“Who am I what?” he asked. I felt all eyes on me and I suddenly realized that my internal monologue had actually been an external monologue, that my wistful thinking about my best friend had been out loud and that my thoughts had been free to hear for everyone. Everyone around the lunch table was staring at me while my sandwich was halfway to my mouth and my brain had just sort of hit the brakes. Did I commit? Play it off as a joke? I saw two people -- two of the asshats of the class, the ones you put up with because you have to or the teacher talks to your parents -- side-eyeing me homophobically.

“Who are you taking to prom?” I asked again, swallowing pride and tuna. He -- this being my best and oldest friend David, Dave for the friends, D-man for the coach, lifelong crush for me -- looked like he was about to say something when he was interrupted by Douchebag 1, colloquially known as ‘Franklin’.

“You been eyeing him up, J-man?” Franklin demanded, managing to make the name I didn’t enjoy using even worse, somehow. Also, what is the point of shortening names to a word that is just as long? Regardless, it looked like the others took him seriously enough to expect an answer from me, and I couldn’t keep up the deer-in-headlights look forever. I was going to have to either answer the question or get hit by the proverbial car of drama.

“No, but my sister needs a date,” I said, and then immediately wondered why I’d said that. There was no way any answer to that question was going to satisfy me in any way, shape or form that wasn’t going to lead me into either mild-to-severe envy or just general drama and anxiety. And the reason for that was--

“You have a sister?” Dave asked. There it was. No, no I did not. I had no siblings whatsoever to speak of. I was struggling to come up with a solution and my brain was offering one up like an excitable dog holding up a leafy branch to a hiker who desperately needs toilet paper. With extreme trepidation, I took the branch.

“Y-eah,” I said, stretching the vowel like he’d just asked a silly question. “She goes here but she doesn’t come to school,” I made up on the spot, and realized that I was not only in for a penny or a pound but about to throw in my life insurance to this elaborate construction of utter nonsense. “Really bad anxiety,” I added, hoping it sounded real enough.

“Why is this the first time you brought this up?” Douchebag 2, Ronald, Ron for the friend (he only had the one, and I’d pity him for it on the day he stopped bullying fifth-graders), asked.

“Like you pay attention,” I bluffed, and glared at him. “What’s my mom’s name?”

“Don’t know,” he said, looking smug as I realized I’d just soft-served him if not a touchdown, then at least several bases of smack talk. “She only ever screams mine.”

“Eat a bag of dicks, Ronald,” I said. “Point is that I don’t have any reason to bring up my sister because why the hell would I spend all day talking about my sister?”

“You guys talk about my sister all the time,” Alan, The Nasal One, said.

“That’s because she’s hot,” Franklin said. He wasn’t wrong. Well, he wasn’t wrong about the fact that most people at the table had had an eye for Alan’s sister, who had a butch cut, a butch walk, and a butch girlfriend. I’d never really indulged in the teenage wolf-whistle awooga-eyes thing myself, and neither had David, bless his heart. In fact, he tended to shoot down whoever went too hard or too creepy.

“How come I’ve never met her?” Dave asked me, a little quietly, his face neutral as he ate his own sandwich. Was he hurt? Did he think I’d been keeping things from him? Well, I had, but not that. For years I’d been lying to him, to pretty much everyone, about two major things in my life that would fundamentally change how they saw me, and I simply wasn’t ready for that yet. On the one hand, I didn’t want to lie to David, but on the other, I really didn’t want to lose him in case he took the news badly.

The first thing was the fact that I had access to a little bit of magic. Not much, mind. Just enough. It required a lot of preparation and a lot of finagling to get things right, and it was a lot more like cooking than baking. Not an exact science in the very least, but a very involved and awkward and annoying art to the point that it usually took more effort to do something magically than it would to do so physically. But there were some very definite advantages. Like helping out with the second thing, the part that really had me worried.

The part where I had been secretly a girl this whole time. I know. Sirens. Screams. The vicar has fainted and the church is on fire. I’d known for a long time, and thanks to my mom (who will be honoured in the halls of valhalla, for no other reason than that she was rad as fuck) I’d been able to magically transition a little bit. Nothing major, really. Just, you know, the right puberty. And The Clicker, a little device that we’d cooked up together. Since I’d known in second grade, I’d decided that I didn’t want to socially transition for some time. Kids were vicious, I’d learned that in gym class, and the clicker essentially allowed me to swap back and forth between what I’d started to refer to as Girl-Mode and DeadMODE (anything to make this shit sound cool). As soon as I got home, I would click the clicker and have a lovely evening in Girl-Mode.

But I couldn’t explain any of this to my friends and classmates, of course. For one thing, it might make their heads explode at the revelation of what the world was really like, of what their friend was capable of, of what could be. And for another, they might find out about magic. Couldn’t have that. Luckily, I’d done some comparisons on my phone a while back, which I’d photoshopped together and that looked enough like a real two-person photo to convince someone not looking too hard.

“Split custody,” I said. “She stays with Dad, I stay with Mom, so we’re almost never in the same house.” A blatant lie, but somewhat believable as nobody at the table had any real idea of what was and wasn’t possible for parents to get up to in a divorce. In reality, Dad lived upstate with his boyfriend and I visited every other weekend, where he had zero (0) spare daughters lying around for me to try to pass everything on to. “Here, look,” I said, fishing my phone out of my pocket to show David the photos. There were a few selfies I’d taken in Girl-Mode, and the fake one where it was Dead-Mode me and her in the same frame. David blinked for a few seconds, staring at the phone, then looked up at me, and then back at the phone. Finally, he whistled softly.

“That bad?” Franklin grinned, but David shook his head.

“Nah, man.” He handed the phone back. “Your sister is beautiful,” he said with the kind of sincerity that made me want to cuddle up to him and feed him pralines, although there were other factors contributing to my ridiculous crush on this… this… boy. “What’s her name?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll tell her you said that. And it’s Louise.”

“Pretty name,” he said with an approving nod.

“I know, right?!” I realized after just a moment that people weren’t supposed to get excited about their relative’s names, and did my best to look disinterested again.

“So she needs someone for prom, right?” he asked. I’d literally already forgotten why I’d made up this story about a fake sister, and I went from zero to a hundred bullets-sweat-per-second in no time at all. “Maybe I can tell her myself? Would be silly not to meet her beforehand.”
“Haha,” I said. “Yeah, that would be silly.” Too convenient, too. Nothing is ever easy, is it? “You can come over this weekend if you want to. I can ask Dad for both of us to be at Mom’s place.” Why did I ask that? Why did I offer? What good could come of it? I couldn’t be in two places at once, could I? That would require some kind… of… magi--

Hold on.

That was Monday. This was Saturday. As it turned out, my Mom was vehemently against the idea of creating a magical double for me to puppet around all weekend. But she was one hundred percent for me either having a friend over and/or dating the nice boy from school, so she’d almost literally taken off, shoving a hundred-dollars into my hand for pizza and promising to be spending the weekend over at her best friend’s house a block over. Say what you will about my mom, but whatever she does, she does it enthusiastically.

David was about to get here in less than fifteen minutes, I was sitting on my bed with the Clicker in my hand, idly going back and forth between Cute and Goblin, trying to figure out what I was going to do. I had a plan, which was a hard Eight on a scale from Zero to Invading-Russia-In-Winter, but it was the only way for me to make sure he wasn’t going to throw a fit that I could come up with. I Clicked back into mostly-elbows-and-knees-Mode and got up. The Clicker also swapped out my clothes for the outfit I’d most recently worn in that form, which was useful, but discarded the unused outfit in a little heap at the foot of my bed, which pissed off Mom royally. I heard a soft ‘fwumpf’ as the cute dress I’d been wearing in Soft-Mode was deposited there As If By Some Kind Of Magic.

The bell rang, my heart stopped for a second, and I did my best not to bump into the doorframe too roughly as I half-ran half-fell down the stairs to open the front door. I was straightening my clothes before opening the door when I realized that this wasn’t the version of me that needed to impress him.

“Hey Jay,” he said as he came in. “What’s up?” We gave each other a little fistbump as he looked around, hanging his coat up on the rack like he lived here. I wondered if he’d moved in if I asked.

“Not much,” I said and walked into the living room. I’d used mom’s weekend money to buy some snacks and I’d sort of casually tossed them on the table to make it look like I wasn’t eating myself alive with anxiety. “Hungry?” I asked, and he shook his head. “There’s coke in the fridge,” I added.

“Not that I don’t appreciate it, Jay, but could I, you know, meet your sister?” He plopped down on the sofa, and looked at me with a soft smile. “Not that I’m not willing to do you a favour by taking her to prom, but I would like to meet the pretty girl first, yknow?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said, stalling for time, “she’s upstairs. She’s doing homework in m-- our room. We have a lot of stuff to do, and we’re taking turns with the hard work.” And also with the homework, apparently.

“Homework wasn’t that hard this weekend though,” David said. Shit, he wasn’t wrong. I’d done half of it out of sheer anxious boredom before he’d even got here. I needed to come up with a believable reason for either of us to spend a lot of time working on it.

“She’s pretty dumb,” I said, realizing I was about to be her in a few minutes, and just barely managed to not slap my own forehead.

“Oh… I thought you were just like… behind on stuff,” David said. Yes, that would have made a lot more sense, thank you David.

“Well that too,” I said. “I uh… I can go get her… if you want.” I didn’t want to postpone this any longer. Besides, he looked so very comfortable on that couch and I also didn’t want to not be sitting next to him, but I also couldn’t very well, you know, cuddle up to him. That would make things awkward. He gave me a thumb’s up, and I sprinted up the stairs two steps at a time. I ran into the bedroom, slammed the door shut behind me, and Clicked. In an instant, my Gangly-Twat-Mode clothes flopped into a pile at the foot of the bed, and I had just a moment to spinny the dress. It wasn’t anything fancy, but I did want to look cute for him and some things you can’t rush. I’d applied my make-up earlier, which thankfully also poofed on and off with the Click, and a quick check reassured me it was still all there, all, well… good enough.

“Is everything okay up there?” David yelled from downstairs. Fuck. I Clicked back into my Testosteroni-Mode, and opened the door.

“We’re fine up here! She’s showing me what she was working on so I can take over while you two get to know each other!” I Clicked, and then yelled in my much more palatable girl voice. “I’ll be there in just a second!” I closed the door and spent a moment trying to figure out why I felt like I was forgetting something. That’s when I realized that it felt like I was supposed to be whispering quickly to my co-conspirator but my co-conspirator was me and she was just as much of a mess as I was. I took a deep sigh, clicked again, and tried not to tumble down the stairs like a hyperactive Slinky.

“Hey,” I said, trying not to call him by a nickname. This was, after all, the first time we’d officially met. The look on his face was worth all of the buildup of anxiety. The smile on the lower half of his face was, and had always been, wonderful to me, but it was the one in his eyes that made my knees weak. The problem was that I was still on the stairs, so down the Slinky went. Luckily for Slinky, David had the reflexes of a highly-caffeinated cat, the attitude of a gentleman and the body of a Greek god, and almost all three of those were relevant.

“Hey,” he said as I was trying to collect myself in his arms. That smooth bastard. I wondered if he knew exactly what he looked like, holding me like that, and I wanted to say something, but all that came out of my mouth was tiny squeaks, so I was going to have to let the heavy blushing do the work for me. He helped me back on my feet. I was still a bit wobbly and he offered me a hand (he didn’t take my arm, he didn’t grab my shoulder, he offered me his hand, I could cry) to steady myself. After a second, we walked into the living room.

“David, right?” I asked, trying to break the ice after having slammed into it full force. “I’ve heard a lot about you.” I hoped that that line would let me off the hook for any slip-ups regarding stuff I wasn’t supposed to know, being my own sister and all.

“Yeah,” he said. “Louise, right? Sadly I haven’t heard a lot about you. If I’d known Jay had a sister -- especially such a cute one -- I would’ve asked to meet you a lot sooner.”

“Aaa,” I said. Eloquence knew no bounds. David didn’t seem to notice, grabbed a bag of popcorn and moved into the living room and waited to sit down until I joined him. I grabbed a bottle of soda and two glasses and hurried over.

“Jay mentioned that you’re looking for someone for prom, right?” I nodded as I poured both of us a glass. “Why are you going to prom if going to school is too much for social anxiety? It’s going to be a very busy night.” I had anticipated the question, so I smiled apologetically.

“I can probably handle a single night,” I said, “but a whole year is… too much. Besides, I plan to be heavily medicated.” That part was true, at least. I mean, I did have social anxiety, medication just made it bearable enough for class.

“Gotcha,” he said. “Well, tell me about yourself.” He offered me some popcorn and we talked for a little bit, me telling the truth in a roundabout way about my supposed growing up with Dad ‘without J’. About what it was like to be a single child, a girl, in this day and age, all that. How I didn’t have a lot of friends, and that it could be alienating not to feel like I could really express myself, but how my anxiety had kept me from doing exactly that. David had been listening intently the entire time, nodding occasionally and asking questions for me to elaborate here and there. He seemed genuinely interested, which was already a little unnerving, but the fact that his face fell when I got to the parts about my childhood that were harder -- the isolation, the constant anxiety -- showed that he actually cared and that was both worse and better.

“Is your brother gonna be okay?” he asked after a comfortable silence had gently wormed its way into the conversation. “He’s been up there a while.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “He’s just picking up some of my slack, but it’s probably gonna take him a while. He’s pretty dumb,” I grinned. The joke didn’t seem to land all that well with him, and my smile ebbed away. “I’m kidding,” I added. “H-- he’s not the worst.”

“Yeah,” David said, and he nudged me with his shoulder. “You’re pretty lucky, you know that? Your brother rocks. He really came through for you and put himself out there to get you a date for prom. He’s a cool guy.” He winked. “Don’t tell him I said that.” I smiled despite myself.

“I promise I won’t. I can go check on him if you want.”

“I could go myself?” he offered and started to get back up. I practically shoved him back into the sofa in a panic.
“No! Uh… no, I mean… I’ll go check. I need to pick up some of the slack of the homework, after all.” I was out of the room before David could protest, and after Clicking in my room, I sighed stretched, quickly exercised my Gremlin-Mode voice, before making my way downstairs again, doing my best to slouch as obviously as possible. “What’s up man?” I asked as I saw David. “You and Louise getting along?”

“Yeah, man. She’s pretty rad,” he said and raised his glass as if giving a toast. “You two are pretty similar, you know that?”

“Haha yeah,” I said. “Mom mentioned that too. But eh… you like her?”

“I mean, for as long as I’ve known her -- which isn’t very long -- I think she’s pretty wonderful. It’s pretty cool of you to set this up. It doesn’t bother you, does it? I can imagine it’s pretty weird.”

“Naah,” I said. “I’m just happy she can be herself around someone that isn’t her family for once, you know? She’s usually cooped up here… well, at home, anyway. So you’re not… you know, you don’t hate her?”

“Of course not. If she enjoys tonight I’d be happy to take her to prom, dude.”

“That’s… really cool, man. I can go get her again if you want.” I snapped my fingers. I had a brilliant idea. “You two should watch a movie. We’ve got all the time in the world tonight. I can order pizzas or something.”

“Yeah man, if you’re cool with that.”

“Hella,” I said, and went upstairs to ‘go get my sister.’ I Clicked and went down the stairs more carefully this time, looking sufficiently cute. I knew my Girl-Mode and Creature-From-The-Boy-Lagoon-Mode were pretty similar looking, but in attitude I’d always been a lot happier as a girl, and that had always been visible in my attitude and appearance. I joined him on the sofa again as he was fiddling with the remote. He’d been here enough to not only make himself at home, but to know how everything worked.

“Your brother recommended we watch a movie, if that’s okay with you?” I nodded.

“I’d love that. I’m down for pretty much anything except gory horror.” He grinned in approval and after ordering pizza we were watching the kind of action movie you can kind of lose yourself in, and I did my best not to be too obvious about scooting a little closer. That’s when it happened. The moment I never thought would ever happen to me in real life. David yawned. Well, not exactly. He Yawned, arms stretched wide over his head and then, very carefully, one arm was deposited behind me, before landing on my shoulder. I was in heaven. Anxiety heaven, but heaven nonetheless. The comfortable weight of his arm made me automatically slide over to lean against him.
Neither of us said anything, but his breathing grew a little shallow, and I couldn’t help but feel the same way. I was doing what I could to pretend that I wasn’t a bundle of tense nerves but very calm and relaxed, actually, and I assumed he was doing the same. Gosh, I never really appreciated how much bigger than me he was. I rested my cheek on his chest and nearly sobbed at how perfect it felt to have him hold me close like that. Watching the movie play out, occasionally reaching out and grabbing some popcorn or filling each other’s cup to drink, was honestly really nice. We giggled at each other’s comments about the over-the-top action hero and we both had pieces of trivia we could surprise each other with. When it was over, we ended up staying like that, and he just... held me. We talked about lots of stuff. The future. Pizza. College. Past relationships (he was surprisingly ill-experienced and I unsurprisingly was too). Anxieties. Movies. I nearly exploded out of my skin when the doorbell rang.

“That’ll be the pizza,” I said after I’d regained my sense. “An hour and a half late.”

“Your brother will get it,” David said calmly.

“Uh… no, he won’t,” I muttered, and pushed myself upright. “Trust me.” I ran out of the room, Clicked quickly, opened the door, paid the delivery guy and grabbed a slice out of the top box as I carried it back into the living room. “Pizza time,” I said. “I got there first.”

“Where… uh…”

“She’s bringing a pizza upstairs for me to eat later,” I lied. “She’ll be down in a sec.” I put the pizzas on the table, pretended to be annoyed waiting for a moment, and then made a face at Dave. “I’ll go check,” I said, hurried upstairs, pretended to have a quick conversation with my sister, then hurried back downstairs. David was still sitting comfortably on the couch so I scooted up close and sighed. “Where were we?” I asked, and I came to a sudden, horrifying realization.

“Where’s your sister?” David asked. “Not that I don’t appreciate… uh… you…”

I jumped up, extremely red in the face and with no excuses or reasons for why I had just cuddled David in Boy-Mode, so I ran out of the room and came back in a moment later after making sure I’d Clicked.

“I’m so sorry about my brother,” I said, still out of breath. “He can be a real weirdo sometimes.” David sat there for a moment, then seemed to come to a realization and just grabbed a slice of pizza like he was waiting for me to say more wrong things. It was clear he could see through my ridiculous plan somehow. There was no way he hadn’t. I flopped down on the couch in resignation. I’d tried really hard but I’d ended up messing it up anyway. “Look,” I said, “I’m sorry tonight has been really weird. It’s just… I like you, David. I have since we met, and I was really hoping I could go to prom with you and I figured--”

“I get it,” David said with his calm, soothing voice. I wanted to climb that man like a tree and never come down. “It’s been hard for you. That’s… clearly an understatement. But you’re… well… you’re gorgeous. And you’re fun. Really cute.” I blushed, as if on cue. “And I had a really good time with you tonight. But...”

Here it was gonna come. He supported people like me, but there was no way he was going to date someone like me. “I get it,” I mumbled.
“No, it’s not that…” he sighed. “I like you, Louise, I really do. But it’s not fair to you. I just… I like your brother. I have for a long time. I mean, kids at school are vicious so I wasn’t going to out myself there, and, well… he’s got things going on… I just didn’t want to add to that. But he kinda… something happened tonight and I think I need to be honest with him.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “You didn’t… figure it out?”

“Figured what out.”

“David,” I said, sitting upright and taking his hands in my own. “I don’t have a brother.”

“What?” Oh David. Big of Heart. Strong of Muscle. Dumb of Ass.

“It’s me, Dave. I’m Jay.” I realized that I was going to have to do a lot of explaining after this, but it was for the greater good. I Clicked once, and then again, being Louise again.

“Oh,” he said.

“I’ll explain that later.”

“Okay,” David said. “So is it Jay or Louise?”

“Louise.”

“Cool.”

“Do you… still like me?”

“Yuh,” he said. “As long as you’re you.”

“Do you want to take me to prom?”

“... Yeah.”

“Hey David?”

“Yeah.”

“I really want to kiss you.”

“Okay.”

“Can I kiss you?”

“Yeah.”

I did.

SecretTransWritingLair

Ela Maxima is a professional coffee-drinker, ferret-appreciator and, ostensibly, an author. What this actually means is that she spends a lot of time drinking coffee and stressing about the relationship status of fictional characters, before severely abusing an old and battered keyboard. Somehow, words come out the other end, and the result appears to be something approaching literature.

When she isn't writing, she can usually be found stressing about writing, or bothering her cat, Samuel, but she's never far from a keyboard.

Frustrated with the lack of good representation, she mostly writes Queer and Trans fiction where the focus is not exclusively on the hardships faced by members of the LGBTQIA+ community. Instead, she writes fantasy, romance, action, science fiction and, occasionally, erotica, where the protagonists just happen to be somewhat sideways of the norm when it comes to gender and sexuality, but always with a smile, a sense of humour, and the desire to leave the world, fictional and otherwise, a little brighter than how she found it.