When Noah told us he wanted to cosplay as Captain Marvel for Halloween, Whitney and I blinked at each other across the breakfast table and were silent for a few moments. Then I said, “Sure, Noah, that’s cool. We can go look for a costume this weekend. Aria, do you know what you want to go as yet?”

“No,” she said, stirring her spoon in her bowl of cereal without taking a bite, “I still haven’t decided.”

We didn’t say anything about it in front of the kids, but we were worried. Concerned, rather. Once we got the kids on the elementary school bus, and we had about five minutes left before Whitney had to leave for work, we looked at each other and I said: “So Captain Marvel, huh?”

“Derek, do you think Noah might be transgender?”

“It would be fine if he were — I mean, fine with me. But he’d suffer a lot, despite everything we could do to protect him. Her, if — I mean — well, we don’t have much evidence yet, do we? Wanting to dress up as his favorite superhero doesn’t prove anything by itself.”

“Yeah, not by itself, it’s just... Do you think we’ve overlooked something else? Some other piece of evidence that he’s trans?”

We talked until she had to walk out the door, and again during a long phone call at lunchtime, but didn’t come to any definite conclusions. While I was waiting for some code to compile that afternoon, I did some research on transgender stuff, especially early signs that your kid might be transgender. I realized there were a lot of other forms of — uh, transgender-ness? — besides just wanting to transition to the opposite sex; gender-fluid, for instance, where you feel like a guy sometimes and a girl at other times, or genderqueer, where you don’t fit into either category. I’m probably not explaining it right; look it up for yourself. Even now, after everything that’s happened, there’s a lot I still don’t understand about it.

At supper that night, Whitney asked Noah, “What’s your favorite thing about Captain Marvel?”

“She can fly and shoot energy blasts and she’s the best Avenger and she flies jet planes in her secret identity, which is the best thing to do when you’re not superheroing, not like stupid reporter stuff like Superman or Spider-Man, and —” He went on like that for a while without a pause for breath, and we weren’t really enlightened much about his gender identity. Later that night, in bed, Whitney and I talked some more about it, and still didn’t come to any conclusions, except that we’d better keep our eyes peeled for any other early signs that Noah might be transgender.

“And,” she suggested, “maybe, just to show Noah we support him and all, we could crossplay when we take the kids out trick-or-treating?”

“That’s an idea,” I said. “Any specifics you have in mind?”

“I was thinking you could be the Wasp and I’d be Ant-Man.”

“Hmm, that could work.” I wasn’t super comfortable with the idea, but it was, on further thought, less daunting than sitting down and giving Noah a version of The Talk that went into gender identity issues I barely understood.

 

* * *

 

By Halloween, Aria had decided she wanted to be Scraps, the Patchwork Girl, from the Oz books which Whitney’d been reading to the kids at night, and we’d all gotten our costumes put together. I felt pretty silly at first, as Whitney helped me get dressed, tucking my junk back so it wouldn’t show a bulge and getting the stuffed bra on, but once I was dressed and made up with the mask, insect-wings and all, I actually looked okay. Still clearly a guy, but not as stupid-looking as I’d feared. Whitney looked pretty good in her Ant-Man costume; her homemade helmet looked more like the one from the comics than the one from the movies, and even with her breasts bound and a pair of socks in her jockey shorts, you could still tell she was a woman, and a beautiful one, in my opinion.

The kids looked adorable in their costumes; Noah could really pass for a girl once Whitney got done with him, which wasn’t too hard at his age, and Aria was bizarrely cute with her quilt-dress and her patchwork face-paint and a rainbow-colored yarn wig. We set out trick-or-treating a little after five, and the kids soon had a pretty respectable haul of candy. We were two blocks from home, on our way back, when things got weird.

It was almost sunset, and we’d paused at the top of a hill to look back toward the Pacific and see the red disc resting just above the distant water. But the kids were more interested in candy than sunsets, so we paused only a moment and continued downhill toward the next house. We walked up the driveway and let Noah do the honors of ringing the doorbell (Aria had gotten to do it at the last house).

“Trick or treat!” the kids sang out as the door was opened by a woman in her sixties. She smiled and held out a wicker basket full of mini Twix bars.

“Happy Halloween,” she said, and then did a double take, staring at us with widening eyes. “What just happened?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I felt something —” My voice was different. But I didn’t have time to think about that just then, because Aria had collapsed to the ground. Whitney and I both knelt down to check on her, talking over each other in our fear and anxiety, demanding to know if she was okay, what was wrong, what happened — then she flopped over and flailed her arms, and I saw with horror that they were bending in places they shouldn’t, and then so were her legs; she seemed to have no knees or elbows, but her limbs just bent and curved wherever. And her face... that didn’t look like facepaint... and in place of her eyes, there were big blue buttons. We hadn’t made any attempt to give her something that looked like button-eyes.

All this time I was ignoring the signals from my body that told me something was different about me, too.

“It’s okay, Mom,” Aria said, picking herself up. “I just tripped. Can you help me pick up my candy?” Her jack o’lantern bucket had tipped over and spilled when she fell.

“You turned into Scraps for real!” Noah said. He bent down and took Aria’s hand, which was also patchwork — we hadn’t made her gloves or put face-paint on her hands as well as her face, figuring it would smear all over the candy and doorbells. “Oh, wow, you’re soft!”

“What could have done this?” Whitney said in a low voice, and when everyone wasn’t talking at once, I could tell that her voice was deeper. Like mine was higher. And, turning my attention from Aria for a moment, I saw that she didn’t look at all feminine anymore.

“What kind of trick is this?” the woman said. “You’re not supposed to play pranks on people who give you candy!”

“It’s not a trick,” I said in my new, higher voice. “At least, we’re not the ones playing it. I don’t know how it happened, but —”

Just then we heard screams from somewhere further down the street.

“I’ll save you!” Noah yelled — and took off flying. I was too astonished to move for a moment, but before I could consciously realize what I was doing, I started running after him — and then my wings were buzzing and everything around me was getting bigger and bigger, and I lifted off, too, but still couldn’t keep up with Noah as he (she, I finally realized) shot toward the source of the screams.

A vampire in stereotypical evening dress with a red cloak — not more than ten years old — was attacking a girl about the same age in a ball gown; she was the source of the screams. A pirate with an eyepatch was trying to pull him off of her, but after a few moments of struggle, the vampire threw him off and he went flying. Noah zoomed in and caught the pirate, easily lifting him — he was three or four times her weight — and setting him down gently on a lawn, then zeroing in on the vampire and shooting an energy blast from her fingertips.

The Wasp could shoot energy blasts of some kind, too; I remembered that much from the movie, even though I wasn’t the same level of comics nerd that Whitney or Noah was. I suspected I could do something like that, so I put myself between the vampire and the girl, raised my arm, and shot him in the face. I hated to do that to a kid, but if he was going to hurt the girl — no, he already had. Her neck was bleeding, and his fangs and lips were dripping blood.

Two more energy blasts from Noah and one from me and the vampire was down for the count. I checked his pulse and breathing and didn’t find any; I was horrified, thinking we’d killed him. It wasn’t until much later that we found out he didn’t need to breathe anymore.

The pirate rushed over to us, looking frantically between the girl and the boy. He went to the girl first. “Savannah! Are you okay?”

“He bit me,” she sobbed. “Danny bit me!”

The pirate took off the bandana from his head and used it to stanch the bleeding from her neck. I buzzed over close to Noah’s ear and said, “We need to get back to your mom and Aria.”

“But there’s other people that need our help! We’re superheroes, we’re supposed to help people!” She turned in mid-air (she’d never landed), looking over toward the houses on the south side of the street, and said: “Over there, on the next street. Come on, Dad!”

“No, wait —” But she was already off. I flew after her as fast as I could, falling behind again. I heard my phone ring and reached for it... I no longer had the fanny pack I’d been wearing over my costume, though. But my costume seemed to have a utility belt, and by trial and error I found the compartment with the phone. It had shrunk with me. Whitney was calling.

“Where are you? Is Noah with you?” he asked.

“I’m chasing her as fast as I can,” I said. “We’re flying over the houses to Pradera Street... she said somebody needs our help there.”

Whitney was quiet for a few moments. “I’m taking Aria home. Be safe, and try to get Noah to come home as soon as you can... but if she’s got Captain Marvel’s powers and you’ve only got the Wasp’s, I’m not sure you can make her come home if she doesn’t want to.”

“I love you,” I said. “I’ll bring her home safe, I promise.”

She was right, although Noah didn’t really have the same level of power as her favorite superhero. Her energy blasts weren’t nearly as powerful and she couldn’t fly nearly as fast. Still, she was a lot faster than me. In the time it took me to fly across those houses and yards and have that brief conversation with Whitney, Noah had already arrived on the scene, knocked out a couple of zombies with energy blasts, and shot off off further down the street chasing another scream. It took me quite a while to catch up with her and finally convince her to come home.

Finding our house from the air in the dark wasn’t all that easy, but we managed it with the GPS on my miniaturized phone, and landed in the driveway, where I tried for a few moments to figure out how to grow to normal size again. I’d originally shrunk in a moment of panic, not consciously thinking about it. Eventually I got the trick and shot up to Noah’s height and beyond... but not, I realized when we walked in the front door, as tall as I’d been before.

Whitney rushed to the front hall and hugged me, then Noah. The feeling of my breasts — real now, not nylons rolled up and stuffed into a bra — squeezing against his muscular chest gave me a weird, fluttery sensation.

“We fought a lot of monsters and bad guys, Mom!” Noah said. “Why didn’t you shrink down and ride a flying ant and come with us?”

“I couldn’t go off and leave Aria by herself,” Whitney said. “And you shouldn’t have run off without us.”

“But I’m a superhero, Mom! With great power comes great responsibility!”

“You’re Captain Marvel, not Spider-Man,” Whitney rejoined with a grin. “And you’re only eight. You still have a bedtime, even when it’s not a school night.”

Aria tumbled into the hall, doing a cartwheel like the Patchwork Girl did in the books. Seeing her cloth, flexible limbs move like that made my eyes water, and it hit me with a pang — Whitney, Noah and I had changed gender, and that might be exactly what Noah wanted (it certainly didn’t seem to bother her), but it was going to be a hard adjustment for me and Whitney. But for Aria it would be so much worse; she wasn’t human, wasn’t even organic anymore. How was she even alive?   Was she?

“I’ve been watching the news,” Whitney said as we all went into the living room, where the TV was on. “This kind of thing is happening all over the country, and in Canada and Mexico, even though not everybody in Mexico celebrates Halloween... nobody knows why, though. People in costume just suddenly changed...” Of course you know all that by now, even if you live in an area where nobody goes trick-or-treating anymore and spent a quiet night before going to bed at your usual time.

We all sat watching the news for over an hour, and got out our laptops and looked at the trending YouTube videos, seeing professional and amateur footage of other people all over who’d been changed into their costumes. Most of the worst disasters of the night tended to involve large concentrations of zombies, although the dragon rampaging in downtown Boston had them beat for sheer property damage.

Finally, at their usual eight o’clock bedtime, we insisted on the kids going to bed. Noah wanted to sleep in her Captain Marvel costume, but I said she had to at least take off the boots that her sneakers had changed into. And with the way the costume’s seams had merged together, she practically had to take it all the way off to pee before bed. Would I have let her do that if I’d known then what I found out a little later? I’m not sure. But Noah still seems happy being a girl, and especially happy to have super-powers.

After the kids were in bed, Whitney and I went and changed into sleeping clothes. I borrowed one of his nightgowns, or maybe “borrow” isn’t the right word considering how things turned out. We were too uncomfortable still with our new bodies to have sex yet, but we wanted to see ourselves and each other naked, to verify with our eyes what we’d felt from the inside.

“Did you ever try shrinking while you had the costume on?” I asked once we were dressed again.

“No,” he said. “I was pretty sure I could, once I saw you shrink and take off, but I didn’t want to disappear and leave Aria seemingly by herself. She might not be able to hear me clearly when I was tiny.”

“Do you want to watch the news some more?”

“Yeah, let’s see if anybody’s figured anything out.”

Of course, less than an hour later we found out that we shouldn’t have done that. I stared at the screen in shock as those witches from Kansas showed off their magic for the studio talking heads and then warned people not to take off their costumes or get pregnant if they wanted to change back.

“This wasn’t going to be permanent,” I said, “but we made it so.”

“There was no way we could have known,” Whitney said, putting his arm around me. I started to cry, and leaned into his shoulder. “But look at the bright side... Aria’s clothes are part of her; she can’t take them off. So she’ll be back to normal in the morning.”

“Great,” I whispered. “Yeah. That’s really good news.”

It was several days before we got comfortable enough with our bodies for me to discover the other good news.