NOVEL NEXT 25 of 62: Fractal Dress
While Meredith and her dad were fixing supper, I read for a little while. After supper and cleaning up, I went to Meredith’s room and looked through her closets and drawers with her. She let me pick almost anything I wanted except a few favorites, but I tried to pick things I hadn’t seen her wearing often. Two pairs of shoes, one casual and one dressy, several skirts and blouses, a few jeans and T-shirts, a coat and hat, and one dress that looked wonderful to me but which I’d never seen her wear.
“We might want to tweak that one beyond just resizing it to fit you,” she said with a laugh. “I wound up with that when Sophia and I were experimenting with changing some of my old boy clothes into girl clothes. It started out as a Mandelbrot set T-shirt, but the design had faded to where you could hardly tell what it was. The material still feels that soft, but the machine must have taken a cue from the fractal, because the pattern and cut are so ridiculously elaborate... I think I wore it on a date exactly once, and I felt so silly I haven’t done anything with it again. The venn’s going to expire later this year, but after we resize it for you and tone it down a little, it would last another three years.”
“It’s perfect,” I said, holding it up to my chin and looking at myself in the mirror on her closet door, admiring the frills that had frills with smaller frills of their own until they were barely big enough to see, each size of frill a different color that went well with the colors of the larger and smaller frills. “I guess I wouldn’t be able to wear it very often, but if you don’t want it, I’d love to have it as is.”
“You’re welcome.”
When we’d picked out a week or so worth of outfits, she opened up her drawers and asked me what type of panties and bras I liked. I blushed and said, “Um, wouldn’t that be kind of... unsanitary?”
“No, it’s fine. When you transform clothes in the Venn machine, whether you’re restyling them or just resizing them, they come out completely sterile. Better than any washing machine.”
“Huh. I bet you could save a lot on laundry that way if you don’t have a washer and dryer.” That might be an issue for me as a college student making ends meet on a shoestring budget.
“Yeah, unless you forget when the venns are going to expire and they suddenly all smell like you’ve worn them twenty times without washing them.”
“Oof.”
When Sophia got home, we hung out for a little while before Meredith and I went to bed. Sophia promised to pick out some things for my approval. After Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey finished the TV show they’d been watching since Mrs. Ramsey and I finished cleaning up, Meredith helped me unfold the sofa bed and I laid down. It had been a long day, and a bit stressful, but pretty neat too. I’d been trying to be unobtrusive and helpful to avoid making them regret taking me in, and going back to my original body for a few minutes hadn’t been at all my idea of a good time. And I was dreading the upcoming meeting with my parents; I still didn’t know when, but I figured it would be soon. But still, I was a human girl again, for two days in a row now, and looking forward to being a dragon-girl again before long, for the first time in over a year. And the Ramseys were willing to help way beyond what I’d dared hope for. Things were looking up.
* * *
Tuesday, not long after Meredith and Sophia left for school, Mr. Ramsey and I went to the library to resize the clothes Meredith, Sophia, and Mrs. Ramsey had given me. Then I changed into a professional-looking navy blue skirt and blouse in the library restroom, and we drove to Catesville to visit the DMV and file one of the forms I’d filled out the day before, for an updated driver’s license. I was also upgrading from the provisional driver’s license I’d gotten at sixteen to a full adult license. Then to the courthouse annex to file for my name and gender change. Those bureaucratic chores took up several hours, and we stopped for burgers on the way back.
Before returning to Brocksboro, we stopped by the bank and I tried to use my old debit card to check if I still had access to my savings account from before I ran away. Not surprisingly, I found that the account had been closed. I’d have to talk to Mom and Dad about that.
Our next stop was Eastern Mynatt High School. I’d only been there for football games before, never to the offices. We didn’t have to wait for long before the secretary said the assistant principal was ready for me.
“Do you want me to come back with you?” Mr. Ramsey asked.
I took a deep breath. “I... I think I can do this.”
He gave me an encouraging smile and I followed the secretary down the hall to an office. Assistant Principal Novacek was either really young for her job, or she’d been rejuvenated with the Venn machine; she didn’t look any older than Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey.
“Good morning, Miss Wallace,” she said. “I understand that you dropped out of high school last year, and want to enroll again?”
“Yes. Can I do that?”
“North Carolina law allows you to continue going to school until you turn twenty-one. But we look at individual cases to decide whether it would be best for you to come back to high school, or enroll in the Adult High School program at Mynatt Community College, or take the GED. Can you tell me something about the circumstances of your dropping out and what you’ve been doing since then?”
“Okay. Well, I’m transgender. I figured that with the help of a friend who came out — um, almost three years ago now? But my parents were so bigoted against trans people that I was afraid to tell them. Do you know anything about conversion therapy?”
She said, “I’ve heard of it,” with a distasteful expression.
“Well, they were talking about how my friend’s parents should have sent her to conversion therapy, and I was pretty sure they’d do the same with me if they found out. So I was planning to wait until I was eighteen to venn into a girl body long-term, but then somebody I knew from school saw me venning into a girl — I’d been doing that every few weekends, just for a couple of hours at a time — and I knew my parents would find out about it soon, maybe within hours. So I ran away and laid low until I turned eighteen.”
“I see. I won’t say that was a good idea, but you were faced with hard choices no one should have to make... Anyway, that’s past now. You said you recently turned eighteen?”
“Yes, this past Sunday.”
“How have you been spending your time while... laying low?”
“Mostly studying for the GED, ma’am. I didn’t really think I could go back to high school until recently.
“What subjects have you been studying?”
We talked about the subjects I’d studied and some of the specific books I’d read and online courses I’d taken. Then she asked me what high school I’d gone to before I dropped out, and apologetically asked me for my deadname so she could ask them for my records, and made an appointment for me to come back the next day for placement tests. I was in! And if I did well on the tests — I was pretty confident about most of them — I might be able to enroll for the last few months of senior year and graduate at the same time as Meredith.
I was beaming when I returned to the outer office where Mr. Ramsey was waiting for me, reading something on his phone. He looked up and saw my smile.
“I take it everything went well?”
“I need to be here tomorrow at nine for placement tests. It’s going to be several hours.”
“We’ll get you here.”
We went back to the house and he got back to work while I spent the remaining hours until supper reviewing for tomorrow’s tests.
* * *
I was jittery about the placement tests as I sat down with a set of fresh pencils and a borrowed calculator the next day, because so much was riding on how well I did, but once I started reading the questions and thinking about the subject matter instead of how many classes I might have to repeat and how soon I’d be graduating, my old test-taking habits kicked in and I managed to focus pretty well. By the time I turned in the last test paper, with five minutes to spare on the time limit, I was feeling pretty confident about having done well on most of the sections.
Mrs. Ramsey was waiting out front to pick me up.
“I’ve got to run by the post office next and mail some packages,” she said as I buckled my seatbelt. “Anywhere else you want to go before we head home?”
“I was thinking I could go ahead and start applying for jobs,” I said. “Stop in to various businesses close to your house, see if they’re hiring, pick up applications.”
“All right, let’s do that.”
I started with the post office, though it wasn’t super close to the Ramseys’ house. They weren’t hiring at that office, though they referred me to the main post office jobs site if I was willing to commute to one of the other nearby post offices. Since I’d be depending on the Ramseys for rides to work, if I couldn’t get a job within walking distance, I declined, planning to exhaust all the nearby options first. Then we drove back to the house, stopping at several businesses along Catesville Road.
After I’d picked up several applications, we returned to the house. Mrs. Ramsey asked me, “Have you thought any more about contacting your parents? Do you feel more ready for it now that you’ve gotten things moving on your name change and enrolling in high school?”
“Yeah. I’m still nervous, but I shouldn’t keep putting it off.”
That night after supper, Mrs. Ramsey called my mom. “Hey, Kathy? This is Erin Ramsey... wait. We need to talk. I’ve been in contact with your missing daughter, and — wait, let me finish. She’s going by Lauren now, and she asked me to talk to you about setting up a meeting... Okay, I’ll hang on... Hi, Peter. Yes, I’ve been in touch with Lauren — that’s what she’s going by now...”
Mrs. Ramsey winced and pulled the phone an inch or two away from her ear. I could hear Dad’s voice raised, although I couldn’t make out what he was saying.
“Peter, please just listen for a moment, okay? ...We can talk about that, but I think things will go better if you — okay. Yes. That’s why she asked me to call you; she wants to meet... No, not at your house. I talked to someone at my church about maybe scheduling a room for this, but the church we’re going to now is most of the way to Catesville — okay, yeah, that would be fine. Call me back when you’ve got it set up.”
I was on pins and needles as I listened. “They agreed to meet?”
“Your dad’s going to talk to the church secretary about scheduling a meeting room at Crossroads. This Sunday’s Easter, so there are things going on Friday and Saturday, but he thinks there should be at least one room available for us to use.”
“Good.” She could apparently tell how nervous I still felt, because she gave me a hug.
“It will be okay,” she said. “If they... if things go badly with them, you’ll still have a place with us.”
“Thanks,” I whispered.
