Elijah slept late again – three nights of poor sleep in a row was messing up his sleep cycle. He was still eating breakfast, trying to answer the questions from friends and family that were still coming in via social media and trying not to go into a spiral again about those confusing thoughts from the night before, when Casey got up and came into the kitchen. Elijah immediately tensed up, forgetting what he’d carefully planned to say.

“Morning,” Casey said, not meeting Elijah’s eyes as he shuffled over to the coffee pot.

“Good morning,” Elijah managed to say. “I’m sorry about last night – I shouldn’t have broken down on you again like that. I was just…” He wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence. Shocked, confused, embarrassed… jealous? No way he was mentioning that bit. He finally settled on “surprised,” but immediately second-guessed himself.

“If you were – wait, never mind that for now. What exactly are you apologizing for? Are you okay with me being trans?” Casey brought his cup of coffee over to the table and sat down across from Elijah.

“I want to be. I’m just so confused. I don’t understand. But – we’re friends, and I don’t have that many friends, and I’m sorry I lost it like that, you must have thought it was because I didn’t like you all of a sudden –”

“Shh, slow down,” Casey said. "I can work with confused. I was… concerned that you seemed to be having a panic attack after I said I was trans. Or after I, uh, took off my shirt – sorry about that, again. Because I’ve heard stories about guys who beat up or killed trans women claiming ‘panic’ as a defense, and… But you weren’t lashing out, you were shutting down, and this wasn’t really the kind of situation where that tends to happen, so I wanted to give you the benefit of the doubt.

“So. You said you were confused. Want to ask some questions?”

Elijah opened his mouth for a moment and closed it again. He knew so little, he wasn’t sure how to word his questions without being rude. So… “How do I… uh, refer to you? I mean, I have a feeling the way I’ve heard people talk about transgender people is… not how you’d like to be treated.”

Casey laughed nervously. “Yeah, no shit. Well, when it’s the two of us alone here, you can call me ‘Cassie.’ For talking about me in the third person with other people – well, please don’t, not until I’m out to my family. Which should be later in the year, hopefully no later than Christmas…” She sighed.

“Okay,” Elijah said, nodding. “But like, transgenders in general –”

“It’s an adjective, not a noun,” Cassie said. “Transgender woman, transgender man, transgender people. Or more commonly ‘trans woman’, etc. Not ‘a transgender’ or ‘transgenders’.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“No need to keep apologizing, you’re trying to learn and you’re being respectful.”

“Well… is there anything else I should know about, uh, how to talk about transgender people before I ask any more questions? So I don’t say anything rude by accident?”

Cassie explained gender terminology until Elijah’s head was spinning – ‘gender’ vs. ‘sex’, ‘assigned gender’, ‘preferred pronouns’, ‘deadname’, ‘binary gender’, ‘non-binary’, ‘HRT’, ‘GCS’ and so on. After a while, she saw that Elijah’s eyes were glazing over and said, “I guess that’s enough to go on with. Do you want to ask some more questions now? Or put that off till later?”

“Maybe at lunch,” Elijah said timidly. “I – kind of need time to think.”

“All right.”

They went their separate ways, Cassie finishing breakfast and then working on her arcane software project, Elijah cataloguing books. Elijah thought a lot about what Cassie had said, especially for the first hour or so after breakfast, but eventually managed to focus on work.

At lunch, Cassie said, “I feel like I should explain what I was thinking yesterday. I wanted to ask you to remove the hair from my chest and belly and armpits, so I don’t have to shave there, as well as… well, almost everything except my scalp. And… like I said, but maybe you were too surprised to take it in, I haven’t seen much yet in the way of results from HRT.”

“HRT – that’s, uh hormone something?”

“Hormone replacement therapy, yeah. I haven’t been on it long and it hasn’t affected me all that visibly yet. I’m really just wearing a bra to make myself feel more feminine, not because I have much to cover or support yet… if I hadn’t told you I was trans, and wasn’t wearing a bra, you might not even have noticed my, uh, nipples are different.”

Elijah realized he didn’t actually know how women’s nipples differed from men’s. He also realized he was blushing. So was Cassie, he saw when he looked back at her after looking down at his bowl of cereal for a few moments. “Oh,” he said. “I guess I overreacted.”

“Yeah, but it was understandable. Anyway, now that you know, I might start dressing more femininely around the house. But that’s why I thought it would be okay to take off my shirt so you could remove the hair.”

“I don’t know if you need to take off your shirt, though,” Elijah said. “I need to trace flesh magic spells on skin, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be the same body part I’m casting the spell on… you saw when I showed you the nail-growing spell, I traced the symbols on the back of one hand and my nails grew on both hands.” He hesitated. “I think I remember the book saying with a flesh magic spell the closer you are to the target area the better, but you can do it by touching a nearby or similar area if it’s hard to reach or… not appropriate.” He had removed the hair from his butt by tracing the hair-removal spell on his hip, though it had taken more tries than most other spots he’d removed hair from. “So you shouldn’t need to take off your bra.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Maybe not even your shirt? It might be worth trying to see if I can cast the spell by, say, tracing it on your arm and having it affect your chest and belly.”

“Oh, duh, I should have thought to ask you that.”

“No, there’s no reason it should be obvious. I still don’t even know if it’ll work that way.”

“Anyway, were there any other questions you had?”

Lots. “How did you know? When you were telling me about your breakup with Amber, you said you’d been gradually realizing things for a while, but wouldn’t admit them to yourself until just before Amber broke up with you. So how did you realize you wanted to, uh, transition to being a girl?”

“Lots of little things over the years,” Cassie said. “Like how I always picked the girl characters in video games, or how when I was little I told my parents I wanted to dress up as Ariel for Halloween. I don’t remember that actually happening, I was probably four at the time, but it was one of those stories my mom and dad kept bringing up to amuse their friends and embarrass me. Or how I sometimes felt jealous of girls about stuff like getting more options for what to wear or being able to have babies. Really, it was a wonder I suppressed it for as long as I did.”

Something about the word “jealous” reminded Elijah of something, but he pushed the thought aside. He needed to be a good listener and pay attention to what Cassie was saying.

“It was when I met a couple of trans people at college that I started learning things that helped me put all those clues together and draw the logical conclusion. There were one or two out trans people in my high school, but they weren’t in my year and we didn’t share any classes, I just heard people gossiping about them, which pushed me more toward suppressing… Anyway, the trans girl I made friends with in college, Maisie, made me feel jealous even more than cis girls, and that, along with learning more about her experiences, made it really hard to deny who I was.”

“Oh,” Elijah finally said after too long a pause. “And… what did you do then? If you don’t mind me asking, I mean. After Amber broke up with you.”

“I shared it with Maisie next,” Cassie said. “I really should have told her first, but I thought Amber deserved to know before anybody else… gah.” She made a disgusted noise and went on. “Maisie asked if I wanted her to be with me when I told some other friends, and I said I wanted to wait until I figured out what name and pronouns I wanted to use. So a couple of weeks later, I got together with Maisie and a couple of other friends and told them. I’d already made an appointment with a therapist Maisie recommended by then, and I saw her for the first time a few months later, and after that I got an appointment with an endocrinologist to get started on HRT, but that had an even longer wait time… anyway. It was around then that Uncle Eugene got really sick, and like I said, that nixed my plans to tell Mom and Dad and my other relatives just after I started on hormones.”

Elijah nodded distractedly. He could feel that turmoil of emotions from last night just starting to bubble under the surface, and he was afraid if it got worse, he’d have another breakdown. And he had no idea why.

“Thank you for explaining all this,” Elijah said. “I’ve never heard anything about transgender people except on the news.” Or sermons, he thought, but decided not to say. “And that’s not really all that reliable, I guess.”

“No, not very often. Any more questions?”

“Not now. Is it okay if I ask later if I think of some?” Or just calm down enough to talk about it without bursting into tears or hyperventilating for no particular reason, he thought, suppressing a tremor in his hand.

“Sure. I could send you some links, if you want?”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

Elijah went back to work cataloguing for a couple of hours, but found it hard to concentrate. The intense emotions he’d started feeling again while talking with Cassie hadn’t gotten weaker, much less gone away. Finally, after staring at Dreamthorp for several minutes without seeing it, he decided that he couldn’t focus on work, and he might even have made some cataloguing mistakes in the last couple of hours. The only thing that might help, although it might just as easily make things far worse, would be to confront his emotions and try to figure out why he was feeling so intensely and ambiguously about all the stuff Cassie had told him.

He switched from the library database software to the word processor, where he had a scratch notes document open, and created a new file. Then he started to write down all the emotions he was feeling, or had felt last night, that he could think of.

shock
embarrassment
confusion
guilt
curiosity
bewilderment

He hesitated, thinking “bewilderment” was a synonym of “confusion,” but decided not to second-guess himself, and pressed on.

fear
self-loathing
jealousy

Some of those really didn’t make any sense. Jealousy, for instance… no, better take them in order. Well, shock and confusion made sense at first, being confronted with such a surprise last night. And then whatever the reasons were for all those other emotions, it was natural that all of them crowding in together should cause confusion. Embarrassment – well, that was obvious, after Cassie took off her shirt last night. But why was it lingering even now?

Guilt, of course, could be traced to how he’d broken down in front of Cassie twice in two days. The first one sort of made sense, losing his best friend and getting the message from her saying she never wanted to talk to him again while he was at the dining table with Cassie. But the second – he still didn’t know why, and he apparently blamed himself (that would probably explain the self-loathing, too, he decided quickly).

Curiosity was natural, too, meeting a transgender person for the first time and naturally having a lot of questions about that. Moving on, bewilderment – yeah, just confusion by another name. Fear.

He was stumped. Was he afraid of Cassie because she was trans? He didn’t think so. He might have been vaguely afraid of trans people at some point, based on knowing almost nothing about them, but he didn’t think that was it, either. He’d been hanging out with Cassie all day every day for weeks and, especially after Monday afternoon, there were few of his friends he could be as vulnerable with as her. And if he’d been afraid for a moment in his first shock of surprise, that should have gone away once Cassie reacted with compassion instead of disgust to his breakdown. So what was he afraid of?

After banging his head against the question for a couple of minutes, he decided he was afraid of the rumors that were still spreading about him due to whatever Monica had told people about why she’d broken off the engagement. Or rather, afraid of how his family and friends would react. And he realized now that if they found out he was friends with a trans person, they’d quite possibly react even worse than to the rumor of him being involved with the occult.

It didn’t occur to him to stop being friends with Cassie. As he’d told Monica earlier, he didn’t have so many friends he could afford to just drop one on the chance he might lose one or two of the others if he didn’t.

Now the last item on the list: jealousy. He was apparently jealous of Cassie for some reason. Well, her money and her enormous collection of books could be enough reason for most people to be jealous of her – at least, her money would incite most people’s envy and the library would tempt any book lover to covetousness. But he hadn’t noticed any of that until the last day or so. Maybe it was just because he hadn’t had reason to consciously analyze his emotions until now? Things had gone on a fairly even keel since the surprise and delight of discovering magic, and then his grief over losing Monica was intense, but not all that complicated. But the more he reflected, he decided that the money and books weren’t what he was jealous of. He was pretty sure he hadn’t felt jealous about her wealth before, and there was no reason he should suddenly be jealous about that now. No, it must be related to what had happened last night – he had found out she was trans.

Was he jealous of her being trans? Why would that be?

If he thought about it consciously, it didn’t make sense. Getting to be a girl would definitely have its advantages, but most of those would be wiped out or counterbalanced if his family and friends – except Cassie – didn’t think he was a real girl. Or if he didn’t think he really qualified as a girl, despite his best efforts. He wasn’t sure if he bought Cassie’s idea that having a girl mind was all that really mattered – that Cassie had already been a girl even before she started taking hormones – but he wasn’t as unreflectingly sure of the opposite as he had been a few days ago. And even if so… medical treatment or more advanced flesh magic might give him a girl body, but he didn’t think any branch of magic could give him a girl mind, so being jealous of Cassie was a profoundly useless thing to do.

He stared at the screen for a couple more minutes, his thoughts going in circles, then shook his head and went back to cataloguing. It wasn’t much easier than before, but he did eventually manage to focus on it.

At supper, Cassie asked him if he was ready to try to cast the hair removal spell again.

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do it right after supper.”

They didn’t talk more about gender at supper. After a few minutes of silence, Cassie asked him what all interesting books he’d catalogued that day, and that led to a more comfortable conversation that pushed Elijah’s confusing emotions further aside than the cataloguing work had done.

After supper, they set up the beach towel under one of the chairs again, and Elijah sat down opposite Cassie, and started trying to cast the modified-target hair removal spell. He traced the spell on her left forearm, focusing on removing the hair from her arm first, and managed that on the second try. But after he did her other arm (on the first try), and moved on to try removing hair from her face by tracing the spell on her arm, it took seven tries before Cassie rubbed her cheek and confirmed that the little bit of stubble was gone.

“I guess the face is too far from the arm to make that easy,” Elijah said. “Okay, now I’m going to try casting on your left armpit without being able to see it. We’ll see if it works.”

“Okay,” Cassie said. “Fingers crossed.”

Elijah cast once. Cassie rolled up her sleeve and checked: no dice. She rolled the sleeve down, and Elijah cast twice more with no results. He was about ready to give up on casting without being able to see the target hair clearly, but Cassie suggested he try a couple more times, and on the fifth try, it worked.

“If you don’t mind,” Cassie said, “I think I’d rather take my shirt off, but not my bra – you can trace the spell directly on my other armpit, and my belly, and probably get faster results that way. I don’t want you getting tuckered out.”

Elijah hesitated, but nodded after a moment. “Yeah, I guess that makes more sense.” So Cassie took off her shirt, and Elijah scooted his chair a little closer, and traced the spell on her right armpit. The hair vanished immediately, and Cassie jerked.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just a little ticklish, sorry.”

“You want me to go back to your forearm?”

“No, let’s get this over with.”

So Elijah traced the spell on Cassie’s belly, and she quivered a little as if he was tickling her again, which made his face feel hot, but again the hair vanished from her belly right away. He traced the spell in the same area again, but focused on her chest, and this time it took three tries. Getting better.

Next he got up and walked around behind Cassie, and cast the spell on her upper back and then her lower back. There wasn’t a lot of hair there, but it vanished on the first try each time.

By this time Elijah had cast the spell twenty-two times, and Cassie noticed he was getting tired.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “We can finish up tomorrow – or later, if you’ve overextended yourself.”

“Tomorrow should be fine,” Elijah said. “Good night.”

He read for a little while in bed, then fell asleep pretty soon after he turned the lights out. He awoke in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom, then had a hard time getting back to sleep when he returned to bed. He found himself thinking again about why he would be jealous of Cassie, and then about casting the hair-removal spell on her last night, and then about casting it on parts of himself a couple of weeks earlier. He’d stopped without removing hair from any part of himself that wouldn’t be covered by a shirt and shorts, except his face, and he started to wonder how it would feel to remove the rest of his hair below the scalp.

By the time he fell asleep again, he’d removed the hair from his legs and arms.