NOVEL NEXT 50 of 62: Meredith’s Birthday
The next few weeks were fairly uneventful. Sophia and I went to the mall and venned into little kids to play on the playground for an hour before closing, the Saturday after Halloween. The following weekend I went on a low-key date with Britt and Desiree, watching Lisette and Poppy at the racetrack and then watching She-Ra at Britt's house afterward. Then I had a therapy appointment the following Tuesday.
When I talked with Mom on the phone a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, she said Dad was still insisting that I had to change back to my baseline body if I wanted to come visit them for Thanksgiving. No thanks. I suggested to Mom that she could split in two, like Jada and I had been doing, and send one of her bodies to spend Thanksgiving with me and the Ramseys, while the other stayed in Durham and celebrated with Dad and Nathan. But it was too much for her; she’d so far only venned to get a younger, healthier body, she wasn’t ready to jump in the deep end and split her mind between two bodies. I’d been doing it for long enough that I’d forgotten how weird it was and how many people, even those who venned into a variety of furry or feathery bodies for various occasions, drew the line at multiple bodies or split minds.
I also talked to Nathan about Thanksgiving plans. We decided he’d stop in Brocksboro and visit with me for a little while on the way back to Mars Hill after Thanksgiving.
Meredith’s birthday fell on a Wednesday, and since she’d be home for Thanksgiving a week later, they decided to have her birthday party on the day before Thanksgiving, when their Georgia relatives would be visiting again. But Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey drove to Chapel Hill on her birthday to have supper with her. Bianca went with them, and they invited me, but it was too short notice for me to change my work schedule. Bianca suggested that I could split in two again, and send one of me to Chapel Hill with them. But we weren’t sure how that might work with Lydia already split off, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to be split three ways anyhow, even if it was just for a few hours. So for me it was a normal workday.
The Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I worked a short morning shift. When I got home, Meredith and Caleb had just gotten home from college — he’d taken a detour to Chapel Hill to pick her up before coming home. They’d both brought home a lot of laundry, but Meredith had beaten him to the washing machine for the first load.
“Is this how you repay me for giving you a ride, little sis?” he said in an aggrieved tone.
“Muahahaha!” she laughed. Despite Sophia being more of a mad scientist, Meredith had a better supervillain laugh.
A week or so earlier, when Mr. Ramsey and his brother were going back and forth and finalizing their plans for Thanksgiving, we’d talked about sleeping arrangements. Caleb had said, back when he moved out and I moved into his old room, that I could keep it and he’d sleep on the sofa when he came home for visits. And I had started paying a slightly greater rent when I got Caleb’s old room. “I won’t ask you to give up your bedroom for Caleb to use next weekend,” Mr. Ramsey said, “but if you were willing to sleep in Meredith’s room for a few days, it would let us host our nephews in the living room like we did last year. We can knock something off your rent for this month to compensate you for the inconvenience.”
“Okay,” I’d said. “That’s cool.”
So that afternoon, before the Georgia Ramseys arrived, Meredith helped me move some stuff from my room into hers, and we changed the sheets on my futon. Caleb apologetically moved his luggage into my room. Sophia and Bianca, to make the house marginally less crowded, went to the library and merged.
I talked on the phone with Jada, who’d just gotten home from college, and we made plans to meet up on Friday. (Britt was out of town; she and her parents had gone to visit Britt’s older brother in Charlotte, who was hosting a lot of their extended family for Thanksgiving.)
Then Eric, Vanessa, Will, Savannah, and Aiden arrived. I think they were pretty surprised to see me and Sophia’s venned forms — I was still wearing the turkey-girl body I’d used for work that day, and Sophia had venned into an improved version of the two-headed body she’d used back in October when we visited Caleb and Meredith, with the stripped-down second head that just had a mouth for eating. None of the Georgia Ramseys were visibly venned, although I could tell that Savannah had probably tweaked her looks again, and that what I was seeing wasn’t just a year of growth.
“So this is Meredith’s friend you told me about?” Eric said.
“Yes, this is Lauren,” Justin said. “Lauren, I’d like you to meet my brother Eric, his wife Vanessa, and Meredith’s cousins Will, Savannah, and Aiden.”
“It’s neat that you venned into a turkey for Thanksgiving,” Aiden piped up.
“I’ll change back to my everyday body soon,” I said. “I used this body for work.”
“Where do you work?” Will asked.
“At Metamorphoses, the same restaurant Sophia works at.”
After Savannah and the boys had stowed their luggage, everyone except Erin and Caleb, who were fixing supper, sat down in the living room and we talked until supper was ready. The washing machine and dryer were an almost-constant background all that evening, and when the dryer would stop, Meredith would get up and race to the laundry room, with Caleb rushing there from the kitchen, to see who could get there faster and get their own things in the washer next.
I couldn’t let on that I’d already “met” Savannah and Aiden, but I pretended when necessary that Meredith and Sophia had told me a lot about their cousins in advance of the visit. Mostly I stayed quiet and let the Ramseys talk. Eric and Vanessa bragged about how Will’s painting of Savannah in centaur form giving Aiden a ride had won second place at a local art show, and about the science project Savannah was working on. At some point it came out that back in August, Will had tried to use the Venn machine again for the first time in months, and it had worked.
“What all have you venned into since then?” Sophia asked.
“Dogs, cats, taurs, human forms with extra arms and sharper senses... I kept the sharper vision for my long-term venn.” He seemed like he was about to say something else, but glanced around and decided against it. Meredith came back from the laundry room and sat down.
Savannah spoke up: “And for the trip up here, he venned into a doll like me so we wouldn’t have to stop at the restroom as often. So did Mom and Dad.”
Aiden pouted at being left out. His mom patted his hand.
“Where did y’all change back?” Justin asked.
“At the library here in town,” Eric said. “I was reluctant at first, but after y’all changed into dolls for the trip to Georgia and made the trip in only five hours, we figured we should at least try it and see if maybe we could stand it for a long road trip. It made the trip faster and easier, that’s for sure, though I wouldn’t want a body like that for everyday.”
That was surprising to me, since last year Savannah had said her parents had barely used the machine except to make themselves younger and healthier. Probably the North Carolina Ramseys were rubbing off on them, or maybe it was their kids’ example.
“Once Aiden’s old enough,” Sophia said, “you can get a friend to venn all of you and your luggage into slips of paper that they can mail to where you’re going. I’m going to do some traveling like that after I graduate and before I start college.” She’d mentioned some plans like that to me and her parents, who were not entirely sanguine about her mailing herself to online friends in California, Ontario and Connecticut.
Vanessa nodded tentatively. “That would save a lot of money over a car trip, but it would take an extra day both ways even if you use FedEx, and I’m not really comfortable with the idea of a completely inanimate venn. There’s so many things that could go wrong...”
“It’s not for everybody,” Sophia said, glancing at me and Meredith, “but you should try it sometime. And don’t assume you hate inanimate forms just because you don’t like the first one you venn into.”
Caleb came and told us supper was ready, and we ate. After supper, we sang “Happy Birthday” to Meredith, she blew out nineteen candles on a tray of brownies and opened her presents. I gave her Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s new novel and she got several books, pieces of jewelry, and other nifty things from her relatives.
Then several of us played Scrabble at the dining table, while others played video games or card games at the card table set up in the living room. Vanessa won by a small margin over Meredith, with most of us a lot farther behind.
At this point, I realized it was well after dark, and I still hadn’t changed over from my turkey-girl body into something more comfortable to sleep in. I’d planned to go change earlier, but I’d wanted to be there for Meredith’s birthday celebration, and that wound up being later in the evening than I expected. I tentatively asked if Sophia would go to the library with me and venn me into my everyday dragon body, but Erin suggested we wait until morning.
After another game (where Meredith won, and I came a close third to Vanessa), Eric and Vanessa said it was Aiden’s bedtime, but that Savannah could watch a movie or something with her cousins if she was in bed by eleven. We all went and got dressed for bed; Meredith and I both used her bedroom, keeping our backs to each other as we changed. After Meredith and I had our nightgowns on, Meredith called Hunter and had a longish conversation with him while Desiree and I went down the hall to Sophia’s room to hang out with her and Savannah for a while.
“This is my girlfriend Desiree,” I said.
“Hi, Savannah,” Desiree said.
“Awww!” Savannah squeed. “She’s so cute! And you get to snuggle her without Uncle Justin and Aunt Erin knowing about it?”
“No, they know about me,” Desiree said.
“But why are you venned into a triceratops plushie now?” Savannah asked. “Do you not have family to spend Thanksgiving with?”
“No, my other self is at home, and she’ll eat Thanksgiving dinner with my sister and Grandma and Aunt Monica and everybody. But me and Lauren split in two so we could spend more time with each other while my other self is at college.”
Savannah had heard of splitting, but didn’t know much about it and had a lot of questions, which Sophia, Desiree and I answered as best we could.
“Has somebody done a video about it, like those videos about venning into animate dolls you did? I looked around when I first heard about it, but couldn’t find much.”
“Huh,” Sophia said. She opened her laptop and checked several search terms, and didn’t find much either. “You two should totally do a video about splitting,” she said to me and Desiree. “I could help you with the filming and editing.”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh, I guess we’ll talk about it with Jada? I’m not sure we’re the best people to do it.”
“The only video I found just talks about the technique, and it was kind of confusing,” Savannah said.
“Your video could talk about how splitting’s helped you stay closer together with a long-distance relationship,” Sophia said. “Plus, you know, explaining the basic technique more clearly than that other guy.”
“I’m all in!” Desiree said eagerly. “If it’s okay with you?”
“I think it’ll be fine,” I said. “If I get camera jitters, we can just do multiple takes until I get used to it, right?”
We talked some more about what it felt like to split and merge, and of course Savannah wanted to try it when they went to the mall Friday.
“Are you going shopping with us?” she asked me.
“No, I’m working a few hours in the morning and early afternoon and then I’m hanging out with my girlfriend in the evening. I’ll probably be around here to hang out for a while in between, if you’re back from the mall by then.”
Around that time, Meredith got done with her conversation with Hunter and joined us. We watched a short movie, going to bed about half past ten.
