Gender Panic and Other Stories

License

These stories are released under under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The cover is based on an image by Anastacia Cooper on Pixabay, released for free commercial and noncommercial use under the Pixabay license. Check out their other fine work.

Introduction

This collection includes almost all of my original short fiction (not including fanfics[^*^](#Other Recent Stories) written or completed since my previous collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories, was released in 2018. It also includes two short novels. For the most part, I’ve ordered them with short works alternating with longer ones, though the two novels are placed at the end.

I had a couple of bad health scares in 2022, and wasn’t sure I was going to make it. After that, I decided to focus on finishing as many works in progress as I could, and getting them out where people could read them, prioritizing that over starting new stories. As of today (14 August 2023), I’ve finished the final drafts of all the stories I’ve completed since then, and I’ll spend the next few days finishing up the formatting of this collection before going to work on a new superhero story.

I’ve been posting my stories online since 2007, but a lot of my earlier stories were flawed due not only to my inexperience as a writer (that may still be true of the stories in this collection), but due to my muddled and imperfect understanding of my own gender, and of gender and sexuality in general. In short, they were too much influenced by the terrible gender-bender TG stories I had read reams of by then, with their tropes of involuntary transformation (exonerating the reader and main character from the stigma of choosing to be a different gender), compulsory heterosexuality (the main character must be straight both before and after their transformation), and so on – even though I was often trying to subvert certain other tropes that I was more consciously aware of, like having the main character get stuck in a different body due to a diabolus ex machina plot twist.

In August 2019 I was invited to join a trans writers’ Discord server, and I learned a lot from the people (mostly trans women and non-binary people, plus a handful of trans men) who have frequented the server over the years. It’s due in large part to the discussions on that server that the stories in this collection are mostly if not entirely free of the bad tropes that I unthinkingly included in many of my earlier stories, and particularly due to the feedback I got from the other server members that many of these stories are not worse than they are. They were also extremely supportive during my severe illnesses last year. I’ve thanked individual beta readers in the afterwords to particular stories, but this collection as a whole is dedicated to the members of the Secret Trans Writing Lair, past and present.

Overview of the stories

All the stories in this collection have transgender themes of one sort or another, but readers may wish to know a little more about how those themes are dealt with in particular stories before starting. This section will necessarily contain some spoilers for the stories, as will the following Content Warnings section; you may wish to skip them if you want to come to the stories cold, and if you’re fine reading about characters of any gender and orientation.

The main characters of A Girl, a House and a Secret, By Strange Ways, Armored, Unstuck, The Etiquette Teacher, Carpet-Bound, Nine Months and Counting, A Post-Scarcity Christmas and Cataloguing, Casting and Cracking are explicitly trans women, and several of those have additional trans characters in addition to the viewpoint character.

The main characters of Gender Panic, Workaround, Race to the Altar and The Accidental Detective are different flavors of non-binary.

One of the main characters of The Wakened Princess is a trans man.

The main character of Misteleported is cis, but there are secondary trans characters and the story deals with trans themes such as dysphoria and gender policing. The gender identity of the main character of Two First Times is not overtly stated, but I think they can be read as trans. The main character of Smart House AI in Another World is arguably trans, and there are two unambiguously trans girls among the other major characters.

Gender Panic, Armored, The Etiquette Teacher, Nine Months and Counting, Smart House AI in Another World and Cataloguing, Casting and Cracking are egg-hatching stories, while the others pretty much all begin with a character who knows they’re trans, though they may not know the terminology and may not have begun transitioning yet.

Workaround, Race to the Altar, Unstuck, Smart House AI in Another World, Two First Times, The Etiquette Teacher, A Post-Scarcity Christmas and The Wakened Princess have a fast or instant magical or high-tech transition; the others involve a slower transition (if still a fair bit faster than what’s possible with our real-world medical technology, as in Cataloguing, Casting and Cracking).

Instead of describing the main characters of the various stories as straight, lesbian, bi, ace, etc., I’m going to adopt a more limited description, especially since in some of the shorter ones, or ones where the plot simply didn’t have room for romance, we don’t get a full picture of the main character’s sexuality – the reader might know they’re attracted to this particular person, but get no information about whether they might or might not be attracted to other types. So:

The main characters of A Girl, a House and a Secret, By Strange Ways, Misteleported, The Etiquette Teacher, The Accidental Detective,’Nine Months and Counting, and A Post-Scarcity Christmas" are attracted to women.

The main characters of Workaround, Race to the Altar, and one of the main characters of The Wakened Princess are attracted to both men and women.

The main character of Cataloguing, Casting and Cracking is asexual, but forms platonic relationships with women; probably the main character of Smart House AI in Another World and the other main character of The Wakened Princess are ace as well, but it isn’t made explicit.

Other Recent Stories

I’ve also written several fanfics set in D.K. Fenger’s Trust Machines universe in the last few years. I’ve released a collection of them in .epub and .pdf on my DeviantArt. It won’t go up on ebook retailers like this collection, as the contents are fanfics, but you can download it from DeviantArt and give it to your friends.

Content Warnings

A Girl, a House and a Secret: nightmares, brief discussion of body parts, mention of pregnancy, rejection by family

Workaround: involuntary transformation, subverted comphet

Gender Panic: transphobia, dysphoria, discussion of body parts and bodily functions

Race to the Altar: nudity, sex (not described in detail)

Armored: gender dysphoria, gender policing

Misteleported: gender dysphoria, panic attacks, gender policing, traumatic injury

Unstuck: involuntary transformation

Smart House AI in Another World: discussion of erectile dysfunction, low-tech gender confirmation surgery

Two First Times: sex, not described in detail; involuntary transformation

The Etiquette Teacher: bodily functions, transphobia, rejection by family

The Accidental Detective: discussion of terminal illness and death, traumatic injury, self-harm, memory loss, mention of body parts, rejection by family

Nine Months and Counting: transphobia, internalized transphobia, mind control, traumatic injury, involuntary transformation, false pregnancy, parasitism, nudity, discussion of body parts and bodily functions

The Wakened Princess: brief nudity and mention of body parts, nonconsensual kissing, capital punishment, police persecution

Cataloguing, Casting and Cracking: transphobia, internalized transphobia, hate crime (vandalism), dysphoria, bad breakups, rejection by family, discussion of religion, religious trauma

A Girl, a House and a Secret

Of course I wasn’t fired because I was trans. No, it was for completely unrelated reasons, as anyone at South Taine Elementary or the Taine County school board would tell you. Besides, Georgia is an at-will employment state, so even if they did fire me for being trans, it would be perfectly legal.

My completely legal and unprejudiced firing aside, I had to find a new job, and I didn’t have the money to move to a less transphobic area right now. I started applying for jobs at schools in the more liberal cities like Athens and Atlanta, despite how long the commute would be until I could afford to move, and considered changing careers, at least temporarily, until I could save enough money to move somewhere more accepting.

Not surprisingly, not many schools were hiring in the middle of the school year. A month went by, and another, and another, and I still didn’t have anything. I was going to have to choose between rent and a full load of groceries – or giving up and moving in with my parents, which might be worse.

And then I got a letter from a lawyer’s office. For a moment I was terrified that someone was suing me, maybe a parent of a child I’d taught in the short time between getting outed and getting fired. Then I daydreamed that I was being informed of an inheritance – not that I knew of any rich relatives, but who does know all the people they’re related to? Not me.

Then I opened the envelope.

Dear Ms. Brand,

I am writing to inform you of a job offer from my clients. They wish to hire a full-time teacher for their disabled eight-year-old child. They happen to have heard that you are recently out of work, through no fault of your own, and suggested that I offer you the job before posting it publicly.

My client is prepared to offer a competitive salary, plus room and board and a budget for teaching materials…

I was on the phone with the lawyer, Leon McKay, a minute later, and on my way to his office for an interview an hour later.

Dietrich & McKay was across the street from the Taine County courthouse. I was pleasantly surprised at the friendly reception I got; their secretary didn’t misgender me once during the fifteen minutes I spent waiting, nor did Leon McKay once I was ushered into his office. He spent half an hour asking questions about my experience and job history (four years teaching third grade), the subjects I was most enthusiastic about teaching, (math and science), whether I’d ever taught any disabled children (several), and so forth. Then he pulled out a thick folder and started explaining the NDA.

You may not discuss the child you are teaching, their family, or their home at any time, during the job application process or employment period or at any time afterward, whether in person, in writing, by phone, on the Internet, or any other means of communication, he said. The family cares deeply about their privacy and the privacy of their child, and you will not be allowed to breach it in any way.

That seemed a little extreme, but I could readily imagine circumstances that would make it make sense. If one of the parents had a stalker, they’d want to avoid anyone finding out where they lived, or if the child was a former actor or musician before they got disabled, they’d want to avoid reporters descending on their new home like locusts. But odds were they were just rich and eccentric. Rich went without saying if they could afford to pay a full-time salary for a live-in teacher; I wondered how many other servants they had.

"What can I say to my friends and family? Can I tell them I have a job as a tutor for a disabled child, without specifying their disability, name, age or gender?"

Or where they live. Yes, you may.

That’s acceptable, then.

I read through the NDA carefully, and it was basically the same as he’d outlined but in more detail with a bit more legalese. I bit my lip, thinking. Signing the NDA didn’t oblige me to take the job, I decided. It just enabled me to find out more about it. I could always turn it down if the situation gave me bad vibes. I initialed and signed.

After I was sworn to secrecy, McKay gave me the address of the place, along with a photocopy of a hand-drawn map, and told me he would call me shortly to let me know what time my second interview would be. I got that call fifteen minutes after I got home: tomorrow at ten.

I was encouraged. I hadn’t expected to find anyone local who would hire a trans woman, but here I’d actually been sought out based on someone hearing about my unjust firing. Well, local – it was up in the north end of Taine County, almost forty minutes’ drive away. Taine County was long and narrow, with its southern end in what could generously be called the remote outskirts of metro Atlanta, and its northern end well into the Appalachians.

I plugged the address into Google Maps and ran into my first problem; it wasn’t there. The road the address was on wasn’t even there. Back when I lived in the Atlanta suburbs, I used to have that problem sometimes with new-built subdivisions, but I didn’t get the impression that was the case here; there weren’t many new subdivisions in Taine County, and none, I thought, in the northern part of the county.

I tried searching for the other roads on the hand-drawn map, and found them, then compared the Google Maps view with the map to figure out where the house was. It seemed straightforward enough seen that way, and I was able to pick a spot near the house and get an estimate of travel time that way.

So the next morning, I put on my best blouse and skirt, left my apartment at nine-fifteen, found my way to the neighborhood on the map… and promptly got lost. It didn’t help that, despite the forecast, the weather got bad right around the time I reached the area on the map; the rain was pouring down hard enough that it was hard to read the road signs or recognize landmarks, and I’m sure I missed some turns. When it was five minutes to ten and I still hadn’t found the road the house was on, I pulled over and tried to call ahead and let them know I’d be late, and maybe ask for help. No reception, not surprising given the storm. So I got back on the road and kept trying to find the place, and fifteen minutes later, finally found the road the house was supposed to be on.

It was a dirt road, winding up the side of a mountain, muddy with the sudden heavy rain, and I drove about five miles an hour, peering through the downpour at the house numbers on the mailboxes. I found my destination a few minutes later and pulled into the driveway, which wound through dense woods to a wide clearing around a big, rambling house with a long porch, a single SUV in the driveway, and a tire swing. I parked as close to the house as I could get, picked up my briefcase, and dashed through the rain to the porch steps, getting instantly soaked to the skin.

When I rang the bell, the door was opened almost immediately by a white woman a few years older than me in an old-fashioned ankle-length dress with puffed sleeves.

Miss Brand? Come in, the bathroom is this way, I’ll get you some dry clothes. I’m so sorry, I should have scheduled the interview for later, I should have known… Goodness, where are my manners? I’m Patience Oldcroft.

Pleased to meet you, I said, shivering as I followed her to the bathroom. I closed the door behind me, found some fluffy towels in the closet, and started undressing and drying off. Patience knocked on the door a couple of minutes later and passed me a dress similar to her own, as well as fresh undergarments, while I held the door slightly ajar.

I was wondering what she’d meant by I should have known. The forecast had been sunny with 5% chance of rain through most of the day, and a slightly greater chance toward evening. I dismissed it, though, being occupied with drying off and getting dressed, and nervously psyching myself up for the interview. I’d only had a brief glimpse of the dimly-lit front parlor as I rushed through to the bathroom, trying not to drip on the hardwood floors too much, but it had looked like the furniture was old and sturdy, with a lot of interesting books and bric-a-brac on various surfaces.

Once I was dressed, I stepped out of the bathroom and looked around for Patience. In here, she called, and I followed her voice to the front room, where she was sitting on a kind of narrow sofa. You can sit anywhere.

I sat in one of the straighter wooden chairs across from her, and tried to look as professional as possible in my borrowed dress and sock feet. It helped a little that Patience was in sock feet as well.

Well, she said, Mr. McKay told me you seem to be just what we’re looking for. I apologize again about the weather – this place is hard enough to find when the weather cooperates. She laughed nervously. But you’ve made a good impression so far. I just have a few questions, and then you can meet Essie, and if she takes to you, you’ve got the job.

Okay. I look forward to meeting her.

Some of these questions may seem odd, she began, and, I don’t know, possibly not legal for an employer to ask? Mr. McKay advised me not to ask you certain personal questions, but believe me, my motives for doing so are not hostile. I just want what’s best for Essie.

That set off alarm bells, but I really needed the job, so I nodded encouragingly and said, Of course.

How long had you known you were transgender before you… came out?

That’s a complicated question, I said. I’d suspected years earlier, when I was in high school, but I dismissed those suspicions because I didn’t fit the media’s usual portrayal of a trans woman. Actually knew for sure…? It was less than a year ago. And then I didn’t exactly come out; I was outed. Someone who knew me saw me when I was going shopping down in Gainesville, in girl mode, and took photos that they sent to the PTA and the school board.

She nodded sympathetically. Have you ever worked with transgender children?

Was Essie trans? Was that why she’d reached out to hire me? Not that I know of. There were one or two kids I had vague suspicions about, but I knew better than to say anything, given the local political climate, and anyway it can be hard to tell at that age if the child doesn’t come right out and tell you ‘I’m a girl’ or ‘I’m a boy.’

She asked me a few more questions about children I’d taught, and how I’d figured out I was trans, without ever coming out and saying whether Essie was trans, or what her disability was. The rain was continuing to pound down hard on the roof and the windows. At last, she said, Well, I think you’re what I’m looking for. Now the third interview. She smiled. This way.

She led me up the stairs to a hallway and down to the farthest door on the left, where she knocked. Essie? The new teacher is here.

The door was opened almost immediately by a girl in a miniature version of Patience’s old-fashioned dress. Her brown hair was loose and shoulder-length, her eyes hazel; I couldn’t see any signs of disability, but I knew most disabilities weren’t obvious at a glance. No signs she was trans, either, but most kids her age can pass for either gender with the right hairstyle and clothes, especially ones that covered as much as that dress.

She had a nice bedroom, with a big south-facing window and several shelves full of books and toys, an intriguing mix of old and new stuff; the toys were a mix of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine toys, soldier action figures rubbing shoulders with ballerina dolls. On her queen-sized bed there was a small crowd of plushies, some of them old and well-loved and some fairly new.

Hi, Essie? I’m Ms. Brand. I’ll be your new teacher, if you’ll have me.

Are you going to go away like the other teacher? she demanded.

Patience said, We had another teacher who quit after a short time. Essie was very upset about it.

I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon, I said. I hope I’ll be your teacher for the rest of the school year, and probably for another year or two after that. Maybe until you’re old enough to need a different teacher, someone with experience teaching middle school or high school. But let me tell you a secret: grown-ups can’t always do what they want. When I was your age, I thought grown-ups could do anything they wanted – stay up late, watch any TV show they liked, eat desserts instead of vegetables. Now I know there are all kinds of pressures on me, making me do things I might not want to. But as far as I can, I’ll be your teacher for as long as you need me.

Essie nodded. Like Great-Grandpa hassles us and makes Mommy do stuff she doesn’t want to.

Essie! Patience exclaimed, looking mortified. We don’t talk about family business with strangers.

When will she not be a stranger? Essie asked. I like her.

Maybe in a few weeks, Patience said. I’ll let you know.

Okay. Essie turned to me. Can we start learning now?

If it suits with your mother, we can start right away. I have a few more questions for her, though, so we’ll need to allow time for that after our lesson? I looked questioningly at Patience, and she said:

Yes, of course. Let me show you to the schoolroom.

The schoolroom was right down the hall; it had a low table with a child-size chair and an adult chair, and a couple of bookshelves filled with children’s books (many of them quite old), a microscope, and a globe. The other walls were covered with maps, charts, diagrams, and a blackboard. A large window looked out into the backyard; it seemed like the rain had slowed to a drizzle in the last few minutes. After looking around for a few moments, I set down my briefcase on the table and sat in the larger chair; Essie sat down in the smaller one and looked expectantly at me.

I’ll let you know when lunch is ready, Patience said. We usually eat around one; is that okay?

Of course.

No, uh, dietary restrictions?

No, ma’am.

Patience left, and I opened my briefcase. I hadn’t been sure if they’d want me to start right away, but I’d brought enough materials for a first day’s lessons just in case. This is a placement test, I said. Don’t worry, you won’t be graded on it. It’s just to let me know what you already know and what you still need to learn…

Essie was a sharp kid. She finished the placement test faster than I expected, and did pretty well in most areas, being a little weak on math, but testing at fourth or fifth grade level in language arts and social studies. When I went over the results with her afterward, she volunteered that since the first teacher her mother hired had left, her mother had been teaching her American history and geography through the lens of their family’s genealogy. Then she started to say something about her great-grandfather again, but caught herself and seemed to remember her mother’s injunction.

Well, I said, it’s good to know your family’s roots. I don’t know mine any farther back than my grandparents. But since you’re way ahead on that, how about we learn some math?

She nodded eagerly, and I got some worksheets out of the briefcase.

Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches. During lunch, Patience and I discussed salary and benefits. The salary she was offering was predicated on including room and board – if I kept my apartment in Harperton, I’d be making a bit less than before I was fired, but if I moved in with her and Essie, I’d be able to put away considerably more savings for my eventual move to a more progressive state. The math seemed simple, but I asked a few questions anyway.

It’s just you and Essie here?

Yes, just us now. I didn’t ask about the implied then. She seemed to hesitate before going on: My grandfather is… down the road, and calls and drops in at unexpected times. I hope he won’t be a bother.

After some talk about use of the kitchen, and splitting the chores, I asked, Can you show me the room or rooms I’d be living in after lunch?

Of course.

When Essie finished eating, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and Patience showed me the rest of the ground floor. Apparently I could have my pick of the unused rooms, a couple of which were already furnished as bedrooms. The house had clearly been built for a lot more than two people to live in. I chose two adjoining rooms with a bathroom between them as my bedroom and office/sitting room, and then broached the other questions I hadn’t wanted to ask in front of Essie.

May I ask what exactly Essie’s disability is? I ask because it’s possible it might affect how I need to accommodate her learning –

You’ll find that out in time, she said, if you stick with the job. Suffice it to say that she can’t go to school with other children.

That was weird and off-putting. Was she ashamed of it, whatever it was? So far I hadn’t seen any signs of disability, either mental or physical, but I wondered if Essie might be slightly neurodivergent, and I wondered in turn if Patience might be ashamed of that. I didn’t want to dig into it when she’d so clearly rebuffed me, though, so I turned to my other question.

Earlier, you asked me some questions about how and when I figured out I was trans…

Oh, yes. Well, I was hoping you knew when you were a child, like Essie, but it’s not a big deal. I’m sure you can still help her if she has questions about… that sort of thing. She waved one hand helplessly as she finished the sentence.

Ah, thought so. How long has Essie been living as a girl? I asked.

About four months. She… informed me one morning before breakfast. I was surprised, but I figured out what I could and I’ve tried to be accommodating.

I’m glad to hear that Essie has such a supportive parent.

I would do anything for her.

I thought uncomfortably about my own parents, and my grandfather, and just nodded. Well. How about if I give Essie another lesson this afternoon, and then make arrangements to move tomorrow?

That sounds good.

Our afternoon lesson focused on magnetism. I had a few magnets with their north and south poles labeled in my briefcase, and let Essie mess around with them for a little while before explaining why they worked.

She had fun using one magnet to pick up another, or push it away by waving the same pole near it, for a few minutes. Then she tried something I’d tried when I was a kid, too: she held one magnet upright in her hand, north pole up, and tried to balance another magnet in the air on top of it, north pole down. She failed, of course; the magnet slid off and fell to the table, and she tried again. The upper magnet flipped over and stuck to the lower magnet. Again; it fell off. I was about to tell her it wouldn’t work, that you needed a special setup to do magnetic levitation, but then – she did it.

I sat there staring slack-jawed as she balanced an ordinary school magnet on top of a repelling magnetic field, constantly adjusting the position of her hand as the upper magnet tipped this way or that. How are you doing that? I asked. That’s amazing!

To my confusion and dismay, she immediately said, I’m sorry! and dropped the magnets like they’d burned her. She looked – embarrassed? Why?

No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong, I said. What you did was fantastic. Probably not one person in a million could do that. Could you do it again?

I’ll try, she said diffidently, but though she tried several times, she couldn’t get the magnets to balance again. I heaped praise on her nonetheless; getting that to happen even once was a feat of dexterity anyone could be proud of.

After she’d tired of playing with the magnets, I started the explanation, getting out worksheets with child-appropriate diagrams of magnetic fields and working through them with her. We knocked off for the day around four-thirty, and I said goodbye. I may see you tomorrow, if I bring the first load of my stuff over then, I said. Otherwise Monday.

Okay, she said, and hugged me. Thank you for teaching me this cool stuff!

I stiffened for a moment; in the public schools, teachers weren’t supposed to accept hugs. Too much risk of accusations of sexual misconduct. This might be even worse, given that I was going to be alone with Essie for hours every day. But after a moment, I gave in and hugged her back. I had only known her for a few hours, but like her mother, I would do anything for this precious little girl.

When I got home, I called my friend Kathy, who taught second grade at South Taine Elementary.

Hey, Jenny, what’s up?

I got a job –

Wooooooooo! she cheered.

I can’t tell you any details because of an NDA, I said. The family wants their privacy. But basically I’m going to be full-time tutoring a disabled child.

Oh! Do they live nearby?

Not too terribly far – I can’t say exactly where they live.

I was afraid you’d have to move away to find another job. Good for you.

We talked a few minutes longer, but I could barely tell her anything about my new job, and I didn’t have any other news to share, so it was mostly her sharing gossip about the other teachers and the PTA at South Taine Elementary. When I told her I was going to move in with the family of the child I was teaching, she offered to help me move, but I said I’d have to check with the family to see if it was okay – that would require telling her the address, and sharing the map Mr. McKay had given me.

How was I going to move, if I couldn’t tell anyone where I was going so they could help? I didn’t have that much stuff, but there was some heavy furniture I wasn’t sure Patience and I could move by ourselves. It wasn’t too late yet, so I called her.

Hey, I said. Just a quick question. Is it okay if I tell a couple of friends where I’m moving to so they can help? I’ve got a few heavy pieces of furniture.

No, she said after a moment of hesitation. I’ll get Mr. McKay to hire a moving firm for you and have them sign an NDA. Sorry, I should have thought of that sooner. This will probably delay your moving in until Tuesday or Wednesday.

No problem, I can commute until then.

See you Monday morning, then.

After that, I gave notice to my landlord that I’d be moving out before the end of the month, and told a few online friends the little I could say about my new job. Then I cooked supper and ate while watching a couple of episodes of The Lathe of Heaven. Finally, I worked up the nerve to call my parents.

It was not a fun conversation. Mom took the opportunity to snipe at me for not going into a more lucrative career, and criticized me for signing the NDA without getting another lawyer to examine it. When she handed the phone to Dad, he didn’t say anything overtly bad, but he said goodbye and hung up after two or three perfunctory questions.

After that, I had to take some deep breaths and count to ten before I called my brother Ethan. Telling him was much easier than telling Mom and Dad. He teased me about joining the NDA club. There’s an awesome clubhouse with a hot tub and arcade machines, but nobody’s allowed to tell you where it is. We had a fun conversation and I hung up feeling much better than I had after talking with Mom and Dad.

Saturday, I drove to the grocery store and asked if they had any empty boxes they were about to throw out. I came home with a car full of boxes and started packing. Kathy came over Sunday and by the end of the day we had all my miscellaneous small belongings packed, except for the toiletries, clothes, and dishes I’d be using between now and the move.

Monday, I drove to the Oldcroft house and taught Essie for a few hours. She was bleary and sleepy in the morning, saying she hadn’t slept well because of nightmares, so after a short review lesson on geography, I suggested she get a little nap. During lunch, Patience told me she’d gotten a call from Leon McKay; he was arranging the moving company and they would help me move on Tuesday.

After Essie’s nap, we went for a nature walk in the woods, and I taught her some basic ecology and how to identify some plants – she already knew several. We also ran across a lizard, crawling up a tree; Essie caught it and let it run up her arm before letting it go.

Tuesday, I didn’t go to the Oldcroft house in the morning, since the movers were to come at eleven. Loading up at my apartment went quickly and smoothly, but by the time we got up to the north end of the county, the weather turned bad again, though not quite as bad as it had been the day I interviewed. We had to slow down because of the heavy rain impairing visibility, and when we got the house, I got soaked coming in from my car and the movers got even more soaked going back and forth between the moving truck and the house over and over. After the stuff was all hauled into the house, Patience let them dry off and rest before they rearranged furniture to remove some pieces I didn’t want from the rooms I was taking and put my stuff in there. The previous bed from what would be my bedroom was taken apart and the pieces put into an already-crowded lumber room at the back of the first floor, along with a roll-top desk that looked beautiful but wouldn’t work as well for me as the modern ergonomic computer desk I’d brought. The storm abated about the time they finished that, and after the movers left, I shared a late lunch with Patience and Essie, and taught Essie for a short session in the afternoon.

The first night I spent in the Oldcroft house was not a restful one. It took me over two hours to get to sleep; I attributed it to sleeping in an unfamiliar space, despite being in my own bed, and to the creaking and settling of the old house, which I wasn’t used to. And when I did get to sleep, nightmares came.

I vaguely remember a dream of being chased, and another where I was hiding from something that was looking for me, but the dream I remember most clearly is almost a memory – distorted by the nightmare lens, even worse than it was in real life, but unfortunately all too solidly based on fact. I had just come out to my grandfather, and he was ranting and raving about things I won’t repeat, and telling me to get out of his house and never come back. And all the while the room was getting darker and darker, and a storm was raging outside the windows, and as much as I was afraid of my grandfather, I was afraid of going out in that storm more. And behind him, looking eagerly over his shoulder and occasionally egging him on with a Yes, yes, or Get rid of it, was another old man, much older if I had to guess from his wrinkles, and indefinably terrifying. At last, cowed into submission, I stumbled away from them and put my hand on the door to go out and brave the storm.

I woke to the sound of a loud creak and for a few moments, half asleep, I was afraid the other old man was walking around upstairs – or worse, coming down the stairs to my bedroom.

Then the door opened with another squeak and Essie stood there, blinking sleepily. I couldn’t sleep. I keep having bad dreams.

Oh, honey, I said, my heart going out to her. I’m having bad dreams too. But why didn’t you go to your mother’s room?

I knocked on the door, but she didn’t answer. She was arguing with Great-Grandpa.

On the phone at this time of night? I’d gotten the impression he was an obnoxious burden on his descendants and this furthered that impression. I wanted to comfort Essie in her mother’s absence, but it would be wrong to let her sleep in my bed.

Let’s go sit on the sofa and I’ll read you a story, I said, getting out of bed. Do you want to go up to your bedroom or the schoolroom for a book, or pick one of those? I gestured to my bookshelf, the one with mostly children’s books on it, as I turned on the lamp with my other hand.

She went over to the shelf and pulled out one book, then another, looking at the covers and titles. Then she said, This one, and held up Howl’s Moving Castle.

Okay, I said. Let’s go in the living room.

You mean the parlor or the drawing room or –?

I smiled. Yes, the parlor.

I turned on a couple of lamps and we sat down on the sofa – or davenport or love seat; I wasn’t up on all the furniture terminology I’d probably need, living in this house. I read to her until she fell asleep leaning against me. Then I carried her up to her bedroom and laid her in bed, staying with her a moment in case she woke up.

I slept better after that.

We settled into a routine. I would teach Essie for about three hours before lunch and two hours afterward, and then she’d have some time to play or read or watch TV before supper. Then, after supper most days, Patience would give Essie a private lesson about their family history. I wasn’t invited, and I used the time for my own recreational reading or for planning the next day’s lessons.

The lessons continued uneventfully for a couple of days, and both Essie and I had a restful night Wednesday. But Thursday night, I had nightmares again, though I couldn’t remember any details by morning, and when I blearily greeted Patience at breakfast, she told me that Essie had come to her in the middle of the night with night terrors and had eventually fallen asleep again in her mother’s bed. She was letting her sleep late to make up for it. I took advantage of it to get a nap myself before starting lessons with Essie later in the morning.

We were doing a history lesson – Patience had gotten Essie well ahead of her grade level on American history, but not as much on world history, especially outside of Europe. I was telling her about the history of India, and took the opportunity to tell her about the hijra, and to mention other cultures in different times and places that had a special role for people like us.

She was listening eagerly and asking intelligent questions, and suddenly she burst out, If there are people like us everywhere, why is Great-Grandpa being so mean about it?

I don’t know, Essie. Only he can answer that. But even though a lot of cultures have a place for us, when the American colonies were formed the countries in western Europe that the colonists came from didn’t. We’ve been trying to carve out a place for ourselves and finally made some headway in the last twenty or thirty years, but a lot of people, especially older people like your great-grandpa, don’t like things to change and get mad about it when other people try to change things.

I don’t like him. I wish he’d leave us alone, she said, tears starting into her eyes. Then she seemed to remember her mother’s injunction about not talking about family business in front of me, and rubbing her eyes, she mumbled Sorry.

It’s okay, I said. I know what it’s like to have your family not accept you. My parents are… sort of okay about it. Not as good as your mother, but not terrible. But my grandfather was pretty bad. I haven’t seen him since I told him I was a girl and he got mad and yelled at me a lot.

He just did that once?

Yeah, he told me never to come see him again.

I wish Great-Grandpa would do that.

Let’s hope he gets bored and finds something else to do.

She giggled and we got back to talking about the Mughal Empire.

For reasons that seemed obvious at the time, I dreamed about my grandfather again that night. He and the other old man I’d seen in my previous dream were sitting around a fire, talking in low voices, frequently glancing at me where I was tied up and struggling to get loose. I was terrified of what they were going to do to me, but I woke up before they did anything more than look threatening.

I woke up about four in the morning and didn’t feel like trying to sleep again right away, in case I had more nightmares. I’d had more nightmares in my first few days in that house than I’d had in my previous apartment in over a year; I tried to chalk it up to sleeping in the unfamiliar, creaky old house, but I was already beginning to suspect there was more to it. I got up and went to the kitchen to make myself some hot chocolate, then headed back to my room to sit and read for an hour or two and clear my head before trying to sleep again. As I passed the staircase, I heard a faint voice coming from upstairs; it sounded like Patience, though I couldn’t distinguish the words. She must have both been talking pretty loud if I could hear her from downstairs, and I hoped she wouldn’t disturb Essie.

I had barely picked up my book and started reading when I heard the creaking of the stairs, and then a knock at my door.

Can you read me a story? Essie asked when I opened it. I had another bad dream.

So did I, I said. And your mom’s on the phone with your great-grandpa again, huh? What a coincidence.

It’s because – she began, and then caught herself. I’m not supposed to talk about that.

Okay, sit down and I’ll read you some more. I picked up Howl’s Moving Castle and asked her how far I’d read last time before she fell asleep, and started from that point. But I could see she was distracted and having a hard time following the plot.

Still thinking about your dream? I asked. Maybe it will help to talk about it?

Only if you tell me yours too, she said.

All right. It was kind of scary, but not one of the scariest dreams ever. I was tied to a chair in a dark room, with the only light coming from a fireplace. My grandfather was sitting close to the fire with another old man, and they were talking about me, but I couldn’t hear everything they were saying. Only I knew they were talking about me because they kept glancing my way, and sometimes I would hear them talk about what they wanted to do to me. I woke up before they did anything, though.

Essie nodded solemnly. My great-grandpa was chasing me to make me turn back into a boy. But I could squeeze into places he couldn’t get, so I hid behind a cabinet while he passed by. But when I thought he was gone, and I came out, he caught me, and then I woke up.

I should have started to realize what was going on at that point, but at the time it seemed logical for us both to dream about our transphobic ancestors when we’d been talking about them a few hours before bed.

It’s okay, I said. You’ve got a supportive mother and she’s not going to let your great-grandpa do anything to you in real life. And my grandfather can’t do anything except make a fuss at Thanksgiving.

She can’t stop the dreams, though.

Something occurred to me then. No, but maybe you can? There’s something I’ve read about, but haven’t tried very hard yet. But now that I’m having nightmares more often, it’s probably worth trying again. Maybe we could do it together? I told her what I’d read about lucid dreaming, and how I’d had some sporadic success with it back in college. So maybe we could try doing those techniques and see if it gets us more control over our dreams. If it works, we could turn the bad dreams into good ones.

Her eyes sparkled. Let’s do it!

So I set aside Howl’s Moving Castle and got out my tablet, and looked up lucid dreaming. We read about several techniques for lucid dreaming, and practiced them together; then Essie went back to bed, looking happier and more confident.

At breakfast, I told Patience what had happened during the night, and how Essie and I had started learning lucid dreaming.

I hope that works, she said. Essie has had a lot of bad dreams lately. I’ve done what I could, but it’s not much.

I wanted to ask her what was up with her grandfather phoning in the middle of the night. Why couldn’t she just turn off her phone if he kept bothering her like that? But I’d definitely gotten the impression she didn’t want to talk about it.

It being Saturday, I hadn’t planned to do any formal lessons, but Essie was eager to work on the lucid dreaming exercises after breakfast, so we did that. Patience joined in. Then we all went for another walk in the woods before it got hot.

Later, while I was in my study working on lesson plans and Patience was fixing lunch, I heard raised voices from the kitchen. From the bits I could make out, Patience was arguing with her grandfather again.

– leave her alone –

– just a child, you can’t –

– no, I won’t –

She was standing up for Essie, it sounded like. I nodded approvingly and got back to work on my lesson plans for the following week.

My sleep, and apparently Essie’s, was restful for a few nights after that. Things went pretty smoothly overall, except that when we were about to go for another nature walk on Wednesday morning, there was another surprise storm that kept us in. I punted to my next lesson and we adapted, but I wondered what there was about this place that it kept getting so many more storms than the forecast called for.

Then on Thursday, we were doing another history lesson, this time about the East India Company and the British Raj. I had slept well, or thought I had, but somehow I seemed to doze off while telling Essie about how the company had gradually taken over more and more of India. I dreamed that Essie and I were walking down a street in Calcutta in the early nineteenth century, weaving in and out of the heavy pedestrian and wheeled traffic. In retrospect, it felt like a dream – the way I unquestioningly accepted this time travel and didn’t think it was weird, for instance, and the way it didn’t occur to me to wonder how we’d gotten there. But I couldn’t remember any other dream that had such distinct smells – the smell of food cooking, of course, but mostly unwashed people and shit. There was a lot of shit, mostly from livestock but plenty from humans. Essie was better at avoiding it than I was. In the dream I was still telling Essie about the history of British colonization in India, and pointing out examples of what I was talking about as we went. Suddenly I gave a start and sat up straighter in my chair, seeing Essie leaning on her elbows on the low table, looking… guilty? I was the one who should be feeling guilty, dozing off at work.

Oh, sorry, I said. I must have dozed off. What was the last thing I said?

You were talking about the sneaky ways the British stole all the little kingdoms from the rajahs.

Oh, yeah. Well, after a few decades of that they were in charge of the whole subcontinent…

We had continued doing our lucid dreaming exercises every morning after breakfast and every evening after supper. And though they hadn’t paid off during that dream I’d had when I dozed off during the history lesson, they did work that night, when I dreamed about my grandfather again.

It started as a modified version of a happier memory; I was a little kid, and my grandfather was pushing me on the swing in his backyard. My brother was waiting his turn on the swing, and my grandmother and parents were sitting on the back porch, but so was the creepy old man who’d been with my grandfather in the earlier dreams. When I saw him, I realized I was dreaming. My grandfather seemed to see when I realized that, and he pushed me way too hard, so I fell out of the swing. Suddenly I was an adult woman, but he was suddenly much taller, as tall as he’d seemed when I was a child, kicking me and yelling slurs.

Nope, I said. I’m in control of this dream now, and I tried to change the scene. The first place that occurred to me was nineteenth-century Calcutta, and I was there a moment later. My grandparents and parents and brother were gone, but the creepy old man was right across the street from me, grinning evilly.

Go away, I said, and turned and started walking. I bought some naan from a street vendor – I don’t know if it was a historically accurate naan recipe – and kept walking, but I kept seeing the creepy old man everywhere I went.

Then I saw Essie, standing on a street corner and looking frightened. I headed toward her; she saw me coming and ran to meet me. Ms. Brand! Can you help me? I tried to get away but he keeps following me!

It’s okay, I said. We’re dreaming. Let’s change the scene, okay? Where do you want to go?

Anywhere Great-Grandpa isn’t, she said tearfully.

How about Howl’s castle?

She smiled. Yeah!

Calcutta vanished from around us and we were on a grassy hill, the lumbering castle that Howl and Sophie lived in approaching us in the distance. The creepy old man was nowhere in sight – we could see for miles in every direction and there was no sign of human habitation except the castle. Essie clapped her hands and we started walking toward the castle.

Somehow, although I knew I was dreaming and that the people in the first scene weren’t my real family, and the creepy old man was a figment of my nightmares, I didn’t question Essie’s reality. It seemed natural to treat her as her real self, and it wasn’t until I woke up that it seemed odd. We had tea with Howl and Sophie, and they showed us around the castle for a few minutes before I woke up. Mission accomplished, at least on my end; I hoped Essie would have as much success with lucid dreaming as I had.

I was awake a little earlier than I would normally get up, but not by much, so I got up and started a pot of coffee, then fixed some scrambled eggs and toast. Essie came downstairs a few minutes later and sleepily poured herself a bowl of cereal.

Good morning, I said. Did you sleep well?

Yeah, she said, brightening. I was having a nightmare, but then you were in my dream, and you told me I was dreaming, and we made it a good dream.

I startled and dropped a forkful of egg. It was just a natural coincidence, I told myself. I was her teacher, specifically her teacher of lucid dreaming; it was natural that her subconscious mind would make figuring out you’re dreaming into a mentor figure tells you you’re dreaming.

I decided not to ask for more details of her dreams, or volunteer much about mine, lest I be confronted with too much of a coincidence for my mind to grasp. That’s wonderful, I said. We should probably keep doing the lucid dreaming exercises for a while longer to make sure they sink in deep, but it looks like they’re already working. I had a good dream that started turning into a nightmare, but I realized I was dreaming and stopped it.

She nodded. Thank you so much!

One of the diagrams hanging on the wall of the schoolroom was a family tree. I’d noticed it earlier, but hadn’t really examined it until around a few days after that lucid dream. One afternoon during a math lesson, Essie excused herself to go to the restroom, and after skimming over my lesson plans again, I got up and went over to the wall to look at the maps. One of the world maps was old, from the mid-twentieth century judging from the presence of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but Patience had acquired a pretty new one at some point as well, and there were maps of the United States, Canada, and several U.S. states, mostly in the South but also including Oregon and Colorado. These maps had pins on them, usually a good distance from the nearest big city; the one on the Georgia map was in northern Taine County, about where we were. And hanging between the maps of Georgia and Tennessee was a large handwritten Oldcroft family tree.

The handwriting was small, and in several hands. I had to lean close to read it. Of course I looked first near the bottom for Patience and Essie, and found a whole crowd of their distant cousins, but not them. Every name was annotated with not just a date or dates, but a location as well, and none of the names at the bottom with no death date were in Georgia.

Then I found Patience and Essie a few inches from the bottom, and realized that they were fewer generations removed from the seventeenth-century patriarch and matriarch at the top of the tree than most of their living cousins. When I found them, I saw where Essie’s deadname had been whited out and written over with her chosen name: Esther Daisy Oldcroft, 2015- , Georgia. Naturally, I next looked to see if I could learn anything about her father, though I knew it was none of my business – I’d gathered enough from Patience’s silence to know he wasn’t in the picture for whatever reason. Her father, Roy Theodore Oldcroft, was still alive and listed as living in North Carolina. But unlike with most of the couples on the tree, there was no marriage date listed for him and Patience. And if I went back up a few levels, I found that Roy and Patience had the same great-great-great-grandparents. That squicked me out for a moment until I did the math and realized that they probably didn’t share much more genetic information than two random white southerners.

Next I looked at Patience’s parents (married in 1990, both died in 2009), and then her grandparents, looking for the grandfather who lived down the road and was causing so much trouble for Patience and Essie.

All four of Patience’s grandparents were dead. The most recent, her paternal grandfather, had died in 2020.

I was pretty sure Patience had referred to my grandfather, but maybe it was Essie’s great-grandfather on her father’s side that they were talking about? I checked. Roy Oldcroft had one of his grandmothers still living, but both of his grandfathers were dead, too.

That couldn’t be right.

Just then Essie came back from the restroom. Oh! You’re looking at the family tree me and Mommy made! It’s really neat, huh?

It is, I said, forcing a smile even as my mind raced, trying to process what I’d just learned. You and Mommy made this? How long did it take you?

She scratched her head. Several months, I guess? Mommy got together all the old family books and the new stuff like wedding invitations and letters saying ‘We had a baby!’ and stuff like that. See here, she said, pointing to the bottom layers, where I could recognize her handwriting on some of the youngest members of the family – babies born in the last couple of years in Oregon, North Carolina, and Alberta.

I let Essie ramble about how they’d made the family tree, and how their first attempts had run into trouble with not having enough room for the more prolific branches of the family until they started over with a bigger piece of posterboard, smaller handwriting and better planning, and then a story about how they’d traveled to visit their North Carolina relatives and she got to hold her baby cousin Nina, she was so cute! and… and… and… If Patience’s grandfathers were both dead, and so were her father and all her great-grandfathers, who was it that she kept having loud phone conversations with?

Was she not talking on the phone at all?

I was too dazed to resume the math lesson right away, so I let Essie keep talking about her family for a while longer, nodding and asking occasional questions whose answers, half the time, went in one ear and out the other.

If Patience was telling the truth when she said Essie had only been living as a girl for four months, she would have transitioned a good three years after her grandfather died. So why was Essie so upset about her grandfather being transphobic about her? He would have died when she was five. I told myself she probably had some early signs of being trans that her grandfather came down hard on, several years before she informed her mother she was a girl. But it must have been really traumatic if she was still having bad dreams about him three years later. Three years is forever for an eight-year-old.

No, that didn’t fit. She