"For the love of God, Trey, shut your mouth!" I almost shouted just before we got to the door to the coffee shop. He just stared at me like I'd taken his childhood blanket away from him. (He still had that blanket, actually. He was in his sixth year of medical school and still held onto that childhood blanket.) I sighed. "Look, I didn't mean that, I'm sorry."

His face shifted into that trademark smile of his. "Nah, don't worry about it."

I rolled my eyes and pushed the door open. The coffee shop was nearly empty, as it almost always was at seven in the morning on a Thursday. We were usually the first customers, which was saying something considering how most of the twon revolved around the place. I knew that by noon, they'd have had at least a hundred fifty customers.

Trey and I sat at our usual table, in the corner furthest from the door, by a glass shelf of old fifties and sixties cars. Trey had a fondness for cars, and I liked the fact that it was out of the way. I hated it when people watched me. I pulled out my laptop and set it down on the table. I'd needed to get some work done on my blog and breakfast was the perfect time to do it.

"The usual, Dani?" Brenda asked when she got to the table. She was chewing gum, like usual. "And for you, Trey?"

"Three eggs this time, Brenda?" Trey asked, eagerness oozing out of his mouth.

"Just pancakes," I said.

"Pancakes for Dani and the usual with an extra egg for Trey," Brenda said as she wrote it down in her little notebook. "Shouldn't be too long."

Trey leaned back and spread his arms across the back of the seat. "How's the article on the circus coming?" he asked.

I flipped him the bird. "Fuck off."

He laughed. "Oh, please, you know I'm just joking."

"Stacy's showing went just fine, I'm just not doing a great job of explaining everybody else."

"You took pictures, didn't you?"

"That's not what I'm talking about."

"Then I'm lost."

"Yeah, so am I, that's my point. It's the emotions I'm having a hard time with. I could tell when everybody was up there just what they were feeling, I should have written that down."

He reached into the complimentary bowl of pretzels on the table and grabbed a handful. "How come you two never invite me whenever you go to one of those runway events, anyway?"

I glared at him over the top of my laptop. "Because the last time we did, we found you in one of the back rooms tied up, naked, and with an apple in your mouth."

He shrugged. "Okay, but how come you don't ever partake in those things?"

"Because you know I don't like being stared at."

"Yeah, but you'd get paid to be stared at. Five minutes of awkward, five grand in your pocket. Win-win, as far as I'm concerned."

I reached for some pretzels. "Whatever. I just like reporting on them. That's a good enough living for me."

He leaned against the table. "Fine. Not every girl likes showing herself off in front of a bunch of people. I remember back in high school, you wore hoodies in the summer."

That was a phase I hadn't entirely grown out of. I didn't wear hoodies every day anymore, but I was still self-conscious in public. Not the only thing about me classified as a "phase", either, but it's the only one I accepted as one.

I got back to the blog and kept at the writing, glancing every so often at the pictures I'd taken to see if I could remember what I'd noticed about everyone the night before. A few of them were easy, I could see the excitement or terror in their eyes. Others, I needed to look closer at things like their posture or their stance. Even then, there were some I couldn't quite place.

Three minutes later, our coffee arrived. I took mine with cream and sugar, Trey took his with ketchup. I thought it was disgusting, but I wasn't the one drinking it, so I didn't say anything. I'd tried it once, and told him I'd never let him touch my coffee again for as long as I lived.

Five minutes after that, our food arrived. I just had a plain stack of five pancakes (the cook, Brenda's husband Alphonse, knew I liked extra pancakes) that I poured more syrup over than was actually necessary. Trey had a stack of waffles, four sausages, three strips of bacon, three eggs and an orange. The orange was apparently to trick himself into thinking he ate healthy.

Twenty-five minutes later, we finished eating and I actually managed to finish my blog. It didn't take long when I got some food in my belly.

"Hey, Dani," Trey said as I was slipping my laptop back into my bag.

"What?" I asked.

He looked... Unsure of himself. Like he was about to tell me something but didn't know how. I prayed he wasn't going to ask me out. Just because he hadn't been the worst boyfriend in my life didn't mean I wanted to get back together with him.

Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled something out. "Don't ask any questions, just..." He took my hand and gave me the thing he'd retrieved from his pocket. "Use it, okay? Use it and make that dream of yours come true."

I felt my eyebrow raise. "What?"

"Ah ah, I said no questions. Just go home and use it." After that, he dropped a $10 bill on the table and left without me. He never left without me. Something was wrong about that.

Brenda appeared beside me. "That boy of yours get out already?" she asked.

"Yeah." I looked down at my hand and saw that the thing he'd put there was a small, leather-bound book about the size of a wallet. I'd never seen it before in my life, and Trey and I did almost everything together. So where had it come from?

And what did he mean about my dream?

***

How had he known?! I couldn't understand how he'd known, how he even had the possibility of knowing.

I looked at the leather-bound, wallet-sized book that Trey had given me. Use it, he’d said, and make that dream of yours come true. I hadn’t known what he’d meant until I opened it up and found the spells inside. Spells. Real, working spells - working magic. Where had he found it? How did he know it worked? I had tried it the minute I got home, managed to make a candy bar appear on my desk with little effort, though it looked like it already had a bite taken out of it.

How had he even known about my dream?

Then again, it wasn’t exactly a secret that I didn’t feel right the way I was. Some men looked at women and saw something that excited them, that got their dicks hard and their breath shallow. I looked at women and saw exactly what I hated about myself. I hated my female body, and yearned for the one that I thought should have been mine.

But, still, I had never told Trey my dream, and here he was providing me with a means of allowing it to come to pass. He’d even dogeared the page with the correct spell.

I picked up the book and ran my hands over the cover. Would I use this? Should I use this? It would solve every problem I had, and let me live the life I wanted to live. If I used the spell that Trey left me, I’d be exactly who I wanted to be, as opposed to who I was stuck as.

I set the book back down on my desk and walked over to my mirror. The reflection was beautiful, she was perfect in every physical way imaginable, but I hated her. I hated the soft green eyes that resembled my mother’s, and the full lips that the cruder men around me talk about how they should be wrapped around their shafts. The breasts, which immediately drew eyes my direction because they were so large. Even though I barely shaved my legs, they were still frequently mentioned as one of my best features by my older sister.

The reflection was beautiful, and I hated looking at her, I hated knowing that it was a reflection I was looking at rather than simply a woman I’d met.

I turned away from the mirror and left my bedroom. The living room of the apartment was just another reminder of what I didn’t like. Stacy, my roommate, was a fashion designer, and she peppered the apartment with drawings, and magazine articles about her work. She’d asked when we moved in if I minded it all, but back then I’d just been closer to indifferent about what I was.

I picked up one of the magazines that Stacy had left on the coffee table and read the only article that had interested me. Adam Coulson, a trans man who grew up in the fashion world and lived out his dream of becoming a male model. I didn’t want to be a model, but Adam was still an inspiration to me.

Would he have gone through with using a magic spell to change himself into a man? The article made it seem as though he wouldn’t. But at the same time, I can’t understand why he wouldn’t. Were the surgeries and treatments really worth it to become a feminine looking man that no one would take seriously?

I hugged the magazine to my chest and felt tears begin to well up in my eyes. Why was this so complicated? I wanted to be a man, and I had the means to do so, but I just felt as though I couldn’t go through with it. It didn’t matter how I became a man, so I should just do it!

I threw the magazine at the wall. It was upsetting me, confusing me. I knew what I wanted, what I needed, so why wasn’t I doing it? I wasn’t right as a woman and I needed to be a man, there was only one clear option, beyond all shadow of doubt.

Except, that going the magic route would just shift me from one form to the other, painless. To everyone else, it’d be like I was a completely different person, they’d see no evidence of how much I hated being the woman I was born as. My parents saw none, no matter how much I told them. It’s just a phase, dear, my mother would say, but I knew that wasn’t the truth. She had to know it wasn’t the truth.

And so I returned to my bedroom and looked at that leather-bound, wallet-sized book yet again. Magic would grant my wish - in every sense of the word - and give me what I wanted, but the other way would as well. Magic would make me a man, but transitioning would explain why I was a man.

I picked up my phone and dialed Trey. “I don’t know what to do,” were the only words I spoke.

"I can't make the decision for you, Dani."

"Where did you find this thing?"

I heard him sigh. "It was in an old box in my grandma's attic. I asked her about it, and she mentioned you and your dream."

"How did she know?"

"I dunno."

I hugged my legs to my chest. "Did you know before that?"

It took him a moment to answer, then he said, "Sorta."

"You didn't say anything."

"I know. You never said anything to me about it, so I figured it was something you weren't ready to tell anybody about. I could tell you weren't comfortable the way you were, but it wasn't my right to confront you about it."

I wanted to yell at him. You could have supported me! But that was exactly what he'd done. Even I had been certain my desire to be male had been nothing but a phase for the longest time. Whatever he could have done otherwise would probably have cemented that, driven me to "accept" a life I hated. He really had supported me at a time I didn't even know I needed it.

"Dani?"

My voice was little more than a whisper. "I'm here."

"If I were you, I'd use that spellbook, I'd change myself and become who I needed to be."

"I want to. I want to so bad... But then what? Then I'm a guy and nobody sees the real me. They see the me I wanna be, but not how strongly I want to be that."

I could almost imagine him opening his mouth to say something, then closing it. Finally, he said, "If you're not gonna use it, then you should probably start hormone treatments as soon as possible. You deserve better than to keep living a life you hate."

I wanted to just say "Thank you!", hang up and rush over to the hospital he was studying at, but I couldn't do that. He seemed to see what I needed to do, I could see what I needed to do...

I just couldn't figure out why I couldn't do it.

***

"Yo, Dani!" Stacy shouted as she came into the apartment. "Hey, Trey called me!"

I sat in the bathtub, not really moving. I'd been soaking in there for at least an hour since I hung up with Trey. Long baths were a comfort thing for me, something I used to think and comprehend. Thinking and comprehension was what I needed right now. I need to weigh the pros and cons, to decide which one to go with.

The one thing I was certain of was that after today, I was going to be a man.

"Hey," Stacy said, walking into the bathroom and sitting down on the toilet.

Stacy was an interesting creature. One look at her, you'd think she was still a high school student. She dressed like a teenager, in a black tanktop with blue sides and a denim half-skirt over a pair of nylon pants that hugged her so tight you could see the outline of her underwear. He hair was a mix of her natural blonde and a host of other colors like blue, purple, orange, pink and green. There were matching gems in her nose and belly button and her fingernails were each painted different colors.

She cleaned up nice, though. The teenager-ish person in front of me would be replaced with a regal beauty whenever she had to model an outfit on a runway or in a photo shoot. It would be difficult to believe they were even the same person if I hadn't seen her make the transformation in person.

"Trey called me," she said, "told me about his little magic book and your problem."

I sighed. "Have you known for awhile, too?"

"Since the day we met."

I rolled my eyes. "And you didn't say anything... Why?"

"Because it wasn't my decision to make for you."

I sighed again. "I guess that makes sense." I looked up at her. "What do you think I should do?"

"Surgery."

"Not magic?"

"No."

"Why?"

"Because it's the easy way out. Also, because you'd have to go through with a new ID, new birth certificate, new social security number, et cetera, et cetera."

I raised an eyebrow. "Okay, how do you know all that?"

"Because I've seen people changed with magic before, duh."

Honestly, after learning magic was real in the first place, everything should have been par for the course now, but that was a surprise. "What?"

"I'm a witch, we don't exactly advertise." She leaned back. "Reality warping is hard, and the average person can't do it at all, so to the world at large, Dani would still legally exist and Daniel - or whatever the hell you decide to name yourself - would be some new person that doesn't legally exist."

For whatever reason, I was still hung up on the whole "Stacy can do magic" thing. "So, you can do magic? Can you warp reality?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes, but not easily and I haven't done it in a few years. Back when my little brother became my little sister, actually. But that's not important, the important part is, you should do hormone treatments and go through with the surgery."

I hugged my knees to my chest. "That's what I've been trying to tell mysefl all day, but I can't deny the fact that just magically changing myself into a guy is enticing."

She walked over to the tub and knelt down beside me. "Dani, you heard my suggestion. Ultimately, do what you need to do." She stood up and opened the bathroom door. "Trey wants you to call him back ASAP."

When the door shut, I sat back in the tub. The friend studying to be a doctor suggested magic, the friend who's always apparently been magic suggest surgery. God, the whole thing sounded stupid. And the worst part was I didn't feel I was any closer to actually deciding.

There were times when I legitimately wished my feelings were just a phase I'd grow out of.

***

I sat down on my bed and picked up my phone. I should call Trey. I should call somebody. But I don't. I can't. Trey wouldn't try to talk me into using the spellbook, I knew that. But at the same time, I almost wanted him to. There was a nagging part of me that wanted to take the easy way out and didn't care about the hurdles I'd have to face doing it. After all, challenges from life were an important part of transitioning, I'd have to deal with them anyway.

But taking the easy way out would just be pushing the challenges away to face them later, while going the slow route with hormone treatments and surgery would put them front and center and force me to deal with them head on.

I stared at the phone again. Call Trey, I told myself, call him now.

Thankfully, I didn't need to. He called me. "Hi, Trey," I said.

"Hey. Did Stacy tell you I talked to her?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. How you doin'?"

"I know what I'm going to do, I just don't know how to do it."

For some reason, I could hear relief in his voice. "Well, that's one step cleared."

I chuckled. "Thanks."

"You just tell me what you need when you've got it figured out, okay?"

"Thank you, Trey. I mean that." I laughed again. "You were literally the best boyfriend I ever had and you still clearly are."

"Hey, don't sell that Oscar guy short." He was smiling, I could tell. Damn him, I could predict his facial movements over the phone... "Dani... Or whatever you want to call yourself, I'll always be here to help."

"I know, Trey. And... I don't know what I'm gonna call myself, so you can still use Dani for now."

"Okay. Look, I've got some work to do at the hospital, so I'm gonna havta go. When you make a decision, I want you to call me, understand? Leave me a voicemail if I don't pick up."

I nodded, even though he couldn't see me. "Thanks again, Trey."

"No problem."

***

I knocked on Stacy's door. She opened it, wearing nothing but a skimpy crop top and panties. "How goes, Dani-Oh?"

I rolled my eyes. "You do know how stupid that sounds, right?"

"Duh, but that's the point. How's the decision making process?"

I walked into her room and sat down on her bed, then sighed. "Still weighing the pros and cons."

She sat down at her vanity. "Pros for transitioning, the world gets to see you make the sacrifices necessary to be who you want to be. Cons for transitioning, you'll still look somewhat like a woman because you're still genetically female. Pros for magic, you'll be genetically male and could actually be somebody's biological father some day. Cons for magic, a lot of aggravation from getting your legal documents changed and nobody knows how much you've really changed."

"I havta deal with the legal documents either way." I leaned back. "But that'll be easier if I'm publicly transitioning."

"Very true." She leaned forward and crossed one leg over the other. "So, it sounds like you've made your decision, even if you don't think you have."

I raised an eyebrow. "Okay, what's my decision, then?"

"You've pretty clearly picked transitioning, I can tell."

"Then why can't I tell that?"

"Because you're you, a very indecisive decisive person."

I rolled my eyes, then sat up straight. "Okay, say I have."

"Say you have, then you're in here for a specific reason."

She was good at this. "I am kinda here for something in particular."

"And what would that be?"

I took a deep breath, then finally asked, "I want you to show me what I'd look like after transitioning."

She raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"You said you're a witch, so you can do that, right? I'm not saying change me, I'm saying show me what I'd look like."

Her eyes light up and a smile spreads across her face. "Oooh, that's an interesting request."

"Don't have fun with this," I said, "just an accurate view of what I'd look like after transitioning."

She rolled her eyes. "Fine." She stood up. "Step up to the mirror, Daniel."

I stood up and walked over to her floor length mirror, and my breath was taken away almost instantly. The man on the other side of the mirror resembled me greatly, though he was somewhat stockier. Apparently I'd gain a little weight as a guy. Not unsurprising, but if there was one thing about my current self that I prided myself on, it was my weight. He was dressed in a similar way to what I was wearing, a plain tee shirt and a pair of shorts, though his shorts were cargo shorts and his shirt had a pair of buttons at the top and a pocket on the left side of the chest. He was somewhat short for a man, and didn't have much facial hair, but he did look like a man.

I moved my hand to touch my face and he mimicked me, touching his face with hands that looked a little slight on a man. If I didn't know any better, I'd say I'd been changed without my knowledge, but of course, I looked down and saw my breasts and knew I was wrong, almost thankfully. After seeing what I'd become, I was actually looking forward to transitioning, and didn't want that taken away from me.

"Wow, he's... Basically you without boobs," Stacy said, sounding almost disappointed. I shouldn't have been surprised that she could see what I was seeing, but a part of me was. "Whaddya think?"

"This is what I have to look forward to," I said, my voice almost a whisper.

"Not too shabby, either. I'd date him, if I didn't already know he was you." She folded her arms under her breasts. "You clean up pretty nice for a guy."

I chuckled nervously. "Thanks."

"So, you ready to become this?" She motioned toward the mirror. "You ready to let Daniel out of his cage?"

I felt a tear streak down my cheek. "Since I was twelve years old."