Mrs. Dirksen said to Mom, after we’d given the waiter our drink orders, “Erin, I don’t think you should be letting Tyler use the ladies' room.”

 

“Do you seriously think she should use the men’s room?” Mom asked incredulously. “The machine changed her completely into a girl.”

Pioneers

part 12 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.

Later that day, Mom and I went out and got some more girl clothes, including a couple of pant suits for church, as well as a purse.

Sunday, we got to church at the usual time. We were less inundated with questions than the previous Sunday, but still had a few people asking about my new girl clothes. Sophia and I hung out with some of Sophia’s girl friends after the service while our parents were talking with other people, and Joseph Wallace sort of orbited at the edge of the group of girls; I tried to include him in the conversation some, thinking about Sophia’s speculation about him, but he was too shy to say much. We went out to eat with the Eberhardts, another couple near Mom and Dad’s age whose kids were in college. They gave me some disapproving looks, but didn’t say much about me where I could hear them.

Monday at lunch, I was patiently listening to Andrew and Evan telling us about their dates over the weekend when Hunter Gorman came over to our table.

“Hi, Meredith,” he said. “And, uh... Andrew, right? Am I interrupting something?”

“Have a seat,” Andrew said. “Guys, this is Hunter Gorman — we met him at the school board meeting.”

Evan, Wyatt and Ian all said hi and introduced themselves. Hunter sat down on the other side of me from Andrew.

“So,” he said, “have any of you guys used the trust machine to change, besides Andrew and Meredith?”

“Me and Andrew used it on each other,” Evan said.

“Cool,” Hunter said. “How long did you set the machine for?”

Andrew and Evan glanced at each other. “We don’t know,” Andrew admitted. “You’ve gotta understand, this was maybe half an hour after the first librarian who got to work discovered the machine. Nobody knew what those buttons meant yet, and we’ve tried to remember which buttons we pushed to get the booths to open, and we can’t. But it was obviously more than three days.”

“Oh! So you were some of the first people to see it?” Hunter glanced at me. “You too?”

“Not exactly. Andrew called me as soon as he saw it, and I got over there as soon as I could finish my homework, but by the time I got there, the deputies had already cordoned it off. I didn’t get to change until after the new machine popped up.”

We talked about the Venn machines and the stranger changes people had made for a while, and then started speculating about how things would change as more machines kept popping up in more and more small towns. “I figure if they keep appearing only in small towns and not in big cities,” Hunter said, “in another twenty years, it will be the big cities that are considered backwards and conservative while the small towns will be more accepting of people who are weird in some way.”

“Yeah, that could happen, but I’m not holding my breath,” I said. “I think it’ll take more than twenty years. And maybe the towns where the machines have appeared will have a boom in population while the big cities shrink a little?”

I thought about the implications of that; if the neighborhood around the library became extremely desirable with a lot of new people moving in, the value of our house would go up, along with our property taxes. I wasn’t sure if our mortgage would be affected. We might have to sell if they went up too much, but we’d get more out of the house than we expected. Of course, with the number of machines that have appeared since then, with still more appearing all the time, the boost in property values in the vicinity of Venn machines hasn’t been as great as some people expected early on. Mom and Dad still live in the same house even now.

Tuesday after school, Mom picked me up and we went to Cheryl Hewitt’s office. She asked me how I’d been feeling, and what I’d written in my diary about. I’d written in it every day for the past week, though most days I didn’t have a lot to talk about, so it was just a paragraph about how I was feeling, except Thursday-Friday when I wrote a lot about the school board meeting and Carmen. (I’d started that entry Thursday night after we came home from the meeting, and had so much to say I didn’t finish it until Friday during free period.)

Telling Ms. Hewitt about Carmen might have been a mistake, because she had a lot of questions about them and my conversations with them. From the tone of her questions, I got the impression she thought Carmen was a bad influence, though she didn’t come out and say it.

I also told her about getting new girl clothes Monday and Saturday, and about the OB/GYN appointment, and how validating all that had felt. She nodded noncommittally and asked a few more questions about those events.

Hunter started eating lunch with Andrew, Evan, and me as often as not. I gathered that he hadn’t had any close friends at school before his transformation. He’d made some other new friends besides us, and ate with them about half the time; toward the end of that week he introduced me to some of them. They were mostly juniors who’d venned each other into hotter bodies, some of them with unusual features. One of them was Melanie Endicott’s little sister Hanna, who had three breasts.

“How do you get bras to fit you?” I asked her as we bused our trays after lunch. “For that matter, how did Melanie get all those tops with four arm-holes? Did y’all sew them yourselves?”

“No,” Hanna explained. “Once we got each other’s bodies the way we wanted them, we just kept changing clothes in the library restroom and then going to the trust machine and changing each other’s clothes so they fit, without changing each other’s bodies.”

“Huh. I didn’t realize you could do that. Maybe I can turn all my old boy clothes into girl clothes that way?”

“Yeah, it would probably work.”

“If Mom and Dad let me near the machine again.”

“Point out how much money they can save that way,” she suggested.

“I will, thanks.”

Friday morning during homeroom, there was an announcement over the PA that the school board had decided on a new policy for the use of transformation booths by students, faculty and staff, and people should look at the school website for details. At lunch, Andrew and other people with cellphones were looking up the new policy and reading bits of it aloud to those without them. Apparently, you weren’t allowed to come to school with a short-term change, and for a long-term change, you had to file a form ahead of time telling the school administration you were going to change, and then get another form witnessed by a notary public who watched you go in the booth and come out different, and took photos and fingerprints before and after. (Somebody on the board had done their research and found out that people’s fingerprints would change even after a fairly minor transformation that didn’t obviously affect their hands.)

“That’s a lot of hassle,” Andrew said, frowning.

“It’s worth it for people like me and Hunter,” I said. “I guess it’s meant to discourage people from changing casually. I wonder if they’re going to require us to file those forms retroactively? Does it say anything about that?”

“No... I don’t see anything about that yet, but it’s long and a lot of it is kind of legal-jargony.”

“I guess I should ask somebody.”

After school, I told Mom and Dad about the new policy, and we looked it up and read it. At last, buried near the end, we found something about how changes people had already made were grandfathered in, but that we would have to file a form within two weeks of the policy coming into effect.

Saturday, after Sophia and I had finished our homework and Mom and Dad had gotten back from their yard-saling, I told them what Hanna had told me about using the machine to transform old clothes to fit your new body.

“I think she was just adjusting her old bras and her sister’s old tops to fit, but I bet we could make bigger changes. Like jeans into a skirt or a T-shirt into a blouse.”

“No skirts until Ms. Hewitt says it’s okay,” Dad insisted. “But... transforming your old clothes might make sense. At some point. We’ll do some research.”

I let it drop for the moment, and neither Dad nor Mom brought it up again until after our appointment with Ms. Hewitt the following week.

I talked to Carmen on the phone for a little while that evening, but they didn’t have a lot of time to talk; they were fixing to go meet their friend Zoe to see a movie.

Sunday after the service, Joseph Wallace came over to me and Sophia and said, “Um, hi, Meredith,” glancing at his parents, who were talking with the Eberhardts a few yards away, and then back at us. “Hi, Sophia.”

“Hi, Joseph. How have you been doing this week?”

“Pretty okay, I guess. I, um, didn’t get a chance to talk to you last Sunday, you were kind of busy, but I wanted to say...” His face got red and he stammered for a few moments before mumbling something inaudible and hurrying away.

“He’s definitely got a crush on you,” Sophia whispered in my ear.

“I think you’re probably right,” I replied in a low voice. “Do you think I should go talk to him?”

“Can’t hurt.”

Joseph had been heading toward the vestibule, so I went out there, but didn’t see him. I found Nathan talking with Caleb and Christopher, another guy who went to the Everett Academy.

“Hey, have y’all seen Joseph?” I asked.

“I think he went to the restroom,” Nathan said. So I camped out near the restrooms for a few minutes until Joseph came out.

He looked startled, then guilty, then looked away from me. “S-sorry,” he said, “I, um...”

“It’s okay,” I said, smiling. “It’s just that I didn’t hear what you said earlier.”

“Um, yeah...” His face got redder. “I just wanted to say that Ireallylikeyouroutfit.” He looked away again.

“Thanks,” I said. “Mom took me shopping last week. I mean, Saturday before last. We finally talked Dad into letting me get some girl clothes.”

“That’s cool,” he said, meeting my eyes again briefly. “What all, um, kinds of things did you get?”

“Well, Dad said no skirts or dresses yet, and Mom said no sleeveless or cold shoulder tops, but I got some casual pants and tops for school and a couple of pant suits like this for church. I hope Dad will relent on the dresses before next Sunday, but I’m not holding my breath — he’s already being more reasonable than I expected.”

I wasn’t sure how much detail Joseph really wanted. If Sophia was right in her guess that Joseph was a trans girl, she’d probably want juicy details about the specific cuts, fits and colors, but if he was just expressing polite interest because he had a crush on me and was willing to listen to me talk about anything at all, I might be boring him already.

“That’s good to hear,” he said. “I mean,” he went on hastily, “that they’re being, uh, more reasonable than you expected. I guess it could be a lot worse.”

“Yeah, definitely.”

We were both quiet for a few moments before Joseph glanced past me and said, “I guess I’d better go.”

I turned and saw that his parents had come out into the vestibule, and his mom was giving me — or Joseph, or both of us — a scowl. “It was nice to talk to you,” I said hastily. “I’m sorry if I’ve gotten you into trouble,” and ducked into the ladies' room as if I’d been on my way there and had just passed by Joseph for a moment on the way.

I’d avoided going to the restroom at church as long as possible, waiting till we went out to eat afterward when I could hold it that long, but now that I was there, though I could wait a few minutes till we got to whatever restaurant we were eating at this Sunday, I figured I might as well. Nobody was washing their hands or checking their makeup when I entered, so I slipped into a stall and did my business.

By the time I came out to wash my hands, though, Mrs. Dirksen had flushed and exited her stall, and she glared at me in the mirror as I approached the sink.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “It’s not right.”

“Do you want me to hurry out without washing my hands?” I asked, feigning surprise. I’d been lucky enough not to get this kind of treatment at school — or not much — but I’d figured it would happen sooner or later at church, and I was right. “That wouldn’t be sanitary.”

“You know what I mean, young man.”

That hurt worse than the “You shouldn’t be here;” I’m not sure why. I wavered between bursting into tears and bursting into a rant. I tried to keep cool and said, as I turned on the hot faucet and started washing my hands, “I have every right to be here. It would be indecent for me to go to the men’s room, and they don’t have enough stalls there, and I c-can’t...” I was going to say “can’t pee standing up,” but I burst into sobs that were only partly drowned out by the water faucets.

Mrs. Dirksen gave me a disapproving look and punched the big button of the hand dryer, which drowned out my sobs entirely. I stayed there as she left, and washed my face, too, then realized there weren’t any paper towels to dry it with. I went back into one of the stalls and dried off with toilet paper, then stood in front of the mirror picking bits of wet toilet paper off my face, hoping no one would come in and see me in that ridiculous position.

Fortunately, nobody but Sophia saw me as I was picking off the last couple of pieces. “What are you doing?” she asked as she came in and saw me leaning close to the mirror.

“It’s a long story.”

“Mom and Dad are saying it’s time to go.”

“Just a second.” I picked off the last bit of toilet paper, and was about to go, but asked Sophia, “Do you see anything stuck to my face?”

She examined me. “No, you got it all. What was it?”

“...I’ll tell you later.”

Of course, who would we be going to lunch with but the Dirksens.

We went to a local steakhouse a couple of miles from the church; the Dirksens had already arrived and gotten a table for us, and we joined them. Mom sat down next to Mrs. Dirksen, and Dad next to Mr. Dirksen, with Sophia and I next to the women and Caleb on the other side of the table with the men.

So I was sitting right next to Mom when Mrs. Dirksen said to her, after we’d given the waiter our drink orders, “Erin, I don’t think you should be letting Tyler use the ladies' room.”

“Do you seriously think she should use the men’s room?” Mom asked incredulously. “The machine changed her completely into a girl.”

Dad said: “It’s not obvious what would be best, but there are certainly potential problems with Tyler using the men’s room, too.”

“I’m still not sure why you’re letting him stay like that,” Mr. Dirksen said.

“I’ve told you why we’re not forcing the issue,” Dad said. “That’s not open to debate.”

I was furiously studying my menu, without understanding a word I was reading. I wanted to jump into the conversation and defend myself, but I had a feeling it would be a bad idea. If I forced Mom and Dad to choose between me and their transphobic friends they’d known since before I was born... well, I was pretty sure they’d side with me, but they’d resent the necessity and maybe take it out on me unconsciously. And it looked like the Dirksens were going to make them choose between us without my help.

“All right,” Mr. Dirksen said, holding up his hands. “All I’m saying is, back when Tori wanted to wear something to school that hardly covered more than a swimsuit, we didn’t ground her until she agreed to wear something decent, we just made her wear something else and threw out the outfit.” Tori was their daughter, a sophomore at UNC Chapel Hill.

“This is more complicated than that,” Mom said. “Please, just pray for us and trust that we’re trying our best to figure it out.”

Sophia reached over and squeezed my hand, and I realized I was gripping my menu so hard my knuckles were white. I forced myself to relax and take a couple of deep breaths.

“This doesn’t affect just you,” Mrs. Dirksen said. “It affects everyone you and Tyler interact with, at church or at school or wherever. By buying him those clothes and letting him use the ladies' room —”

“Stop,” Mom said, leaning forward a little. “Please, Tamara, let’s talk about something else.” After a brief pause, she continued: “What have you heard from Tori lately?”

Mrs. Dirksen didn’t say anything for a few moments, but she relented and started telling us about Tori’s volunteer work with a student organization that visited people in the hospital. I sighed with relief and returned to studying the menu.

Wings, the sequel to Pioneers, is now over 83,000 words. I'm about two and a half years into a story that's probably going to cover about five years of internal chronology. (There are a lot of timeskips and montages; it's not paced like Pioneers.)

My new collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available now from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here: