Eva: Hey Tia. Sorry I’ve been not replying, things have been crazy. I started sort of… blowing air around without trying and it got really out of hand.
Tia: Why didn’t you tell me?
Eva: Mum said I shouldn’t. We have some help with learning to control it… but idk. It’s not much. Mum’s having the same problem. She didn’t want us to tell anyone until we could keep it from happening.
Tia: Oh. That makes sense.
Eva: I’m really sorry. Can I come over sometime and we can talk?
When I got that message, I had to pause for a second to think about how I felt. I was kinda hurt that I didn’t know that she’d been going through something like that. It made my stomach squirm and ache, because it reminded me of middle school. We were best friends for most of elementary, but our friendship took a big hit during the transition to middle school. I only found out in our last year of middle school that she was getting bullied, that her new friends weren’t defending her, and that she was… well, really hurting.
Our friendship had kinda been like how a professional athlete will have a real bad injury, and they disappear for like, a year. They try to get back into the game, and maybe they succeed, but they’re never the shining star they were before they got smacked around by fate. Except, you find out that the athlete is also having funding issues, or their personal life isn’t great, or…
I thought, when our changes happened, we might finally be getting our original friendship back. I thought that the changes to my body had negated the issues, making it so she was properly comfortable around me again. I guess that wasn’t the case… I guess—
Eva:Tia?
I flinched when the notification popped up.
Tia: Um. Sure. Some shit has gone down on my end, too. We, uh… kinda have another fox girl staying with us? She’s like 6 months older than me. She is very intense.
Her response took almost ten minutes to come through. It was one of those ten minute periods where you can see eternity laughing at you from the bottom of an infinite well.
Eva: Intense… how?
Tia: TBH? Alien, but still familiar. She’s not human, she’s a spirit. She’s also basically my cousin? Except we’re about as related as anyone who in an old european country is related to anyone else there. She’s really nice though, and very scared of our world. I’m doing my best to teach her how things work and protect her from anything bad.
This time, the wait for a reply was twenty minutes of confused agony. I could see her type a few things out, then think better of it and the dots would stop wiggling. Then, they’d start again, and stop again.
Eva: Nice! She’s lucky to have you!
I stared at her message for a long, long time, trying to understand if there was a hidden meaning behind her simple answer. I just told her I was living with a spirit, and her response was… ‘Nice’? I could feel it at the base of every hair follicle — this iceberg of unsaid shit was just barely peeking out above the waves.
I gave up on trying to think of a reply, and dropped my phone back onto my desk. We were two months past the Concord Event now, and school had started back up, sorta. It was all online again, with the same painful zoom calls where everyone was sitting in their little windows, their home in the background.
It was like peeking at a normal school life through a crack in a giant concrete wall. Maybe it was because of that wall that I hadn't explained my situation to the rest of my friends. All the guys were pretty confused and sorta… sad, I guess, that both Eva and I had faded from our group.
To make things worse, after mum had sorted things with the school about my new name, I showed up as just ‘Tia’ in Zoom. With a blur filtering out my room, nobody had put it together that I was once the boy known as Itias. I'm sure if someone had been zeroing in on me, they'd put the puzzle pieces together… but everyone had shit going on. Nobody had time or interest in digging into who ‘Tia’ was, when I was just a name and a square on screen.
I sighed, dragging my attention back to what the teacher was saying… for like two full seconds. It just felt so fucking weird that the world had gone to utter shit, but everyone was still pretending everything was fine. It felt like we were all wandering happily through a park while an active shooter was miraculously missing us with a hail of bullets.
Like, I was vaguely aware that gender and name changes were a bureaucratic nightmare before the Concord Event, but somehow mum had changed all that after a few weeks or effort. Oh, yeah… hearing that I was now legally a girl, without my consent again — that sure was fun. Mum and I were not the best of friends right now.
It was honestly funny, because until all this magic stuff, mum was actually pretty good, and it was dad who sucked. Now, dad was making a moderate effort. They'd switched places.
A knock at my door had me checking to make sure I was muted before I called, “Yeah?”
The door creaked open slightly, and a pair of foxy human eyes lit up the sliver of darkness beyond. “Tia!”
“Hi, Saoirse,” I said, a smile pulling at my cheeks despite my grumpy, frustrated thoughts.
Holding the door as shut as possible, she squeezed herself through the thin gap she left herself, then closed it.
I struggled to contain a little snort of amusement. “You know the door can open wider than that, right? You don't need to squeeze yourself through like the last little bit of toothpaste in the tube.”
“I didn't want to be more of a disturbance,” she whispered loudly.
“Right,” I said dryly.
Keeping herself out of the range of my camera, she did a sort of restrained bounce that landed her beside my desk. Her silver eyes were shining like she'd stolen the colour from a royal diamond. “Your dad! He decided that I gotta do school. Can you believe it! I'm going to be institutionalised. It's awful.”
My student senses were tingling that I was this close to being called out for how I was obviously not paying attention, so I turned my eyes back to my screen.
Moving my mouth as little as possible, I said, “So… why do you look so excited?”
“I've never been educated before! Except for when the elders used to teach us about the world,” she explained, her hand flicking out to steal my pen.
Before she could try to bite it or anything, I yoinked it back. She stared dumbfounded at the space where it was in her hand.
“How did you do that?” She demanded, baffled. “How are you so fast?”
I raised an eyebrow. “What was I doing, like thirty minutes after we met?”
“Going toe to toe with a Writhe Demon,” she said, nodding slightly. “Right. I forgot about that, since you've been kinda nothing but slow and grumpy for 2 months.”
“Slow and grumpy?!” I squeaked, losing my battle with subtlety.
“Tia Tynan!”
My full name pulled me up short, and I stared down at my screen. Apparently, I’d half stood up in my outrage, and the teacher had noticed. How she noticed when the Zoom call was a sea of pixellated faces in little boxes, I don’t know.
Sitting back down carefully, I thumbed the button that unmuted me and mumbled, “Yes, ma’am?”
“Is someone distracting you? Do I need to send a message to your mother?” my teacher asked, giving her camera an especially pointed look.
I swallowed. Oh dear. “No, ma’am.”
“Next time, that message is getting sent no matter how polite you are,” she said, but her tone was chilling out a little.
I just nodded and pressed the button to mute myself again.
Phew. That was close. We could not afford to make mum think Saoirse was distracting me. She wasn't as pressed about the situation as before, but I figured one spark might set her off again. So, any shenanigans had to be kept as low-key as possible.
My eyes flicked to the side, ready to try some sort of eyeball to eyeball communication with Saoirse, telling her to go away. Instead, she had vanished, and my door was just clicking closed. Huh… sneaky girl.
A chime sounded on my computer. Then another one, and another. What was up, now?
It was discord, specifically the group chat with my friends. It hadn't had much activity recently, so I was curious what was happening.
Noah: Tia Tynan, huh?
Doug: Yeah, what was that about? Itias, you got a sister you never told us about, bro?
Ah… shit. Those two were in my class currently. Of course they fucking heard that. Noah, for sure wasn't stupid — his big wrinkly brain was probably connecting the dots right now. Doug was probably too focused on checking me out in my tiny webcam window to think too hard about the mystery. That dude turned into a mega-smooth brain when girls were involved. Well, except for Eva. He was somehow normal around her.
Eva:Oh boy…
I couldn't help myself. The joke was right there, begging to be said.
Itias: Not anymore. Lol.
Benny: What's this about?
Jared: I'm with Benny? Can someone give context? Pls?
Noah: We're in English class. Teacher just scolded this new girl, ‘Tia Tynan’. Tynan is Itias’s last name.
Eva: Waitwait. Let's like, get together. Hang out. I have some stuff I wanna talk about anyway.
Noah: That is probably a good idea, if I'm right about what Itias's joke means. Plus, I have a few new… things to talk about too.
Doug: Right! Guys I'm a Spiritborn!! I forgot to tell everyone except Noah cos he is too. How cool is that?
I snorted. Doug just throwing Noah being Spiritborn out into the wild was very on-brand. I couldn't see any physical changes in the Zoom windows though… I wonder what they got stuck with?
Noah: Way to spoil the fun, fuckwit…
Benny: Wow… you guys have powers now??? Man I'm so jealous.
Jared: Where can we meet? It's pretty scary on the streets these days.
Eva: I mean… the park? They got guards there, I think. The courthouse is like just down the street.
I left the conversation to stack up notifications while I returned to doing work. Except I absolutely didn't do any work, because how was anyone meant to do work when their brain was full of buzzing thoughts.
Before everything had happened, this crew were my buddies — my co-conspirators in life. Now, I was scared. What would they think, knowing that their boy Itias was… at least looked like a girl now?
Class ended while I was busy worrying, and I closed Zoom, then just sat there, staring at my laptop.
A sudden discord call caused me to twitch in my chair and swear under my breath. Who—
“Eva?” I blurted, as I accepted the call.
She turned on her video immediately, so I hesitantly followed suit.
Her smile hit me like an ocean wave on a blisteringly hot day. It cooled my anxieties a little, and brought sweet relief to months of confused uncertainty.
“Hey, Tia,” she said softly. “I'm sorry you got outed like that.”
I blew out a weary sigh. “It's whatever. Saoirse was in my room behind the camera being a total dork. Dad's going to try get her some sort of schooling and she was babbling about it.”
“Seershah? Isn't that one of those wildly spelled gaelic names? This is the fox spirit you were talking about?” Eva asked, with an infuriatingly odd tone in her voice.
“Yeah, that's her,” I said evenly. Then I saw the door handle twist slightly, and I couldn't help but laugh.
Eva leaned forward, her face approaching the camera until it lost focus. “Who are you laughing at? Is it her? Is she secretly there behind the camera?”
“She's trying to listen in all subtly and failing,” I said, throwing an eraser at my door. It landed with a dull thunk.
There was a squeak from the other side, and the pressure on the handle released.
“You should bring her to this thing,” Eva said suddenly. “I want to meet her.”
“I'll see if she wants to come,” I said awkwardly. Eva was acting so strange…
“Cool, cool,” she said, returning to a distance from the camera where she could actually come into focus. “Bring her. We're meeting in two hours. The park. Bring your fox girl.”
My fox girl? Nobody owned Saoirse, that was for damn sure. Eva, why were you acting like a fucking alien?