Chaos on CatNet Read online

  This at least temporarily diverts her from her own troubles. “What, really? Why?”

  I tell her the version of the story that leaves in the kidnapping. I explain the trip to Boston with my girlfriend as the two of us were looking for a friend of my mother’s to help keep us safe. Now that my father is in jail awaiting trial, I have a phone, I’m attending school under my real name, and Mom’s hired a lawyer to straighten out all the paperwork. Including the part where she technically committed kidnapping when she took off with me.

  I leave out the sentient AI, of course. I wonder if CheshireCat is ever going to be a secret I don’t have to keep. I haven’t even told Julie, my childhood best friend I reconnected with last fall, that part of the story.

  Nell’s out of the question, obviously. I don’t know her at all.

  I finish off with, “And now we’re both in therapy. Mom is getting treated for PTSD, and we’re in family therapy, plus I have my own therapist.”

  Nell looks at me bleakly and says, “My father wants to put me in therapy, but he can’t, because my mom still has full legal custody.”

  “But she’s missing! What if you have to go to the doctor?”

  “That’s what Thing Two said. My dad said he’ll call a lawyer sometime this week for sure. Thing One doesn’t seem to trust him to actually do it, though.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I say. How is so much that comes out of Nell’s mouth so confusing? This time, I’m not sure I even heard right. “Who is it that doesn’t trust him?”

  “Thing One is my stepmother, Thing Two is my father’s girlfriend, and Thing Three is my stepmother’s girlfriend. It’s in order of distance from me.” She furrows her brow. “Did you ever read the Dr. Seuss book with Thing One and Thing Two?”

  That may be the first cultural reference point we actually have in common. “Oh, yeah,” I say. “The Cat in the Hat. I get it.”

  She looks relieved that I understand this one for real, and her voice warms to something like actual cheer. “To their faces, I call them Mrs. Reinhardt, Ms. Hands-Renwick, and Miss Garcia, though. It would be disrespectful to call them things to their faces. But there are four adults who all live in the same house and all think they get a say in my life. It’s a whole thing.”

  I’m glancing around, wondering where I’m supposed to go next, when a chipper girl in a bright yellow vintage jacket slides in next to me, a phone in one hand and an out-of-season Christmas mug in the other. I can smell the tea she’s brewing in the mug. “Hi, new people,” she says in a buoyant tone that reminds me a little of Firestar. “I’m Amelie. I need to connect with two new comrades on Mischief Elves—do you play?”

  I shake my head automatically even as I curl my hand around my phone. For most of my life, phone games were one of those things that everyone else did that I couldn’t do. I am torn between that excited sense of I could do this now and fear that this will be like typing with my thumbs, that everyone else learned key basic skills when they were six and I’m going to be hopelessly behind forever.

  “Even better,” Amelie says. “I get superlative bonus points if I recruit a new player!”

  Okay. Why not. I unlock my phone and bump it against hers to sign up for whatever this is. “How about you?” Amelie says to Nell. Nell nods slowly and holds out her phone. “Don’t look so grim!” Amelie says. “This is a game. It’s fun, you’ll see!” She looks down at her own phone and winces. “I’m going to be late for biology. It was great to meet you, see you around!”

  “Did she ask our names?” Nell asks in a faintly judgmental tone.

  “Maybe she’ll get them from the game,” I say.

  Nell glares down at her phone. “Hmm.”

  Nell needs therapy so much more than I need therapy. But she also needs a friend, and having a queer friend seems like it could help her. I’m still a little worried that she’s going to turn on me, but I like her, and I feel a weird kinship with her—we’re both dislocated small-town girls suddenly moved to the city, even if Nell only lived in one small town and I’ve lived in probably a hundred of them.

  At all my past schools, I needed someone to befriend me if I was going to have any friends at all. But here … there’s another new kid.

  Anyway. Straightening out legal messes, never mind solving disappearances, is usually outside the scope of what CheshireCat can interfere in, but I’ll ask later if they have any ideas.

  3

  • Nell •

  Thing Two picks me up at the end of the school day. “Did you have a good first day?” she asks.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say.

  “Don’t call me ma’am,” she says, trying for a sort of jolly, joking tone. “It makes me feel five hundred years old.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, which is what my mother told me to say to adults who asked not to be called sir or ma’am or Mrs. or Mr. Well, it’s yes, sir, to the men, yes, ma’am, to the women, and what I’m supposed to do when I can’t tell and the person is Mx. Gwinn, like the person who teaches drawing at Coya Knutson, was not covered. My mother would be five hundred varieties of horrified if she knew that not only was I living in a den of iniquity, I was being taught by a Mx.

  Surely my mother did not just leave me. She would never leave me behind, on purpose, knowing that I could wind up living with my father.

  Thing Two sighs heavily and drops all efforts at conversation, which is perfectly fine with me. I check my phone for texts from Glenys. Still none. I send Glenys a text saying, Can’t wait to tell you about my so-called school, so she’ll see it when she gets her phone back, and then scroll up through the texts. I stop scrolling before I get to the panicked messages I sent when my mother first didn’t come home.

  I feel abandoned. Not by Glenys. I know Glenys would text back if she could. By her parents, who surely know about my mother by now. By her siblings, who haven’t slipped her a phone or a tablet so she can get in touch with me. By the rest of the Abiding Remnant. I haven’t heard from anyone.

  Thing Two lets us in and flips on the porch light. I wipe my feet carefully and hang up my coat, then sit down to take off my boots while Thing Two goes into the kitchen. “Do you want a snack? Oh—” She breaks off into a string of appalling obscenities. “Kent was supposed to do the dishes before he left. He swore he would do the dishes before he left.”

  I struggle to get my boots off quickly and present myself at the kitchen door, feeling a surge of anxiety at the sound of her voice. “I can do them,” I say.

  “No, don’t be ridiculous It’s Kent’s turn,” Thing Two says, and points at an extremely detailed chart posted on the wall. “I’ll wash the ones I need. Do you want a snack?”

  I do, but I want to get away from Thing Two more. “No, thank you,” I say, and retreat to the living room, where I listen to the sound of furious dishwashing that finally resolves into more peaceful sounds of a carrot being peeled and cut into carrot sticks.

  I hate it here, I think. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. At home, I know what’s expected. At home, I know what people want from me. At home, I know what the right thing to do is, even if I can’t always do it, even if I don’t agree, even if I don’t want to.

  I text Glenys again. The definition of ridiculous: complaining about undone dishes, but not letting you do them.

  I go get my laptop and bring it into the living room. I’m not sure anyone here cares what I’m doing on my computer, but it feels wrong to use it somewhere private. I log in to the Catacombs, the social media site that Glenys and I use because our parents approve of it. Sometimes Glenys has her laptop but not her phone, and even when she’s being very closely supervised, there are ways that she says hi to me, like sending me the “I prayed for you today!” message that takes just one click. She hasn’t, and that means she hasn’t been on her computer at all.

  I try voice-calling my grandma, but she doesn’t pick up.

  The front door opens; it’s Thing Three coming home from work. She hangs up her coat but tracks snow a
cross the living room floor to talk to Thing Two, who yells a bunch about the dishes. “Well, don’t blame me,” I hear Thing Three say. “Kent said he’d do them for me since I was running late!” She comes back out with half a toasted bagel with peanut butter on it and says, “How was your first day at Coya Knutson?”

  I give her a long, stony look and say, “Good news: they think I’m at grade level or ahead in every subject.” Thing Three was the one who suggested that I should go to Coya Knutson Learning Center because they can help kids with “deficiencies,” which is a word she used right in front of me.

  “Glad to hear it,” she says, her smile wavering, and her gaze drops to her bagel.

  Mom, wherever she is right now, would want me to pray.

  When we all woke up on New Year’s morning and my mother hadn’t come home, my grandfather’s first thought was that she’d had an accident, and they called the police to go look for her car. The police came to the house instead of calling when they found the car, and from the look on my grandmother’s face, I thought they were going to tell us that she was dead, and I told God that if he’d just make sure she wasn’t dead, I’d never ask for anything else as long as I lived.

  And then she wasn’t dead. Or at least, she wasn’t in the car. Nothing about my mother’s disappearance made sense. The police hadn’t come to give us bad news in person—they’d come to ask questions, to try to understand where my mother might have gone.

  “We’ll search the woods, of course,” they said. But they hadn’t found her.

  It was clear to me that either my faith was being tested or everything was ashes and dross and lies. I haven’t been able to bring myself to pray for anything since.

  No one here has looked over my shoulder at my computer screen even once. It’s appalling. Clearly, they don’t care about the state of my soul—which, given the state of their souls, should not surprise me. I close the Catacombs completely and pull out my phone to check out the site suggested by that girl at school today—the Mischief Elves.

  4

  • Steph •

  Everything about our new apartment feels unnervingly permanent. Mom signed a lease and paid a pet deposit since we have a cat now, Apricot. We have furniture that wouldn’t fit in the van. Beds that came vacuum-packed in boxes. A cat tree. One of Rachel’s mother’s birdhouses, a little art shadow box with a sculpture of a bird with miniature gadgets, hanging on the wall.

  Mom’s latest “not moving anymore” acquisition is a teakettle: bright red, with a solid feel to it. When I get home, I fill it with water and put it on the stove to make myself hot chocolate.

  CheshireCat texts me. You appear to be home now. Have you had time to think about what I should do?

  They have the microphone on to listen, so I talk out loud instead of typing with my thumbs. “How sure are you that whoever this is does know what you are? Maybe it’s a shot in the dark. There are plenty of people with secrets they’re hiding, maybe someone sends out messages like this as bait and then blackmails people who respond.”

  CheshireCat switches to voice. “You might be right.”

  “Is the other person saying they’re an AI?”

  “They have not made that claim.”

  “Maybe try to feel them out and see what they say?”

  “Okeydokey,” CheshireCat says. Okeydokey is one of those things people’s moms say, and it sounds extra weird in a synthesized voice. I tried installing a more human-sounding voice emulator on my phone, but CheshireCat said they prefer the robot voice.

  “Were you listening earlier to my conversation with Nell?” I ask.

  “Yes,” CheshireCat says. “You had the app enabled, so I assumed I had permission.”

  “Oh, it’s fine. I’m just wondering if you have any idea where her mom is.”

  “I looked and didn’t find her,” CheshireCat says. “But I did find the police report on her disappearance. There was no sign of a struggle. The car is the property of Nell’s grandparents, and the police think that’s why she left it behind.”

  “Do you think Nell’s just in denial that her mother abandoned her?”

  A pause, and CheshireCat says, “That is definitely the conclusion that her grandparents, father, all three of her father’s partners, and the Lake Sadie Police Department all reached.”

  “What’s the legal process like for her father to get custody so he can find her a therapist?”

  “He needs to call a lawyer,” CheshireCat says. “He has an app with a to-do list, and he added ‘Call lawyer about Nell custody’ to it four years and three months ago. It reminds him of this task daily. There’s no indication that he’s ever acted on it.”

  This is, in its own way, weirdly relatable. Although when I ignore reminders of stuff on my to-do list, it’s stuff like “Recover password and check ACT score,” and not “Take first steps to un-abandon my teenage child.”

  I make myself a snack and check the time. Rachel will be home from school soon. We’re talking every day and visiting on weekends; long-distance relationships are a pain, but so far, this one seems worth it. I settle in on the couch with my laptop, and I’m checking CatNet when I get a text from Nell. Did you sign in to that game? It looks like another site I use, and that one has a good chat function.

  It takes me a minute to remember what she’s talking about, but I check my phone, and it’s installed. I open the game. Welcome to the Invisible Castle, the site says. Home of the Mischief Elves. It wants to know my name. I tell it my name is Genevieve Horkenpinker. I never use my real name on online sites, because even my CatNet friends agree that’s a good idea, it’s not just my mother.

  Once I’m signed in, the site goes dark and presents me with a prompt. To be admitted to the Realm of the Mischief Elves, you must complete one task, it tells me. I can go out and cross against a light; I can run a quarter mile; I can introduce myself to a stranger.

  By text, Nell says, Is it giving you tasks? We should pick the same thing. The social media site I use at home has a similar interface and it uses this to sort you into Tribulation Teams.

  Did Lake Sadie even have a traffic light?

  The tasks were different!

  I look them over again. It’s kind of icy out for running.

  I don’t like talking to strangers, Nell says.

  Okay, I say. I guess we’re crossing against the light.

  You don’t have to actually do it, Nell says. It’s not like the site’s going to know.

  I click the jaywalking option and get a nice animation of dancing elves dodging traffic. Go! Do Your Thing! the site urges. And check the Castle for fun surprises wherever you go!

  Nell’s advice is reasonable, but I actually don’t like cheating, and there’s literally an intersection with a traffic light a block and a half away from me. I put my coat back on and let myself out of the apartment.

  I’m really not used to Minneapolis yet. I’ve lived in so many small towns, I’ve lost track every time I’ve tried to count them, and their features blur together: diners, bowling alleys, farmers’ co-ops, bars. Two-lane highways through the center of town. Tractors, turkey farms, wheat fields, cornfields. I remember individual features, but not where they were: the four-story building that everyone called the high-rise. The locked, sprawling Victorian mansion that no one had lived in for a decade. The tomato sauce cannery that made the wind smell like pizza.

  Minneapolis is huge. My first days in the city, I’d had a list of places I wanted Mom to take me, but even just getting to any of them took a lot more time than I’d expected.

  On the other hand, no one notices me here.

  In the small towns we moved to, I was always an object of curiosity because new people were so rare. Mom taught me early to give boring answers to the questions people asked. Here, no one asks. No one cares. People come and go all the time.

  Our apartment here is an upstairs duplex near a couple of very busy streets. I am not going to cross Bloomington Avenue against the light, and hilario
usly, the cross street is green for me when I arrive. I cross, then wait to cross back until the light has changed and the traffic is clear, since presumably the rules do not require me to get run over.

  It’s cold and gray and the sun’s already going down. When I get back inside, I put water back on the stove for more hot chocolate.

  Mom hears the door close when I come back in and emerges from her bedroom / home office, laptop dangling from her hand like an open book. “Did you go somewhere?”

  “Just for a walk around the block.” I don’t explain the part about the game.

  Her face softens a little. “It’s supposed to get really cold later this week. Get some exercise in while you can.” She goes back into her room, leaving the door ajar this time. Mom is a computer programmer; she’s still doing freelance work, although now that we’re theoretically going to stay in one place for a while, she’s making noises about getting a more normal job.

  I pull out my phone while the water heats. I’d meant to look for the fun surprises wherever I go, but I’d have had to take off my gloves. There’s an option now for I did the thing! that I can click. Dancing animated elves present me with a gold star for not being a cheater and then give me a scavenger hunt, pictures of things near me that I can take pictures of for a bonus score, and a new mission: Take a picture of a stranger’s house and mark it on the map. An elf pops out to add, No hurry!

  I sit down with my hot cocoa and see that Nell’s identified me and pulled me into a chat room. I log in from my laptop because typing on a keyboard is so much less of a pain. “Hi,” I type. “I went out and crossed against a light.”

  “Seriously?!? I just went to the bathroom. It only takes about two minutes for the I Did the Thing button to appear.”

  “Did it give you a gold star?”

  “What?”

  Guess not. I drink my hot cocoa and wonder if the app tracked my movements, if they know I wasn’t a cheater, or they just guessed because I was gone for longer. CheshireCat would know, if they were tracking me. The app has access to my location (so that it can provide location-specific “fun surprises”)—it could definitely have watched me go out to the intersection. It feels a little weird and personal, having an app that’s run by strangers, watching my movements like that. I mean, CheshireCat watches me, but that’s different. CheshireCat is a friend.