I'll spare you Latisha's gossip about her mom and dad's experiments with the thermostat and the humidifier. They didn't work; it was several years before scientists figured out why we "Athens magnolias," as they've started calling us, will flower in the Everglades or the Okefenokee in the early spring, or in north Georgia along about July or August, but not indoors in a temperature and humidity-controlled room. It's a combination of several triggers -- the temperature and humidity, but also the presence of suitable pollinators, as the _Flagpole_ article had speculated.

When Mom and Dad learned about this, they dropped their plans to send me to live with Uncle Mike; they didn't want any chance of me getting pregnant. Latisha and I both flowered on the Fourth of July weekend that summer, and spent a miserable three days indoors, forbidden by our parents to go outside or open a window. Mom and Dad hung several bug zappers outside every window and door of our house -- and then nailed the window of my room shut. Latisha's parents lay sunbathing in their back yard, letting the bees and butterflies pollinate them, while their children stayed inside in their separate bedrooms until their flowers faded and fell off several days later. Being in bloom and not getting pollinated was so agonizing that I didn't even think about the fireworks and cookout I was missing until later; it was a whole year of teenage horniness compressed into seventy-two hours, and I could hardly think of anything except Latisha, naked, with bees and butterflies crawling in and out of her blossom... and then fluttering over and crawling into mine. But when it was over, I could think straight again, and was glad I hadn't gotten pregnant, as I might have if I'd been pollinated by one of the same bees or butterflies that had visited Mr. and Mrs. Bailey's flowers a couple of miles away, or if I'd been in Athens where almost any bee or butterfly of the species attracted to us would visit multiple people's blossoms during our flowering. (It was another two weeks after that heat wave hit Atlanta before Athens, Danielsville and Hartwell experienced the right weather to trigger everyone who hadn't already flowered while traveling to the Everglades or the Okefenokee or somewhere.)

Latisha and I celebrated our freedom by going to a movie a couple of days later. I took a county bus that went by her subdivision on the way to the mall, and saved a seat for her; she smiled as she sat down beside me.

"I am so glad that's over," she said.

"Hell yeah," I said. "I hope it's only once a year."

"Probably so; nobody's reported flowering more than once since the change."

Latisha had gotten an A+ on her extra credit report on the Athens magnolias -- it was twice as long and thorough as Ms. Killian had asked for, three or four pages longer than mine on the Huntsville telepaths and ten pages longer than Tyrone's on the Valdosta frogs. It had brought her up to an A- for Biology, and a B+ on her overall GPA for the year. I hadn't done as well, but Ms. Killian didn't fail me outright for lying about what species I was and my parents didn't ground me for getting a C. Latisha had kept following the research on *Homo athenanthus* during the summer; she said she was thinking about double-majoring in botany and reproductive biology at UGA.

"You know," I said after a pause, "I kind of feel sorry for the species that are in heat all the time."

"Yeah," she said. "I know what you mean. I know it's not so intense all the time for them as it is for us when we're in bloom, but still -- I remember it being pretty bad, sometimes, when I was *Homo sapiens*. Worrying about whether boys would notice me, and obsessing over them -- scared of sex and wanting it at the same time -- I'm glad I don't have to deal with that very often now."

"Yeah. Don't take this wrong, but I'm glad your sexiness only distracts me from your beauty for a few days a year."

"You know just what to say to a girl," she said with a grin, and squeezed my hand.

We looked out the window for a while, and chatted about inconsequential stuff the rest of the way to the mall. The movie was an awful mess, but kind of fun. They'd been most of the way through filming it when the changes happened, apparently, and the producers decided to change the story so that it happened just before and after Valentine's Day. But of course they film scenes out of order, based on when various sets and locations are available, so some of the scenes early in the movie, when the characters were still *Homo sapiens*, had to be filmed when the actors no longer were, and adjusted in post-production by not entirely convincing CGI. In the later scenes, the plot took a total left turn as the changes threw ten kinds of monkey wrench into the characters' romantic and heroic and villainous plans; most of the actors had become Hollywood capybaras, but there were three other California and Nevada neospecies among the main characters and a dozen others among the minor characters. Latisha and I both laughed so hard our rib muscles hurt.

After the movie, we went to the ladies' room. By the end of the school year, I'd decided Mom was sort of right; I wanted the flexibility to use whichever public restroom had a free toilet stall at the moment. And by then, both Latisha and I looked androgynous enough that we could get away with using whichever restroom we wanted. Her breasts had gradually atrophied to nothing, and my face had softened to where strangers occasionally called me "miss," especially when I went a little too long between haircuts. By that time it didn't bother me much.

We hung out at the mall for a while, and ran into Arnie and Tara and some other centaurs we knew from school when we were getting gelati at the food court.

"We missed y'all at the fourth of July party," Arnie said.

"Sorry," I said. "We were both... indisposed."

"I hope you're feeling better," said Kirsten.

"All better," Latisha said. "It's just something Athens magnolias get this time of year."

"Why do they call y'all magnolias?" one of the guys asked. Latisha giggled; Arnie blushed; Tara looked annoyed.

"Let me explain," I said, and whispered in his ear.

-----

When I got home, walking the last few hundred feet from the bus stop, I found Mom and Dad working together in the front garden. Along about Easter, Mom had gone insane with her spring planting; she'd planted not only the annual flowers she'd usually done, along the edge of the sidewalk and driveway and mailbox, but had plowed up almost all the lawn and planted a zillion different kinds of vegetables. Dad and I helped, sometimes. Now they were weeding the patches of tomatoes and okra, Dad wearing nothing but shorts and Mom nothing but a short skirt. Sure, her breasts weren't on her chest anymore, but it still felt a little weird to see her going bare-chested in hot weather.

"Did you have a good date?" Mom asked.

"Yep," I said. "The movie was unintentionally funny -- funnier than a lot of movies that are supposed to be comedies."

"Latisha seems like a nice girl," Dad said. "I hope you don't -- You know why we had to keep you inside until it was over, don't you?"

"Sure," I said. "When I'm in my right mind I know I'm not old enough to have a baby. Latisha knows it too. Ignore everything I said for the last three days, I wasn't thinking straight. I'm sorry I screamed those things at you..." This was getting awkward. "Hey, let me go change and I'll come help you with this."

"Thanks," Mom said. "I'll get a hug after you change into your gardening clothes."

Mom and Dad never told me exactly what had happened between them, but over the years I picked up hints here and there from things I overheard. I think that day when I came home from school and found Mom crying and Dad off running errands, they'd tried to have sex, maybe for the first time since the changes, and it was a horrible failure. Then Dad started sleeping in the guest bedroom, and they avoided each other for a while. I worried that they were going to get a divorce, but they didn't believe in divorce, and they did believe in each other. After a few weeks of giving each other plenty of space, they tried again to see how much affection they could give each other without making each other frustrated with almost-but-not-quite-right sexual signals; it turned out to be just enough.

Most of the drawings and paintings I did before I was seventeen or eighteen look embarrassingly crude to me now. I threw away a lot of them, except some that I gave Mom that she won't give up. But the earliest painting that I'm still proud of is a portrait I did of Mom and Dad for their twentieth anniversary. Dad is standing next to Mom, and they have their arms around each other; they're in our front garden, looking off at the sunset to the viewer's left. And you can tell from their expressions that, barring accidents, they're going to be standing there together in twenty years, and in forty, never mind that they were sitting on different sides of the change-region boundary that Valentine's Day. They won't let a little thing like being different species divide them.

I have the best parents in the world.

TrismegistusShandy

I haven't had many people reading these stories so far. I'm undecided whether I'll keep posting the Valentine Divergence stories on Scribblehub, or if I'll only post my secondary-world fantasies, which seem to be more to the taste of Scribblehub readers. If you want to see the other Valentine Divergence stories here, please give me a rating, comment, favorite, or review on one or both of these stories. If I don't end up posting them here, you can always read them on another site; see the links in my profile.

Four of my novels and one short fiction collection are available from Smashwords in EPUB format and Amazon in Kindle format. Smashwords pays its authors better than Amazon.

http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/trismegistusshandy

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00I14IWV6