NOVEL NEXT The story
“Come on, close the door before someone sees us,” my best friend said as he ushered me into the storage closet.
“I’m not sure it’s the best place to do something like this,” I responded.
“Well, it’s the best we’ve got; and no chickening out now, you already agreed to do this.”
I had to admit, no matter how risky and scary of an idea this was, I’d agreed to do it, and my reason for doing so hadn’t changed. So to back up a little, today was the last day of the school year, and the school had decided to make it an event, where in most classrooms they aired a variety of movies, while gym and a patch of grass behind the school had been set up for many different sports for students to play; the problem was that instead of letting students choose what they wanted to do, guys got the sports day, and girls got the movie day.
That decision had, of course, upset a lot of students, including the two of us. We had not signed up for a whole day of P.E. For better or for worse, that’d inspired my friend to come up with, as he called it, the best idea ever — to use his barely above novice level skills in magic to, you guessed it, transform us into girls for a day.
So you might ask, how had he convinced me to go with what might well be a very bad idea? He’d simply asked me if I was ever curious what it was like to be a girl, and I’d said the truth — I was. Since before I could remember, I’d been extremely curious, and sometimes even a bit envious, and the day he’d asked me that question, I’d found out I wasn’t alone. We’d actually ended up bonding over it for several hours that day, and that’s when we’d decided we would go ahead with the plan, no matter how scary it was.
“Okay, so the first step — do you have any requests?” he asked, snapping me out of my thoughts.
“Requests?” I asked.
“For how you’ll look, of course. I stayed up a little late yesterday to try all the different things out, so I know exactly what to do for me, but for you I don’t know, so tell me,” he explained excitedly.
I didn’t really think changing most things had any real purpose, but… I had one thing.
“Would it be okay to make me shorter?” I asked shyly.
“Of course. How short were you thinking?”
“One hundred and fifty centimeters,” I said without hesitation.
“That’s… really short.”
“Some people are that short.”
“Okay then. Anything else?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Cool. Here we go.”
His right hand started to glow with magic, and for two or three seconds I lost feeling in most of my body. When the glow stopped, I was suddenly looking up instead of down at my friend.
When he said it was his turn, I looked down and noticed how long my hair was now. I’d always wondered what it was like to have such long hair, and when I ran my hand through it, it turned out to be really soft. Speaking of soft, the skin on my hands was also really that. And all my other skin. Even my clothes felt softer after they got transformed. I had to admit that while I only had a couple of seconds to experience it so far, I really didn’t mind being soft and small.
A clearly fake cough drew my attention away from the soft, and onto my already transformed friend. Aside from noticeable lack of change in height, what really surprised me was the pure black shoulder length hair with turquoise highlights.
“That—” I stopped, surprised by just how soft and delicate my voice suddenly sounded. “That was fast.”
“Well, your thing was really simple, and I spent a lot of time practicing transformation magic yesterday night trying to get my thing just right. I’d say the effects are pretty stunning,” he explained.
I just nodded. Made sense he’d stay up late to get it perfect; he always did that when it came to stuff he was excited about, and I had to agree, the results were quite… good.
“So did you come up with a name that doesn’t ‘feel wrong’?” he asked.
When I first agreed on the plan, I’d admitted that picking a fake name might be a problem for me, since if I chose a random one, it might turn out that it didn’t feel right. He apparently already had one in mind for himself.
Eventually, I had actually found something too. “I think J-Juniper will be okay… it sounds nice…” I admitted.
“Yeah, it does. I always kinda liked Nia a lot, so I’ll go with that.” He paused for a moment. “‘Kay, now comes the fun part. I mean, all the parts are fun, but this one’ll address something important — aren’t you worried that we might say or do something wrong on accident that’ll make people realize what we’re doing?” he asked.
“Y-yeah… I am…” I stammered. I had a feeling I’d be doing that a lot that day.
“That’s the problem; I’ve been worried about that too. I’ve done some thinking about what we might do to avoid it, but then I realized that the problem was born from the way we think about it. Of course we’re gonna slip up if we just go around pretending to be something we’re not — that’s why we shouldn’t do that!” he said.
“W-wha?”
“That’s right, and that’s exactly why for today, you won’t be pretending to be Juniper. For today, you are Juniper. The same goes for me being Nia, and using girl pronouns and stuff for both of us. So, when you find yourself wondering what Juniper would do in a given situation, don’t — everything you would do is what Juniper would do because you are Juniper. Your past is Juniper’s past, because you are Juniper. And of course, that means that Juniper and Nia have known each other since elementary school, because we did, and we are Juniper and Nia. Does that make sense?” she asked.
“Y-yeah, it does… And, umm, I guess it's a better idea than the… alternative,” I said.
If I had to be honest, I had real trouble focusing on finding flaws in that idea, given the warm fluffy feeling that being repeatedly told I was Juniper brought.
“Okay, now that all that’s finished, let’s go,” she commanded.
“W-wait. Already?” I stammered.
“Yes, already, the last thing we want is for some teacher to catch us where we shouldn’t be. Come on.”
And then, she just took my hand and just started walking. My confusion was clear by the fact I’d only processed that that had happened after we were already outside the closet and walking through the corridor. Needless to say, the reaction I had was very complicated and slightly overwhelming.
“By the way,” Nia started, “are you doing something to your voice to make it sound like this?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“The thing where it’s so high and soft; I didn’t make it sound like this. Remember what I said about not pretending,” she explained.
Now that I thought about it, I was using my voice differently, but I wasn’t doing it on purpose. It was almost like…
“I think it’s just how I naturally use this voice, like, it’s different so I use it differently, if that makes sense…” I responded.
She nodded.
“Okay, I was just making sure. We should be close to the room where they have one movie I wanted to try watching,” she said.
I felt my anxiety spike at that. “A-aren’t we going to go to a washroom or something? You know, to check if e-everything’s okay.”
“What exactly wouldn’t be okay?”
“Y-you know, what if our clothes are wrong in some way? Or if our hair is messy and full of knots? W-we need to check,” I explained.
“Those don’t really have a chance of happening without me knowing, and I can tell you that it’s okay,” she assured.
“B-but what if something went wrong and you can’t tell and it’s really visible to everybody but us and it’s super embarrassing?”
“Oh… Okay, you’re just spiraling now; take a deep breath, everything’s going to be okay,” she said soothingly.
“And what if it’s not?” I asked, not quite ready to calm down yet.
“Then I’ll take all the bad stuff on myself; it was my idea after all.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder.
It took me a minute or two of deep breathing and confusingly reassuring squeezes from Nia for me to calm down somewhat.
When she noticed that I was doing better, she said, “Okay, now remember, whenever you start having anxious thoughts again, just try to, you know, do what’s normal for you.”
“Anxiety is my normal state of being,” I mumbled.
“You’re joking, right? Because, uhh, that doesn’t sound healthy.”
“I-I don’t know, I might be over exaggerating, I don’t have a reference… I just normally can hide it, I don’t know what just happened now…” I explained.
“How about this — we go to watch the movie now, and if you’re feeling overwhelmed just tell me, and we leave, okay?” she asked.
I shyly nodded.
It was very odd, how I was suddenly stripped of most of my defense mechanisms. Granted, those were mostly just not expressing how I’d really felt, without an option to turn them off, so my new situation wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it happening suddenly without reason in a moment when I was much more vulnerable than usual was definitely less than ideal. The last time I was actually like this was when I’d been around twelve, and I’d used to be very emotional back then, so I really hoped it wouldn’t cause any troubles now.
When we entered the classroom, it turned out that the teacher was waiting for one more person to start the movie. Apparently, it was a romantic comedy, which was an unpleasant blast from the past, but I’d live. More importantly, Nia probably didn’t have that phase, and our current situation provided a rather good excuse to try to experience it, so I just let her make that mistake for herself. As long as we didn’t spend the entire day watching this kind of stuff.
So we sat somewhere at the back of the class in the nice empty space, which provided us with loneliness for the entirety of one minute before some girl who entered late too asked if she could sit next to Nia, which spiked my anxiety a little. What spiked my anxiety ‘a little’ more was another girl entering about five minutes later, and asking me if she could sit next to me, to which I made the mistake of nodding. At least she gave off some of that easy-going energy, which negated my anxiety aura a tiny bit.
I decided to try to distract myself with the movie going on, which was a mistake.
At some point Nia must have noticed I was getting upset over that vaguely movie-like thing, because she asked, “Is everything okay?”
“Yes, it’s just… this.” I gestured at the projector screen.
“I’m afraid you’ll need to be more specific,” she responded.
“It’s just all about making people care about this relationship that is clearly toxic and not going to work…” I explained.
“But they’re in looooove,” said the stranger girl next to me, with what I could hope was sarcasm. I was never good at recognising this sort of stuff.
I didn’t think I was speaking loudly enough for her to hear. I responded before even thinking.
“T-that’s not… They’ve talked with each other for less than two minutes. A-and in that time they had three dramatic arguments already. They just… stared at each other’s faces for five seconds at the beginning of the movie, that doesn’t count. O-or at least it shouldn’t…” I mumbled out, panic setting as I realized I was ranting to a complete stranger about things I didn’t have any real experience in.
I legitimately half-jumped in my seat as I heard the girl sitting next to Nia respond. “For a lot of people it just works like that. The movie’s still toxic about it, but I honestly don’t know what you expected getting into this.”
“Heh, that’d be my fault, sorry. Just wanted to try it out of morbid curiosity I guess. Name’s Nia, by the way, and the anxious mess next to me is Juniper,” Nia explained, then put a hand on my shoulder, as if to demonstrate that I was, indeed, still here.
I might have let out a muffled squeak through my closed mouth. Maybe.
“I’m Rachel.” The girl next to Nia waved nonchalantly.
“Chloe. I’m honestly just here to text my friends and make fun of this trash movie with them.” And that was the one next to me.
“Nia, huh… Say, I think I’d remember seeing someone with such striking hair around, what’s up with that?” Rachel asked.
Nia, as if sensing my slight panic at that question, rubbed my shoulder she was still holding a tiny bit. “Oh, I got it done yesterday, you know, for summer break, to try it out.”
“That’s so cool, I really need to do something like this too,” Chloe chimed in again. “By the way, Juniper, can I ask you a bit of a personal question?”
I nodded, knowing I could always say no if it was too personal. I think. I wasn’t really good at this whole ‘social interactions’ thing.
“Have you ever had a crush on anybody?” she asked.
“Umm, n-no,” I stammered.
It was weird. There were multiple reasons why I should have answered honestly, and yet automatically saying the truth still felt like a slip-up. Though that was the point, right? To be honest about myself? It was starting to get a tiny bit confusing, if I had to be honest.
“Heh, yeah, I had a feeling,” she ‘explained’.
“Is… Is that a bad thing?” Now I was just getting into the existential worries about how to be a teenager properly.
I felt Nia rub my shoulder some more, and I could feel my face heating up for some reason.
“Nah, as a local ace lesbian love guru, let me tell you, that sort of stuff can be very different for different people. At the end of the day, the only thing worrying about it like that will do is make you feel worse about yourself.” Chloe explained, for real this time.
“T-thanks…” I said.
The rest of the movie went by quickly, with occasional comments from Chloe once in a while. In the end, the characters got together without addressing any of the bad stuff other than the guy saying basically ‘I’m sorry if you felt upset by what I said and did’; the fact that the love interests didn’t seem to like each other as people was brought up, only to get laughed off right as the credits started to roll. Chloe explained that that movie was basically infamous for being ridiculously bad, but she also said that in some other classroom they were going to be watching Wall-E soon, so things were starting to look up.
In the walk between classes, Nia stopped and asked, “How are you holding up?”
“Better than I expected, to be honest,” I half-whispered.
“Okay, that’s a relief.” She sighed. “By the way, sorry for holding you so long there, it’s just… you were nervous, and stuff like that usually helps me when I feel like this.”
“It’s okay, you just surprised me a bit, I’m not really used to something like that happening to me,” I explained.
“Wait, like, at all? Don’t your parents, like, comfort you like that if you’re down and stuff?” she asked.
“Not really? I mean, I think they used to when I was, like, a small kid, but it’s been years since that…” I said.
“Can I hug you?”
I gasped. I got legitimately startled by that question. I stumbled through the mess that was my thoughts at the moment. It was new and scary, I’d never experienced something like that, but at the same time… I didn’t see any reasons to say no.
So I nodded.
Suddenly, I was wrapped in a surprisingly warm embrace. I stiffened at first, not knowing how to react, not knowing if there even was a right way to react. Should I hug her back? Was I allowed to lean into it? Actually, whether or not I was allowed to do it, not leaning in was rapidly becoming increasingly harder. It wasn’t just the warmth, it was something deeper, like I was missing something about the contact that I didn’t even know how much I needed until it was given to me at that moment.
“You’re really melting into this, huh?” she teased.
I didn’t get it at first, but then I realized what she was referring to, and it was actually a surprisingly good way to describe it.
“Is… Is it supposed to feel this nice?” I asked.
“According to my parents, human contact is important for your mental health, so you not having it for so long is probably skewing the results. But yeah, hugs are generally really nice,” she explained.
After a bit of silence, she added, “We need to do this more. After all this is finished too. I don’t want to see you go on without this just because your parents have their weird ideas.”
Rationally, I knew this was true, but trying to imagine it, with me being back to usual…
“After all this is finished… I don’t think it’s a good idea…” I responded.
“Why would that—” Nia started to say, then paused for a second. “Oh, right. I… I’m used to it myself, but I think I understand where you’re coming from. I— just… Can you still give it more thought? It doesn’t have to be all at once, you can take small steps, but… it’s just important.”
“I… I promise I’ll try,” I muttered.
After a couple of seconds of comfortable silence, Nia stopped hugging me and took a step back. I mostly didn’t fall over due to that.
“Come on, we gotta go, don’t wanna miss the movie,” she said playfully.
Chloe was already waiting for us in the class, and Rachel joined soon after, with the movie beginning as she opened the door. To my surprise, despite everything, it was fun. I didn’t even do anything other than sitting there next to my friend and the surprisingly friendly strangers, but it was still a very fulfilling activity.
Unfortunately, just like all the other good things, it wouldn’t last.
At some point, about two-thirds into the movie, the anxiety started to come back with a revenge. Nia was relatively quick to notice, and she put her arm around me again, which helped a lot, but by the time we got fifteen minutes into the next movie, I became full-on stressed.
You see, I’d made a rather startling realization. The fact that I was comfortable enough to enjoy myself despite being in public, right next to the people I didn’t really know, and in a situation which put me in a much more fragile than usual position, made something really clear — there was no way I’d get to experience anything like that after I turned back.
I desperately tried to find something, anything that I could look forward to to distract myself, but there was nothing. Even when the last movie was about to end, and I was possibly the most stressed I had ever been in my entire life, anything that could possibly happen to me after that day paled in comparison to the feelings I got when I looked down at myself while feeling Nia’s hand gently rubbing my shoulder.
I’d somehow managed to keep myself together while leaving the classroom and saying goodbyes to Chloe and Rachel. I ended up standing with my back against the wall, waiting for Nia to use the toilet before… well, thinking about what we’d be doing next was too scary, so I decided to do my best to focus on not shaking out of stress.
In that admittedly weak attempt at controlling my emotions, I almost missed Rachel approaching me, only noticing her after she said “Hi.”
“H-hi?” I asked nervously.
“I… You see… Ugh!” she paused for a bit, then sighed. “Listen, I don’t know how to confront people about stuff and I don’t wanna go in circles about this, so I’m just gonna say it — I… I saw you two enter and exit that closet this morning.”
I felt the spike of cold envelop my entire body, and I froze in place. In practice, it didn’t matter that we’d gotten caught now. This was going to end soon anyway, and any potential punishment wouldn’t really make that much of a difference; and yet the knowledge that someone knew what was happening, and would probably draw the obvious conclusions and see me and Nia for the disgusting people we probably were even though we didn’t want to do anything bad — it pushed me out of the place where I could keep my feelings under control. I did the only thing that I could do, something I couldn’t not do.
I broke down crying.
Sobs started escaping me as my eyes hurt from the tears. It felt like trying to stand still in a tornado of emotions, except I just lost my grip on the only thing keeping me from flying away. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t control my emotions, I couldn’t stop crying, and it just kept getting worse.
“Shit! I-I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to… I’m not gonna…” I could hear Rachel saying in the background, but I couldn’t really gather myself up enough to actually listen.
I didn’t even notice sounds of running until they got really close, but by that point I didn’t have enough time to react in any way before I was enveloped in warm softness at a very high speed.
“What. Just. Happened?” I heard Nia’s voice from right above me. She sounded kinda angry, and despite the fact I could tell it wasn’t directed at me, I couldn’t help but find it kinda scary.
But then she moved one hand up to rest it against the back of my head, and I finally connected the dots and realized that she was indeed hugging me again. I was still sobbing into her chest, and I still had practically no control over my state, but being there, with her, made me feel a bit more safe.
Eventually, I calmed down enough to actually listen in to the conversation.
“...so if you’re not going to report us or anything, then what do you want?” Nia asked.
“Well, I wanted to talk to you two, you know, like a reasonable person would. People don’t normally do this kind of stuff the way you did, so I wanted to check if everything’s alright. Maybe I can offer bits of my experience, I happen to know a bit about gender stuff,” Rachel explained.
At some point I’d realized trying to not cry wasn’t going to achieve anything, so I’d stopped, and it made it better. What also made it better was the fact that Nia was hugging me; I knew she only ran to me to avoid making a scene, and was only patting me and whispering reassurances to get me to stop crying faster, but it still made me feel safe.
During Rachel’s explanations, I was in a weird state. I definitely heard what she said, and rationally understood it as well, but I wasn’t quite there to process the implications yet. Still, it was kinda surprising that both me and Nia had never decided to look up what ‘transgender’ meant, despite the fact we’d both heard the word in passing multiple times; that would have probably made that day much less stressful.
Oh, who am I kidding, I would have probably found something to be stressed about no matter what.
Even after stopping crying, I stayed in Nia’s hug until it was time to say goodbye to Rachel when Nia made sure to friend her on Discord.
We then started to quickly walk to Nia’s — and by that I mean Nia put up a fast pace I was unable to keep up with, only slowing down after the third time I had to run up to her.
“Sorry about that, I’m just so excited! There’s suddenly so many new possibilities!” Nia said. “How are you feeling?”
“Excited too, but also scared…”
“Scared? Of what?” she asked.
“Well, the biggest thing is… what if I’m wrong? What if I’m not… you know, and I just think I want to be for some reason I don’t know yet?” I explained.
“I… Listen, I’m not going to pretend I know more than what we both heard Rachel say, but from what I understand, being scared you’re not actually a girl isn’t a very guy thing to do.”
I thought about it for a moment.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right…” I mumbled. “Still, if we didn’t know, there’s probably many other people who don’t, and there’s a big chance some of them will be jerks… You know I don’t know how to deal with people treating me like that…”
Nia stopped, and wrapped her arm around my shoulders, pulling me close.
“I guess I’ll just have to defend you then.”
I felt something tingly in my stomach, and I couldn’t help but intently look up at Nia.
“D-don’t give me that look!” she exclaimed.
“What look?” I intuitively tilted my head a bit.
She looked away, covering her face with her other hand. “Geez, you’ve known you’re a girl for five minutes and you’ve already started to exploit your cute girly charms.”
Charms? Me?
“You’re the one to talk, suddenly being all confident and cool and stylish…” I retorted.
She looked like she was about to respond back with something, but then she just burst out laughing.
“Just five minutes, and I can already tell we’re gonna have so much fun like this.”
I thought about it. Nia’d said that there were so many new possibilities, but honestly, I wasn’t thinking about that. I just wanted to try all the normal stuff that I hadn’t been able to properly enjoy before for real this time, but I supposed if Nia tried to rope me into some new plan of hers, I wouldn’t be opposed. Everything was kinda new and exciting, but doing it with someone I knew and trusted was definitely going to make it easier and more fun.
Nia was still laughing, and I couldn’t help but smile too.
“Yeah, I think we will too.”
