Wings

Friday, I had quizzes or tests in several classes, and I felt like I did well on most if not all of them. I got my weekend homework done that night while Meredith was out on a date with Hunter, and the next morning, she dropped me off at the library on her way to work. She didn’t have far to go and we were a few minutes early, so she hung out with me waiting for Jada to show up.

“Sorry, but this splitting yourself in two is just too weird,” she said. “Once was enough for me.”

“Supposedly this way is actually easier to deal with,” I said. “You don’t have to coordinate two bodies with one mind, the machine splits your mind in two so one of you can operate one body and one the other, and...”

“Nope. That way lies evil duplicates and ‘I’m the real Meredith, shoot her!’ drama. No thanks.” I giggled.

Jada pulled up in her old Dodge Neon just then, got out and jogged over toward us excitedly. “Hey, Meredith! Did you change your mind about joining us?”

“No, I’m just hanging out with Lauren and I wanted to say hi since we haven’t seen each other much this semester. I’ve got to get to work in a few minutes, but I can hold your stuff while you venn.”

(The library had just recently put in a set of coin-operated lockers for people to stash their stuff in while they venned, so their keys, money, ID cards, etc. wouldn’t get distorted or subsumed in their new body. But whenever we had an extra friend with us who wasn’t venning at the same time, we would let them hold our stuff instead of paying for a locker.)

“I need to be at work pretty soon too,” Jada said, “but one of me will also be hanging out with Lauren.”

Meredith shivered.

While we were in line, we talked about what we wanted each other to make our two bodies like.

“I need one of them to be about like this, to go to work,” Jada said. “Especially the face. And it needs to be wearing black pants, to go with the uniform shirt I’ll put on before I go to work with that body. The other should be taller and heavier. It’s important for your two bodies to be different sizes if you’re going to split your consciousness in two, otherwise you might wind up with one of your bodies vanishing instead of splitting off independently.”

“Okay. Anything in particular for your bigger body? Should it have the same kind of arms and all?”

“You can surprise me, as long as it’s humanoid enough to sit in a car and drive. It can be tricky to get exactly the change you want on the second body while making the first one look like my everyday body.”

“Okay. I’d like one of my bodies to be a dragon-girl. About this tall. Um... if we’re going to be driving around, I guess I want the wings to be pretty small and high up on my shoulders so I can sit in a car seat comfortably. The face should be sort of a mix between human and dragon features — look for something that looks pretty, I guess? And I like purple scales, but other colors are fine if you can’t get one with purple scales and the other important qualities. The other body should be a human girl, shorter than me; maybe with extra arms like Britt.”

“I’ll see what I can do. Sounds awesome.”

“Do you want her to pick one of your dragon-girl forms from your history to start with, and tweak that?” Meredith asked.

“Yeah, that would be fine,” I said.

“If I’m starting with a dragon girl and adding a second human body, the human won’t look much like you do now.”

“That’s okay.”

“Hang on,” Meredith said. “I think I might have some pictures of her dragon-girl forms in my phone.” She started looking through her phone gallery for old photos from a couple of years earlier — glancing over her shoulder, I saw she had them organized in folders, not just in one huge chronological list like me. Before long, she showed us a selfie of Meredith, Sophia and me in our “dragon sisters” forms.

“Yeah,” I said. “That would be a good starting point. Or one of the more recent dragon-girls, but smaller wings, like I said.”

I wondered if Jada would recognize the dragon statue in my history. I wasn’t worried; I didn’t know Jada as well as I knew Meredith, but after a week of hanging out with her at school, I was pretty confident that she wouldn’t blab about my having lived with Meredith as an animate statue.

We didn’t have much longer to wait, and soon Jada and I were in the booths.

“History,” she said, and started looking through my old forms. If she recognized the dragon statue, she didn’t react or say anything about it. She’d only seen the statue once, the better part of a year ago, and probably didn’t remember it.

I said, “Two of her, one just like this, the other taller and more muscular.”

I looked through the resulting images, mentally eliminating ones where neither of the bodies looked quite like her current one. Of the ones where one body looked the same and the other was taller and more muscular, some looked grotesquely huge and misproportioned, and I ignored them too. I studied the remaining ones, finding several that looked good, some of them with interesting oddities, and picked one. Variations on that appeared, and after some hesitation, I picked one of those. Meanwhile, Jada had been muttering and picking through images too.

“I think this’ll look good on you,” she said. “You ready?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

We pressed our green buttons and suddenly I had two bodies again. Both were wearing dresses, the dragon-girl body an open-backed one with room for my wings. The easiest thing to do at first was to make both bodies do the same thing at the same time. So I turned with both bodies and walked out of the machine single file, then stopped once both bodies were clear of the door and it closed behind me. I glanced over at Jada, who’d done something similar, although her bodies were already moving more independently, taking different stances. Her taller body (about four inches taller than her everyday body and six inches taller than my dragon-girl body) was looking at its hands, which had six long, slender fingers; she had different hair in that body too, greenish on the left and shading toward blue on the right. Both bodies were wearing black pants, like she’d been wearing before, but the shorter one was wearing a T-shirt with a blocky, stripy abstract design and the taller one a lacy tank top.

“We’d better get out of the way,” she said. I nodded both heads and turned to walk to the side, letting the next people in line use the machine, then carefully navigated around to the back of the line.

“Here’s your stuff,” Meredith said, “but which of you is going to take it?”

“Here,” I said, reaching out with my dragon body’s hands and taking my purse.

Jada took her purse with her shorter body, then said to me, “No, it’s your smaller body that needs to be holding the purse while we go in again with our bigger bodies.”

“Oh, right,” I said, and handed the purse to my smaller body.

“Okay,” Meredith said, “I’m gonna go to work now. See you gals later.”

“Bye, Meredith,” we said with four sets of vocal cords, then giggled at each other. Meredith rolled her eyes and turned to walk toward her car.

When we got to the head of the line again, I used the body holding the purse to take a slip of scrap paper out of my purse and feed it into the machine, then set the machine for two days again. Then I walked into the machine with the dragon-girl body, and Jada did the same with her taller body.

As soon as the doors closed, I could no longer feel or see through my other body. “Whoa,” I said. “You just got cut off from your other body too, right?”

“Yeah. Now we just push our green buttons to renew the changes and open the doors — unless you want me to tweak your body a little more?”

“No, this should be fine.”

“Okay.”

We pushed the green buttons and the doors opened. Our other selves were staring at us in fascination.

“This is weird,” my smaller, softer self said as I walked out.

“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t feel as weird as controlling two bodies at once, but I think it might be even weirder once we think it through.”

“Yeah,” she agreed.

Jada’s bodies — or selves, now — gave each other a high-five, giggling at their imperfect coordination. Jada’s smaller self handed the purse back to the taller one, and we headed toward their car. I sat up front with the tall Jada, who was driving, and the ones who were going home and to work sat in back.

“So where do you work,” the four-armed me asked, “and are they hiring?”

“Food Lion,” said the Jada in the back seat. “And not really, but they’re always taking applications to have on file in case a vacancy opens up,” the one in the front seat added.

“Yeah, I applied there —” I said. The other me started to say something (probably the same thing) a moment after I did and stopped. We both giggled.

“It’ll be less confusing once there’s only one of each of us,” the Jada who was driving said. “But possibly less fun.”

It didn’t take us long to get to Food Lion on Catesville Road, and the Jada in the back seat hopped out, taking her Food Lion employee shirt to change into in the restroom. Then we returned toward the Ramseys’ neighborhood.

“You sure you don’t both want to hang out with me for a while?” Jada said.

The other me said, “I really should do more job hunting, and help the Ramseys out around the house. And I think we’ll enjoy merging memories more if we’re combining completely different sets of memories, instead of slightly different perspectives on the same events.”

“And if we stick together, we’ll be talking over each other a lot,” I said. “Thought it might be interesting to watch how that happens less over time, and see if it’s noticeable by the end of the day.”

“Something to suggest to Sophia for her research,” the other me said.

“Okay, then you’d better remind me how to find Meredith’s house,” Jada said.

“Turn left on —” we both started to say, and then I continued uninterrupted: “— on Buckley Street.” I finished giving her the directions and she parked on the street to let the other me out.

“Wait,” four arms said. “You need to lend me your house key so I can unlock the door.”

“You might as well keep it,” I said. “I’m not going to need the key to get in later — you’ll be home to let me in, if not Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey too.”

“Yeah, but I might be in the bathroom or something when you ring the bell. Hang on a sec.”

She unlocked the door, ran back to the car and handed me the key, then waved goodbye and went back inside.

“Okay,” Jada said, “where to now?”

“Um,” I said, “I don’t have a job yet, so I’d rather do something that doesn’t involve spending money. Maybe we can go to the river park and walk?”

“Sounds great,” she said. “I think I know where the park you’re talking about is, but how about give me directions?”

I hadn’t been in a couple of years, since the summer after I turned sixteen when Mom, Dad, Nathan and I had last picnicked there, so I was a little vague about the exact route. I got out my phone, looked it up, and got the maps app to give us directions. Somehow I was feeling more nervous now about being alone with Jada than I’d been when Meredith left us and we’d had extra copies of ourselves to sort of chaperone us. She’d called this a “date” during lunch Wednesday, but I didn’t think she meant a romantic date; or did she? In the course of two more chats in homeroom and two during lunch, she’d never gotten around to telling me her story like Poppy and Lisette had done, but I had gotten confirmation, from things she and other people had said, that she liked girls. I still wasn’t sure whether she was bi or a lesbian, and hadn’t gotten a clear indication that she liked me that way. And I’d been reluctant to tell her I’d had a crush on her since I first saw her (and how long ago that had been) until I had some kind of hint that she liked me back.

“So,” I said, “the other day when me and Poppy were telling our stories, you seemed like you were going to say something too, but then we started talking about horror movies instead. Did you have a hard time figuring out you liked girls?” It took a great effort to say that, but being a dragon-girl helped.

“It should have been obvious,” she said, “the way I was crushing on Shuri when we went to see Black Panther. But no, I didn’t really figure it out until a couple of years later. Cristina was over at my house for a sleepover, and we were sitting on the sofa in the basement watching a movie, and I sort of unconsciously snuggled up next to her, and — well, she noticed I was getting turned on before I did, and she just sort of gently nudged me back toward the other end of the sofa and said, ‘It wouldn’t work, Jada, I’m not like you,’ and I asked what did she mean and she said she was straight. She’d figured it out before I did, by how I looked at girls in real life and in movies and TV. Or at least she’d suspected and seeing me nip out when I snuggled up to her confirmed it.”

“Oh, wow. That reminds me of how after I came out, not to everybody but just to Meredith, she told me Sophia had guessed I was trans before I knew it myself. I guess it was because of the kind of questions I asked Meredith after she came out?”

“Yeah, you need your friends to be a mirror sometimes, or you can’t see yourself clearly.”

“Have you ever dated anybody?”

“I dated Britt for a few months last year,” she said, “back when she thought she must be lesbian because she didn’t like guys. Eventually she figured out she was ace, though, and we sort of broke up.”

I’d run across a little bit of information about asexuality when I was first doing research on gender and sexuality a couple of years ago, and I’d learned more when I lived with Carmen. “Sort of?”

“We still snuggle sometimes,” she said. “Just that. No kissing or making out. I care about her a lot, but she knows I want to date someone who’s interested in more than that.” She looked over and met my eyes for a moment before looking back at the road, and my heart skipped a beat.

“Yes!” I said, and babbled on before I could lose the momentary burst of confidence, “I’m interested in —”

The damn phone talked over me then, saying “In one thousand feet, turn left on Byram’s Mill Road.” I faltered and lost my nerve, mumbling, “if that’s something you...”

“Yeah,” she said with a smile, a little distracted as she looked for the turn, “I’d like that.”

The park entrance we were heading for was just a few hundred feet down the side road. The river park consisted of two sections a couple of miles apart, one of which had a small parking lot, a restroom, a picnic pavilion, and a boat launching ramp. The second section just had a single port-a-potty at the corner of the parking lot, and the two were connected by a two-mile-long trail winding along the riverbank, dotted with benches every quarter of a mile. There was a margin of forest, thinner in some places than others but usually at least ten yards wide and often over fifty, between the river trail and the road. There were also a couple of sculptures along the trail, one representational WPA sculpture from the thirties and an abstract thing that nobody understood that had been carved when I was a kid. (Dad had been very sarcastic about it.) It was officially the Clarence L. Woodberry Memorial Conservation Trail, named after a conservationist county commissioner who’d lived around the time of the New Deal and got the Civilian Conservation Corps to contribute the labor for the park while he brokered a deal to buy the land cheap. He’d died partway through the construction, thus the “Memorial” part of the name and the WPA statue of him at the midpoint of the trail. But everybody I knew just called it “the river park.”

Jada had never been there somehow, despite living less than seven miles away all her life, and I was delighted to be able to show it to her. We used the restroom and then set out along the trail, pausing to look at the first of the little laminated signboards describing the plants and wildlife native to the area.

“Otters!” she said. “Have you ever seen any otters along here?”

“Once when I was little,” I said. “I think I was about seven or eight? Elementary school age, anyway.”

“Sometime or other I want to venn into an otter and go swimming somewhere like this,” she said. “I’d need a friend to drive me. And preferably another friend to venn into an otter too, and play with me. Do you know if it’s safe to swim around here?”

“It’s not the most polluted river in the South, but it’s not recommended. If you’re in a temporary venn, though, whatever pollutants you come in contact with would go away when you venn back to your everyday body.”

“Yeah. Let’s do it sometime!”

We hadn’t gone much farther before we met someone walking the other way, a white couple walking their dog, a collie or at least some mix that looked mostly like a collie.

“Awww!” Jada squeed. “What’s her name?”

“Her name’s Molly,” the woman said indulgently.

“Can I pet her?”

“Sure, she’s pretty friendly.”

Jada bent down to pet her, saying “Who’s a good girl?” and such silliness, but Molly thought I smelled suspicious and whined when I got too close. I backed away and folded my wings tighter against my back.

“Sorry,” the woman said. “I guess she doesn’t understand venning.”

“No reason she should,” I said. I wondered if there were animals that would be okay with my dragon-girl body and how long it would be before I had my own place, either a house or an apartment in a building that allowed pets.

After they continued on their way, Jada shot me a commiserating glance, saying, “I’m sorry about Molly. Did that upset you?”

“A little,” I admitted. “Not too bad. The trope is that dogs are always good judges of character, and if a dog growls at somebody you know they’re a villain, but in real life dogs are cute but kind of dumb.”

“Yeah,” she said and laughed. Then: “Is it okay if we hold hands?” she asked a few moments later.

My heart started pounding harder. “I’d like that.” I slipped my scaly hand into hers.

“Your scales are so delicious,” she exclaimed.

“Did I give you taste buds in your hands somehow?” I asked, startled.

“No, but I’m kind of synaesthetic. When I pet my snake it tastes kind of like this, but not as good.” She closed her eyes for a moment and sniffed deeply, which was weird but extremely cute. I giggled.

“You have a pet snake?”

“Yes, her name is Nefertiti. She’s a corn snake, a little on the small side for her species. I’ve had her since I was ten.”

“There’s so much I don’t know about you,” I marveled.

“Well, we’ve only known each other for a week. Give it some more time.”

I felt a little troubled, and I said: “Actually...”

“What?”

“I’d met you before. You probably don’t remember it, and you wouldn’t have recognized me if you did, because it was before I transitioned.”

“Oh. When was that?”

I told her about the day Nathan and I had first used the Venn machine and how Jada and Cristina had been in line behind us, and how Nathan had venned me into a tiny dragon and she’d petted me and cheered me on as I learned to fly.

“Oh! I remember! You were so adorable!” I felt warm, and if I hadn’t been covered with scales, I would have visibly blushed. “I mean, you still are, but... now I’m babbling.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of cute,” I rejoined. Her blush wasn’t all that obvious either, but I was paying close attention. “That meant a lot to me. You were the first girl that ever thought I was cute. Even though I was a tiny dragon at the time, I had an instant crush on you after that, and I figured it would go nowhere because I didn’t know your full name or what school you went to or anything. Then I saw you at the grocery store a few months later, and...” I decided against telling her about seeing her at Meredith’s house when I was a dragon statue. “Well, I was really glad when Meredith told me she was going to tell some of her friends who have fourth period lunch to look out for me, and you were one of them.”

“Okay. But... well, my point is, even if you’d met me or seen me a couple of times before, we still haven’t known each other long. I have a lot more to learn about you, too, you mysterious girl.”

“Where do you want to start?”

“Well, we talked about horror movies and anime earlier in the week, and about books. What else do you like to do?”

“Walking like this,” I said. “In the woods or in a nice downtown area... I haven’t ever been to a big city, not any bigger than Greensboro or Raleigh, but I’d like to walk around downtown Atlanta or New York sometime. Maybe not Los Angeles; it sounds like it’s a terrible place for pedestrians. And I’d like to go hiking out west, maybe at Yosemite and Yellowstone and Redwood National Park. And I like flying. I’ve only had a good chance to venn into forms small enough to fly a few times — back before I came out, I would only get a chance to venn every few weeks at best, and sometimes it would be months, so I wanted to spend as many of those as I could refining my human girl body and my dragon girl body for when I eventually came out.”

“Did you try venning into a little bitty version of that body you’re wearing now? Could you fly like that or would it need more modifications to be aerodynamic?”

“Yeah, it’s a little clumsier than the four-legged tiny dragon form, but I can make it work.”

“Oh! I want to see that sometime. Do you think we could do that today? Maybe you could venn me into a copy of you after I venn you into that form from your history?”

“That would be fun! Maybe for our next date, though? I’m not sure how it would work if we venn again while we’re split in two.”

“I’m not sure either. I think it’s okay, as long as it’s the bigger versions of us who go in the machine, but I’ll look it up on VennWiki later.”

“And maybe it shouldn’t be on a date — more like sometime we’re hanging out with friends. Or on a double date with Poppy and Lisette.”

“I think we can make it work. I know the interface adapts to your size, so the buttons and the image bubbles are down near the floor at around your eye level if you’re tiny.”

“We’d be too small to get our purses out of the locker and get a coin out, so we’d need something else to feed the machine when we want to change back. Unless we want to stay that way for eight hours or more, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to ever let a venn expire naturally again. I’ve had to go back to my original body too many times already.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. That must be awful. But we don’t have to haul around a scrap of paper or a coin while we’re flying. We can just find a leaf.”

“Of course. I’m glad I’m dating such a smart girl.”

We walked on in silence for a couple of minutes before I said, “Uhhh... I just realized. If we’re dating, shouldn’t we tell Britt before we go any further than holding hands?” I thought a moment longer and the vague guilt I’d started feeling got worse. “Or maybe before we hold hands again.” I let go of her hand reluctantly.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Really, I told you Britt and I already talked about this. She knows sooner or later I want to find a girlfriend who wants to do more than hold hands and snuggle.”

“But...” I struggled to articulate what felt wrong. “I just don’t feel comfortable going any further until you talk to Britt about dating me, specifically, now. Not some hypothetical girl you might meet at some point.”

“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it this afternoon. Hopefully she’ll be able to hang out after a while.”

I was a little taken aback that Jada wanted to talk about it with Britt while I was present, but I couldn’t articulate my objection, so I didn’t say anything. We fell silent for a while as we passed a few more walkers and a sandbar with a few small trees growing on it. Then we came to the statue of Clarence Woodberry.

“This is the halfway point,” I said. “We’re about a mile from where we parked. Do you want to go the rest of the way?”

“Sure,” she said.

We continued on, and came upon a straight couple seemingly in their early twenties, but probably rejuvenated; they looked too young to be the parents of the eight or ten year old girl and boy with them. They weren’t walking, but standing there looking out across the river.

“There’s a heron over there,” the man said in a soft voice. We stopped and looked, and eventually spotted the Great Blue Heron in the shadows on the other side of the river. We all stood around watching it fish until it flew away.

“How long have you been a dragon?” the boy asked me as the family continued their walk. They were going the same way we were, and we walked together for a while.

“Just an hour or so this time,” I said. “I’ve been a dragon-girl like this several times, and I’ve also been a little bitty four-legged dragon.”

“She was so cute like that,” Jada reminisced.

The boy shook his head. “Dragons should be fierce, not cute. When I grow up I’m gonna be the biggest dragon that can fit in a Venn machine.”

“Rarr!” I growled. “Is that fierce enough?” The boy made a face and his sister giggled. Their parents smiled.

“But seriously,” I said, “I can’t fly with these little wings, they’re just there to look pretty. Even if I have big wings that won’t fit through doors or let me sit in a car, they won’t really let me fly. If you want to fly, you can’t be any bigger than a large bird like a condor, and it’s easier if you’re small, like a robin or a brown bat.”

“Oh,” the kids said. Then the boy said: “What if you turn into a cyborg dragon with jetpacks?”

“That might work,” I said. “I was a cyborg triceratops taur one time.”

“You haven’t told me about that,” Jada remarked. “I want to hear this one.”

“Well, the friend I was staying at the time with had a friend who was into cyborging, and they venned me into a cyborg like I described with implants to process air and take the carbon out of the CO2 and spit it out as graphite. Like the gray stuff in a pencil,” I explained as the kids looked puzzled, but I think there was more they didn’t understand besides the word “graphite.”

“That sounds great,” the woman said. “Could we really stop global warming if enough people did that?”

“I think she said we’d have to go farther than that to really stop it,” I said. “Reducing carbon emissions too, and having a lot of people venn into dedicated carbon-extracting machines for a month every year or whatever, not just going around as cyborgs processing CO2 all the time. But every little bit helps.”

“Yeah.”

A little further on, we came to the abstract sculpture. It had been carved in place by a local artist from the log and stump of an oak tree that had fallen in a storm, and then treated so the wood wouldn’t rot. The kids climbed on it and played, which was allowed; Nathan and I had done the same when we were their age. Jada and I stood nearby talking with their parents for a minute or two, and then walked on.

After we came to the other end of the trail and turned back, we met them again and passed them with a brief greeting.

“Those were cute kids,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jada said. “The girl reminds me of my little sister when she was younger.”

I told myself the first date was way too early to talk about how many kids we wanted and how we wanted to conceive or adopt them, but I was definitely thinking about it.

“I remember seeing her that time I saw you at the grocery store,” I said. “At least I assume it was your sister? She was around twelve or thirteen.”

“She’s fifteen now. I’ll show you a photo when we get back to the car if you like.”

“Sure.”

More people passed us on the trail as we got closer to the main parking lot. When we got back to the car and Jada got our purses out of the trunk, we checked our phones for messages before we started driving.

“Oh, Britt texted,” she said. “She says she’s done and could meet us somewhere. But we’re not that far from her house.” She dialed and put the phone to her ear. “Hey, Britt,” she said a few moments later, “I’m at the river park with Lauren. And I’m also at work and Lauren is also at Meredith’s house, but we’re the versions you care about, right?” She grinned and listened silently to whatever Britt was saying in reply. “Okay, I could swing by and pick you up. I think we’re like five minutes from your house... Okay, cool.”

“You ready?” she asked when she hung up.

“Sure.”

We were on the road again before she said, “Oh right, I was gonna show you a picture of Tamily.”

“No hurry.”

“You can pull my phone out of my purse and look at it. You don’t need to unlock it or anything, it’s the background image for the lock screen.”

So I tapped the button on the side of her phone and saw a photo of her (in the orange-haired four-elbowed body she’d been wearing lately) with the girl and woman I’d seen with her at the grocery store a few years ago, all wearing beautiful, colorful dresses and standing in front of an azalea bush. The image was marred with the overlay of text asking for her PIN.

“Do you... never mind,” she said hastily.

“What is it?”

“...I was gonna ask if you have any pictures of your family, but I guess that might be a sore subject, with them kicking you out or whatever.”

“I’m getting on okay with my brother and mom. It’s Dad who’s still a problem. But I’m not sure if I have any pictures of them on my phone... let me check.” I started looking through the gallery on my phone, but I’d never taken a lot of pictures with it, and apparently I’d emptied the pictures off it onto the computer just a couple of months before I ran away. There were several from the camping trip Dad, Nathan and I had taken the winter before I ran away, but mostly nature photos without Dad or Nathan in them, and there were some from the Christmas road trip — mostly the roadside scenery or the relatives we were visiting rather than my immediate family. I did find one photo of my cousins with Nathan in it, and when we got to Britt’s house, I showed it to her.

Britt didn’t live in a subdivision or in town, but on a poorly maintained rural road about halfway between the river park and Eastern Mynatt High. It looked like a fairly nice house for the neighborhood, if a bit small. There was an outbuilding almost as big as the house, apparently a garage as I realized when we got closer and saw the sign painted on its side, “Boyce Automotive.” A big white guy with four arms was bent over the open hood of a minivan and there were several other cars parked around and behind it. Britt was sitting on a bench and chatting with him while he worked, but she’d apparently washed up and changed clothes since she finished working.

“See you after a while, Dad,” she said, standing up. The big guy looked up and turned to look at us.

“Oh, hey, Jada. Who’s your other friend? Nice venn, by the way, miss.”

“This is Lauren,” Jada said.

“Hi, Mr. Boyce,” I said.

“Y’all have fun,” Britt’s dad said. “Britt, let us know if you won’t be home for supper, okay?”

“Sure thing, Dad.”

We got back in Jada’s car. I was hesitating whether to get in the front or back seat, but Britt went to the back driver’s side door, so I sat in front again. I gave Jada a mute glance, silently asking, “Are you going to tell her now?”

“Let’s go somewhere we can talk face to face,” Jada said. “Is the Forbidden City okay with y’all?”

“That sounds expensive,” I said.

“It’s not, it’s a little hole-in-the-wall Chinese place over near Catesville; they mostly do takeout, but they have a few little tables for eating in.”

“Then sure,” I said. I figured I could just eat an egg roll or some fried wonton, and if I was feeling pangs of hunger by the end of the outing, they would go away when I merged with my other self, who would probably be helping herself to leftover soup around now. (Turns out I was wrong about that.) I wondered what she was doing. I’d find out soon enough, but I had no way to ask her, as I had our phone and the Ramseys didn’t have a landline.

“Sounds good to me,” Britt said, and Jada started talking about our split consciousness experiment. She didn’t bring up dating me until we got to the restaurant, which made me too nervous to participate much in their conversation on the way there.

When we walked in and looked at the menu, the girl behind the counter, who was venned with some draconic traits although she was far more human-looking than me, said approvingly, “Very good dragon venn. I venned into a full dragon for Chinese New Year.”

“Neat! I’ve venned into four-legged dragons, but usually really small, so I could fly. Sometime or other I’d like to venn into a big dragon that barely fits in the Venn machine.”

“Be sure to get your friend to specify that you’re really flexible. Otherwise you might have trouble getting out. I heard about someone who took so long to figure out how to untangle his giant centipede body and get out that the Venn machine turned him back.”

After a couple of minutes of studying the menu, I ordered a little more than I’d planned — an egg roll and a bowl of wonton soup. Jada ordered Mongolian beef, and Britt ordered a lot of stuff — two entrees and a couple of appetizers, I think, including multiple egg rolls. She’d been doing hard physical labor all morning, I realized. We filled our cups at the soda dispenser (I’d gotten water) and sat down at the table farthest from the cash register to wait for our food to be ready. Jada sat down next to me, Britt across from us.

“This cutie wants to make sure it’s okay with you before she’ll let me hold her hand,” Jada said. I spluttered and the sip of water I’d taken sprayed across the table, fortunately missing Britt.

“Jada!” I exclaimed. “I thought you’d, you know, sort of lead up to it gently.”

“Yeah, I hoped y’all might hit it off,” Britt said, casually wiping the splatter off the table with a napkin. “Congratulations.”

I felt relieved and my wings relaxed some. Jada slipped her hand into mine, and I felt hot again but didn’t resist, squeezing her hand for a moment and then holding it loosely.

“So we should talk about how this fits with Britt’s and my relationship,” Jada said. “Is it okay with you, Lauren, if Britt and I still snuggle sometimes?”

“...Um... yeah, I guess? The way you explained it, Britt doesn’t want to do any more than that, so...”

Britt and Jada smiled, and I felt good about making them happy, though I was still slightly weirded out about sharing my girlfriend with her previous girlfriend... but just for innocent snuggling.

“Would you like to snuggle with us?” Jada asked.

“Umm...” For just a moment I pictured myself sandwiched between Jada and Britt and I felt like if I were a cartoon character, steam would be blowing out of my ears. I mentally corrected that image: Jada in the middle, with Britt and me snuggling her on either side on a big sofa. Probably while watching one of the magical girl anime that Jada had been telling me about yesterday. There, that made sense. “That... might be nice? We could try it sometime...”

“Number thirty-eight,” the girl at the counter called out. We got up and brought our food back to the table.

“So does that make us a poly triad?” Jada asked.

“I feel like I’ve heard of that but I can’t remember what it is,” I said.

So Jada explained what she knew about polyamory — she wasn’t exactly an expert, she’d just read about it — while Britt and I started eating. Britt occasionally contributed something, but let Jada do most of the talking, like she did when we ate lunch at school.

“Does that mean that you’d be my girlfriend too?” I asked Britt after Jada had finished explaining.

She shrugged. “If you don’t read too much into it? I feel like most straight girls don’t snuggle on the couch with their straight friends, even if they hug a lot.”

“Uh, maybe. I wouldn’t know.”

She shrugged again. “Anyway, yeah, we could call it being girlfriends. Even though I reckon that will mean something different for you and Jada than it does for me and you, or me and Jada.”

“Okay. Thanks for being so understanding about this.”

Britt just nodded, her mouth full again. Jada said: “We’ve talked about this a lot, what we’d do if I found someone else that was interested in more than cuddling, so we were ready for whatever. Whether you were okay with including Britt or not. But I’m glad you are.”

After that, we talked about other things for a while. I got a little more backstory about how they’d started dating. Britt’s older sister had set her up with a couple of dates with boys that hadn’t done anything for her, and she’d told Jada she wondered if she might be lesbian, although she wasn’t sure. Then Jada had asked her out, and they’d started dating.

“Then after two or three months, I figured out I was ace, but not a lot really changed,” Britt said. “We stopped kissing and Jada stopped asking me every few dates if I was ready to have sex,” (Jada blushed at that,) “but we kept doing other stuff together. Going to movies, watching anime at each other’s houses, hugging and snuggling.”

“That sounds so sweet,” I said. “I’m glad you were able to keep your relationship working like that.”

Jada reached out across the table with the hand that I wasn’t holding and touched Britt’s hand. Britt smiled around a mouthful of lo mein.

When we finished eating, Jada said: “So what do y’all want to do next? I need to pick my other self up from work at six, but we could do whatever until then.”

Britt didn’t say anything right away, and I timidly suggested: “What about if we go somewhere more private and snuggle?”

“Your house, Jada?” Britt mumbled, then swallowed her mouthful of food and said more clearly, “or mine?”

“We’d better go back to your house, Britt; if we go to mine, my grandma will want to know why I’m not at work and I don’t want to have to explain the split consciousness thing right now.”

“If you don’t explain it at some point, you’d have to always stay away from home with one self while the other one goes to work,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, I want to see how I feel after we merge back to decide if I want to do it again. I don’t see any sense in worrying Grandma about it if I’m only going to do it once.”

“That makes sense.” I started to worry, for the first time, that I might suffer some kind of backlash from integrating however many hours of divergent memories. A headache, dizziness, confusion? I should have looked this stuff up myself rather than just relying on Jada to do the research.

We went back to Britt’s house, and Britt led the way inside. Her parents were sitting on the sofa watching one of those home renovation shows. Her mom was darker-skinned than Jada, and apparently rejuvenated to her mid-twenties; she didn’t have any unusual features like her husband and daughter’s extra arms, just a strikingly beautiful face and figure, somewhat downplayed by her T-shirt and sweats.

“Hey, Britt and Jada. And, ah... Laura, right?”

“Lauren,” Britt said.

“So this is the new girl you were telling me about?” Mrs. Boyce said. “You didn’t mention she was a dragon.”

“It’s news to me too,” Britt said.

“Hi,” I said. “I like being a dragon-girl when I can, but it has its inconveniences, so I’m a normal-looking human most of the time.”

Mrs. Boyce nodded approvingly. “Will you girls be staying for supper?”

“No, ma’am,” Jada said. “I’ve got to be somewhere at six, and I need to get Lauren home.”

“All right.”

Britt led us back to her room, and we ended up cuddling on her bed with Jada in the middle and Britt’s laptop in Jada’s lap. They introduced me to Ms. Vampire Who Lives In My Neighborhood; we watched the first few episodes with subtitles.

I later realized I had only the vaguest idea what had happened in the first episode, because I was too wrapped up in the delightful sensation of cuddling with my girlfriend (girlfriends!) for the first time. Holding hands had been wonderful, but snuggling up against Jada and feeling her arm wrapped around me, stroking my wings and the scales between them now and then... it left my cloaca all squishy and my mind dazed. In between the second and third episodes, Britt got up to go to the bathroom, and once she was gone, Jada kissed me on my dragony snout. I didn’t have lips in that form, but kissing was pretty nice anyway, if not any more mind-blowing than the snuggling had been. I figured it would be even better if we both had human lips and tongues next time.

“If holding hands tasted delicious,” I asked, “what does kissing feel like?”

“Plaid,” she said. “Extremely plaid.” Then, seeing my consternation, she burst into giggles and said, “No, I’m joshing with you. It’s more visual this time, though. Kind of a blue and orange pattern, but not a grid, something more loopy and swirly... hmm.” She closed her eyes and kissed me again, then said: “Yeah, kind of like a complicated knot.”

“Are you saying I’m knotty?”

“You knotty girl!” She tried to look stern and couldn’t hold it for more than a few seconds without giggling again. It was infectious; Britt came back to a barrage of terrible rope, string, and knot puns, and started the next episode of Ms. Vampire in self-defense.