Was he into me? It kind of looked that way. Not that we could do anything about it; I was grounded indefinitely, and his parents would never let him date a trans girl.

Pioneers

part 8 of 15

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with permission, in dkfenger's Trust Machines universe. It's a prequel to his stories, however, and I've written it to stand alone for readers who haven't read them.

Thanks to dkfenger, clancy688, MrSimple, Karantela, Icaria, and JAK for feedback on earlier drafts.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Saturday, Mom and Dad left early to go to an estate sale and some yard sales. “We’ll call home at random intervals,” Dad said, “and you or Sophia need to answer, and then hand the phone to the other one.” Standard procedure when they had to go out somewhere while we were grounded, to make sure we stayed home. Caleb left for football practice an hour or two later.

I finished my weekend homework in the next couple of hours, then had Sophia check my biology homework while I checked her English homework, and we hung out and talked until and after lunch. We decided to take advantage of everyone else being gone for me to try on more of her clothes. None of them fit me perfectly, but some were reasonably close, and I got a better feel for the sort of things that would suit me when and if I was finally able to shop for girly clothes.

By the time Caleb came home from football practice and Mom and Dad came home from shopping, I’d regretfully changed back into sweats and a T-shirt and we’d put away Sophia’s clothes. I spent most of the day reading Dragondrums, finishing it not long before bedtime.

Sunday morning, we got going earlier than last week and got to church around fifteen minutes before the service would start, as usual. Several times during the week, I’d overheard fragments of phone calls in the evening where Mom or Dad were clearly talking to friends about me, about my coming out and transition. More often than not, if we were both in the living room or dining room when they answered the phone, they’d leave the room to continue the conversation. So I wasn’t absolutely sure what their friends were saying about me. But I could guess.

It started, as it had last week, with Mr. Colton greeting us. “Good morning, Justin, Erin, Caleb. Tyler... Sophia.”

“Good morning, Mr. Colton,” I said as sweetly as possible. “Maybe you didn’t hear clearly when I said it last Sunday, with all the background noise, but I’m going by Meredith now.”

“That was a boy’s name when my Uncle Meredith was born,” he said, “but it’s pretty much a girl’s name now.”

“That suits, because I’m not a boy.” I hadn’t realized there were guys named Meredith, and later on I did some research and saw it was about equally popular for both sexes a hundred plus years ago, and then briefly more popular for boys than girls; from the 1930s onward there were more and more girls and fewer and fewer boys with the name. But that was later, at the school library where the academic relevance of my Internet research wasn’t as tightly controlled.

“That’s enough,” Dad said to me, and then to Mr. Colton, “We’re dealing with it as a family. I hope you’ll keep praying for us, and try to quash any gossip you hear.”

“That’d be easier if I knew what was actually going on,” he said, “but I won’t pry further.”

“Thanks,” Mom said.

We moved another three yards before being accosted by Mom’s friend Crystal Southers, who stared at me for a couple of moments before saying, “I heard about it but I can hardly believe it. You’re really a girl?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Glancing around to see who was close enough to hear, I said in a lower voice, “I started my period Thursday.”

Sophia elbowed me. “Say it’s your time of the month,” she whispered, “if there are guys in earshot.”

I figured I was okay because Dad and Caleb already knew I was having my period, but I chalked it up as one more piece of girl wisdom to learn.

“But why are you wearing that?” Crystal asked.

“We didn’t want to spend a lot of money on girl clothes until we were sure it wasn’t just a phase,” Mom said. “I’m pretty nearly convinced, but Justin isn’t.”

“Have you tried borrowing things from Sophia?” Crystal asked me. “That might be better than what you’re wearing, even if it isn’t an exact fit.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that,” Dad put in. He’d been talking to someone else, but was apparently close enough to hear most of what we were saying. “It doesn’t suit for Tyler to wear girl clothes.”

“Why not?” Crystal asked. “You can tell, even with those unflattering clothes, that she’s a girl. It’s kind of the opposite of those transgenders who still look like men no matter how they gussy themselves up.”

I was dumbfounded. She was transphobic and shallow and arguing from superficial appearances, but she was on my side. I’d take it for now, and hope it had some influence on Dad.

“By the way, I’m going by Meredith now,” I said to her.

“That’s a pretty name,” she said with a smile.

“She’s definitely a girl physically,” Mom said, “there’s no doubt about that, Justin just isn’t sure she should be.”

Dad nodded, and Crystal said:

“But the reason the old kind of sex change was wrong was that it didn’t work. It didn’t really change a man into a woman, it just made him sort of look like one, but not really able to have babies or anything. With the trust booth, I don’t see why someone shouldn’t change sex if they want to. And if they do,” she continued quickly, as Dad started to open his mouth, “shouldn’t they wear clothes that fit their new body?”

“We’ve talked about it,” Mom said, “and we’ll be reevaluating that decision again soon. But not today.”

“It was good to talk to you,” I said (more or less honestly) to Crystal as we moved on toward the sanctuary. I hadn’t expected that kind of support here.

Moments after we walked into the sanctuary, before we found seats, Nathan and Joseph Wallace came over to talk to us. Nathan was a little younger than Caleb, and Joseph was between my age and Sophia’s; we used to hang out with them more often when we went to Sunday School or youth group regularly, and still talked with them some before or after worship on Sundays, or when we went out to lunch with them and their parents after church. Their parents sent them to the Everett Academy, so we didn’t see them at school.

“Hey, is that Tyler?” Nathan asked Caleb, not talking to me directly for some reason.

“I’m going by Meredith now,” I said for the fiftieth time.

Joseph just gawked at me, seemingly unable or unwilling to speak. Caleb said, “Yeah, she can talk for herself, as you might notice.”

Mom and Dad had moved on to talk to someone else while Caleb, Sophia and I stood there with Nathan and Joseph. Nathan said again, “Sorry, uh... Meredith. It’s just kind of hard to believe. We were out of town last weekend, and I heard about you from some people at school.”

So the kids at the Everett Academy were gossiping about me, too. Great.

“Good things, I hope?” I asked.

“Uh...” Nathan said. Joseph blushed and looked away from me for a few moments before looking back.

“Apparently not,” I concluded.

“There were some kids that showed up to our school after being transformed by the trust booth, too,” Nathan said, “but the headmaster suspended them until they changed back. I never saw any of them, just heard about it. I hear lots of kids at your school have changed?”

“A couple of of dozen, at least,” Caleb said. “There might be more that changed only a little bit, so it’s not obvious.”

“And then there’s the ones who tried out temporary changes overnight or over the weekend,” Sophia said.

Just then the lights dimmed further and the music started up, so we hurried to find seats. Caleb went to sit with Nathan and Joseph, but since Sophia and I were grounded, we sat with Mom and Dad as usual.

Dr. Debenham’s sermon that Sunday didn’t say much if anything about the “trust booths,” it just moved on to the next chapter of John’s gospel, the Good Shepherd discourse. Some of the prayers thanked God for a lot more people who’d been healed by the machine, though; I don’t know how many, as I lost count, but it was at least eight or nine. There were several people at the service that morning I didn’t recognize at first until I realized they were decades younger than I knew them.

After the service, we hung around talking with various people, including the Wallaces and the Dirksens, and wound up going out to lunch with them at the Fisherman’s Cove. Andrew’s older brother Nick was our waiter, as it happened. He was super professional with us until he’d taken all the adults' drink orders; then, after he’d taken the orders from us kids at the end of the table, he greeted Caleb, then looked at me and said, “Meredith, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Andrew told you about me, I guess?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Nice work, Sophia. I’ll go get your drinks.”

After he left, Joseph finally found his tongue. “So, uh, what did he mean by saying ‘Nice work, Sophia’?”

“The Venn machine takes two people to work it,” Sophia said. “They go in the booths and either they can both tell the machine what to transform the other person into, or one of them changes the other person and the other one does nothing. That’s what we did; I asked Meredith not to change me.”

“Does it have, like, a menu where you can select ‘change sex’ or ‘cure cancer’ or whatever?”

“No,” she explained, “it shows these pictures, and you touch the picture that’s closest to what you want and new variations pop up...” I tuned out her explanation and studied my menu for a while. When I decided what I wanted and looked up, Joseph was looking at me, but quickly looked back at Sophia when I caught his eye. Caleb and Nathan were talking about football, apparently, and Mom and Mrs. Wallace were talking about me, to judge from the fragments of their conversation I overheard; I couldn’t make out anything of the conversations further up the table.

“...so they wouldn’t let Meredith borrow any of my clothes, or buy girl clothes either,” Sophia concluded.

“I’m sorry about that,” Joseph said, turning back to me. “Y-you look nice, even wearing boy clothes,” he said, and blushed, looking down at his menu.

“Thanks,” I said, smiling. Was he into me? It kind of looked that way. Not that we could do anything about it; I was grounded indefinitely, and his parents would never let him date a trans girl. But it felt nice to have a boy look at me that way, the way I wished Andrew would look at me. He was kind of cute, though not super hot like Andrew.

Nick came back with the tray of drinks, distributed them, then started taking our meal orders. After he left, Joseph asked, “So I guess you haven’t gone to a movie or played any games since you’ve been grounded, but have you read anything good?”

I told him about re-reading the Harper Hall trilogy, and he told me he was reading Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley; then Sophia pitched in with what she’d been reading, and that topic lasted until our food came and for a while afterward. But after a while, something Sophia had said about genetic engineering from one of the nonfiction books she’d read recently reminded me of something from the Dragonriders books (the later ones more so than the Harper Hall trilogy) about genetically engineering the dragons from little winged lizards, and somehow that led us back to the Venn machines.

“Do you think someone could use the machine to turn a lizard into a dragon?” he asked.

“No,” Sophia said. “We tested it on a worm, and it doesn’t seem to work on animals. I haven’t tested it on lizards, but some people on the Internet said they couldn’t get it to work on cats or dogs, so probably it doesn’t work on anything but humans. I want to do more testing someday, but probably somebody will beat me to it before I’m ungrounded.”

“But maybe you could turn a person into a dragon,” I said. “Something kind of like a dragon, anyway. Back before we were grounded, we read on the Internet about people who turned into cats or dogs and were still able to think like people. And we’ve seen people at school with mixed and matched parts, mostly human but with cat ears or a tail or something. So I figure the machine could put together parts from a lizard or alligator and a bat and make it look fairly dragony, even if it couldn’t breathe fire or teleport like the ones in the Dragonriders books.”

“It couldn’t turn you into a big dragon, or you wouldn’t fit in the booth,” Sophia pointed out.

I remembered some stories I’d read about an alien transformation booth that could stretch space inside like a TARDIS as needed to turn you into something bigger than its exterior size, but I dismissed the thought. Just because the Venn machines were way beyond our known technology didn’t mean they could do anything. And it turned out Sophia was right. But we didn’t find out for sure until much later.

After that, our conversation lulled for a few moments, though the conversations further up the table were still going. Joseph’s mom got up and left the table, presumably to go to the restroom. Joseph gave his dad a nervous glance and then asked, what I figure he’d been wanting to ask for a while, “What did it feel like when you changed?” He pitched his voice low, so I figure my parents and his dad couldn’t hear him over Caleb and Nathan’s friendly argument about whose team was going to win the Eastern Mynatt High vs. Everett Academy game in a couple of weeks.

“I couldn’t feel the change — it was instantaneous,” I said in the same low voice. “And suddenly being a girl probably wouldn’t feel like this for you, or most guys, but for me it felt wonderful. Like I’d been wearing clothes that were too tight all my life and I finally had an outfit that fit me. Or I’d been carrying a heavy backpack for a long time and finally was able to take it off.” That was kind of on the nose, given my former weight problem, but I moved on. “I mean, losing the extra weight was nice too,” (I gave Sophia a grateful glance), “but even becoming a girl as overweight as I used to be would have been a big improvement.”

Joseph was speechless.

Most of us were pretty much finished eating by then, and Nick came back with the checks for our dads and Mr. Dirksen. A few minutes later we went our separate ways. When we got home, I had no sooner changed into casual at-home clothes than Sophia knocked on my door.

“Come in, I’m decent,” I called out. She slipped in and closed the door behind her.

“I think Joseph likes you,” she said.

“Yeah, it looked like it to me too. But you know nothing’s going to come of it. I’m grounded until I’m eighteen and his parents wouldn’t let him date me anyway.”

“Who knows what might happen in the next few months? But you know something else?”

“What?”

“I think he wants to be a girl, too.”

I thought back over the conversation. “...You could be right,” I said slowly, mulling it over. “Or he might just be the kind of guy who gets off on the idea of transforming, rather than wanting to be a girl per se. He was pretty interested when we talked about the possibility of turning into a dragon, too.”

“I hope he gets the chance to try sometime. After what we did, you can bet his parents aren’t going to let their boys go to the library by themselves.”

“Yeah.”

We chatted for a while longer, and then I started re-reading Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones until it was time to help fix supper.

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