Graduation and Wedding

We ended up planning a combined graduation and wedding. We rented graduation robes and Ralph’s tux for the wedding, while I managed to find a wedding dress for three hundred dollars and spent another eighty getting it tailored down to fit me. One thing I didn’t tailor was the bust. It was designed for C or D cup boobs, and it was cheaper to buy C-cup breast forms to fill them than fix that part of the dress. And why not? It would help me look more womanly, and it was something I should have done years ago. I started wearing them about once a week to get used to them, with some of my other dresses that had enough space for them. Ralph noticed, but if anybody else did, they didn’t say anything.

There was a chapel on campus that we were able to rent for weddings. We had to rent slots, because other students wanted to get married right after graduation as well; the graduation march was going to be Saturday afternoon and we had the chapel from 10 to 11 AM on Sunday.

We also had to hire the marriage officiant, and we never expected so many choices! As a state university, they were forbidden from providing religious services, but they were allowed to provide a place for students to practice religion without limiting the religions practiced, and this chapel was it. There was a list of clergy from various churches nearby who could be hired to come here to hold religious services, weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs, and other services, and the list included at least one clergyman of every Christian denomination I had ever heard of, three different Jewish ones, a Muslim, Baha’i, and more.

I hadn’t been raised under any religion except the general air of Christianity that existed throughout much of America. Ralph had been raised Christian, though his family had moved around and attended different sorts of services over the years, and he hadn’t attended any services here. There was a non-religious person who could perform civil marriages, but Ralph wanted a Christian wedding. So what I mainly looked for was one who would be OK with gay weddings and transgendered people, whatever they might think of me as, and there was a Methodist one who was popular among students and known to accept anybody. Sadly, he was giving services in his own church at that hour. We found a bilingual Baptist who gave services in Spanish at 11:30 at a church after an English service run by someone else ended, and he also didn’t discriminate and just had time for our wedding before his own services, so we hired him.

There was room for about 50 on the pews, but we weren’t expecting to have anywhere near that many, as the “gay” situation had alienated us from most of the students. I just had my parents, Ralph had parents and a younger sister, and we invited the entire gay and lesbian club and 6 of them said they would attend. And we weren’t having any bridesmaids or groomsmen. Neither of us had good ideas on who we would have picked, and there were so many confusing things due to my condition that I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

We had arranged jobs in my home town after we graduated, so my parents rented a U-Haul both to come see the graduation themselves and to bring all of our things back to town with them. But we didn’t hear from them when I expected them to get here on Friday, and I was worried. In the evening, I got a call from the police. They had been in an accident on the way here and they were both killed.

It was my turn to be a ball of blubber and Ralph’s to console me. What worked was getting me talking. I told him every story from my childhood and the misadventures that ensued due to both my parents and fellow school students’ misunderstanding of my gender. I got composed enough before the end of the night to decide that I was going through with our plans for the weekend. We would do graduation normally, only missing the opportunity to introduce Ralph to my parents. Some calling around allowed us find that one of the gay students we had invited had a tux, and he was willing to stand in for the “father of the bride” role, the only other person besides the two of us we expected to walk the aisle while the music was playing during the ceremony.

Graduation went mostly fine, though while I had asked to have my name read as “Miss Kelly Jones” I was called as “Mister Kelvin Jones” instead. I got to meet Ralph’s family afterward, but they certainly seemed confused. It turned out it was because he had never told them about my condition and had only described me as a great girl he met, dated, and got engaged to. Upon meeting me they thought I was trans. But we spent the evening with them, and I told all those stories over again. And Ralph swore he had had sex with me in my vagina and not my ass. I could tell they didn’t believe that, but they accepted me for whatever they thought I was and didn’t disown Ralph over it or anything.

It was good that we got that over with then rather than when I marched down the aisle. Ralph’s family was there and they were all able to enjoy it despite the feeling they had that I was actually a guy. It was clear, though, that everyone there saw my bridal gown for what it was. I still don’t know what a lot of the students thought I was wearing when I wore my ordinary dresses, but the ceremony had at least put the people here into the camp of “Kelly is trans.”

Every wedding is special, but something very special happened at the end of our wedding when our wedding officiant pronounced us husband and wife. I had spoken with him before the ceremony and wanted to make sure he didn’t say “husband and husband” or any such thing; I was to be Ralph’s wife and to be described as a woman entering into marriage, regardless of what some people thought of my gender. He did say “woman” and “wife” when appropriate, but at the exact moment he finished “I pronounce you husband and wife,” I felt something. I couldn’t say what it was, but Ralph afterward said I literally glowed for about five seconds.

We kissed, and marched off together as a married couple. We didn’t have time for excess ceremony, as we had to clear the chapel for the next couple. In another room nearby, we signed our marriage license for the legal part of the marriage, as well as the name change. I was pleased to see that, unlike at graduation, they had gotten my name and gender correct. I was becoming Mrs. Kelly Hodgson, nee Miss Kelly Jones. No Kelvin in sight, no male gendering.

Then we hurried off for the makeshift reception we had planned, which the guests had gone directly to, with the students no doubt helping Ralph’s family find the room. In a room in another school building nearby that we had reserved, there was a small wedding cake and several pizzas waiting, along with all the guests by the time we got there. We did the foolishness with feeding each other cake, and everybody got what was effectively lunch, given it was after 11 AM. We cleared the middle of the room and did some dancing, and told some stories of our lives up to this point, such as they were.

And the penny dropped. Our handful of guests were literally crying at hearing me tell my stories of having been mistaken for a guy. The students claimed to have always known me as a woman, but some compulsion had made them treat me as a guy. Ralph’s family was saying a thousand “sorrys.” They had not wanted to treat me as a man, either, but likewise described being unable to act in the way they had wanted to.

Had I been under some kind of a curse? One broken by marrying my true love? Did such things really exist? It certainly seemed like it had ended, at least for the people in this room.

We finished up the reception and said goodbye to the other students, two of whom gave us their contact info and promised they’d do anything for us to apologize. Ralph’s family followed us to my dorm. We still had to work out how we were going to move out, since our plan had been destroyed along with my parents’ lives by the accident.

A lot of the other students had already moved out of the dorm, but we passed several who were in the process of moving out. Every single one apologized to us, some putting down stuff they were carrying to do so. They also regretted missing our wedding, but understood why we didn’t invite them due to the way they had acted toward us. We spoke with one student from my entering class at length:

“I knew you were female from the beginning. I wanted to warn you that you couldn’t live here, in a male dorm as an obvious woman, using the restroom and showers with the men, whether it was because of you exposing yourself or the threat of rape or worse, but something prevented me from acting on that in any way. I was relieved to see other students also treating you as male, figuring that whatever possessed me was also affecting them, and as a result saving you from anything worse than being ogled. And I was stunned junior year to find out you and Ralph were dating, doubly so. First, to find out that he, uniquely among us, was able to treat you as a woman, and second, to hear myself calling your relationship gay. I apologize deeply for that.”

“Apology accepted.”

We got to our dorm room, and the first thing we did was make Ralph’s family stay outside while we changed out of our wedding outfits and back into normal clothes. We couldn’t celebrate our wedding any longer; we had to deal with our problems.

Ralph’s parents wanted to help. Not only were they apologetic to me, but they were his parents, and so they were there to help with the moving problem that was partly his. While they called around to try and find another truck, I returned the rented clothes. When I got back, they told me that due to students moving out, every truck nearby had been rented, but they found a truck large enough 50 miles away.

We drove them there in Ralph’s car to pick up the truck and bring it back to campus. Although I expected only Ralph’s parents to drive the truck, all of us signed up as possible drivers. To my surprise, when I pulled out my driver’s license it said Kelly Jones, female. Of course I needed to get the name updated; in fact, one of the forms I’d signed back at the chapel was an application for that update. But I was surprised to see that even my existing license now said female.

We completed the rental paperwork and they followed us back to campus with the van. The four of us loaded up all our stuff, most of which was packed already, as we had expected to move out. Another change in plans was that rather than moving to the apartment we had leased across town from my childhood home, as my parents were no longer living there and I was their only child, we were going to live in that house. So I drove Ralph’s car and led his parents in the truck to it.

Back Where I Started

We halfway worried something weird was going to have happened to the house, something that nobody could see until the distortion of reality surrounding my life was lifted when Ralph and I married, but it was fine. We moved my stuff in, and after some more goodbyes and sorrys and hugs all around, Ralph’s family drove back to return the rental truck and make their flight home tomorrow.

We boxed up my parents’ clothes right away so we had space to put ours, but that was all we cleaned out the first day. We had lots more to worry about.

We called to cancel our apartment lease. We had had to put down a deposit of first and last month’s rent, and canceling it today, on the expected move-in day, meant we forfeited that amount. But we were going to save much more than that living in a house with a mortgage that was almost paid off already.

There were two different insurance claims to get done, and on Sunday we only filed to get things rolling. First, their automobile liability insurance. We didn’t know yet how the accident happened, but we needed to at least report it to them. Second, their life insurance, which was small but would help.

Ralph’s parents called in the evening to say they had made it back with no trouble, and the next day called to say their flight went fine as well.

Monday was nothing but making calls. I made arrangements for my parents’ funeral, and separately started the process to handle their estate so their house and car could be put into my name, as well as access their bank account and Dad’s pension plan.

To invite people to the funeral, I found myself calling a bunch of the kids I grew up with and their parents, people who had known my parents, as well as a few of the college students who we now knew didn’t really hate us. The same thing that happened to the college students happened to the locals, too. They had always known I was female but found themselves unable to acknowledge it. They were worried about me using the men’s restroom, especially when I dressed up female and still did it. One of my college dorm-mates confessed wonder about how I had managed to use urinals since he had seen my female genitals when I was there for showers. One girl who had kicked me out of the women’s room apologized for that. And it went on and on, each person we called finding a new thing to apologize for. I told all of them that everything they had done was forgiven because it was clear to me they had been constrained by something beyond their control.

Lisa was the most interesting one. She was actually always a lesbian, and had agreed to date me because she could see I was female, even though she was then forced to lie about that and never mention being lesbian. She was glad to have been able to date me, and told me she had found somebody else now. I told her “me too” about the last point.

Ralph and I didn’t have a honeymoon. We spent the two weeks before our jobs started dealing with business like getting utilities put into our name, shutting off subscriptions my parents had had and I didn’t want, and going through more of my parents stuff, as well as the actual funeral and the other processes we had set into motion. But we did set aside time to have sex every night.

We got started at our jobs. I filed for my name change, and didn’t have to file a gender change, as that record had also been updated properly when the curse was lifted.

It was a couple months after we moved into the house, once we were able to start cleaning up more of my parents’ belongings, that I encountered my mother’s diary from the year she was pregnant with me.

“Should you read that?” Ralph asked.

“Who else should possibly read it?” I responded. “Besides, if there is any way of ever figuring out what happened to me for the first 22 years of my life, maybe it’s in here.”

Indeed, I think it would have been pretty boring for anybody else, but it was fascinating for me to read Mom’s documentation of her growth in weight and girth and her other experiences as I grew within her. But then I encountered something strange. A bunch of pages were stuck together. The last entry before that was when she was five months pregnant and had an ultrasound planned the next day to determine my sex, and the first entry after the stuck pages she was eight months pregnant and they were getting ready for the birth of their baby boy. Had they glued the pages together to hide something, and if so, why?

I showed it to Ralph and he was as suspicious as me.

“It’s too weird that you have this mystery around the way people see your gender, which has been wrong since your very birth, and right here in this book that’s literally about when you were developing in the womb, there’s a bunch of pages glued together starting from the day before they were going to learn your gender.”

Some fiddling with these pages led me to believe they were only glued along the edge, and I applied a knife and was able to pull the pages apart carefully, one by one.

The first revealed page showed that they went to the ultrasound and found Mom was carrying a baby girl. And she went on with the weight updates and such. So what happened? I worked to carefully separate the remaining pages to find out.

A month later, Mom had written something about Dad discovering a bad crack in a brick wall in our basement. He called in someone to look at it, and they recommended taking down all the bricks because they surrounded the central pillar beneath the crossing of the main beams that held up the floor of the house. If those bricks were cracking, that could mean the pillar was also cracked and needed to be replaced, and the house was in danger of collapsing or sagging in a way that could cause more damage throughout the house.

The solution was to install temporary supports on all four sides to hold up the beams, and then remove the bricks and inspect and repair or replace the pillar. That was expensive, but the most expensive part was chipping out the bricks. This needed to be done by hand, slowly, brick by brick, to avoid putting too much stress on the house and avoid endangering the temporary supports.

They already were having to deal with the expense of Mom’s pregnancy, so to save money, after he paid people to put in the temporary supports, Dad went down there and spent an entire weekend chipping away mortar and taking down the wall brick by brick. Strangely, they discovered one of the walls around the pillar was double, and the space between them held a long, flat metal box, within which were a set of three books.

They got the repairs done on the pillar and had it bricked back in, but naturally they didn’t cover up the box again, instead simply covering the pillar itself. The box contained a set of old books handwritten in Latin, embossed in gold lettering on the covers reading LIBRIS PRAESIDIUM, with Roman numerals after it, I to III. This apparently meant “Books of Protection” in Latin.

Dad had been a classics major, and between his knowledge of the language and a Latin-English dictionary, he translated the table of contents written into each book. If the books were to be believed, they were magic spell books, and Dad became fascinated by a spell designed to protect a young girl. Another part of one of the books explained how spells could be cast on a fetus in utero by drawing the magic design on the pregnant woman’s stomach, and he did that and cast whatever this spell was on me. This was in the last of the entries that had been glued together, and starting on the very next entry, they had forgotten all about the books and the spell and now believed they were having a baby boy.

Well now I had to find the damned books. We went down to the basement and indeed found the column with its relatively new brickwork, unlike all the old bricks elsewhere in the basement, surrounded by stacks of boxes of stuff. My parents were such pack rats; it was all the clothing I’d outgrown as a child, male and female, up to about age 14, and a few other childhood possessions I had outgrown the need for. You could literally trace back through the years, see where I had switched to and from wearing mostly girls’ clothes when I was 8 and 9, with boys’ clothes before and after.

Under all these boxes, the metal box with the books was lying directly on the basement floor. They were exactly as Mom had described them in her diary. The box had three velvet-lined compartments each just big enough for one book and a space for a hand to pull it free. One book had a bookmark in it, and Ralph and I worked to translate what was on the pages it marked.

The spell on those two pages was indeed described in the text as spell to protect a girl, though it seemed like it was meant to be cast after birth. We decided that was probably because they didn’t have ultrasound centuries ago whenever this was written, and the book was adamant it could not be cast on a boy. The spell was supposed to protect the girl from evil and hide her from anyone who might do her harm, so that only truly innocent people would be able to see the girl’s true self. And it was designed to last until the girl married, to ensure she married someone pure of heart and who would be certain to obey the marriage oaths to protect and honor his wife, and to be faithful to her, and it also would ensure she did indeed find such a person.

“So that’s what I am?” Ralph asked. “A truly innocent person, pure of heart, and certain to protect and honor you?”

“I think that describes you pretty well, Ralph. Remember that you hadn’t even had a date with a girl until you entered college, much less had sex.”

This led to an evening of me reminding Ralph about our first days together, and him telling me about his experiences in high school. They totally confirmed his innocent and pure nature. Then I realized something.

“But wait. You were having sex with a doll when we met. Was that pure?”

“It was purer than having sex with a bunch of different girls,” Ralph countered.

“Hmm, maybe so. It may be that you were considered a virgin until we first had sex.”

“And I still counted as innocent after our sex because I was the person the spell chose. I have never had sex with any other girl, before or after; you have always been my only one.”

“So you’re faithful. I now have more reason than perhaps any other married woman in history to believe my husband has been faithful to me since the day we met. It’s still weird, though. The spell hid me by making everybody else act as if I was a man, even though they knew in their hearts otherwise?”

“Even your parents. They went from casting the spell on their unborn daughter to writing about their unborn son the next day.”

“Yeah, we will never know what they experienced, since they couldn’t even write down the truth, but I assume it was the same as the others. They knew they were sending their daughter into men’s restrooms and the boys’ locker room at school and that must have caused them severe anguish, tempered only by the fact that, by that time, they must have figured out everybody else in the world was also unable to do to me what they would have done based upon seeing me as a girl.”

“Apart from the mental trauma, how much of your life do you think the spell orchestrated?”

“A lot. It kept me from ever being able to date any man, or ever having sex with any, until I met you. No doubt it arranged for me to live in the men’s dorm and for you to be assigned as my roommate. It let me trust you. I was scared when you first recognized me as a girl. Nobody else did. You could have taken advantage of me in so many ways and you didn’t.”

“What about the ways you helped me after that?”

“I think that was just me. The spell didn’t say anything about helping my mate, just finding me one.”

“Do you think it made us have the time slot when our first choice of marriage officiant was unavailable, so we’d have to pick somebody else?”

“Oh, maybe. Maybe the Methodist guy the students liked wasn’t pure enough. The one we got was able to get my gender right, and presumably met that pureness condition of the spell.”

Ralph added, “Yes, the spell seems to have done what it was meant to do, but the way it did it was terrible. Torture for you and for everyone close to you in your life except me. Not that I didn’t suffer some, being called gay for being with you.”

“Definitely not worth it. We shouldn’t let anybody else ever fall into this trap. So what do we do now, Ralph?”

Ralph stopped for a moment, seemingly about to say something. I was about to suggest burning the books, slicing the pages to bits, or anything to prevent any other person from ever being able to cast any spell from the book, but found myself unable to do so. Were we still being affected by the books?

Ralph then said, “Let’s bury them in the yard. We can plant a memorial garden for your parents over them.”

“That will not prevent somebody from eventually finding them, but it is better than leaving them around the house,” I agreed, despite wanting to do otherwise.

I found I wasn’t completely powerless. The compulsion was apparently only against destroying the books. I wrote out a short summary of my experience on blank pages at the back of the diary, wrote THESE BOOKS ARE DANGEROUS in large letters on the cover, and hollowed out enough of the case to fit the diary into the metal box along with the three books. We went out the next day to dig, and the day after that we got flowers and shrubs to plant over them.

We moved on, and I was able to adapt to a normal woman’s life actually treated as a woman. I never used a urinal again, but the skill didn’t go away. Sometimes when I was in a hurry at the house I’d still stand in front of the toilet to pee.

Years later I looked back at this. As much as I hated it, I had benefited greatly from the spell. I had a totally devoted husband. I had guided his transformation from an incredibly shy nerd into an incredibly successful technological wizard. But my own job was going nowhere. Five years after we married, I retired from work to become a housewife. Ralph and I agreed to have kids. With the house paid off and him making good money, there was really no need for me to continue working.

The next year we had a child, a son. We named him Melvin, a combination of the name Kelvin I thought I had had from birth, and Melissa, the female name I wished I had chosen rather than Kelly when I discovered Kelly could be a boy’s name, too. It was correct to say that I only thought I had had that name, as every record showing the name Kelvin, including my birth certificate, had turned out to be disguised by the spell and actually had read Kelly.

Two years later we had a second son who we named Fred, both my father’s name and one of Ralph’s grandfathers’ names. And absolutely nobody denied those sons came out of my vagina! I sometimes wondered what the doctors would have said if I had gotten pregnant and given birth while under the curse, but I suspect the curse would have done everything to prevent that from ever happening.

I never told my sons about my childhood torture, instead only telling them the positive bits like how I dated a girl when I was in high school before meeting Ralph in college.

Privately, Ralph and I did discuss the curse. I worried that we had had two daughters, had cast the spell on them both, and couldn’t speak or act in any way to reveal it. But Ralph reassured me that the people affected by the curse knew the truth all along. We both knew our children had always been boys.

Our boys never showed any transgender bent; they were both as straight as could be, another reassurance that we had not cursed them the way I was. We raised them to treat people of any persuasion fairly.

Melvin ended up being an attorney who focused on cases of discrimination, of which there were still a lot based on gender and sexual identity. Fred went into politics, hoping to make right the places where our laws still treated some people unfairly.

We never told anybody about the books. Certainly, someone will find them someday. Hopefully, they will heed the warning I left.