I had trouble at first holding the pages of the trade paperback open with my little hands, but after a few minutes of trial and error, I managed to get the hang of it, and started reading.

Once I’d abandoned my car — partly Mom and Dad’s car and mostly the bank’s — and met up with Meredith and Sophia again, we headed southeast to Siler City, way on the other side of Greensboro. Sophia had still been transparent when I left the mall, but she was back to her usual body now, though she was wearing a different outfit. They’d stopped at a couple of places to buy the things we needed.

Meredith parked a couple of blocks away from the Venn machine and stayed with the car. Sophia put on a bulky raincoat with a stocking cap, and handed me another of each, along with four sticks of gum.

“Chew up the gum,” she told me, “and when we get close to the machine, have a couple of lumps of gum in each cheek. That will change the shape of your face a bit and hopefully fool facial recognition software. Pulling the cap down low and keeping your head down will help, too. It’s cold and wet, so nobody will think that’s suspicious.”

We walked to the machine, which was sitting on the sidewalk in front of a hardware store. With it being outdoors and the day being rainy, nobody was waiting in line to use it. We set it up for a two-year change, which would take me past my eighteenth birthday.

Once we were inside, Sophia said, “So have you made up your mind?” We’d been talking about what form my little statuette body would take on the way down there, although most of our focus had been on crisis management — what story Meredith and Sophia would tell their parents and the police when they were questioned about my disappearance, and how they’d keep life interesting for me while I was more or less a prisoner in Meredith’s room for over a year. “I know you wanted purple scales, but we don’t want the statue on Meredith’s desk to look too much like the dragon-girls they’ll see in the camera footage if they dig back a few months. Or the dragon you had on your shoulder today.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You said you could make the statues out of all kinds of materials, right?”

“Yeah. I even got some made of a bluish-silver metal so tough I couldn’t chip off a piece for chemical analysis with the tools in the school lab or workshop. But we should probably use a readily identifiable material, or it might be obvious that you’re venned.”

“Some kind of hard ceramic, maybe? A Chinese dragon. Red with a white ruff? Not very humanoid, but with something like opposable thumbs, hands I can use to turn pages or type. I don’t think the police would connect that with the dragon-girls I’ve turned into before.”

“All right. Scrunch yourself up in the front corner there, so when the door opens you’ll be hidden from the camera.” Sophia went to work, and a few minutes later the booth expanded vastly around me, like when I’d turned into a little dragon or a dragon-girl small enough to fly. And I felt different from ever before. Even as a squirrel-sized dragon, there had still been basic commonalities — I breathed, I smelled things, I subconsciously felt my heart beating, I felt a temperature difference between me and my surroundings. All that was gone. At first I thought Sophia might have messed up and made me an inanimate statue, but then I moved, wiggling one leg at a time until I felt confident about walking. Moving felt natural, but staying still even more so; I felt like I could stay still for hours and never get cramped.

By the time I had tested all my limbs, Sophia had come into the booth and scooped me up to put me in her purse. She didn’t talk until we were back at the car.

“What did she decide on?” I heard Meredith ask.

“Take a look,” Sophia said, and opened up her purse. I looked up at Meredith and waved.

“Wow, you’re beautiful. Are you sure you’ll be okay like that until you’re eighteen, though? It’s really different from any of the bodies you’ve worn.”

Internally, I was having some second thoughts. I liked this body so far about as well as the tiny quadrupedal dragons I’d changed into. But how comfortable would I be long-term being semi-animate, or this tiny? I really couldn’t think of any better option, though — not just better for me, but better for Meredith and Sophia, who could get in big trouble for helping me if I venned into something that was harder to hide, like a tiny scaled-down human or dragon-girl, or a dragon-girl statue that looked like my dragon-girl bodies the police would find on the security camera footage. I didn’t want to worry Meredith and Sophia, or make them go through the Venn machine again and look odd to whoever might glance at the security footage from the Siler City machine. So I said, “I think so. Thank you so much for doing this for me.”

“I would do anything to help my sisters.”

I might have cried then if I’d had tear ducts. Happy tears. As it was, I wiggled for joy and then went still again, as was so easy now.

* * *

When we got back to Meredith and Sophia’s house, Sophia transferred me from her purse to one of the shopping bags Meredith had acquired during the mall trip; I shared it with a pair of earrings, a scarf, and a receipt, which her parents hopefully wouldn’t look at to see that no dragon statuette was listed. I went rigid and stayed that way as they carried their things, including me, into the house.

“Supper’s in the refrigerator,” I heard Mrs. Ramsey say. Something was slightly off about her voice, but I wasn’t sure what. “Did y’all find some good stuff?”

“Several neat things,” Sophia said, and she and Meredith listed several of the things they’d bought, including me in the middle of the list where I wouldn’t stand out particularly.

“I’m gonna go put this stuff away before I eat,” Meredith added.

“Sure.”

A few moments later, a hand plucked me out of the shopping bag and set me on a broad, flat surface. I looked around and saw I was on Meredith’s desk, which was neatly arranged: a stack of papers and notebooks, a stack of books (both textbooks and novels), and her laptop. I stayed still and quiet, waiting to make sure no adult was around.

“I’m gonna go eat in a minute,” Meredith said in a low voice. “Make yourself at home. Are there any books you want me to set on the desk where you can reach them?”

“Maybe Dreadnought?” She’d told me about it, a novel about a trans superhero, but I’d never dared to borrow it from her to take home.

“Of course. Just a minute.” She pulled the book down from the shelf and set it next to me, then put away the rest of the things she’d bought and left the room, closing the door behind her.

I had trouble at first holding the pages of the trade paperback open with my little hands, but after a few minutes of trial and error, I managed to get the hang of it, and started reading. I read most of the first two chapters by the time Meredith returned from supper.

“Um, can you close your eyes while I change for bed?” she asked. “I don’t want Mom and Dad to wonder why I’ve suddenly started changing clothes in the bathroom.”

“I don’t think I can close my eyes,” I said after trying for a few moments. “But I can turn my back.”

“Thanks.”

When she said I could look again, she was wearing a lacy lavender nightgown. Then she opened a drawer of her desk, took out some makeup supplies, and started removing her makeup before bed.

“I want to learn how to do that,” I said.

“I guess you can watch me put it on and take it off a few hundred times in the next year or so,” she said. “And I can explain what I’m doing. You’ll need to be organic again before you can practice what you’ve seen, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you feeling okay, being like that? Sophia’s turned me into animate dolls or statues several times, but rarely for more than a couple of hours.”

“Yeah. It’s weird and different, but I can live with it. I feel safe here. I’ve never felt safe at home since I started figuring out who I am.”

She took on a fiercely protective look and stroked my back with a couple of fingers. “I’ll keep you safe. They can’t hurt you here.”

My ceramic body was still room temperature, but I felt warm and fuzzy inside.

* * *

After Meredith fell asleep, I realized I wasn’t sleepy and wasn’t going to get sleepy. This could have some disadvantages. I didn’t want to turn the light back on to read and maybe wake her up. But I had a lot to think about, a lot to process from the very full day, and my thoughts kept me company. Eventually, somewhere during the night, I fell into a fugue state like I’ve heard people experience when they turn into inanimate objects and nobody is using or wearing them, and I wasn’t consciously aware of my surroundings again until Meredith’s alarm went off at six.

Then there was a flurry of activity as Meredith got ready for school. She only had time to exchange a few words with me before she left, leaving the light on so I could read. I started to read more of Dreadnought, but after a little, I decided I needed to study, too. She’d taken some of her textbooks with her to school, but not all, and I found one of those within my reach and turned pages until I found roughly where we’d left off in my American History course at the Everett Academy.

Then Meredith’s mom came into the room a few hours later. I quickly crawled off the textbook when I heard the doorknob turn and froze in my standard position as she opened the door. At first glance, I barely recognized her: she was fifteen or twenty years younger than when I’d seen her at the steakhouse over a year earlier, and I realized that was what had felt off about her voice. Meredith and Sophia had told me about their parents rejuvenating each other, but seeing it was another thing altogether. She glanced around briefly and turned off the light. After she left, I found I still had enough sunlight from the window to read.

That evening, when Meredith was doing her homework and I was looking over it with her, her mom knocked at the door. I froze in position as Meredith called out, “Come on in.”

“I just heard from Crystal Southers,” her mom said. “[Deadname] Wallace is missing.”

“What happened?” Meredith asked, doing a good job of looking concerned.

“He left for work yesterday after church and never came home. His parents called the restaurant he works at and his manager said he never showed up.”

Meredith hesitated for a moment and said, “I guess I should tell you what I know, and you can decide if it’s worth telling his parents.”

“You know something about it? Where is he?”

“I don’t know where he is now,” she lied, “but Sophia and I saw him yesterday at the mall.”

“When?”

“Early afternoon. Ever since we both got our driver’s licenses, we’ve been getting together and hanging out once a month or so. We didn’t say anything because his parents wouldn’t approve of it and we figured the fewer people who knew, the less likely his parents would find out.”

Mrs. Ramsey was quiet for a moment. Then: “I understand. It’s not fair that you should lose contact with your friend just because your parents had a fight with his parents. But if you saw him yesterday — did he seem okay?”

“At first. Then, just when we were about to go our separate ways, for him to go to work and Sophia and me to do some more shopping, we ran into a bully from his school.”

“Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that he’s being bullied.”

“I’m not sure of the details, but...” She hesitated, even though we’d gone over the cover story in the car yesterday: Tell as much of the truth as the police could figure out from talking to Tim and looking at the mall security cameras. “Well, we’ve been using the Venn machine at the mall, and the bully saw [deadname] using it, and said he was gonna tell everybody at school. [Deadname] was sure his parents would find out pretty soon and said he was gonna run away to a big city instead of going home.”

“Oh no! Why didn’t you —?”

“I thought we’d talked him out of it,” Meredith went on. “But I guess maybe not?”

“You should have told someone as soon as you got home! You should have called from the mall before he got out of your sight! Meredith, I thought you were more mature than this.”

“Mom,” Meredith said, “I don’t want to give away secrets that aren’t mine to share, but I think [deadname] might be safer on the streets of a big city than in his parents’ house once they find out what he’s been venning into. I tried to talk him out of it, like I said, Sophia and I both did, but... if he changed his mind and ran away anyway, he might have had a good reason.”

“Has...” Mrs. Ramsey swallowed. “Have his parents been abusive?”

“He hasn’t told me everything, but... maybe?”

“Oh my God. If you hear from him, tell him he’ll be safe here, okay? We’ll find a way to keep him safe. Do you have any idea what city he was thinking of running away to?”

“He mentioned Atlanta and Miami. He was probably thinking in terms of warmer weather.”

“I’ve got to tell someone. The police, but maybe not the Wallaces...? I don’t know — maybe Child Protective Services —”

She left the room. That was uncomfortable to listen to (although it felt nice when she said she would keep me safe from my parents), but it was necessary. Sooner or later the police would talk to Tim, who would tell them he’d seen us using the Venn machine at the mall, and then they’d show the camera footage to my parents and ask them if they recognized the girls I was venning with. Then they’d question Meredith and Sophia. It would look a lot better for them if they spoke up before the police came calling.

My 335,000-word short fiction collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, is available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)

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