Secret Transfic Autumn Anthology / #13 (Chapter One)
A Girl, a House, and a Secret
by Trismegistus Shandy
Fired from her teaching job after being outed as trans, Jenny Brand was offered a tutoring job for a disabled child of a wealthy family. But why so much secrecy surrounding the job?
Nightmares, brief discussion of genitals, mention of pregnancy
Chapter One
Of course I wasn’t fired because I was trans. No, it was for completely unrelated reasons, as anyone at South Taine Elementary or the Taine County school board would tell you. Besides, Georgia is an at-will employment state, so even if they did fire me for being trans, it would be perfectly legal.
My completely legal and unprejudiced firing aside, I had to find a new job, and I didn’t have the money to move to a less transphobic area right now. I started applying for jobs at schools in the more liberal cities like Athens and Atlanta, despite how long the commute would be until I could afford to move, and considered changing careers, at least temporarily, until I could save enough money to move somewhere more accepting.
Not surprisingly, not many schools were hiring in the middle of the school year. A month went by, and another, and another, and I still didn’t have anything. I was going to have to choose between rent and a full load of groceries — or giving up and moving in with my parents, which might be worse.
And then I got a letter from a lawyer’s office. For a moment I was terrified that someone was suing me, maybe a parent of a child I’d taught in the short time between getting outed and getting fired. Then I daydreamed that I was being informed of an inheritance — not that I knew of any rich relatives, but who does know all the people they’re related to? Not me.
Then I opened the envelope.
Dear Ms. Brand,
I am writing to inform you of a job offer from my clients. They wish to hire a full-time teacher for their disabled eight-year-old child. They happen to have heard that you are recently out of work, through no fault of your own, and suggested that I offer you the job before posting it publicly.
My client is prepared to offer a competitive salary, plus room and board and a budget for teaching materials...
I was on the phone with the lawyer, Leon McKay, a minute later, and on my way to his office for an interview an hour later.
Dietrich & McKay was across the street from the Taine County courthouse. I was pleasantly surprised at the friendly reception I got; their secretary didn’t misgender me once during the fifteen minutes I spent waiting, nor did Leon McKay once I was ushered into his office. He spent half an hour asking questions about my experience and job history (four years teaching third grade), the subjects I was most enthusiastic about teaching, (math and science), whether I’d ever taught any disabled children (several), and so forth. Then he pulled out a thick folder and started explaining the NDA.
“You may not discuss the child you are teaching, their family, or their home at any time, during the job application process or employment period or at any time afterward, whether in person, in writing, by phone, on the Internet, or any other means of communication,” he said. “The family cares deeply about their privacy and the privacy of their child, and you will not be allowed to breach it in any way.”
That seemed a little extreme, but I could readily imagine circumstances that would make it make sense. If one of the parents had a stalker, they’d want to avoid anyone finding out where they lived, or if the child was a former actor or musician before they got disabled, they’d want to avoid reporters descending on their new home like locusts. But odds were they were just rich and eccentric. “Rich” went without saying if they could afford to pay a full-time salary for a live-in teacher; I wondered how many other servants they had.
“What can I say to my friends and family? Can I tell them I have a job as a tutor for a disabled child, without specifying their disability, name, age or gender?”
“Or where they live. Yes, you may.”
“That’s acceptable, then.”
I read through the NDA carefully, and it was basically the same as he’d outlined but in more detail with a bit more legalese. I bit my lip, thinking. Signing the NDA didn’t oblige me to take the job, I decided. It just enabled me to find out more about it. I could always turn it down if the situation gave me bad vibes. I initialed and signed.
After I was sworn to secrecy, McKay gave me the address of the place, along with a photocopy of a hand-drawn map, and told me he would call me shortly to let me know what time my second interview would be. I got that call fifteen minutes after I got home: tomorrow at ten.
I was encouraged. I hadn’t expected to find anyone local who would hire a trans woman, but here I’d actually been sought out based on someone hearing about my unjust firing. Well, “local” — it was up in the north end of Taine County, almost forty minutes’ drive away. Taine County was long and narrow, with its southern end in what could generously be called the remote outskirts of metro Atlanta, and its northern end well into the Appalachians.
I plugged the address into Google Maps and ran into my first problem; it wasn’t there. The road the address was on wasn’t even there. Back when I lived in the Atlanta suburbs, I used to have that problem sometimes with new-built subdivisions, but I didn’t get the impression that was the case here; there weren’t many new subdivisions in Taine County, and none, I thought, in the northern part of the county.
I tried searching for the other roads on the hand-drawn map, and found them, then compared the Google Maps view with the map to figure out where the house was. It seemed straightforward enough seen that way, and I was able to pick a spot near the house and get an estimate of travel time that way.
So the next morning, I put on my best blouse and skirt, left my apartment at nine-fifteen, found my way to the neighborhood on the map... and promptly got lost. It didn’t help that, despite the forecast, the weather got bad right around the time I reached the area on the map; the rain was pouring down hard enough that it was hard to read the road signs or recognize landmarks, and I’m sure I missed some turns. When it was five minutes to ten and I still hadn’t found the road the house was on, I pulled over and tried to call ahead and let them know I’d be late, and maybe ask for help. No reception, not surprising given the storm. So I got back on the road and kept trying to find the place, and fifteen minutes later, finally found the road the house was supposed to be on.
It was a dirt road, winding up the side of a mountain, muddy with the sudden heavy rain, and I drove about five miles an hour, peering through the downpour at the house numbers on the mailboxes. I found my destination a few minutes later and pulled into the driveway, which wound through dense woods to a wide clearing around a big, rambling house with a long porch, a single SUV in the driveway, and a tire swing. I parked as close to the house as I could get, picked up my briefcase, and dashed through the rain to the porch steps, getting instantly soaked to the skin.
When I rang the bell, the door was opened almost immediately by a white woman a few years older than me in an old-fashioned ankle-length dress with puffed sleeves.
“Miss Brand? Come in, the bathroom is this way, I’ll get you some dry clothes. I’m so sorry, I should have scheduled the interview for later, I should have known... Goodness, where are my manners? I’m Patience Oldcroft.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, shivering as I followed her to the bathroom. I closed the door behind me, found some fluffy towels in the closet, and started undressing and drying off. Patience knocked on the door a couple of minutes later and passed me a dress similar to her own, as well as fresh undergarments, while I held the door slightly ajar.
I was wondering what she’d meant by “I should have known.” The forecast had been sunny with 5% chance of rain through most of the day, and a slightly greater chance toward evening. I dismissed it, though, being occupied with drying off and getting dressed, and nervously psyching myself up for the interview. I’d only had a brief glimpse of the dimly-lit front parlor as I rushed through to the bathroom, trying not to drip on the hardwood floors too much, but it had looked like the furniture was old and sturdy, with a lot of interesting books and bric-a-brac on various surfaces.
Once I was dressed, I stepped out of the bathroom and looked around for Patience. “In here,” she called, and I followed her voice to the front room, where she was sitting on a kind of narrow sofa. “You can sit anywhere.”
I sat in one of the straighter wooden chairs across from her, and tried to look as professional as possible in my borrowed dress and sock feet. It helped a little that Patience was in sock feet as well.
“Well,” she said, “Mr. McKay told me you seem to be just what we’re looking for. I apologize again about the weather — this place is hard enough to find when the weather cooperates.” She laughed nervously. “But you’ve made a good impression so far. I just have a few questions, and then you can meet Essie, and if she takes to you, you’ve got the job.”
“Okay. I look forward to meeting her.”
“Some of these questions may seem odd,” she began, “and, I don’t know, possibly not legal for an employer to ask? Mr. McKay advised me not to ask you certain personal questions, but believe me, my motives for doing so are not hostile. I just want what’s best for Essie.”
That set off alarm bells, but I really needed the job, so I nodded encouragingly and said, “Of course.”
“How long had you known you were transgender before you... came out?”
“That’s a complicated question,” I said. “I’d suspected years earlier, when I was in high school, but I dismissed those suspicions because I didn’t fit the media’s usual portrayal of a trans woman. Actually knew for sure...? It was less than a year ago. And then I didn’t exactly come out; I was outed. Someone who knew me saw me when I was going shopping down in Gainesville, in girl mode, and took photos that they sent to the PTA and the school board.”
She nodded sympathetically. “Have you ever worked with transgender children?”
Was Essie trans? Was that why she’d reached out to hire me? “Not that I know of. There were one or two kids I had vague suspicions about, but I knew better than to say anything, given the local political climate, and anyway it can be hard to tell at that age if the child doesn’t come right out and tell you ‘I’m a girl’ or ‘I’m a boy.’”
She asked me a few more questions about children I’d taught, and how I’d figured out I was trans, without ever coming out and saying whether Essie was trans, or what her disability was. The rain was continuing to pound down hard on the roof and the windows. At last, she said, “Well, I think you’re what I’m looking for. Now the third interview.” She smiled. “This way.”
She led me up the stairs to a hallway and down to the farthest door on the left, where she knocked. “Essie? The new teacher is here.”
The door was opened almost immediately by a girl in a miniature version of Patience’s old-fashioned dress. Her brown hair was loose and shoulder-length, her eyes hazel; I couldn’t see any signs of disability, but I knew most disabilities weren’t obvious at a glance. No signs she was trans, either, but most kids her age can pass for either gender with the right hairstyle and clothes, especially ones that covered as much as that dress.
She had a nice bedroom, with a big south-facing window and several shelves full of books and toys, an intriguing mix of old and new stuff; the toys were a mix of traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine toys, soldier action figures rubbing shoulders with ballerina dolls. On her queen-sized bed there was a small crowd of plushies, some of them old and well-loved and some fairly new.
“Hi, Essie? I’m Ms. Brand. I’ll be your new teacher, if you’ll have me.”
“Are you going to go away like the other teacher?” she demanded.
Patience said, “We had another teacher who quit after a short time. Essie was very upset about it.”
“I don’t plan on going anywhere anytime soon,” I said. “I hope I’ll be your teacher for the rest of the school year, and probably for another year or two after that. Maybe until you’re old enough to need a different teacher, someone with experience teaching middle school or high school. But let me tell you a secret: grown-ups can’t always do what they want. When I was your age, I thought grown-ups could do anything they wanted — stay up late, watch any TV show they liked, eat desserts instead of vegetables. Now I know there are all kinds of pressures on me, making me do things I might not want to. But as far as I can, I’ll be your teacher for as long as you need me.”
Essie nodded. “Like Great-Grandpa hassles us and makes Mommy do stuff she doesn’t want to.”
“Essie!” Patience exclaimed, looking mortified. “We don’t talk about family business with strangers.”
“When will she not be a stranger?” Essie asked. “I like her.”
“Maybe in a few weeks,” Patience said. “I’ll let you know.”
“Okay.” Essie turned to me. “Can we start learning now?”
“If it suits with your mother, we can start right away. I have a few more questions for her, though, so we’ll need to allow time for that after our lesson?” I looked questioningly at Patience, and she said:
“Yes, of course. Let me show you to the schoolroom.”
The schoolroom was right down the hall; it had a low table with a child-size chair and an adult chair, and a couple of bookshelves filled with children’s books (many of them quite old), a microscope, and a globe. The other walls were covered with maps, charts, diagrams, and a blackboard. A large window looked out into the backyard; it seemed like the rain had slowed to a drizzle in the last few minutes. After looking around for a few moments, I set down my briefcase on the table and sat in the larger chair; Essie sat down in the smaller one and looked expectantly at me.
“I’ll let you know when lunch is ready,” Patience said. “We usually eat around one; is that okay?”
“Of course.”
“No, uh, dietary restrictions?”
“No, ma’am.”
Patience left, and I opened my briefcase. I hadn’t been sure if they’d want me to start right away, but I’d brought enough materials for a first day’s lessons just in case. “This is a placement test,” I said. “Don’t worry, you won’t be graded on it. It’s just to let me know what you already know and what you still need to learn...”
* * *
Essie was a sharp kid. She finished the placement test faster than I expected, and did pretty well in most areas, being a little weak on math, but testing at fourth or fifth grade level in language arts and social studies. When I went over the results with her afterward, she volunteered that since the first teacher her mother hired had left, her mother had been teaching her American history and geography through the lens of their family’s genealogy. Then she started to say something about her great-grandfather again, but caught herself and seemed to remember her mother’s injunction.
“Well,” I said, “it’s good to know your family’s roots. I don’t know mine any farther back than my grandparents. But since you’re way ahead on that, how about we learn some math?”
She nodded eagerly, and I got some worksheets out of the briefcase.
* * *
Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches. During lunch, Patience and I discussed salary and benefits. The salary she was offering was predicated on including room and board — if I kept my apartment in Harperton, I’d be making a bit less than before I was fired, but if I moved in with her and Essie, I’d be able to put away considerably more savings for my eventual move to a more progressive state. The math seemed simple, but I asked a few questions anyway.
“It’s just you and Essie here?”
“Yes, just us now.” I didn’t ask about the implied then. She seemed to hesitate before going on: “My grandfather is... down the road, and calls and drops in at unexpected times. I hope he won’t be a bother.”
After some talk about use of the kitchen, and splitting the chores, I asked, “Can you show me the room or rooms I’d be living in after lunch?”
“Of course.”
When Essie finished eating, she went upstairs to her bedroom, and Patience showed me the rest of the ground floor. Apparently I could have my pick of the unused rooms, a couple of which were already furnished as bedrooms. The house had clearly been built for a lot more than two people to live in. I chose two adjoining rooms with a bathroom between them as my bedroom and office/sitting room, and then broached the other questions I hadn’t wanted to ask in front of Essie.
“May I ask what exactly Essie’s disability is? I ask because it’s possible it might affect how I need to accommodate her learning —”
“You’ll find that out in time,” she said, “if you stick with the job. Suffice it to say that she can’t go to school with other children.”
That was weird and off-putting. Was she ashamed of it, whatever it was? So far I hadn’t seen any signs of disability, either mental or physical, but I wondered if Essie might be slightly neurodivergent, and I wondered in turn if Patience might be ashamed of that. I didn’t want to dig into it when she’d so clearly rebuffed me, though, so I turned to my other question.
“Earlier, you asked me some questions about how and when I figured out I was trans...”
“Oh, yes. Well, I was hoping you knew when you were a child, like Essie, but it’s not a big deal. I’m sure you can still help her if she has questions about... that sort of thing.” She waved one hand helplessly as she finished the sentence.
Ah, thought so. “How long has Essie been living as a girl?” I asked.
“About four months. She... informed me one morning before breakfast. I was surprised, but I figured out what I could and I’ve tried to be accommodating.”
“I’m glad to hear that Essie has such a supportive parent.”
“I would do anything for her.”
I thought uncomfortably about my own parents, and my grandfather, and just nodded. “Well. How about if I give Essie another lesson this afternoon, and then make arrangements to move tomorrow?”
“That sounds good.”
* * *
Our afternoon lesson focused on magnetism. I had a few magnets with their north and south poles labeled in my briefcase, and let Essie mess around with them for a little while before explaining why they worked.
She had fun using one magnet to pick up another, or push it away by waving the same pole near it, for a few minutes. Then she tried something I’d tried when I was a kid, too: she held one magnet upright in her hand, north pole up, and tried to balance another magnet in the air on top of it, north pole down. She failed, of course; the magnet slid off and fell to the table, and she tried again. The upper magnet flipped over and stuck to the lower magnet. Again; it fell off. I was about to tell her it wouldn’t work, that you needed a special setup to do magnetic levitation, but then — she did it.
I sat there staring slack-jawed as she balanced an ordinary school magnet on top of a repelling magnetic field, constantly adjusting the position of her hand as the upper magnet tipped this way or that. “How are you doing that?” I asked. “That’s amazing!”
To my confusion and dismay, she immediately said, “I’m sorry!” and dropped the magnets like they’d burned her. She looked — embarrassed? Why?
“No, no, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. “What you did was fantastic. Probably not one person in a million could do that. Could you do it again?”
“I’ll try,” she said diffidently, but though she tried several times, she couldn’t get the magnets to balance again. I heaped praise on her nonetheless; getting that to happen even once was a feat of dexterity anyone could be proud of.
After she’d tired of playing with the magnets, I started the explanation, getting out worksheets with child-appropriate diagrams of magnetic fields and working through them with her. We knocked off for the day around four-thirty, and I said goodbye. “I may see you tomorrow, if I bring the first load of my stuff over then,” I said. “Otherwise Monday.”
“Okay,” she said, and hugged me. “Thank you for teaching me this cool stuff!”
I stiffened for a moment; in the public schools, teachers weren’t supposed to accept hugs. Too much risk of accusations of sexual misconduct. This might be even worse, given that I was going to be alone with Essie for hours every day. But after a moment, I gave in and hugged her back. I had only known her for a few hours, but like her mother, I would do anything for this precious little girl.
I came up with the idea for this story in March 2022, wrote the first draft from July 22 to September 22 of that year, and revised a few days later. The title and parts of the basic concept come from Jo Walton's essay "A girl and a house: the gothic novel".
Thanks to Chiri, Gwen, rooibos chai, Sarah and Sonia for feedback on the first draft.
My free stories can be found at:
I also have several ebooks for sale, most of whose contents aren't available elsewhere for free. Smashwords pays its authors higher royalties than Amazon. itch.io's pay structure is hard to compare with the other two, but seems roughly in the same ballpark.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Oh. I am *hooked*. I would also do anything to protect the small mysterious child that I've known less than a day
This is what I mean when I say you are through the ride right before me.
@TechnocratKT lol, i see what you mean