“If you don’t want to share the bed,” Radhika said, “I’ll sleep on the floor.”
“No, it’s your room,” I protested. “And I wouldn’t mind sharing, except...” I looked up at her. “Is there really room for both of us?” The bed was bigger than the single beds we had in the dorm, but I wasn’t sure we’d both fit in it without squeezing. Radhika was pretty tall, and wide in proportion.
“Let’s try it,” she said, “and I’ll get my sleeping bag out of the closet if you aren’t comfortable.”
I went to the bathroom to change into my nightgown (there was no sense in buying more pajamas until I finished growing), and she’d changed into her pajamas by the time I got back. We laid down, and I found there was more room in the bed than I’d thought; I had several inches between me and Radhika on one side, and me and the edge of the bed on the other. “This is fine, I guess.”
“Good night.”
I woke up during the night with something hard poking into my thigh. It was too dark to see what it was, but I could figure it out: Radhika had rolled over in her sleep and her clitoris was sticking through her pajamas into my nightgown. I squirmed over to give her more room and eventually got back to sleep.
(I’d never seen a Cary hyena naked, what with the bathrooms at the dorm being unisex so everyone wore a bathrobe or towel on the way to and from the shower, but I’d seen anatomical diagrams when I was researching Triangle-area neospecies before I went off to school. Female Cary hyenas have a clitoris that’s as big as the average penis of a male Cary hyena, and it’s hollow — it opens up when they’re aroused. It’s the reason they’re named for hyenas, not because they eat carrion or anything.)
The next morning, I got up early so I could shower before anyone else. Mrs. Eames was already up, getting the turkey in the oven, though she went back to bed before I was out of the shower.
Later on, after she got up again, I helped her out in the kitchen, getting things ready for dinner. Radhika, Lauren and Gary all helped out too. Gary and I set the table a little before noon, and then we sat down to dinner. Due to bad planning, I found myself sitting between Radhika and Lauren; I felt my face getting warm when he sat down next to me.
“So, Joel,” he said after we’d passed all the plates and bowls around and served our food, “did I understand you right — there weren’t any other Raleigh rabbits in the town where you grew up?”
“No — none in all of Nebraska as far as I know. I never saw any when I went to Lincoln or Omaha for shopping or concerts or whatever. And a couple of times when I went on web forums for Raleigh rabbits I asked about rabbits living in the Midwest, and the closest people who responded were in Illinois.”
“So is that why you look so young?”
“...Yeah, I didn’t start puberty until I came here for school.”
He gave me an appraising glance. “It’s going pretty fast, then. You look about fourteen or fifteen, I guess...?”
“Yeah, the doctor said it was going five or six times faster than normal. I need to buy new clothes every few weeks.” I didn’t mention needing to replace my cane, as well.
“She was shorter than Paul by a couple of inches when I met her, and now she’s an inch taller,” Radhika put in.
“I still haven’t met this Paul,” Lauren said. “What’s he like?,” and I was thankful for the change of subject.
After we put away the leftovers and cleaned the table, we went out and watched a soccer game at Gary’s high school: two teams of Cary hyena girls. I didn’t know enough about sports to be sure, but I thought they were playing by slightly different rules than the Lincoln bison use in the Lincoln change-region. The home team won, which made Gary and his family pretty happy.
“Back before the Divergence,” Radhika’s dad said on the way back to the house, “we would have been watching college football on TV this afternoon.”
Radhika shrugged. “I like this way better. I actually know some of the girls on our team. Why did people care so much about athletes they didn’t know, back in the day?”
“They were going to the same college we went to,” Mr. Eames said. “Or they were going to the college we would have liked to go to, or that other people in our family went to, or something.”
“But what about pro athletes?” Lauren asked. “I mean, if you lived in a big city, maybe you’d care about the team that was based in that city. But why would people in Raleigh care about teams from Atlanta or Miami or wherever?”
“Good question,” Mr. Eames said. “Especially since the athletes in those big-city teams came from all over, not particularly from the local region. So there might have been a guy from the Triangle area, maybe even Cary, on an Atlanta or Miami-based team.”
Gary had something else on his mind. “Did you see that Tarika Andrews? She’s something else — that last goal she made, wow!”
“Which one was she?” I asked.
“Number fourteen,” Radhika supplied. “The one who made the last goal in the game, and also a couple of earlier ones.”
“Yeah, she was good.”
“And hot!” Gary added, then gave his parents an embarrassed glance. Mr. Eames smiled.
“You hoping she’ll ask you out?” Radhika asked.
“I wish,” Gary said. “But she’s got her pick of boys. I doubt she’s ever noticed me.”
“It can’t hurt to talk to her.”
After we got back to the house and washed the dishes, I called Aunt Ellen and talked with her a while. She and Uncle Tyler were at Grandma and Grandpa Kritzer’s house for Thanksgiving, and she passed the phone around so I could talk to everybody.
A little later, we all played another round of Fluxx. I won, much to my surprise, and Radhika said: “You pick the next game.”
“Um...” I looked over the shelf of games for a couple of minutes, and picked out Blokus, which I’d never played, but which looked like a geometry matching game of some kind.
“Good choice,” Lauren said. “That’s one of my favorites.” Uh-oh.
Blokus was for up to four players, so Radhika and Gary joined me and Lauren, while Mr. and Mrs. Eames went for a walk. Radhika and Lauren taught me how to play, and we played two rounds; Radhika won the first, and Gary won the second. We heated up and ate some leftovers during our second game.
Later, when we were getting ready for bed, Radhika said: “So, has my brother made another conquest?”
“No,” I said, my ears twitching. “He’s... I guess he’s kind of hot, but he’s too old for me.”
“You didn’t think so yesterday,” she said with a grin.
“No, I meant... aargh. I didn’t want him to think I was just a kid. But I don’t want to date someone as old as him either.” He was five years older than me and Radhika.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “You might have distracted him a lot tonight — he was way off his game, he usually wins at Blokus — but he’s not going to go after another girlfriend who’s barely of age, not when he’s already got three.”
I’d distracted him?
Friday, Radhika, her mom and I went shopping at some stores in downtown Cary. I didn’t really need anything new; I hadn’t yet outgrown the stuff I’d bought the previous weekend, but I tried on various things, wondering when I’d stop growing and could start wearing pants again. I didn’t buy anything for myself, but I bought Christmas presents for Aunt Ellen and Uncle Tyler and several friends. I was at first surprised to see that the women’s restrooms in Cary had urinals, but then I remembered that female Cary hyenas could pee standing up. (I hadn’t seen them doing that before because the unisex bathrooms in the dorm didn’t have urinals.)
That afternoon, we met up with Lauren and Mr. Eames at Gary’s high school, and watched his team play another boys' team from Apex High School. They lost by a narrow margin, and everybody commiserated with Gary about it afterward.
“You did good,” Radhika said; “it wasn’t your fault the team lost.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “We were good, I can’t see where we made any big mistakes, but I guess they were better.”
Two of Lauren’s girlfriends, Urmila and Bob, came over that evening for supper and stayed the next couple of nights. Zach had gone to her grandparents' house in Asheville for the weekend. Once they were around, Lauren stopped looking at me so much — I wasn’t much to look at beside them, with Urmila having that black fur with white patches at the tips of her ears, and both of them (especially Bob) having breasts way bigger than mine. That was a relief at first, but after a while I realized I was feeling disappointment, too, and an impatience for my body to finish developing. Paul came over for supper, too, though he didn’t spend the night.
Saturday morning while we were getting dressed, Radhika asked me: “Do you want to stay another day?”
“I thought you were going to stay until Sunday afternoon?”
“Yeah, I’m planning on it, but I could give you a ride back to the dorm if you’re exhausted from hanging out with my family by now. They can be a bit much, I know, especially when Lauren’s girlfriends are staying over...”
“No, I’d like to stay if it’s okay.”
“Sure, Mom and Dad said it was fine.”
So I stayed another day. Lauren and his girlfriends went out to a movie that afternoon, and Gary went over to a friend’s house, but I spent the day hanging out with Radhika and sometimes with her parents. She showed me the first three or four episodes of a comedy produced in Wake Forest whose cast was mostly Cary hyenas, with a couple of characters from neighboring change-regions. It was pretty good; I bet anybody of a species with fairly standard psychology would find most of the jokes funny, though there were a few jokes that depended on peculiarities of Cary hyena sexuality or culture and didn’t seem funny even when Radhika explained them. But I didn’t appreciate the way the Raleigh rabbit characters were portrayed, especially in the second episode where a girl is trying to date a guy who already has two girlfriends. It reminded me of Paul’s complaint about “Shifting Alliances.”
“Has Lauren seen this show?” I asked, and she nodded. “What did he think?”
“He likes it pretty well, though he doesn’t watch it regularly, just when I tell him the new episode is unusually good.”
“Hmm. How long has he been dating those three girls?”
“He’s been friends with Urmila since middle school, when they were both girls. He changed into a guy after they started high school, and they started dating not long afterward. They added Bob and Zach after they went to UNC; I don’t remember now which came first.”
We watched another couple of episodes, and then Lauren, Urmila and Bob came back from their movie and ate supper with us. Bob took more of an interest in me than she had the previous evening.
“So Lauren tells me you just started puberty a couple of months ago?”
“Almost three months now. Yeah.”
“And you were a boy before the Divergence... did your, um, aunt and uncle tell you you might grow up to be a girl? Or was it a surprise?”
“They didn’t tell me. I found out on my own, doing research, several years ago.”
“You seem to be doing pretty well with it, from the way you’re dressed and all.”
“Thanks. Actually, the main reason I’m wearing skirts is that I’m growing so fast I can’t afford to buy pants, I’d outgrow them too fast. Skirts last longer. This one was ankle-length when I bought it in September. But when I stop growing I want to start wearing pants again.”
“That’s cool. Girls can wear whatever we want, though there are sometimes advantages to dressing a particular way.”
“You were a boy before the Divergence, too, right?”
“Yes, and for a year and a half afterward, until I went from middle school to high school. It was kind of a shock at first — more the realization that I was attracted to guys than the having girl parts, because I’d already seen several of my friends changing right after the Divergence.”
“Well, I’m not having that kind of trouble with my orientation changing, because I wasn’t attracted to anybody before, and I had no idea what orientation I’d end up with afterward... and I was already used to peeing sitting down... but wearing a skirt and bras, and having people treat me as a girl, was a lot to get used to.”
“And periods?” She smiled wryly.
“Period, singular, so far. Also not on my list of fun things.”
“It’ll be plural before long.”
“Yeah, probably just before Christmas if they’re on a regular schedule. But the doctor said they might be more frequent at first until my body stops growing so fast.”
“Ouch! My sympathies.”
“I’ve got my fingers crossed.”
Lauren, Urmila and Bob disappeared into Lauren’s room not long after supper and didn’t come out until morning. Mrs. Eames threw them a disapproving glare as they excused themselves, and Mr. Eames sighed and shook his head gently. “We can’t live their lives for them,” he said quietly to her; I don’t think he thought I heard him.
Next morning, we all went to church. Mrs. Eames, Bob, Urmila and Radhika all wore really nice dresses; I felt kind of underdressed in my black skirt and white shirt, especially since I didn’t have anything but tennis shoes to wear with them. My feet were still growing so fast I couldn’t afford more than one new pair of shoes at a time, and even one was straining my bank account; those last three shopping trips had used up most of the money I’d saved up from my summer jobs the last couple of years. And services at the chapel on campus were pretty informal. But nobody stared at me, so after I’d been there a while I relaxed and felt more at ease. It was a big church, and most of the people were Cary hyenas; I think I only saw three or four other rabbits besides me, Lauren and his girlfriends, and a similar number of Durham bulls and Chapel Hill trinocs.
After church, we all went out to lunch at a fancy restaurant. I had to go to the restroom before we ate, and Bob came with me. I gave a curious glance at a hyena woman standing at a urinal, remembering how I used to be able to do that when I was a little boy, and went into a stall. Afterward, while I was washing my hands and Bob was brushing the fur at the tips of her ears, I worked up the nerve to ask her:
“How’d you get together with Lauren and Urmila? I mean, they were already together when you met them, right? Did they ask you out or did you ask them?”
“Yeah, them and Zach as well, though Zach had only been with them a few months. Lauren and Urmila have been together since high school —”
“Yeah, Radhika told me.”
“Well, I got to be friends with Zach first; we met when we both joined the gaming club our first semester at UNC. Then Zach started dating Lauren and Urmila early the next year, and she introduced me to them, and we hung out a lot for several months before they invited me on a real date.”
“Oh... thanks.”
“You dating yet?”
“Not this semester, anyway. I just wanted to pick your brain about it, since you seem to have more experience than some of the girls I’ve met at school.”
“You’ve made some friends at school, right? Not just Radhika, she’s nice but she doesn’t know how things are for us rabbits...”
“Yeah, I’ve got several other friends, some of them rabbits. But they’re less experienced than you, like I said.”
“Give me a call sometime if you want more advice,” she said, and gave me her phone number. “But I’m getting hungry. Let’s go eat.”
Radhika and I went back to the campus that afternoon, and she helped me bring my bag in to the dorm. Amy was already back from her grandparents' house; she wanted to know about our Thanksgiving “revelry,” as she called it, and told us some of what she’d done with her family, especially her cousins — she seemed to have a lot of them. I felt a little jealous of Amy and Radhika’s big families; my mom was an only child, and my dad only had one brother, Uncle Tyler. He and Aunt Ellen didn’t have any children of their own, so I was the only one of my generation.
I continued to notice more attraction to guys over the last few weeks of the semester. Dr. Mathers advised me to start wearing a pad again just a week or two after my first period, in case the next one started early because of my accelerated puberty, and it turned out to be a useful precaution when I found my crotch getting wet while I was idly staring at a guy sitting at the next table during supper one evening. I was grossed out when I realized that; I changed my pad as soon as I got back to the dorm, and curled up in the bed reading for the rest of the evening. Amy seemed to sense something was wrong, but I didn’t want to talk about it; she wouldn’t understand.
The next evening I dug through my stuff until I found Terry Davenport’s business card, and called her.
“Terry Davenport speaking.”
“Hi, Terry. Um, this is Joel — Joel Hampton — we met on the train from New Orleans to Raleigh back in September...”
“Oh, yes, I remember you. How are you doing? I gather from the sound of your voice that you’re developing as a biological female...”
“Yeah, and it’s going pretty fast — the doctor says I’ll probably be full-grown by Spring break at this rate.”
“Are you still identifying as male?”
“I’m not sure. I mean, I still feel like a guy in some ways, maybe, but it’s less every week — there’s just too much female stuff in my life. I have to wear skirts because I can’t afford to keep buying new pants every month, as fast as I’m growing, and I have to wear bras or my nipples will show, and I had my first period a month ago, and I’m definitely attracted to guys. That’s kind of why I called you; I kind of freaked out last night when I realized I was staring at a guy and my, um, my body was reacting to him. More than to any of the other guys I’ve seen since I started growing girl parts.”
“I see. There are other options, you know; if you aren’t comfortable with your breasts you could wear a binder instead of wearing bras.”
“That sounds like it would be uncomfortable.”
“For some people, it’s a choice between physical discomfort and psychological discomfort. It’s your choice, if your breasts or the fact that they need support are making you uncomfortable.”
“Maybe I’ll try it; I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to somebody.”
“I’m glad to listen. As for being attracted to men... I know it’s a shock right now, but it will probably feel natural to you pretty soon.”
“I guess. I mean, I’d probably be freaking out almost as much if I’d turned into a male and had my first, um, erection while I was looking at a girl. It’s just kind of weird and, frankly, pretty gross...”
I could almost hear her smile. “It is, isn’t it? It’s a good thing we evolved with a sex drive, or we’d be too disgusted with ourselves to propagate the species.”
“Yeah, that’s what worries me. If I’m getting — wet, looking at and thinking about guys, I’m probably going to start wanting to — to have sex with them, pretty soon. I don’t think I’m ready for that.”
“Then don’t. Especially don’t let anyone pressure you into it. Has anyone asked you out yet?”
“Just one couple, so far.” That reminded me that Rob owed me a dress; she’d bet me a new dress that two or three guys would ask me out within a week after I started wearing bras, and there’d been only one, Larry. But did I want a dress? “I think I still look too young for most guys... somebody told me recently that I look about fifteen.”
“You should definitely wait, then. And — ah, maybe ask some of your female friends for advice about other ways of relieving the pressure. I’d rather not give you advice about that over the phone, for obvious reasons.”
My face got warmer. “I might ask somebody about that, yeah... or look stuff up on the Internet.”
“Good idea. I’m an old fart and looking stuff up on the Internet isn’t the first place my mind goes with things like this.”
I laughed. “Thanks. I don’t want to keep you too long, but you’ve been a big help.”
“Any time. Thanks for calling.”
