Olivia

August had always had a fear of the irrational, which was, in and of itself, an irrational fear. A phobia within a phobia. It was stupid really, but stupidity, in all its forms whether raw or processed through layers of bourgeoisie and boarding school terrified him; if for no other reason that he was afraid he’d become cognitively dissonant or, worse yet, a climate change denier.

This week, that fear had exacerbated to heights that made him wake up at night, drenched in enough sweat to feel like he’d wet the bed. That wasn’t the case. That wasn’t far off either.

It all started right after Oliver’s flash transition. First off, as any man in his position – one of acute inquisitiveness and dumbstruck disbelief, he demanded that Mimi explain how and what the penis-vanishing hell happened.

She laughed. Then, when she realised August was dead serious, she laughed again. This time with a little more compassion.

“Nanomachines,” she answered finally.

“What.”

“You know everything’s made of things made of smaller things made of smaller things? Turns out that the smallest things are actually the bosses. So if you control those, you’re basically omnipotent.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. Take for example our DNA. It’s just a bunch of chemicals decided to line up in a certain way. But if you take all of those, shuffle them around a little, maybe add one or two carbon atoms and boom! A perfectly healthy chimpanzee becomes a banana. Or you get a plant that produces tabasco sauce. Or you can make a fish grow arms and legs. And tits.”

“Huh.”

Suffice it to say that Mimi’s explanation only made his mind do even more somersaults. Science was never his thing. He got in on a humanities scholarship, won a bunch of international essay writing competitions, and aspired to become either a journalist or a PhD in British Neogothic literature – men in robes were kinda his thing. Realistically speaking, most of the technology in Astella’s Dawn Wing was arcane to him; advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic.

Speaking of magic and magical girls, which are a subset of girls – Oliver. It turns out that rearranging your molecules to perform a very literal sex change, whilst straightforward enough a process one way, is like arguing equity with a social democrat. Long, tedious, at times hair pulling, but ultimately possible with enough threats.

In this case, the problems were two. First, the nanomachines Oliver had swallowed had a very limited battery life, which Mimi gleefully exhausted on all the cheap SFX that played during his kyun-kyunification. Luckily, they could be recharged in much the same way the human body usually recharges. By breaking down carbohydrates into glucose, and turning that into molecular creme brulee. The total energy needed for that was somewhere in the tens of terajoules. If you checked the label of, well, anything, you’d now be aware of problem number two.

Nevertheless until that could happen and Oliver could return back to normal, he still had to attend classes. Which August thought impossible until next Monday, when he saw Oliver prance into the classroom, hair sprayed, lashes curled, skirt flouncing fancily in the breeze.

What he told his parents, August didn’t ask. He would’ve hated the answer.

What he told the school however was equal parts summer blockbuster logic and salaried incompetence. Due to a severe, aggressive and undisclosed disease, Oliver had been left bedridden for the time being. As such, Olivia, his personal servant of select intellectual pedigree, had been asked to deputise for him. That is to say, attend classes in his stead, take notes, and even sit exams, provided the proper anti-fraud security measures were taken (they weren’t.)

Naturally, no one cared. August wondered if he was the only person in a two mile radius with brains. Then he remembered that Oliver’s family was one of Astella’s main bribe – own – benefactors, so it reasoned that he could fart out any explanation and the world will be obliged to smell and sit in it.

Everyone, of course, except for August. He wasn’t going to be anywhere near that. In fact, ever since Olivia became a thing, he had done his utmost to avoid her.

To tell the truth, August had never really been fully comfortable around Oliver. It had nothing to do with him, rather the idea of him, how he fit in within the academy’s tenuously balanced ecosystem. He was a handsome, well-put together stud and August was a dweeby, shut-in mouse. The two of them even being in one another’s vicinity felt unnatural, a travesty, an oxymoron and a sin; the two of them being friends, even more so. Oliver didn’t seem to care too much about that, whereas August did only because others did. They cared a lot.

He wasn’t deaf to the whispers, the gossip, the unsavoury rumours and the pranks following him around. Things like scratched-out Stonewall pins and AIDS scare pamphlets snuck in his desk, or boys changing out of their gym clothes only after he’d left the locker room. Gold-digger, opportunistic, parvenu, all said under haughty breaths.

One time, during the early days of their friendship, when they were nothing more than tutor and tutee, August made a passing mention to Oliver about some of these incidents. It wasn’t meant to be serious, just a flippant slip-up, disguised as tongue-in-cheek banter. Oliver, however, wasn’t having any of that.

He shut his copy of Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals loud enough for it to be heard from the floor above. Then, he lowered his voice, and his voice went down along with it. For all of August’s efforts to downplay his grievances with humour, Oliver was not amused.

“Don’t pay them any mind,” he said, smiling. A warm, yet bitter smile, comfort masking despondence. “I’m not even gonna waste my time explaining the obvious reasons why they say that shit. Just know it means nothing to me. Doesn’t change anything either. You’re still the smartest and best teacher I’ve ever had, you got that?”

August took that with a grain of salt at first. He’s just buttering me up. If I’m distracted, he’ll fail his exam. Though if that were the case, after they had finished for the day – and for the term – Oliver wouldn’t have invited him to a bougie cafe. And when they got there, instead of facing a crowd of angry elitists, raring to dogwhistle slurs at him, he got treated to an expensive mocha. And some nice, non-philosophical conversation. And a ride home, because it was bleeding into evening by the time they’d exhausted every topic.

Oliver’s chauffeur picked them up in a Bentley, the cost of which was probably more than August’s home. A home which August tried his best to hide, asking Oliver to drop him off a couple blocks away to ‘do some shopping’. When he shuffled out of the backseat, Oliver called out to him.

“Can I have your number?” he said simply. No snarky comment about living in the ‘boonies’, no incisive and belittling prodding.

“Why?”

Oliver recoiled, “What do you mean?”

“What do you need my number for?”

“How else am I gonna ask you to hang out over break?”

No trace of a deeper plot. It was all genuine.

Looking back on it, it was probably then that he started liking Oliver. At that point he’d gone two years at Astella as nothing more than a tool, a being without identity meant to help rich kids pass with the bare minimum of credits. Lest he lost his hard-earned spot due to ‘failing to meet the academy’s social responsibilities.’ But Oliver saw him as – well, as someone. And, childish as it may seem, that was good enough for August.

Even now, he remembered that feeling; it was a dear memory. It was the same warmth one experiences when a cat sits on them – gleeful, childlike and, above all, pure.

“There you are,” Olivia said as she rounded the corner to August’s hiding spot. Few knew about the small garden that grew next to the tennis pitches – most thought it was just a hedge wall erected to hide an otherwise unaesthetic copse. But inside, with spring in full swing, there were daffodils and azaleas and tulips and lilies of the valley, and the cool shade of a sprawling magnolia tree made it perfect for quiet, scenic lunches.

“So this is where you’ve been holing yourself up all this time, huh?” Olivia continued, caressing the lilac bushes as she joined August on the only bench around. “I don’t blame you, really. If I knew Astella had something so fairy-like, I’d have kept it to myself too.”

“Sorry,” August replied instinctively. “The people who look after this place told me to keep it a secret.”

“People?”

“The horticulture club. Unofficially – you can imagine it’s not a high-brow hobby. Certainly not up to the academy’s standards. Doesn’t help that the members are mostly bursary students and enrolled servants. Which begs the question – how did you find out about it?”

Olivia tilted her head and gave him a knowing look. August’s eyes flashed with recognition. “Ah,” he said. “Right. The cover story.”

Olivia chuckled, a long tinkling. It was such a pleasant sound, soothing like wind chimes ringing in the breeze. The impression lingered with August for a while longer, numbing his senses. He didn’t realise when Olivia got even nearer to him. Their thighs now brushing against each other, trouser to bare skin, her head leaning on his shoulder.

It was – strange. All the things their closeness made him aware of. Her sweet scent – maybe it was a shampoo, maybe perfume, maybe just her – the plump curve of her breast touching his arm, how her breath came in long, drawn spurts that clung to his chest and made his heart vacillate. Something was wrong. This – all of this, these feelings and sensations. They weren’t right.

“Oliver,” August said, peeling away from his friend’s grasp. Olivia flinched in response, then drew a half-smile on her lips that might as well have been a full frown.

“It’s Olivia now,” she said somewhat airily, somewhat sternly.

“I – right, I’m sorry. Force of habit, I guess.”

It was a bad lie. He was never good at those. But Olivia still bought it out of sympathy.

“It’s fine, don’t worry. I guess them starting the same doesn’t help either. Which is why, I’ve been thinking I should maybe go by Liv. How’s that sound?”

Weird. August nodded.

Silence. Somewhere far, but not too far behind, rackets slammed tennis balls into nets, bang and swoosh, bang and swoosh. The songbirds had quieted, and only the flapping of their wigs remained in the air. The sun vanished behind the clouds. It was a cloudy day and the cold hung low like a thick, damp blanket.

“Can I ask you a question, August?” Olivia asked. August took a moment to process that. It wasn’t often he heard his first name, and it was the first time either Oliver or Olivia had said it.

“Sure, erm… go for it.”

“You’re not really comfortable with this, are you?”

Though he hadn’t seen it, August knew she had gestured towards her body. Her body. Was that – was that it? Was he really avoiding her just because she was a her now?

He took a long glance at her. She had lost two inches of height and her hair was lighter now – dirty blonde more than chestnut. The warm sheen of her skin had dulled to a pale alabaster, and her eyes were a more vibrant green, the hazel spots all but gone. Even the way she sat, slouched and with the shoulders off-kilter had changed; Oliver always stood tall and proper.

“I don’t know. Honest. It’s just – you have to admit it’s a lot to take in in a short amount of time. Usually these things take years, lifetimes even. But for you it just happened like that. No warning, nothing. And really,” August started, well aware that once he went down that path, there was no turning back. He grit his teeth, and his throat tightened. A deep sigh loosened it. “You’re okay with it. Everything sorted itself right away, the explanation, the due processes. You even got a uniform made for you in what, a day, a weekend? Not to mention how Mimi and you seemed to know about this. Like this was all planned ahead.

“I guess,” August slumped forward, took a deep breath, slowly let it out, “I guess it feels like you’ve been hiding this from me, hoping I’d be okay with everything if you just sprung it on me. And it’s not like it’s a small thing either. It’s – well, you. All of you. Like l-l-look at you,” August stammered, pink shades flushing on and off his face. “Is this really you?”

Olivia bit her lip. For a moment, August thought she was going to cry, and her brittle quiet sure didn’t help dismiss that possibility. But then, she turned towards him, so that he could see all of her face, not just her profile. All the thoughts swimming through her head, all the struggles and difficulties, the words dangling on her tongue, the doubt swimming in her eyes.

Then, she reached out to him, her dainty fingers knitting with his. August’s mind blanked. His spine snapped to a straight, rigid line. Warm. Soft. Weird. His nostrils flared. His blood felt hot.

He shot to his feet and backed away. Olivia called to him, “August? Are you okay?”

She was a picture of worry, and he was a deer in the headlights. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Sorry, I – I have to go. Sorry,” he repeated over and over, as he rounded the bench, grazing the rose thorns on his way out, then dashed to the academy. And all the way he ran through the courtyard, faster than he had ever been capable off, he kept thinking about Olivia. The tinkling sound of her voice, the cotton skin of her thigh, the plump curve of her breast.