the subject. It wasn’t until later that Katie told me what she’d been doing at the time of the Divergence: she’d been across the street at a friend’s house, sitting in her friend’s bedroom talking and listening to music. They freaked out when they transformed, like most people did, but were safe enough, unlike her friend’s mom, who was carrying a basket of clean laundry up the stairs when she transformed, and fell backwards down the stairs — fortunately she’d just started climbing the stairs, and had only two or three steps to fall, or she might have been killed. As it was she suffered a concussion and several broken bones, and was in the hospital for months. Katie’s dad had come over to get her when she hadn’t come home right afterward, bringing her little brother and sister with him since he couldn’t leave them alone, and found Katie and her friend standing by her friend’s unconscious mom, trying to dial 911 and getting busy signals. It took them over an hour to get through.
Thanksgiving morning, Katie’s parents had some work for us to do, but not in the kitchen. It was too crowded with four adults working at once. They asked Katie to watch her little siblings while they were busy. “You know Tom and Grant have to watch the little ones all the time; and you haven’t seen them in too long,” her dad said.
“Sure,” Katie said, and she and I took the little kids, Usagi and Jenny, up to their bedroom and played with them until it was time for dinner. Both of them were Katie’s half-siblings; Usagi’s dad was Katie’s dad, and her mom was Gus, while Jenny’s mom was Katie’s dad, and her dad was Katie’s stepdad Iris.
Usagi and Jenny pulled all of their toys out of the toybox one by one and showed them to me and explained them. There were a lot of toys that looked like old-style humans, hand-me-downs that their older siblings had acquired before the Divergence, and a lot of non-human toys — dinosaurs, prehistoric megafauna and robots, mostly. There were only a few Raleigh rabbit dolls.
“This is Dejah Thoris,” Usagi explained, holding up a naked doll that looked like an old-style human woman except for the bright red skin.
“What neospecies is she?” I asked.
“She’s a Martian princess,” Usagi said, and Katie laughed.
“When Alice was about four or five,” she said, “I read A Princess of Mars to her at bedtime. And we took one of the old Barbie dolls I’d bequeathed her and painted it with red nail polish to be Dejah Thoris.”
After dinner, most of us piled into two cars and drove to Knightdale High School, where the soccer team from South Garner High was visiting. Little Jenny was sleepy and needed a nap, and their mommy, Katie’s dad, stayed home with them.
Katie’s stepsister Grant (Gus’s child by her first marriage) was on the SGHS team. They did well, but the Knightdale team was doing a little better and it looked like they were going to win, until a couple of Grant’s teammates scored goals near the end and pulled ahead.
I remembered that Knightdale was where Sarah, Rob and Bill’s families lived, and I looked around the bleachers during lulls in the action on the field, to see if I could spot any of them. I finally saw Rob, and waved to her, but I don’t think she saw me. After the game I found her, though, and we talked for a few minutes before we had to leave. She told me that Sarah was spending the afternoon with Rico’s family, but her family wanted her at home today; she’d go over to Rico’s tomorrow.
In the evening, we watched a couple of movies. I sat squeezed in between Katie and Alice on one of the sofas, holding Katie’s hand, with her leaning against me and our ears brushing from time to time. It was almost as good as a date.
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“Come in... did it fall through, what you had planned with your friend who was coming back early...?”
“You’re the friend who was coming back early,” she said, putting her arms around me. “I love my family, but I’ve had enough of their chaperoning to last me a while.”
part 16 of 16
by Trismegistus Shandy
This story is in my "Valentine Divergence" setting, like my earlier stories "Butterflies are the Gentlest", A House Divided, and "Nora and the Nomads". I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, but if you find it confusing, reading those earlier stories first, or at least "Butterflies are the Gentlest", might help.
Thanks to Unicornzvi, epain, and Scott Jamison for their comments on the first draft.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. So are my last several stories posted here, although I forgot to put the CC license notice in some of them.
Black Friday, several of us went shopping including Katie and me. She asked me what I thought of some of the things she tried on, and I told her. I bought a pair of pants and a couple more shirts, and a fair number of Christmas presents.
We ate lunch at the mall. When we got back to the house, Katie’s dad and Gus had supper ready for us. We played a couple of party games after supper, things suitable for a large number of players, and simple enough that Usagi could join in although they were over Jenny’s head. After Jenny and Usagi were sent to bed, the rest of us watched another movie: a big-budget film from a Hollywood studio, an alternate history where the the Divergence happened in the middle of the Civil War, and soldiers on both sides at Gettysburg become members of the same hermaphroditic neospecies.
Saturday, Katie said she wanted to get back to campus. “One of my friends is coming back from Thanksgiving break early, and we’ve got plans,” she told her parents. She hadn’t mentioned those plans to me yet, but I didn’t say anything. We hadn’t had much time to talk in private and maybe it was something that had come up just recently that she didn’t want her parents or siblings to overhear.
Katie’s dad gave us a ride back just after lunch; they dropped me off at my dorm, then Katie and I kissed goodbye and she got back in the car to go to her dorm.
I had unpacked and started watching the latest episode of “Shifting Alliances” when there was a knock at my door. I opened it and saw Katie.
“Oh,” I said. “Come in... did it fall through, what you had planned with your friend who was coming back early...?”
“You’re the friend who was coming back early,” she said, putting her arms around me. “I love my family, but I’ve had enough of their chaperoning to last me a while.” We kissed, and sat down next to each other on my bed.
“So what is this mysterious plan?” I asked.
“That was stage one, and this is stage two,” she said, taking my hand and putting it on her thigh. “Stage three is up to you. I’m ready to go all the way if you are.”
“I — um — maybe? But, I, uh, I’ve been meaning to buy some condoms but I haven’t got around to it —”
“It’s okay, I’ve got plenty left over from when I was male.” She fished in her purse and pulled out a package. “So what do you think?”
“Let’s see where this goes,” I said, trembling, and kissed her again.
The following Sunday, we took the bus over to Chapel Hill and met Amy and David for lunch. We talked about movies we’d seen, books we’d read, how annoying some of our professors were this semester, and North Carolina politics. Then Amy looked at me and Katie and apparently saw something that I hadn’t thought would be so obvious, especially to an Athens magnolia.
“Spill,” she said. “You two are doing it, aren’t you?”
I stared at her. “To anybody else I’d say it’s none of their business. To you, I’ll just say how did you know?”
She shrugged. “I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have said anything. As to how, well... My high school was mostly Athens magnolias, but not all. I know what Gainesville squid look like when they’ve just had sex recently, how squid couples act when they’re doing it regularly, and... well, y’all look completely different from squid, but somehow kind of the same, too.”
“Yeah,” Katie said. “This morning... I went over to Joel’s dorm to meet him before we caught the bus over here, and he wasn’t in the lobby yet, so I went up to his room, and... one thing led to another.”
“That wasn’t the first time,” I said, “but I think that’s enough detail.”
David nodded. “I know a lot of neospecies don’t talk about sex as easily as we do... it’s kind of clinical to us most of the year, we know when we bloom we’re going to want to be pollinated worse than we ever want anything, but we don’t actually want it or even care about it when we’re not in bloom.”
“We spent the blooming last year together,” Amy said. “David came to my house and we lay out in the back yard together. It was the first time I’d gotten pollinated, and it was too wonderful for words.”
“Our parents always made us stay indoors during the blooming until we turned eighteen,” David explained. “I turned eighteen before the blooming last year, but Amy’s birthday’s in August, and the blooming’s generally in June or July.”
“I wasn’t even capable of wanting it until I was almost nineteen,” I said. “And then... I’ve only done it once as a girl and three times as a guy, but it was never worse than good, and mostly it was great.”
“That’s more than me or David,” Amy said. “Unless — we could count every bee and butterfly separately, then we’d have a pretty respectable number of notches on our bedpost, or whatever the phrase is.”
“We didn’t get any hummingbirds this year,” David said. “I’ve heard they’re kind of rough, but maybe more exciting than bees or butterflies.”
I thought of Larry and Bill’s handcuffs and whip, and managed not to flinch at the thought. “Some people like it that way,” I simply said.
There’s not a lot more to say. Katie and I stayed together though that semester and the next; during Christmas break, we talked on the phone several times, and during the following summer, she came to visit me in Hebron.
Ron moved into an off-campus apartment in St. Louis with Lindsey, and didn’t go home again for several years, until his parents unbent a little. I went to visit them a couple of times during summers and Christmas breaks in my last couple of years of college, and they came to visit me a couple of times — I’ll get to that soon.
The next fall semester after Katie and I got together, though, I started changing back into a girl. I suspected, but wasn’t sure, and was thinking about going to the clinic for blood tests. I was dreading having to tell Katie, and procrastinated; but she noticed, of course. She’d been through it before, and knew the signs.
“Yeah, you’re definitely smaller than you were before,” she said, after examining me. “If you’re like I was, you’ll probably be able to get hard for another week, maybe two.”
“Do you want to stay together until then?” I asked. “Or break it off clean, all at once?”
“We can stay together as long as you’re attracted to girls,” she said. “Even if we can’t have sex for part of that time... And, you know, we can still be friends afterward.”
“Yeah.” I was still friendly with Larry and Bill, though they’d started dating another girl last spring, one who’d never been male and would probably stay female except under the most extreme provocation. “I want to stay in touch.”
“Maybe we can be roommates next semester.”
“I’d like that.”
We were quiet for a few minutes, and then I said: “Do you maybe want to stay together as co-girlfriends? Date guys together, and tell them we’re a package deal?”
“That could work. But — hmm. I think we should vet them.”
“How?”
“Ask them how many times they’ve changed sex since puberty. If it’s not at least once, we won’t go out with them again. Plus the usual other criteria, of course.”
“That’s — um. Wouldn’t that be awkward if they change too, though?”
“Yeah, but think about it. If you and I keep hanging out a lot, one of us is pretty likely to turn into a guy eventually. Or if we’re both hanging with another girl, one who’s prone to changing sex fairly often like we are, the odds are really good that one of us will change into a guy if we stick together long enough.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that would work. Let’s try that.”
So we did. We dated a couple of guys together later that semester, after I’d finished changing, but didn’t really click with either of them. We roomed together at the beginning of the following semester, but then she turned male, and had to move to another room; that didn’t matter, because we were dating, and he had a single until the following semester when they assigned him a roommate.
He stayed male and I stayed female until after he graduated. In that time we dated another girl for several months, but it didn’t last; she wanted Katie to do things to her that he didn’t feel comfortable with. We also went on one or two dates each with three or four other girls who didn’t work out; in some cases, after finding out that they’d been girls ever since puberty we decided not to go out with them longer-term, and in some cases we wanted to go out with them again but they weren’t interested.
The summer after Katie graduated, we got married. We talked with each other and our families about where to have the wedding. Aunt Ellen said we had to have it in Hebron, it was traditional to have the wedding at the bride’s home church. But nearly all of Katie’s friends and relatives, and the majority of my friends, lived in the Raleigh area. So, although Aunt Ellen grumbled, she agreed that she and Uncle Tyler could come to Raleigh for our wedding. Grandma and Grandma Kritzer came too, and Ron and Lindsey. I think Uncle Tyler was really pleased that I was marrying only one other person, though I didn’t mention that Katie and I were still open to adding a third person at some point.
We got an apartment near NC State during my senior year, which turned out to also be conveniently near Katie’s new job, at a lobbying firm whose offices were near the capitol. Not long after I graduated and got a new job — a thirty-minute bus ride away in Durham — we started dating Helena, one of my co-workers. And we were just starting to get serious about her, and talking about maybe proposing to her, when Katie started turning back into a girl.
“I think I mentioned that our department just hired a couple of new guys?” he said, as we lay in bed after noticing the first signs of his changing. “I guess one of us had to change... and it would probably be me, because most of the others have two or three wives or girlfriends, and in some cases daughters, to keep them stabilized as males.”
“And because you’re more prone to changing than the average person,” I said.
“Well. With another woman at home, you’ll probably be a guy within a few months, right?”
“Probably. It would be even more likely with three women living here, though. Meanwhile, let’s get some more use out of this while it still works,” I said, reaching for his slightly smaller but still very satisfying manhood.
We kept our next date with Helena, and after supper, Katie told her that he was changing. “Oh,” Helena said, looking disappointed. “I’m sorry... this has been a lot of fun.”
“We’ll still be friends,” I said. “And... we were planning to ask you something, and this doesn’t change that, although it may change your response.”
“Helena Owens, will you marry us?” Katie and I said in unison, as we’d practiced.
“What? But you’re — by the time we can arrange the wedding, you’ll be —”
“If you move in with us,” I said, “with three women in one household, all of them with a history of changing sex more than once... one of us will almost certainly turn male pretty soon. Probably me or you, because we haven’t changed as recently.”
“Hmm. Yeah, that’s pretty likely, isn’t it? But let’s do it this way. I’ll move in with you, and we can schedule the wedding as soon as one of us starts turning male. I’m a traditionalist.”
So we did, and it was Helena who was the groom at our second wedding. My relatives didn’t come to that one, but Ron and Lindsey did, and most of our Raleigh-area friends, and all of Helena’s extremely extended family.
We’ve got four children now; I’m Amy’s mother, Helena is Terry’s, and Katie is Melinda and Roger’s. Amy is ten, and probably going to be turning into a boy or girl within another year or two. If they’re male, that may introduce some new complications — so far we’ve never had all three of us parents female for more than a couple of months at a time, but if Amy turns male because of the pheromones from kids at school, and then I turn female (I’m the man of the house at the moment)... well, one male and three females will probably be stable for a while.
We’ll still be a family, whatever happens.
That's all; thank you for reading. Please leave a comment, even if you're reading this months or years after the serial was finished; I keep reading new comments posted on older stories. I can't improve if I don't know what parts of my stories worked or didn't work for people.
I have a Twisted novel of about 40,000 words that's finished in first draft. I'll start revising it soon, and start serializing it after I finish the second or third draft (depending on how drastic editing it seems to need and whether it needs another pass). Meanwhile, I'll probably post two or three short stories at weekly or biweekly intervals, and a stand-alone science fiction novella in several chapters. Anyone who wants to beta-read any of those stories should respond by private message to this post.
I have five unfinished novels in progress, all of which I'm working on intermittently:
Feedback on this post will exercise some influence on which ones I spend the most time and energy on. When I finish one or more of them, I'll probably post here asking for beta readers.
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