Chapter 14: Chapter 12 – Help!

“Anya’s right, you know,” says June.

“Hang on.” Anya pulls out her phone. “Lemme put this in the calendar. New event. Anya…was…right.”

I grin, but then flop back on the couch. “I know, but I feel like I either have that conversation with my parents soon or it’ll just be hanging over my head.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to have it on your birthday!” June protests.

“And I don’t want do a birthday thing with them if I don’t have that conversation, either, because then they’d be like, ‘Happy Birthday dear Deadname,’ and I would be sad.” I pout and lift my feet off the floor because I’m kind of twisted after flopping and it’s uncomfortable. I put my legs in Anya’s lap instead, which is much better.

“Do you want to try to talk to them sooner?” asks Anya. “Just springing it on them in the middle of a birthday party seems like it could go badly.”

“What if I, like, gave them a little heads-up? Asked to keep things low-key because there was something important I wanted to talk to them about?” I stare above me. “There’s a crack in your ceiling that looks like a rabbit.”

Anya looks up. “Huh. I always thought that was Alfred Hitchcock, but I can see the rabbit, too.” She considers. “It might work? As long as you’re okay with your birthday maybe being a disaster, I mean.”

“Eh, whatever. Twenty-eight feels like a mid-tier sort of birthday anyway. What the fuck are you doing?”

Anya is rhythmically tapping on my thigh and shin. “Weird,” she says. “I thought you were a musician.”

I pay attention to what she’s doing for a moment and then roll my eyes. “Oh em gee. Are you playing Heart and Soul on my leg?”

Anya shrugs. “It’s the only thing I remember from piano lessons.”

“Better than Chopsticks, I guess. Where’s my phone?”

June leans forward in her chair and slides my phone across the coffee table to me.

“Thanks. I’m still not used to the pocket situation; I keep leaving my phone all over the place.” I start tapping out a text to my parents. “Mom invited me to their place, but I could ask for someplace more public, I suppose.”

“I think,” says June, “that depends entirely on how likely they are to react badly. If you’re pretty sure they won’t take it well, then having that conversation in a restaurant or someplace is decent insurance that they won’t completely flip out. On the other hand, if your parents are stereotypical midwesterners, you’re more likely to get an accurate picture of how they’re feeling if you’re not where they’re worried about other people seeing. The most important thing is that you’re safe. That matters more than their comfort.”

“Yeah…,” I say uncertainly. “I’m not worried that they’ll get violent or anything. I’m not really expecting immediate support and understanding, either.”

“Okay, but we’re clear that physical violence isn’t the only way a situation can be unsafe, right? Anyway, you’ll have Anya with you.”

Anya bares her teeth in a mock-threatening grimace.

“Eek!” I say playfully. I go back to my phone and eventually say, “How does this sound? ‘Sorry I missed you last night—I was out with friends. I’m not really feeling up for much for my birthday but would like to see you. You can meet my girlfriend and I have something important I want to talk to you about.’”

“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” says June. “How about ‘exciting news that I want to share with you’?”

“I’m not sure they’ll think it’s exciting,” I say doubtfully.

“Hey, Lark?” Anya pats my thigh. “Are you happier now?”

“Yeah, of course,” I say.

“Then that sounds like important and exciting news. If your parents don’t think so, that’s a them problem. Besides, I don’t think a positive spin is gonna hurt.”

“Also,” adds June, “you don’t want to give them the idea that this is some sort of discussion or that you’re looking for advice. It’s exciting news, you want to share it with them. Period.”

I laugh and start editing my message. “Okay, clearly I’m outvoted. Also, you’re right. Gaaah, I’m just so used to thinking of my gender shit as something to be ashamed about!”

June shakes her head sadly. “That makes sense, but it’s so awful that you were made to feel that way.”

I give her half a smile. “One of these days, I’ll get it. Coming out to such a good response from Dave and then Kelly and the others has helped. It’s harder with my parents, I guess.” I tap the send button. “Anyway, now I’m cute and I have a hot girlfriend, so that helps too.”

“Pretty much winning at life,” Anya agrees.

“Aaaand, now I have anxiety,” I announce and shove my phone at Anya. “Here, please take this so I’m not checking it every two seconds. Somebody please talk about something that’s not my parents!”

Anya takes my phone and puts it on the other side of her. “I figured out why my client’s ‘sanctum’ is fucking with the computers. It’s wild.”

“Oh yeah?” I say.

“I thought it was some kind of magical interference, which is definitely a thing. Our darling June here has enough control over the electromagnetic spectrum that she can do an EMP if she wants.”

“Whoa, seriously?”

“Seriously,” June says. “You’ve seen my halo trick, right? It’s just light. And I’ve done the deep tissue infrared on you a couple times. The EMP is pretty easy, since by definition it’s not a question of finesse. Takes a lot of power, though.”

“What about directly manipulating your guitar pickups?” I ask.

“I can do that. It’s a bitch to stay in tune, though.”

“Pfft, spoken like someone who relies too much on frets,” I tease.

“Anya, your girlfriend is getting uppity just because she can play fretless,” June says with a grin. “Please do something about that.”

“Lark!” Anya says sharply. “Show some respect!”

“Sorry,” I mumble, heat rising in my face and other places.

“Good girl,” Anya laughs. Of course, that only amplifies the effect.

“How the fuck do you do that to me?” I mutter.

Anya cocks an eyebrow. “With you? Easily.”

I hide my face in a convenient throw pillow, but quickly resurface when my phone dings. “Is that my mom?”

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“Yep,” Anya says, picking up my phone.

“Gimme!” I say, making grabby hands in her direction, then, “Please?”

Anya grabs my hand, kisses it, and presses my thumb to my phone to unlock it, but holds my phone out of reach.

“We didn’t know you had a girlfriend, exclamation mark,” she reads. “Very exciting, exclamation mark. Hope the big news isn’t a grandbaby because that’s too fast, exclamation mark, exclamation mark, question mark.”

June smacks her forehead. “I didn’t even think of that as a possible interpretation! I don’t spend enough time with the straights.”

“How about Sunday, question mark,” Anya continues. “Lunch or supper, you pick.”

Another ding. “P.S. We do still want grandbabies, just not right away, dot dot dot.”

“Getting some mixed messages, Mom!” June rolls her eyes.

“My girlfriend is very sexy, but she hasn’t gotten me pregnant yet,” says Anya, tapping at my phone. “Sunday lunch sounds great, exclamation mark. And send!”

“Don’t you fucking dare!” I yell, my heart suddenly beating very fast. “Is—is that possible?”

“I didn’t,” Anya says gently, finally handing over my phone so I can see the message she sent and the reply that comes through:

No grandbabies lol
Sunday lunch sounds great! 

Phew. See you Sunday!

“And yeah,” Anya adds, “it’s possible.”

“Holy shit,” I breathe, then lapse into silence. There are suddenly a lot of thoughts and feelings competing in my brain.

“You gotta be more careful. You keep breaking your girlfriend!” June says.

“I can’t help it that she’s so submissive and breedable!” Anya protests.

“I—dammit!” I bury my face in the pillow again.

*****

“Hey,” says Anya on the way home. “Please let me know if the teasing is ever too much.”

“I mean, I like it,” I admit shyly. “It can be a bit overwhelming sometimes, but that’s part of what I like about it, I think? It’s just a very unfamiliar dynamic. But I’ll let you know. Thank you.”

I lean my head back against the car seat and watch the city go by.

“Oh!” I say. “What did you figure out with your sanctum problem?”

“Huh, I guess we didn’t completely short-circuit your brain. At first I was thinking some kind of magical electromagnetic interference with the Wi-Fi, which hardly worked at all, but ethernet wasn’t much better.  So today I brought my frequency scanner. Everything looked fine outside the sanctum, but inside the sanctum the signal from the router kept jumping around the spectrum a little bit.”

“I don’t quite follow.”

“From inside the sanctum, the frequency channel that the Wi-Fi was on kept changing. It’s not supposed to do that. I couldn’t think of a reason that would happen. It was like pulling teeth, but I finally got the client to admit that the sanctum was in a pocket dimension. Which is something I’ve never seen before.”

“You know what? I’m gonna just pretend that’s a cool but not completely mind-blowing thing.”

“In our world, it basically is.” Anya thinks for a minute. “It’s like…I don’t know, a big industrial laser or something. It’s really cool and expensive as shit. Most people never get to play with one, but it’s not that surprising that somebody who’s obscenely wealthy has one in their basement just because they can.  The client wouldn’t reveal who set it up, but it could have been an angel. Some of what they can do makes our stuff look like small potatoes.”

“But June seems so down-to-earth, not like a reality-warping being of cosmic power!”

“She can be both. Also, she hardly ever warps reality. But that’s her thing to talk about if she wants.”

“Hmmm. So someone warped reality in your clients basement, though?”

“Yeah, apparently the sanctum dimension isn’t tethered super tight to our universe so that my client can alter the relative flow of time. They can speed things up if they’re brewing a potion or something, or cut it off entirely in the event of an emergency.”

“That has some pretty interesting applications!”

“Oh, for sure! Ten bucks says that somebody out there is using it to increase apparent processing speed for brute-forcing encrypted data or something. But I think my client really is just practicing magic. The problem is that even at rest, the time ratio isn’t entirely stable. It’s not a big effect, but it’s enough that any sort of signal that comes in that relies on a particular frequency, like Wi-Fi, or precise timing, like any kind of digital signal, gets fucked with.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“First, I made it clear to the client that they still owed me for all the time I spent trying to figure out what the hell was going on because they didn’t disclose a very important piece of information. Fortunately, they had no problem with that, since they’re rich enough to have a pocket dimension in the basement. Next, they’re going to contact their pocket dimension installer to see if things can be tuned a bit and I’m going to start trying slower transmission speeds over a wired connection and see if I can find something that works.”

“Huh.” I laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“Up until recently, I was just some guy in a mundane world. Now I’m a trans demon girl with a hot demon girlfriend living in a world where magic and pocket dimensions and stuff like that are normal. And yet, my hot demon girlfriend’s job is still fixing the fucking Wi-Fi. It’s just…surreal?”

Anya chuckles. “I guess when you put it like that.”

“Also, despite all that wild shit, I’m still stressed out about coming out to my parents more than anything else. And I’m almost twenty-eight, so I feel like maybe it shouldn’t matter as much.”

“I think everybody feels the need for acceptance and approval from their parents. You, the real and complete you, never got that when you were young. That doesn’t go away just because you’re older. Also, June says queer people hit milestones at different times.”

For some reason, I feel tears welling up in my eyes. I sit in silence as Anya pulls up to the curb outside my apartment. She turns to face me and reaches up to cup my face in one hand, brushing away an escaped tear with her thumb. I lean into her hand, sighing softly.

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