“So, Meredith,” Julianna said, plopping down on Sophia’s bed, “dish! Sophia’s told me about you, and I heard some stuff from girls at school, but I want to hear it from you. What do you like best about being a girl? Is there anything you miss about being a boy? Is there a boy you like? Or a girl? Are there girly things you haven’t tried yet that we can initiate you into tonight?” Her eyes gleamed with joy and enthusiasm, and even though I found her prying questions a little uncomfortable, I couldn’t resent her.

Pioneers

part 13 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.

When I walked into Biology Monday morning, I saw that Andrew was back to his old self, just a few inches taller than me and almost as overweight and pimply as I used to be.

“Good morning,” I said. “I guess you and Evan must have pushed the month button, then?”

“I guess. It wasn’t quite a whole month, though — I woke up like this around three in the morning, but it was around nine-thirty or so that Saturday when Evan and me transformed each other.”

“Huh, that’s weird. Are you going back to the machine sometime soon?”

“As soon as I can. I went by the office and got one of those forms to fill out before homeroom, and I’ve got to get Mom or Dad to sign it, and then find a notary to witness the transformation.”

I nodded. “Do you want to change into the same form again, or...?”

Before he could answer, the bell rang and I hurried into my seat as Mr. Collins started calling the roll. After class, we walked together to the end of the hall where we’d go different ways to our next classes.

“I figure I’ll ask Nick or Evan or whoever to make me look as much like I did before as he can,” he explained. “Trying out something weirder sometime for a day or two might be nice, but I don’t want to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops to tell the school I’m going to have four arms or green skin or something for the rest of the school year and then decide I don’t like it.”

It was several months before anybody discovered the history feature, where you could get a display of all the forms your partner in the other booth had ever transformed into and pick one to turn them into again. Until then, getting back to a form you’d changed into before was a matter of trial and error and you could never get it exactly the same.

I mulled over my feelings toward Andrew during odd moments of Literature and Geometry. I hadn’t ever thought about Andrew sexually or romantically until he and Evan had transformed each other; my previous silent crushes had mostly been on tall, athletic guys, and none of them very serious. But now that Andrew was back to his old familiar self, I still felt pretty warmly toward him. I wasn’t having to suppress the urge to grab him and kiss him, but I still wished I wasn’t grounded and he wasn’t dating Emilia so we could maybe start dating and see where things went.

When I arrived at our table for lunch, Andrew and Evan were talking about when and how they could change back, looking over the forms they’d picked up from the office and trying to decide what to put in some of the blanks.

“‘Reason for change’?” Evan wondered. “How about ‘Be hot and get girls’?” He’d dated three different girls on the four weekends since his transformation.

“I don’t know if they care why, at least I don’t think they’ll say you can’t because they think you don’t have a good enough reason,” Andrew said. “There wasn’t anything in the policy about only certain reasons being allowed. But I think I’m gonna put ‘Cure obesity and acne’ in that blank.”

“Probably a good idea,” I said. “I need to go by the office during free period and pick up one of those forms, too. I’m gonna put ‘gender dysphoria’ in that field, I guess.”

“You want to look at it?” Andrew asked.

“Sure.”

He handed it to me. He’d filled in his name, date of birth, address, and parents' names, but hadn’t filled in the description of the new body he wanted or the reason why or the date he intended to change. There were places at the bottom for him and one or both of his parents to sign.

“What about the notary?”

“There’s another form to fill out that the notary would sign,” Andrew said. “Hang on a minute, it’s in my backpack.”

We talked about those forms for a while in between mouthfuls of extruded food product and figured out how to describe our changes. Later in the day, during my free period, I went by the office and picked up the forms to fill out.

“Since you’ve already changed, check this box here,” the secretary said. That checkbox was labeled: “Long-term change was made before adoption of new policy.”

Tuesday morning during homeroom, Emilia was talking about how Andrew had changed back and was planning to get himself re-venned into a hotter body later in the week, once the paperwork was out of the way. “I don’t think I ever would have noticed him in the first place if he hadn’t gotten that new body,” she said, “but now that I’ve gotten to know him, he still seems kind of cute with his original body. He asked me if I had any preferences about his new body when he goes back to the Venn machine later in the week.”

“What did you tell him?” Lily asked. I thought about how my own reaction to Andrew’s transformations had been pretty much the same as hers — I’d never been attracted to him before his first transformation, but I still wanted him now that he’d changed back.

“I kind of wanted to ask him to have darker hair next time,” she said, “and not be quite as tall as last time — kissing is kind of hard with such a big height difference — but I told him I wanted to think about it and talk to him again after class today. I’m not sure if I should ask him to change himself for me like that.”

So maybe Emilia was more mature, and a better fit for Andrew, than I’d thought. That hurt, but I managed not to show it.

At lunch, Andrew told me he’d found out why he and Evan had changed back early in the morning instead of at the same time of day they’d originally changed. “Somebody on the Venn machines subreddit figured it out,” he said. “If you do a month-long change, you change back when the moon returns to the exact same phase it was at the moment you changed.”

“Oh, I guess that makes sense,” I said. “The moon’s orbit isn’t an exact number of days, right? Something like twenty-nine and a half...”

“It varies from one month to another,” Ian said, “but about that.”

After school, Mom took me to Cheryl Hewitt’s office again. I didn’t tell her that I’d talked to Carmen on the phone again; I told her about getting to know Hunter, Hanna, and their friends, and about the incident with Mrs. Dirksen in the ladies' room at church, and lunch with the Dirksens afterward. As I should have expected, but hadn’t, she asked me to go through the same empathy exercise we’d done for Mom and Dad, putting myself in Mrs. Dirksen’s place.

“What?” I asked incredulously. “Okay, you had me do that with Mom and Dad, and it made sense; they really care about me, even if they don’t get gender issues, and they’re making an effort to understand me back. But Mrs. Dirksen is just a rude, hateful bigot. Why should I go through mental gymnastics to put myself in her shoes?”

“If you understand her better, maybe you can deal with her more effectively,” Ms. Hewitt said.

“I think I understand well enough. The only thing I could ever do to satisfy her is change back into a male body, and I’m not gonna make myself miserable to satisfy a few people like her. Even that probably wouldn’t be enough, because to those people I’d always be ‘that pervert boy who changed into a girl for a month’.”

“I can’t force you to think about what it’s like to be her,” she said with a slight shrug. “But keep it in mind, and maybe consider doing it sometime before you have to interact with her again. Everyone is the hero of their own story; she has reasons for acting and talking like she does, and to her those reasons seem like good ones. What do you suppose they might be?”

I set my mouth in a hard line and didn’t answer, and after a few moments, Ms. Hewitt changed the subject, asking me more about Hunter and my other new friends.

With the vagaries of his parents' schedules, Andrew didn’t get to change back until Wednesday afternoon; he came to school Thursday morning with a body and face a lot like the one he’d worn for the previous month, but different enough that I wouldn’t have known it was him if he hadn’t been sitting in his usual spot in Mr. Collins’s Biology class.

“It was a hassle,” he told me at lunch when we had more time to talk. “Apparently notaries normally expect you to bring documents to them to be notarized. They’re only allowed to charge five dollars per signature, so they make their living doing something else, and it’s not worth their time to go meet you somewhere unless they’re also getting paid for some other service. We tried a couple of notaries near the library, a tax accountant and a manager at the bank, and they didn’t want to leave their business unattended and go to the library with us to watch Dad change me. Somebody at the school board didn’t think this through. We finally got Dad’s lawyer to do it, but we had to pay way more than the five dollars a notary would normally charge.”

“I talked to my dad again after you called last night,” Evan said morosely, “and he balked at the idea of paying that much. I guess I’m stuck like this for a while.”

“We’ve got an appointment Friday afternoon to have my forms notarized,” I said. “I think it’s with the same tax accountant you mentioned. Fortunately, since my change is grandfathered in, we don’t have to pay extra to have somebody meet us at the library.” The accountant’s office was a couple of blocks from the library, not too far from our house.

Friday was the last day of the month that Sophia was grounded for. Mom picked us both up after school, and we went to the accountant’s office to get my long-term transformation form notarized. I wasn’t sure why it had to be notarized when the notary hadn’t actually witnessed my transformation, but that’s bureaucracy for you. Since Sophia was the one who’d transformed me, she had to sign the form too.

From there, we drove home and ate a quick supper, then we (including Dad) went back to the school to watch the EMHS-Everett Academy football game. The Everett Academy won by a small margin, but Caleb did pretty well, scoring once and helping other players score a couple of times. It was the first game I’d seen since the season began, what with being grounded pretty soon after that. I was still technically grounded, but I hoped that, with them relenting on girl clothes to some extent, they’d soon decide I’d been grounded long enough, too.

Sophia and her friend Julianna Keller had planned a sleepover to celebrate her not being grounded anymore; her mom was going to drop her off Saturday afternoon, at an hour that should give both of them plenty of time to do their weekend homework beforehand and for Mom and Dad to get home from their regular yard-saling. I hadn’t seen Julianna since before we were grounded; both she and Sophia had a different lunch period, and most of their freshman classes were on a different hall than the ones where most of my classes were. But Sophia said that she’d told Julianna about me and she was cool with me being trans.

When Mom and Dad got home from their yard-saling, a couple of hours before Julianna’s mom was supposed to drop her off, I asked: “Is it okay if I hang out with them some?”

“You’ve finished your homework, right?” Mom asked, but even as I nodded, Dad interjected:

“You’re still grounded for now. You can’t watch movies with them or play games... but I suppose you can hang out with them when they’re just talking. You’ll sleep in your own room, though.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” That wasn’t what I’d hoped for, but it was more than I’d expected.

When Julianna arrived, I hung back a little and let her greet Sophia without me butting in; I just waved to her and continued reading. (I’d been reading on the sofa in the living room since I finished my homework.) But Julianna turned to me moments later and squeed: “Meredith? Oh my God, I can’t believe it! You look amazing!”

“Thanks,” I said, feeling my face getting hot. “Sophia’s the one who designed my new body.”

“Yeah, she told me. Wow, I want her to design my new body when I turn sixteen. Mom and Dad said I’m not allowed to use the transformation booth until then.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be allowed to that soon,” Sophia said sourly. “I’m not grounded anymore, but I’m still not allowed to go to the library without Mom or Dad or Caleb watching to make sure I don’t try to use the machine.”

“A lot can happen in a year and a half,” Mom said, coming back in from the porch, where she’d been talking with Julianna’s mom. “We’ll know more about those machines and the risks involved in using them by then, and we can make a more informed decision.”

Sophia looked hopeful, but obviously knew better than to press the issue. It was nice to think that they might let her use the machine well before she turned eighteen, but it still probably wasn’t going to be anytime soon. As for me, even if I wasn’t grounded and was allowed to use it, I wouldn’t be in any particular hurry to. I was a little curious about what it would be like to have four arms like Melanie, or to be a bird for a few hours and fly around, but after seeing how Andrew hadn’t been able to get back to the same appearance he’d had for the first month after that first transformation wore off, I was unwilling to experiment with it if it might make it hard or impossible to get this exact body again. As it happened, I didn’t get the chance to use the machine again until after the history feature had been discovered.

Sophia and Julianna went off to Sophia’s bedroom, and dragged me (quite willingly) along. “So, Meredith,” Julianna said, plopping down on Sophia’s bed, “dish! Sophia’s told me about you, and I heard some stuff from girls at school, but I want to hear it from you. What do you like best about being a girl? Is there anything you miss about being a boy? Is there a boy you like? Or a girl? Are there girly things you haven’t tried yet that we can initiate you into tonight?” Her eyes gleamed with joy and enthusiasm, and even though I found her prying questions a little uncomfortable, I couldn’t resent her.

I sat down in Sophia’s desk chair and Sophia sat down beside Julianna. “Well,” I said, “what I like best about being a girl is finally being comfortable with my body. And I’m not sure if I miss anything about... pretending to be a boy. Except not getting hassled by people who think I’m using the wrong restroom.” I paused a moment, thinking about her torrent of questions and deciding to skip the next couple. “And Sophia and I have spent a few hours trying on clothes and stuff while Mom and Dad were out shopping or something, but we haven’t done anything with makeup or nail polish yet.”

“Oh! I know we were planning to do some other stuff, Sophia, but could we do Meredith’s makeup first?”

“Sure,” Sophia said with a big smile.

They explained things to me as they went along, but they went fast enough that, even though I’d read a bunch about makeup, I couldn’t absorb all the explanations. A few minutes later, I was thoroughly made up.

“You look great!” Julianna said. “Not that you didn’t look pretty good before, but we’ve improved on perfection.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m not sure you didn’t go a little too heavy on the — I think it’s the mascara? And the blush?”

“You wouldn’t want to wear that much makeup just any time,” Sophia said, “but this would be good for a special occasion.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly, wondering if Andrew would like seeing me this way. “How about we do it again, but more of a normal schoolday kind of makeup, and take it slower so I can understand everything you’re doing?”

“Deal,” said Sophia, and started cleaning the heavy makeup off.

When they finished, I looked a little nicer than usual, but it wasn’t obvious, looking in the mirror, that I was wearing makeup. I could still feel it on my face, though not as heavily as before. After that, I tried putting it on myself the way they’d done it the second time, and it looked ridiculous — I’d applied it unevenly, and in the heavier spots it was worse than the first time. But after a couple more practice tries, I was doing sort of okay.

“So what do you want to do next?” Julianna asked me. “Nails?”

“If you want,” I said. “But you’re the guest. Didn’t you say you and Sophia had plans?”

“We were gonna watch Wonder Woman and Walking with Dinosaurs and play Mario Kart. But you’re the one who’s having her first sleepover, so I think you should decide!”

I smiled. It was nice to feel accepted. “Then yeah, if you don’t mind, teach me your nail wisdom. I’m still grounded, so I can’t watch the movies or play with you.”

“What?”

Apparently Sophia hadn’t explained, or Julianna had forgotten. I explained how I was theoretically grounded for one month plus however long I spent as a girl, “but the way Mom and Dad have been acting lately, I’m pretty sure they’ll back off on that sometime soon. Not today, though.”

“That sucks,” Julianna said. “Why would they do that?”

That led into a long discussion of Mom’s and particularly Dad’s attitudes toward gender issues, and how they’d softened up a bit over the last few weeks, which I won’t rehash here. Even before we’d discussed that topic to death, we started doing each other’s nails; Julianna did my fingernails, explaining what she was doing, and then let me practice on Sophia’s fingernails while she did my toenails. I made a mental note to clean them off before I left Sophia’s room, so Dad wouldn’t see them; he hadn’t explicitly forbidden me to use nail polish, but I didn’t want to set him off.

The conversation drifted at some point to some freshman and sophomore boys Sophia and Julianna were interested in. Neither of them were allowed to date until they were fifteen; Sophia would be fifteen in February, and was hoping Chase Niles would ask her out soon after that. “I told him when I was allowed to start dating,” she said, “but I don’t know if he took the hint.”

“Boys can be pretty clueless,” I said. “Maybe you should give him more hints when it’s getting closer to your birthday?”

“Wow,” Julianna said. “I should have thought of that. You can tell us how boys think and stuff.”

“Kind of, not really?” I said uncomfortably. “I mean, I guess I know about how boys talk and act when they don’t think there are any girls around, because I’ve spent time hanging out with them when everyone thought I was a boy. But I don’t know how they think any better than you do.”

Sophia swatted Julianna’s arm lightly. “Meredith was always a girl,” she said, “she just looked like a boy until a month ago.”

“Oh,” Julianna said. “Sorry. I still don’t understand this.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You’re trying.”

There was silence for a few moments after that, and Julianna broke it by asking: “So do you like boys or girls or both?”

I glanced at the closed door. “Promise you won’t tell my parents?”

“Cross my heart,” Julianna promised.

“I like boys. The machine didn’t do that, I already liked boys before. But I don’t want Dad to know that until he figures out I’m a girl.”

Sophia nodded. “I sort of figured, from when we talked about Joseph.”

“Joseph who?” Julianna asked.

“Joseph Wallace, a guy at our church. I think he’s got a crush on Meredith. And when we talked about it, Meredith said it couldn’t go anywhere because she was grounded and his parents wouldn’t let him date a trans girl. She didn’t say anything about her not being interested in him.”

“Sophia!” I protested, blushing. “He’s kind of cute, but way too shy. When I’m not grounded anymore, I’d want to date somebody with more confidence than him.”

I didn’t tell them about my hopeless crush on Andrew when they pressed further, and neither Sophia nor I said anything about our vague suspicion that Joseph might be trans. The conversation drifted back to the boys Sophia and Julianna were interested in, and then to other subjects, and after a while, I excused myself so they could watch movies and play games.

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: