Wings

After work Saturday, I sat on one of the benches out front and waited for Nathan to show up. He’d texted me over an hour earlier, saying he was about to leave Mom and Dad’s house in Durham, and I’d texted back saying I’d get off work just about the time he got to town, so he could pick me up from there rather than from the Ramseys’ house. I’d also texted him a selfie so he’d know what I looked like today.

He pulled into the parking lot about ten minutes after I got off; I recognized his car, and stood up and waved. He pulled over to the sidewalk where I was sitting with the passenger door toward me, and I got in.

“Where do you feel like eating?” he said. “I’d have been glad to eat at Metamorphoses, but I’m guessing you’re tired of eating there.”

“Not tired of it, but I am craving some more variety,” I said. “I had Thai last night, but almost anywhere in town is fine with me.”

“Let’s go to the Fisherman’s Cove, then.”

So we did. I got an assortment of shrimp cooked in different ways, and Nathan got a baked trout, and we talked about various things going on in our lives. We’d been talking on the phone every week or two, but it was great to see him in person again. He told me about Thanksgiving at Mom and Dad’s house, and I told him about my Thanksgiving with the Ramseys, and my double date with Jada, Meredith and Hunter the night before.

“You changed into little kids and played on the playground?”

“I know it sounds silly, but it’s so much fun!”

“I expect so. I meant to compliment you on your dragon form, by the way, but we dived right into talking about how Mom and Dad were doing and it slipped my mind.”

“Thanks! Jada venned me into this. She has a lot of talent for designing Venn forms. I’m still a dragon-girl more days than not, but I’m trying to venn into other things more often, since Mr. Buckholtz wants to see more variety.”

That led to me telling him about the changes at work, and him talking more about his own work at the hotel. After we finished eating, Nathan insisted on paying for supper, and then we went for a walk around downtown, talking more about Nathan’s college extracurriculars and my trip to visit Jada back around Halloween. Then Nathan drove me back to the Ramseys’ house, and we hugged each other goodbye before he left to go back to Mars Hill.

I texted Jada to tell her Nathan had left, and hung out with Meredith, Sophia and Savannah in Sophia’s room until she came over half an hour later. “You feeling ready to split?” she asked when I came to the door.

“Sure,” I said.

“Can I hang out with you while you do that?” Savannah asked.

“It’s okay with me, if your parents are okay with it,” I said. Jada nodded, and Savannah asked her mom if it was okay for her to go to the library with us and watch us split into multiple bodies.

“You can go,” Vanessa said. “Just don’t get in the Venn machine with them.” She looked apologetically at me, adding: “No offense, but we don’t even let her get in the Venn machine with friends from school she’s known for years.”

“No problem,” I said.

We all got in Jada’s car and went over to the library. On the way, Savannah asked us a lot more questions about our experiences with splitting; she’d done it for just a few hours the day before at the mall, but she wanted to know how it felt when one of our bodies was organic and the other was a living doll, what it felt like to merge a whole month’s worth of memories, and so on.

We got in line, Savannah standing with us to continue asking questions. The line was kind of long, with about eight or ten people ahead of us, but most of them were doing simple venns or picking something from their history. The last couple before us, though, took their sweet time, and (since they’d been taciturn when Savannah asked them what they were there for) we spent the last few minutes speculating on what they’d be when they came out. At last they emerged; the guy had become an avian creature of some sort, near human size, with small human-ish hands at his wingtips and a long, ethereal-looking tail like a bird of paradise. The woman was also avian, but more humanoid, with legs as thick as a human woman’s but covered with feathers, and wings separate from her feathered arms. They walked off hand-in-hand, and Jada and I went into the booth.

We quickly called up each other’s histories, picked the two-plushies forms, and venned each other. When we came out, Savannah squeed over how cute we were, and asked, “Can I hold you?”

“Sure,” I piped up with my smaller body. “We like snuggles.”

Savannah picked up and cuddled our smaller bodies while we went to the back of the line with our larger bodies. Not as many people were in line now.

“What are you gonna venn each other into?” she asked.

“I’m going back to college tomorrow, so I need to be back in my everyday body,” Jada said.

“I’ve been a dragon-girl for three of the last four work shifts,” I said, “so I’d probably better be something else tomorrow. Maybe a clouded leopard type?”

“Oooh, that’d be pretty,” Jada said. “Can I talk you into some extra arms?”

“A waitress can’t have too many arms,” I agreed. Savannah giggled.

Just then, the people ahead of us came out of the Venn machine. The taller guy had turned into a litter of puppies, and his friend scooped them up one or two at a time and put them in a big cardboard box lined with towels before hauling them off to his car. We heard the yapping recede as our big plushie selves tried to reach the Venn diagram and put a leaf in the slot — but it was no good. They were too short.

“Savannah, could you help us out?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Oh, I see.” She’d been looking at the box of puppies, and then at us in her lap, not our big selves. She scooped us up in her arms and went over the machine, where she took the leaf that my bigger self offered her, activated the machine, and put it in the slot.

“How long?” she asked.

“Three months,” Jada said.

She pushed the moon button three times and we trotted into the booths with our big selves.

Our big selves stayed in the machine for two or three minutes while Savannah wondered if her parents would let her split in two again and speculated about what she could do with two selves. Then they emerged; Jada was back in her everyday body and my big self was a clouded leopard-girl, a couple of inches shorter than my usual dragon-girl body, with two sturdy arms on the right and three delicate arms on the left. She came over to the bench where Savannah was sitting, and took Jada’s plushie form from her, while big Jada picked me up and nuzzled me.

“Let’s get home,” my big self said.

So Jada drove us home, and kissed my big self good night.

“I guess I’ll merge with you just before Christmas, Lydia,” my big self said as she got out of the car. “Have fun at college.”

“Wooo! Girls and partying!” I exclaimed as I waved back. Jada and my big self both giggled.

 

* * *

 

Savannah’s eyes were wide as she and I went inside, but she didn’t say anything about what my rascally little plushie self had said until near bedtime. After Meredith and I had changed into our nightgowns, we hung out with Desiree, Sophia and Savannah for a few minutes more until we went to bed.

“That plushie version of you was joking, wasn’t she?” Savannah asked me.

“Kind of?” I said, scratching my head. “I mean, Jada and her roommate Steph are girls, plural, but Lydia doesn’t usually get invited to a lot of parties.”

“What’s this about?” Sophia asked.

“Oh,” I said, “when we were saying goodnight to Jada and Lydia, I said something like ‘Have fun at college’, and Lydia said —”

“‘Wooo! Girls and partying!’” Desiree quoted in the exact tone of voice Lydia had used.

“Yeah, that.”

Sophia burst into giggles. “Is Steph going to have a tea party for you and her other plushies?”

I smiled. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

Savannah was still gaping at me. “Are you... is this Steph girl also your girlfriend?”

Desiree giggled and I curled my tail up uncertainly. “Kind of? I mean, kind of like Britt. We snuggle, but just that; no kissing or anything. I don’t think Steph would call me her girlfriend, though.”

“She’ll probably figure it out by the end of the school year,” Desiree predicted. “And then she might be ready for something more than snuggling.”

My blush would have been as obvious as Savannah’s if I didn’t have fur.

 

* * *

 

The next day, the Georgia Ramseys left to go home around the same time the North Carolina Ramseys left for church. I’d already gone to work by that point, saying my goodbyes to Will, Savannah and Aiden before their parents arrived from the hotel.

Jada and Britt came by to eat at Metamorphoses at the end of my shift, just before Jada headed out of town, and we hung out for a few minutes after I got off.

A few days later, on Thursday, Hunter picked me up early at the Ramseys’ house, and we drove to Chapel Hill to pick up Meredith before going on to the district courthouse in Greensboro. The evening before, I’d gotten Jill to venn me into my usual human girl form. We met up with the organizers of the demonstration in a parking lot near the courthouse, got signs to wave, and walked the rest of the way to join the demonstration. There were a few cops present, but unlike the wetlands bill protest, it felt like they weren’t particularly on edge and ready to start shooting if somebody looked at them cross-eyed. I guess a bunch of kids and parents (more than half of them white) waving signs about an athletics discrimination suit looked less scary than a bunch of weirdo environmentalists, many of them furries, scalies, and cyborgs? There were TV reporters there, too; they talked briefly to us and then interviewed Hunter for a couple of minutes, none of which ended up on that evening’s coverage of the demonstration (they mostly aired interview snippets from high-school athletes and their parents).

That night, I called Jada to tell her about the demonstration and just to chat. She put it on speakerphone so Lydia could listen in, and when I finished telling them about it, Steph said, “Hi, Lauren.”

“Hey, Steph, how’s it going?”

“Pretty okay. I’m a little worried about my Freshman Comp final, but I think I’ve got my other classes nailed.” I remembered that she was still pretty shaky on the spellings of less common words and a lot of the nuances of punctuation, even after studying written English for two years since she’d gained her sight. But in the couple of months I’d spent with her as Lydia, she’d already gotten a lot better at organizing her thoughts into an essay.

“You’ll do fine,” I encouraged her. “Hey, Lydia, have you been to any parties yet?”

Jada laughed uproariously and Lydia said, after only a moment of hesitation, “Oh yeah, we’ve had some wild parties here in the room. We had like nineteen people crammed in here a couple of nights ago —”

Steph gasped. “When was — oh.” She seemed to catch on to the joke and said, “Yeah, I invited Greg and some of the other folks from the chess club, and Jada brought in a bunch of her friends, and we venned each other into bodies about six inches tall so we could all fit, and, um... it was fun. Yeah.”

I laughed in turn. “Don’t party too hard, now.”

 

* * *

 

We hadn’t actually had any such party in the middle of the week, but the following Saturday night, Greg stayed the night with Steph (both of them venned into half-size bodies to fit her bed) while Jada and I spent the night (again, with Jada venned into a smaller form) with Karen and Jaylyn, her friends from the queer group.

First Karen and Jada spent some time studying World Civilizations, with Jaylyn (who’d taken it the year before) coaching them some in between studying for some of her own finals. Then we watched a short movie before going to bed. With Karen and Jaylyn also venned into smaller forms, there was plenty of room in Karen’s bed for us to sleep without bumping into each other. (I was almost as big as Jada’s venned form and about two-thirds the size of Karen and Jaylyn.) That didn’t stop Karen’s roommate Antonia from poking fun at us when she got back from her date right around the time we were going to bed.

“Try to keep the noise from the orgy down, okay?” she said.

I gave an un-draconic “eep!” at that, and Jada laughed.