“It’s...” My face felt hot and my ears were twitching. “I want to be friends. It’s just...” I couldn’t say it.

You Could Go Home Again

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.