Catfishing on CatNet Read online

  “What are you worried about in eleventh grade, Firestar?” That’s not Hermione, but CheshireCat. “Tell us and maybe we can help.”

  “There isn’t anything you people can help with except math, like last year.”

  “Math is overrated,” Boom Storm says. “Possibly mythological.”

  “How about you, LBB?” CheshireCat asks. “Are you worried about starting at a new school?”

  “I’m used to it,” I lie. “It’s no big deal anymore.”

  * * *

  In the morning, Mom yells at me to get up, that I’m going to be late for school, even though I don’t see how I can be late for something I’m not actually enrolled in yet. I get dressed, then dig out my file folder of transcripts. I have four. I have been enrolled at six—no, seven—different high schools, but I wasn’t at three of them for long enough to get a transcript.

  New Coburg High School is in a low building surrounded by parking lots and cornfields. Mom parks our van in the far end of the parking lot rather than hunting for visitor parking. It’s a hot, sunny day, and the breeze throws dust and the smell of asphalt in our faces.

  Mom doesn’t like talking to people, but there was this one time she tried just dropping me off by myself at the high school and it didn’t go very well, so now she always comes in with me. We open the front doors of the school and are met with a rush of air-conditioning and the faint smell of the wax they probably used to shine up the floors over the summer. There’s a trophy case in the front hallway that’s half-covered by a big banner saying WELCOME BACK WRANGLERS. It takes me a minute to find the sign saying OFFICE, with an arrow, but I spot it before my mother does.

  “This will be fine,” Mom says, and I’m not sure if she’s talking to me or herself.

  The time she dropped me off without her was my second high school in ninth grade, the one in Kansas. There were basically two problems that intersected. The first was that Mom wasn’t with me, which got their attention in a way that was not helpful because it was weird. The second: we’d rented a house next to a vacant lot. What the landlady didn’t tell us was that the vacant lot had had a house that was used as a meth lab. Everyone in the town knew about the meth house, and the fact that I was right next door to it—and didn’t have a parent with me—made the school secretary so concerned she literally called the police.

  That was one of the high schools I don’t have a transcript from. After showing up to try to reassure everyone she wasn’t up to anything dodgy, Mom loaded the van back up, and I finished ninth grade in Missouri.

  Anyway, looking around the office in New Coburg, no one here looks like they’d care enough to call the cops on us, so that’s good. There’s a secretary and a touch screen for signing people in and out and a robot with a tray of sharpened pencils. Thief River Falls got that same “Utility Robots for Rural Schools” grant, but the robot broke and there wasn’t money to fix it, so all it ever did was sharpen pencils; it didn’t cart them around to classrooms.

  The guidance counselor is a woman whose hair is dyed blond but growing out gray at the roots. When the secretary tells her there’s a new student here to enroll, she lets out a heavy sigh and says, “You’d better come into my office.”

  In her office, I find out that she doesn’t want to let me take calculus because I wasn’t here for the placement exam and how does she know whether the precalculus class in Thief River Falls was any good, and also I’m only in eleventh grade and calculus is for twelfth graders. There’s also no Spanish class here—the high school only has German—and they do American literature in eleventh grade, which means I’ll be reading almost the same books I read last year at my last two high schools, both of which had American lit in tenth grade. I read The Scarlet Letter twice last year.

  She flips through my stack of transcripts with obvious irritation. “Why is your name misspelled in half of these?” she asks. I shrug. So does my mother.

  By the start of third hour, I’m registered for calculus despite the guidance counselor’s reluctance, the usual stuff like English and history, an animal science class, and something called Global Arts and Crafts, which sounds like the sort of class where most of my classmates will be showing up high. I was hoping that maybe they’d have a photography class, but no.

  Animal science is mostly a class about dairy farming, but it’s only one semester, so I’ll have half of a credit of a science under my belt when my mother moves me again, assuming we stay here through the semester, which may be a big assumption.

  The office secretary makes me a student ID card and sets me up with a lunch account, which my mother funds with $11.42 in mixed change that she empties out of her purse.

  “Good luck,” she says, smooths down my hair (which is apparently sticking up funny, or at least Mom thinks so), and leaves.

  The secretary gives me a printout of my schedule. “Would you like a student to show you around?” she asks.

  “Your rooms have numbers on them, right?” I say. “I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

  The secretary gives me a wide smile. She’s wearing a very red shade of lipstick. “The kids here are very nice,” she says.

  Almost every school I’ve gone to, someone’s told me that the kids there are very nice. Admittedly, the one time they didn’t, the kids were really awful. It doesn’t mean much when the office secretary says people are nice, though.

  Anyway, it doesn’t matter. No one ever writes to me after I move away, and there’s no reason to assume that Mom won’t move me to Michigan the week after next. The only friends I ever get to keep are the people on CatNet.

  * * *

  The first class I get to is a tele-learning math class, in which we watch a teacher on a screen explain calculus to us. The teacher can see all our classes and call on us, but they’re based somewhere else and apparently teaching four remote classrooms. This is how they taught Spanish in one of my previous school districts. Because of some law about supervision, there’s also a classroom monitor sitting in the classroom with us who has nothing better to do than yell at anyone who takes out their phone. She’s ignoring other goofing-off sorts of behavior, though, including the girl next to me who’s drawing instead of taking notes.

  The girl starts out graphing the function the teacher is talking about, but then she extends the lines and starts turning the functions into a castle. It’s a pretty elaborate castle, but as I watch her draw, I realize that she’s actually still taking notes. All the notes are incorporated into the castle somehow.

  She looks up and notices that I’m staring at her drawing. I immediately feel self-conscious and worried she’ll be mad, but she looks thoroughly pleased with herself and adds a princess standing at the top of the wall with a bird on her shoulder.

  The artist girl has long brown hair that spills down against her desk, half hiding her face as she works, and some elaborate nail art, black varnish with pictures of the planets on them. I wonder if she does her own nail art or if she has a friend who does it for her. I have trouble even just painting the nails on my right hand, my left hand is so clumsy.

  Art Girl is in my English class, as well, where we all get paperback copies of The Scarlet Letter. The good thing about reading The Scarlet Letter is that I saved all the essays I wrote for my other two English classes and probably I can just recycle them and no one will notice. The bad thing: I didn’t like The Scarlet Letter the first time, I really loathed it the second time, and I’m not expecting the third time to be the charm.

  The teacher, Ms. Campbell, is grouchy and boring. As she starts lecturing about Puritanism, the girl draws an enormous cursive-style capital L and starts decorating it. I wonder if this stands for her name, but as we are gathering up our books for the next class, I hear someone call her “Rachel,” so no, that’s not it.

  At lunchtime, the school secretary turns up at the door of my classroom to summon me back to the office; my mother failed to fill out some stack of forms, which she insists on explaining to me so that I can hav
e her sign them tonight. By the time she’s done explaining, I don’t have time to get anything to eat.

  Next is health class. I had a health class back when I was in ninth grade, but for some reason, that state lists health classes as gym classes, and that’s how it’s on my transcript, so they’re making me take health class again, which is at least as bad as a third go with The Scarlet Letter. I’m surprised to find Rachel in that class, too. It doesn’t look like it’s a ninth-grade class here, though. They’re most of the way through a unit on the importance of exercise. The sex ed unit is next, and I hear a bunch of jokes about it being taught by the robo teacher, which I realize toward the end of class is not actually a joke. They have a robot that does the sex ed unit.

  My final class of the day is Global Arts and Crafts. By now, I’m not surprised to find Rachel.

  The teacher hands out paper and charcoal sticks and tells us to draw whatever we want. I want to draw a picture of a fruit bat hanging from a tree, its wings folded around it, and its pointy little puppy face. I don’t have a photo to work from, and my picture looks approximately like a banana with a cat head on the end. I grimace and look to see what Rachel is drawing now.

  She’s drawing me. Her picture has me scowling at my paper.

  “Hey,” I say.

  She looks up. The smile is gone, and her eyes are open a little extra wide. “What?”

  I don’t know what to say. I feel weirdly self-conscious about this picture. One of my mother’s really strict rules is no photography of me, ever. I have a digital camera because I fought and begged and promised to never, ever, ever take a selfie. I’m supposed to leave or cover my face or turn away if a camera comes out, because an online picture of me could lead my scary-ass father straight to us.

  This is a drawing, but it really does look an awful lot like me.

  “That’s a really good picture,” I say finally.

  Her smile returns slowly, blossoming into a grin. “Thanks,” she says. “You want it?”

  “Aren’t we going to have to turn them in?”

  “Oh, maybe. I’ll just draw something else to turn in.”

  I put the sheet of paper in the folder with my transcripts. She starts on a new drawing. I put down my charcoal to watch her work.

  “What are you drawing?” she asks, not looking up.

  “I was trying to draw a bat, but it didn’t come out right.”

  I watch the lines on her paper come together and turn into the teacher—rough strokes forming face, posture, attitude.

  “That’s amazing,” I say.

  “You’re new, aren’t you?” she says.

  “Yeah. My name is Steph.”

  “I’m Rachel. You should finish up something to turn in; he won’t grade you down as long as you’ve drawn something.”

  “I need a picture to work from,” I say.

  She slides her phone across the table. I glanced over at the teacher, since I’ve seen some kids at this school get yelled at for having the phone out, but he doesn’t look like he cares. I pull up a picture of a fruit bat. My second attempt is still deeply unsatisfying, but at least it looks basically like a bat. I love my camera; I love the way photography captures every detail. Rachel’s picture, and the details she puts in—the teacher’s slumping shoulders, the way he puts his hand in one pocket—make me think about what drawings do better.

  As I’m packing up to go home, I slide out the picture Rachel drew of me. I’m staring down at my paper; my forehead is furrowed, my shoulders hunched in. In just a handful of spare charcoal lines, Rachel made me look tense and worried. It’s unnerving seeing myself through Rachel’s eyes—it’s unnerving how much about me she saw. Looking at the picture makes my palms sweat.

  I want her to draw me again. Maybe sometime when I’m less stressed out.

  I slide the drawing carefully back into a notebook so it’s protected.

  * * *

  Mom isn’t working when I get home; she’s wrapped up in a quilt in the living room, watching out the window.

  “Hi, Mom,” I say.

  She looks up, not smiling. “How was your day?”

  “The school here really sucks.” What I really want is for her to pull up stakes again, move again, before I’ve found anything I like. Because surely the next town will have a better school, or at least one that has Spanish 3 and calculus with an actual teacher. Mom doesn’t say anything, though; she just looks back out the window. I turn on the stove and put on a pan of water. “I’m going to make myself hot chocolate, okay? Do you want some?”

  She shakes her head.

  I hate it when she gets like this. For one thing, it’s frustrating because it’s so obvious that something’s wrong, but she won’t tell me what. Maybe it’s just the same thing that’s always wrong (i.e., my father). But she won’t ever tell me. A few times I’ve gotten so frustrated I’ve yelled at her, but she doesn’t yell back, just withdraws further, and that feels even worse than the frustration.

  At least it looks like she went shopping after dropping me at school, because there’s food in the fridge. When she still hasn’t moved by 5:30 p.m., I pull out eggs and the big bag of grated cheddar cheese and a green bell pepper and make us both omelets. I like omelets better with sautéed onions, but I hate cutting up onions, so I leave those out.

  She rouses herself a little when I put food on the table and comes over to eat it.

  “How’s work?” I ask, since that’s generally a pretty safe topic.

  “No word from Sochie yet,” she says and falls silent again.

  Since she’s in a bad mood, anyway, I figure there’s no reason not to ask. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to the waitress, about red flags. Did my father really want to become a global dictator?”

  She looks up, chewing. Swallows. “Yes,” she says.

  “For real? Was he serious?”

  “He wanted control. Starting with us but ending with everything. I thought it was a joke at first. He’d say things like, ‘You know I couldn’t possibly be worse at running things than the people doing it now,’ or he’d say, ‘I’m going to save the world, you know, but it has to be mine first,’ and he’d laugh, so I assumed he was joking, but he wasn’t.”

  “How did you realize that wasn’t a joke?”

  There’s a long pause as my mother chews, and then drinks some water, and then takes another bite of omelet, and I think maybe she’s going to answer me, but eventually I realize that she’s not going to answer. When we’re done, I wash the dishes while she stares at the wall some more.

  When I was younger, Mom went through all sorts of stories about why we moved so much. First, she pretended moving was fun. For a while, she insisted that a fresh start was a good idea if you’d gotten in trouble, and we moved every time I got in trouble. When you’re little, you don’t always know just how abnormal something is.

  At some point in middle school, I realized that something was really wrong. And the summer before high school, Mom sat me down to tell me about my father. We were living in Arkansas at the time, in an apartment where the air conditioner had broken, which was pretty horrible. The windows were open, and I was damp with sweat. I remember that my legs were sticking to my chair as Mom laid the laminated clipping down in front of me and told me about my father.

  Afterward, I remember thinking that now, finally, my life would make sense. I thought Mom would answer my questions and I would know what was going on. But Mom still doesn’t answer my questions, and my life still doesn’t make sense, and I still don’t know what’s going on.

  It feels like there’s a wall between us made of all the things she won’t talk about.

  I go to my room and look at some pictures I took: a squirrel, a bird that’s blurry because it took off flying while I was still trying to focus, the dog that belonged to our next-door neighbor in Thief River Falls. I liked that dog. The neighbor had me give him some treats when we first moved in so he’d know I was a friend, and after that, the dog always a
cted like we were best buddies. Most of my pictures of the dog are blurry because he never held still, but this one’s pretty sharp except for his tail. I decide not to upload the picture. Looking at the dog makes me sad.

  I wonder if Rachel would like CatNet. Would the admins let her count animal drawings as animal pictures? She draws really well. I open up the site and look to see which of the assistant administrators is online. Alice, the teenage girl admin, has a little green light by her name. “Hey, Alice, do you have a minute?” I type.

  “Yes, I do, LBB,” she says. “What can I help you with?”

  “I was wondering if I could have an invite for a friend.”

  “Is this someone you know in person or online? What’s her name?”

  “Her name is Rachel, and she’s in my art class at school. She draws really cool pictures. That was my other question—could she upload her drawings instead of photos of animals? Would that be okay?”

  “It would depend on how good the drawings were,” Alice says. “How well do you know her?”

  “Not all that well.” Not well at all, actually. “I’d like to get to know her better.”

  “I tell you what—find out her last name and her email address, and I’ll see about sending her an invite.”

  I feel a flush of uncertainty. I like Rachel. I want her to be on CatNet so I can stay friends with her after I move. But what if Rachel takes one look at CatNet and decides I’m a loser? It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. We’re leaving either way. Sooner or later.

  “Okay,” I type.

  “How’s the new town?” Alice asks.

  “I guess I’d sum it up with, ‘They’re going to have a robot teach us sex ed because they don’t trust the human teachers not to go off-script.’ Rachel seems cool, though.”

  “Good luck,” Alice says. “Talk to you again soon.”

  3

  Clowder