When Eliza got to Cassie’s house, Cassie was waiting on the porch, and got up and walked down the steps to greet her.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked. “Do you want a hug?”

“Yeah, I mean a hug would be nice,” Eliza said. “I’m not really okay.”

They hugged, and then Cassie seemed to notice what had been scratched into the hood of Eliza’s car.

“Huh,” she said. “Looks like they started to write a slur and stopped because someone saw them?”

“Or they thought someone might have seen them. Or they started feeling guilty about it. Or something.”

“Come on in. You said you’ve already eaten, right?”

“Yeah. I’m kind of wiped out even though I’ve only been up a few hours – I want a nap.”

“You should take care of yourself.”

---

Eliza was woken after only about an hour by the ringing of her phone, which she’d forgotten to silence. She sleepily glanced at the caller ID and saw it was her mom. She answered the call.

“Hey, Mom,” she mumbled. “How’re you?”

“We’re doing okay here. I haven’t heard from you all week and I wanted to check on you. Are you feeling okay after breaking it off with Monica?”

“Better,” she said, unsure for a moment if she were lying or not. “At least in some ways,” she amended. “But today has been kind of stressful, too, for unrelated reasons.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Drama at church,” she fudged. “I don’t want to get into the details. I was talking after the service with one of the other grad students about probably going to church somewhere else.”

“I know God will lead you to the right place for you. And that you won’t leave a place God has led you to for trivial reasons. You remember when you were in middle school and we changed churches because of the infighting at Centerpoint; that was a hard decision, but it worked out.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if it’s gonna get that bad, but I have a feeling it may.” It belatedly occurred to her to be glad that she hadn’t started working on speaking in a feminine voice.

“Well, you’re a grown man and have to make those decisions for yourself now.” Eliza flinched at the ‘grown man’, but didn’t say anything. “But if you want my advice, or your dad’s, just let us know.”

“I’d rather not go into details about what’s going on,” Eliza said. “It feels too much like gossip.”

“No, don’t tell me anything that’s not yours to share. But how are you feeling about Monica?”

“I’m getting over her,” Eliza said. “She made it super clear she never wanted to talk to me again, and that hurt a lot, but… well, I’ve had a lot to distract me from it, and Ca– Casey’s been a good listener and that’s helped me process it, too.”

“Good, good. How’s work going?”

Eliza told her about some of the neat books she’d catalogued, and estimated about how many books she had left to catalogue before the end of her internship, then listened to her mom share a week’s worth of news from their extended family and friends at church. She finally said goodbye and hung up, and Eliza fell asleep again soon afterward.

---

When she woke up again, Eliza was feeling hungry. She went to the kitchen to fix something, and Cassie, working in her office, apparently heard her.

“Hey,” she said, coming into the kitchen as Eliza rummaged in the fridge for sandwich fixings. “Are you feeling better?”

“Yeah, that nap helped.” Eliza set the sliced turkey, horseradish sauce and mustard on the counter and closed the fridge. “I still feel weird about everything that happened this morning, but I’m less upset about it than I was.”

“I was so worried about you when I woke up and saw you were gone,” Cassie said. “I don’t know much about the church you go to, but I was afraid something like that would happen.”

“Yeah… to be honest, so was I. But I didn’t want to give up on them without giving them a chance.” Eliza let out a sob, realizing she maybe wasn’t feeling as much better as she thought. “I mean, the pastor has never said anything against gay or trans people as far as I can remember. And… and I thought that coming out to them would be a dry run for coming out to my family and friends back home.” She suppressed another sob and forced herself to focus on fixing a sandwich.

“I’m sorry it went so badly,” Cassie said. “I honestly didn’t expect it to go as badly as it did, though my brain did throw all sorts of worst case scenarios at me. I thought they’d just be emotionally abusive, not… carving a slur into your car.”

“That was probably just one person,” Eliza said. “And the pastor was really mad at Jacob and Brother Allen for kicking me out. I don’t know, but I hope most people feel like Sarah and Brother Greg, not like Jacob and Brother Allen and whoever vandalized my car.”

“Let’s hope,” Cassie said in a neutral tone.

Eliza finished making her sandwich and put the fixings away, then took her plate to the table. Cassie sat down across from her, looking worried.

“Are you thinking of going back, if it turns out most people are on your side?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll decide after I meet with Brother Greg after work tomorrow.”

“I guess he called you after you left?”

Eliza told her about the phone call from Brother Greg and the vaguely planned meeting for the following day.

“Are you sure meeting with him is a good idea?” Cassie said. “It sounds like… well, he didn’t like those guys kicking you out during the service, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try to guilt-trip you back into the closet. Or that this might not be a setup for an intervention, with half a dozen people trying to guilt-trip you all at once.”

“I… I don’t know. Maybe. But I said I would talk with him.”

“You were probably too upset to think clearly when he asked you to do that; you shouldn’t be held to a promise you made under that kind of stress.”

“Okay. I’ll think about it, and call him tomorrow morning to tell him whether I’m coming.”

“Good girl.”

Eliza blushed and hid her face in her sandwich.

“And,” Cassie went on, “don’t meet him at the church, at least? Tell him you’d rather meet at a restaurant. I can tag along for moral support and sit at a nearby table, to give you some privacy but step in if it looks fishy or you get obviously upset.”

“Thanks,” Eliza mumbled through a mouthful of sandwich.

After she finished eating, Eliza decided to work on her magic. She opened the spellbook to the new library search spell, and started practicing with it. She thought she remembered a passage in one of the Oz books where the characters fell through a tunnel to the antipodes, but couldn’t remember which one, so she focused on that and cast the spell. The first three times it didn’t work, but then it led her unerringly to the shelf in her bedroom where she’d shelved L. Frank Baum’s books, and her finger fell on Tik-Tok of Oz. She opened it and found the passage.

She tried again with several more vague memories, sometimes getting no results and sometimes a definite negative; whatever book she’d read that in wasn’t in the house. Then she got another definite result, but it led her to Cassie’s bedroom, and to one of the boxes of Cassie’s books she hadn’t unpacked yet – apparently the scene she remembered was from Passage by Connie Willis.

Then, with her next try, she got multiple results. The spell led her to find the passage in Deerskin where Lissar and Ossin stay up all night to nurse the newborn puppies, but then it also led her to another book she’d never heard of where something similar happened.

By this point, she was getting tired again, so she said goodnight to Cassie, went to bed, and read for a while before going to sleep.

---

Monday morning after breakfast, she called the church office on the kitchen phone and asked Mrs. Erwin if she could speak with Brother Greg.

“Just a moment,” the secretary said, and transferred the call.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Brother Greg, this is Eliza Hudnall.”

“I’m glad to hear from you. I want to apologize again – after the police officer told me about your car being vandalized, I went outside to speak with you, but you’d already gone. Did you get my email?”

“No, I haven’t checked it yet today.”

“Well, at yesterday evening’s service, we took up a collection to get your car fixed. I don’t know what your insurance situation is, but I hope we can collect enough between last night and next Sunday morning to pay for it without you having to file a claim and have your premium go up.”

“Oh, thank you…”

“I’m appalled to realize that someone at our church was hateful enough to do that. Some of our congregation believe that what you’re doing is wrong, but that was no excuse for what someone did.”

“Do you know if the police got anything useful from the security camera footage?”

“Unfortunately, it seems the cameras don’t cover that part of the parking lot well enough to be sure. I’m going to make a proposal to add more security cameras at the next business meeting. At the evening service, I asked for the vandal to confess, and I’ll keep doing it at every service until they’re caught or turn themselves in.”

“Thank you. That’s… I’m still not sure if I want to come back. Do you want to talk about where we’re gonna meet?”

“Do you want to come by the church office around five?”

“Five-thirty would be better for me – I’m half an hour away from Boone now, and I want to work until five. Also, I’d rather meet at a restaurant.”

“Of course. Any preference?”

“How about the Red Onion Cafe?”

“Okay, Red Onion Cafe at five-thirty. Is there anything more we need to discuss before we meet?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Will you pray with me?”

“Yes, let’s.”

Brother Greg prayed that God would show them both what to do and how to serve him, and that the vandal would repent, confess, and make restitution. Then they said goodbye, and Eliza got to work cataloguing and shelving the fiction by authors with names beginning with H.

When Cassie got up, Eliza told her what she’d decided and what Brother Greg had said about taking up a collection and calling for the vandal to turn themselves in.

“Wow, that’s better than I expected,” Cassie said. “I’d still feel more comfortable if you have me or your friend Sarah at a nearby table when you meet him, though.”

“All right. I figure we’ll leave right at five?”

“Yeah. I’ll be ready.”

---

During her lunch break, Eliza practiced the library search spell a few more times, and finally unlocked chapter five. She eagerly skimmed through it to see what new spells she was about to learn.

One would allow her to play back a recent event, whether she were present for it or not. She wondered if it would let her see who vandalized her car, and on further reading, it probably would. It was supposed to let her see events up to three days in the past. But she’d have to go back to the church parking lot and cast it there, and make a good guess about when the vandalism happened, or else cast it several times until she hit on the right moment.

The second was even more exciting: a spell to adjust one’s hormone balance. With daily castings of this spell, it seemed, she could bypass the need for HRT. She’d need to do a lot of research on glands and hormones to know what to focus on when she cast the spell, though.

The third was also cool, but less obviously amazing at first. It would give her more precise awareness and control of her muscles for a couple of hours, which would presumably make her more skillful with delicate tasks. However, when she told Cassie about her new spells, she was just as excited about the third one as other two.

“Oh, wow! That should really speed up your voice training, once you get started on that.”

“Voice training… yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. How do you make your voice sound feminine?”

“I’ll send you some links to a couple of videos that helped me. They’ll explain it better than I can. But I think if your spell gives you better awareness of all your muscles, you might be able to focus on the muscles in and around your throat and chest and adjust your timbre and pitch and resonance more easily.”

“Wow…” Eliza considered asking if she could take a couple of hours to practice that before meeting with Brother Greg that evening, but reminded herself of all the time she’d slacked off last week and went back to work. There’d be enough time to practice the new spells, and watch the videos Cassie was going to send her, later in the evening.