Wings

Jada parked in front of a small house in a neighborhood on the north side of town, a little tidier and more prosperous than Lisette’s neighborhood, from the little I saw of it as she got out and carried me into the house. There was one other car in the driveway, a white Ford Taurus, and there was a wheelchair ramp as well as a set of stairs leading up to the side door. That door opened onto the kitchen, where her grandma was cooking something.

“Hey, Jada,” she said. “Supper’s almost ready. Where’d you get that stuffed animal?”

“Lauren gave it to me,” she said. “We met up right after work. It was a going away to college present she forgot to give me the other day.”

“Nice. Well, go change out of your work clothes and wash up, and tell Tamily to wash her hands too.”

We went to Jada’s bedroom, where she set me gently down on the bed and then changed out of her work uniform into a T-shirt and sweats. Then she said quietly, “I’m gonna go talk to Tamily and eat supper. Talk to you later, sweetie.” She kissed me and I nuzzled her in return, not having lips to kiss her with.

I was bigger than when I’d been a statuette, but less dexterous with my plush claws than with the ceramic ones I’d had before. I tried flapping my wings, but though I was lighter than an organic being of the same size, my cloth wings weren’t anywhere near strong enough to lift me. I could climb, though, and I explored Jada’s bedroom while she and her grandma and sister ate supper, looking through the glass of the terrarium at her pet corn snake, Nefertiti, and watching her stare back at me. Later, Jada came back to her bedroom and did some last-minute packing for college; we chatted in low tones as she worked, and she started an anime episode playing to cover the sound of our voices.

“Can I ask what the ramp was for?” I asked. “Was your grandma disabled before she venned into a younger body?” Or you, I wondered.

“No,” she said. “That was for my great-grandma; she used a walker. She died not long after me and Tamily came to live with her and Grandma.”

After she finished packing, she let Nefertiti out of her terrarium for a little while, letting her wind around her arm and slither around on the bed. I petted her with my forefoot.

“I wish I could take her to school with me,” Jada said, “but there’s no pets allowed in the dorms, and she’d be harder to hide than you.”

“Is your sister going to take care of her while you’re gone?”

“Yeah, I trust Tamily to take care of her.”

After putting Nefertiti back in her terrarium, Jada went to bed early and we snuggled until she fell asleep. I thought about whether it was really such a good idea to venn into a plushie and go to college with her for a while, then fugued out until her alarm went off in the morning. She unconsciously slapped the snooze button and dozed off again, and I took it upon myself to wake her up, nuzzling her face and then tickling her with my wingtips and claws (which weren’t sharp) until she squirmed around and sat up.

“Bratty girl,” she said. “Why must you force me to wake up on time and get to college by — oh, right.”

Tamily and Mrs. Plinkett helped her haul the remaining things to the car — she’d loaded some of them the night before. Within ten minutes after she finished eating breakfast, we were off, with me sitting in the passenger seat, perched on top of some bags and pillows where I could see out the window.

Most of the route we took was on surface roads, with only a few miles on interstates as we passed through Greensboro and Raleigh. A few miles down U.S. 421 from Greensboro, we passed through Siler City, and I told Jada again about how Sophia and Meredith had helped me the day I ran away.

We got to Greenville and the university campus around eleven, and after a little trouble with the maps app on her phone giving misleading directions, she found the freshman dorm she’d be staying in and started hauling stuff in. I was one of the first things she brought in, after she’d identified herself and gotten her room key, and I sat on top of her desk while she brought in her stuff. Her roommate wasn’t there yet, so once she had all her stuff in the room and had moved her car from the temporary moving-in parking to the freshman parking lot, we had some time to talk while she unpacked and put things away.

“Okay,” she said when her phone alarm went off, “I’ve got to go meet up for a campus tour. I’d leave something playing on my laptop for you to watch, but my roommate could be here any time now...”

“It’s okay,” I reassured her. “I won’t get bored.”

I was only alone with my thoughts for a little while before there was a knock at the door. A few moments later, a key turned in the lock, and a tall, muscular white girl with short auburn hair came in, carrying a small suitcase and a duffel bag, followed by a big, beefy man who looked like her father rejuvenated or her older brother, carrying a larger suitcase.

“Looks like your roommate’s already here, punkin,” the man said. “Where do you want to put this stuff?”

“Over by the wardrobe and dresser, I guess? Most of it’s gonna go in there; the desk stuff is still in the car.”

“I’ll go get the rest while you start unpacking, then.”

The girl unzipped the larger suitcase and started unpacking clothes into the dresser and wardrobe. I noticed her brushing her fingertips along the furniture, the walls and the open door frame of the wardrobe a lot while she was doing that. Her dad came back with a couple of cardboard boxes, which she directed him to put on her desk. She continued unpacking the suitcases while he went to the car for a larger but apparently lightweight box.

“Where does this go?”

“On the bed for now.”

“I didn’t see any more stuff, but maybe you’d better double-check.”

“Yeah, I think this is the last box.”

“Your campus tour group doesn’t meet till four, right?”

“Yeah. We could eat lunch or something before you go?”

“Sure, let’s do that.”

They left, and an hour later, returned in different bodies — shorter in her case, less muscular in both cases, and newly female in his case, but with recognizably similar faces — carrying bags of groceries, which they proceeded to unpack into the mini-fridge and the chest of drawers. Once that was done, they stood there for a moment, looking awkwardly at one another, and her dad finally said, “I guess I’d better go, punkin. Have fun, make lots of friends, and learn a lot, okay?”

“Okay, Dad. I’ll call y’all tomorrow after the tour and orientation and so on.”

“And... don’t be afraid to ask for help, okay? Not just from us, but from your professors or the administration or your fellow students. It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you need extra time for exams or —”

“Okay,” she said, looking more than a little ashamed, and glancing toward the door as if she were afraid her roommate might barge into the room at any moment. I felt bad about overhearing this and started to have second thoughts about tagging along with Jada to college. “I will. I don’t think it’ll be an issue until I get into more advanced classes, though.”

“Probably not, but if so, be sure to ask right away, not wait until the problem gets bad. Promise me?”

“I promise.”

“Good girl.” They hugged, and her dad finally left.

Before she unpacked any more of her stuff, she looked over Jada’s things, including me, but didn’t touch anything — except me. She petted me gently before going back to her side of the room and finishing unpacking the suitcases, then the school supplies, laptop, and peripherals (including a nice speaker system), then the large box that her dad had left on the bed.

It turned out to contain a quilt, a pillow (much fluffier than the college-issued pillows or the pillows Jada had brought), and several plushies. She set them up on her desk facing me, trying to be friendly, I guess. So much for my worry that my presence might make a poor impression on Jada’s roommate.

After that, she took an MP3 player out of her purse, plugged it in into her speaker system, and selected an audiobook chapter. I knew it was going to be an audiobook chapter because it spoke aloud the folder names and track names as she navigated from the music she’d apparently been listening to earlier to the book, pushing the buttons without looking at them. Once she had chapter ten of Tik-Tok of Oz playing, she switched from the normal speed she’d been listening to music to 2X speed, and laid down and listened for twenty minutes or so (the characters fell into a tube through the center of the Earth and out the other side, then met some people even stranger than themselves) until the door opened and Jada came in.

“Oh, hi, I’m Steph Merricks, hang on a second while I pause this.” She sat up straight as she did so, and looked toward Jada but didn’t meet her eyes for more than a moment.

“Hey, I’m Jada Plinkett. Just got done with the campus tour and lunch. When did you get here?”

“A little before noon, I guess? My dad and I ate lunch and then I unpacked stuff. My campus tour group doesn’t meet until four.” She had a look on her face that I recognized; I used to have the same anxiety when I met new people, and still did to a lesser degree.

“Okay, cool, we’ve got time to hang out a while. Are you going to that mixer in the common room later?”

Steph didn’t look thrilled. “Uh, no, not really.”

“I guess we can just mix things up here for now, then. Care to introduce me to your friends?” She gestured toward the plushies lined up on Steph’s desk. “This is Lydia,” she said, laying a hand on my back possessively and stroking me between the wings. I had to make an effort not to shiver with pleasure and give the game away right off. Being plush was a lot more sensuous than being ceramic, or maybe it was a difference in how Sophia had designed my body back when she expected I’d be living mostly on Meredith’s desk, versus now, when I’d be sleeping with my girlfriend. (My girlfriend! Even after over three months, it felt nice to think those words.)

“Oh,” Steph said. She introduced us to her pig, Freddy, her puppy, Toto, and her octopus, Ms. Longfingers. Then there was an awkward silence. Steph filled it by saying, “And, uh, I won’t play my audiobooks over the speaker like that unless you’re out of the room. Most of the time I’ll use my earbuds. Only I like to use the speaker when nobody else is around because having the earbuds in too long irritates my ears...”

“Sure, that’s cool. You listen to a lot of audiobooks?”

“Yeah.” Steph ducked her head slightly as if she was a little ashamed of it for some reason.

“What were you listening to just now?”

“Oh, um... Tik-Tok of Oz. It’s the eighth Oz book.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember my friend Meredith telling me about those one time. That guy, what was his name, he wrote a whole bunch of sequels to The Wizard of Oz, right?”

“Yeah, L. Frank Baum. I’ve listened to them a bunch of times ever since I was little, not just the Oz books but several of his other books too. And I used them to learn —” She broke off and looked away.

“Cool. I mostly read manga, as far as fiction goes. I’ve got a stack of manga I haven’t read yet somewhere in one of these boxes. And other stuff, history and urban fantasy and things, but probably more manga than anything else. What else do you like to do?”

“I’m kind of still figuring that out. There’s a lot of stuff I can do now that I used to couldn’t.”

“Did you get healed of something with the Venn machine? My friend’s boyfriend used to have muscular dystrophy.”

That seemed to put Steph at ease a bit. “Yeah, I used to be blind. After we found out about the Venn machines, Mom and Dad took me to the machine in Chapel Hill and changed me so I could see. And they made each other young again.”

“Yeah, my grandma and her friends rejuvenated each other too. Most of the older folks in Brocksboro have done that by now. Where are you from?”

“I was born in Charlotte, but my family moved to Raleigh when I was little so I wouldn’t have to board at school. That’s where the state school for the blind is.”

“Are they changing the way they do things now that kids are only gonna be blind until they get old enough to use a Venn machine?”

“I think so. They’ve been phasing out Braille for a while, because it’s not as useful as it used to be before we had computers with screen readers and before the big audiobook boom, but I think they’ll ditch it entirely now. And the upper grades are focused on teaching kids like me to read print, and learn the names of colors and what they symbolize — things sighted kids learn in kindergarten. I’ve heard some kids’ parents won’t let them use the Venn machine for religious reasons, but everybody in my class had at least tried to use the machine by the time we graduated, and all but one of us had our sight by then.”

“Yeah, my girlfriend’s parents were like that,” Jada said. Steph looked at her, startled. “I mean religious objections to the Venn machines, not...”

“Is your girlfriend going to school here?” Steph asked.

“Not yet; she’s gonna work for a year and save up money before she starts college. Her parents cut her off after she used the Venn machine without permission and they won’t help pay for her tuition or anything.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

That led to Jada bragging about me for a while, which would have made my ears burn if I’d had distinct ears in that form, and asking Steph if she had a boyfriend or girlfriend.

“No, not really. I went on two dates in high school and neither of them went well.”

Jada seemed to notice that was a sensitive topic and backed off, drawing Steph out about what new things she’d tried since she gained her sight, whether she’d used the Venn machine for anything else, and so on. Steph seemed to gradually relax a little as she started talking about her new baby brother — reading between the lines, her parents had decided not to have any more kids after Steph was born blind, and had recently had another one after rejuvenating. “That’s why Mom didn’t come with us; driving for over an hour with a newborn in the car is not fun.” That made me wonder how many other people might start having more children now that they were young again. With people also living longer because of the Venn machines, it might be a problem.

After they’d talked for a while, an alarm on Steph’s phone went off and she said she had to go meet the campus tour group. “It was nice to meet you,” she said as she grabbed her purse and plugged her MP3 player into her earbuds. “I’ll see you later tonight, I guess.”

“Or maybe at supper. I’ll be going down to eat in another hour or so.”

After she was gone, Jada asked me, “What do you think of her?”

“She seems nice. I think she might have anxiety issues like me; you’ll need to watch for signs to avoid making it worse. Like when you and Lily introduced me to about eight new people at once. She seemed pretty nervous about that mixer.”

“Yeah, I’m not gonna push her to go to that. Introduce her to one or two new people at a time, maybe?”

“Wait and see.”

We snuggled and watched a couple of episodes of Hourou Musuko until Jada started feeling hungry and left for supper.