Chaos on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  “I don’t think it would be legal for your parents to lock you in a shed, either.”

  I want to ask CheshireCat what exactly the laws are about this, but first I have to figure out how to bring Bryony up to date on the whole “Cat, who’s a very definitely human programmer, who lives somewhere like Boston, definitely in a house or apartment of some kind like all other people who have bodies” thing.

  Rachel decides to go for it: “By the way, Cat—you remember Cat, the programmer from Boston—Cat bought a robot and had it shipped to Steph’s house this week.” Her voice has gone very slightly higher in pitch.

  “Oh,” Bryony says, catching on. “Cat. I think we’re all talking about the same Cat.”

  I nod. CheshireCat, fortunately, doesn’t say anything.

  “Cat sent you a robot. Uh. Yeah, that sounds like something they’d do. Did it come in handy?”

  “It let the air out of their tires so they couldn’t follow us,” Nell says, “and when they freaked out, they shot the robot instead of shooting in our direction.”

  “Instead of … Where did you say these people were?” Bryony stands up and goes and locks the doors to their house.

  “Well, they don’t have any obvious way to figure out where we went…” Rachel says.

  Except one of them is Rajiv. “There’s something I should tell you about one of them, though,” I say. Everyone in the room looks at me. “Rajiv, the programmer guy who worked with my parents and Xochitl years ago. When we were leaving, I saw him watching us from one of the windows of the big house.”

  “From one of the windows?” Rachel says. “We were moving quickly and we weren’t that close. How sure are you that’s who you saw?”

  I think this over.

  “I mean, I looked at him and thought, Oh, that’s Rajiv. But I don’t know. I mean, I’m not 100 percent sure.”

  “You’ve never met him, right?” Rachel asks. “This is just based on pictures?”

  “Right.”

  “Do you remember a Rajiv?” Nell asks Glenys.

  Glenys shakes her head. “I saw Brother Daniel. And Sister Karen. And that was it. I know Brother Malachi was there and I heard other voices, but those were the only people I saw.”

  “What does it mean if it was Rajiv?” Nell asks.

  “He used to work with my parents. He’s kind of a hacker. I don’t know what exactly he can do.” I mull over possibilities. Had Rajiv recognized me? Did he even know what I looked like? The cult knew or at least suspected that Nell had broken Glenys out, but when they talked about the other girls, they didn’t name us. “I think Rajiv knew I was in New Coburg last fall. So if he recognized me, it’s not impossible he’d work out that I was here.”

  “They didn’t want to involve the other girls, though,” Rachel says.

  Bryony looks from me to Glenys to Nell to Rachel and sighs.

  “At least we didn’t drag you on a car chase this time,” Rachel offers.

  “There’s that,” Bryony says, and turns back to Nell and Glenys. “Okay, look. You can all definitely stay here tonight. But Glenys, if you want to stay longer, I will have to tell my mother what’s going on.”

  “If you do, will she let me stay?” Glenys asks in a small voice.

  “Maybe, but she’ll want a whole lot of explanations, and the authorities may be involved.”

  Glenys kind of shrinks in her chair and says, “I don’t know.”

  Nell puts her hand on Glenys’s and says, “She’ll come with me. No one in my father’s house pays much attention to what I’m up to. It’ll be fine.”

  “Can I borrow your laptop?” I ask Bryony.

  * * *

  On CatNet, Marvin is telling everyone some new story about his LARPing group, involving a game of hide-and-go-seek in an abandoned building and someone almost falling through a hole that would have dropped them three stories.

  “This doesn’t sound safe,” Hermione says.

  “No risk, no fun,” Marvin says.

  “Is that what your LARPing friends are telling you? Didn’t they almost give you hypothermia last week?”

  “No, it was the OTHER set of reenactors that almost gave me hypothermia!”

  “So hey,” I say, “not to distract Hermione from badgering Marvin about his life choices, but remember how Greenberry was able to host Rachel and I last fall when we were on our road trip? In Buffalo?”

  “Yes!” Greenberry says.

  “Greenberry’s parents never go down to the basement, which meant we could stay down there and not get caught. Does anyone know of someone like that in Minneapolis, or nearby, who’d let someone stay and not ask too many questions?”

  “You’re the only person I know who lives in Minneapolis,” Hermione says. “That’s where you live now, right? I’m not misremembering? This person can’t stay at your house?”

  “Not without my mother getting involved.”

  “Is this for Nell?” Hermione asks.

  “No, no, no,” I say, and fill in the essentials.

  “How soon?” Marvin asks. “Do you need something tonight?”

  “No, we’re staying with Orlando tonight.” That’s Bryony’s name on CatNet. Rachel is Georgia. “We need something tomorrow.”

  “Remember my secondary RPG chat room?” Firestar says. “One of my friends there lives in Minneapolis, and I bet he’d be 100 percent up for a side quest of hiding a runaway lesbian exevangelical! And his family is renovating a huge, huge house. Fair warning, though: it’s probably haunted.” Firestar pastes in an address, and I take a look. It’s huge. It’s not technically in Minneapolis; it’s in Saint Paul, across the river.

  Bryony peers over my shoulder. “Is that seriously one house?”

  Glenys looks and says, “I don’t want to stay anywhere with a ghost.”

  “It’s okay,” Nell says. “We’ll go back to my house. There’s a lock on my door, and it’s not haunted.”

  We don’t fit in Bryony’s bedroom, but their mother comes back downstairs to help Bryony move the coffee table out of the living room, and we spread out blankets and sleeping bags on the living room carpet. “No hanky-panky or you’re going to make me feel left out,” Bryony says as Rachel and I spread out a single blanket.

  “As if you didn’t make me watch you and Colin make out all summer,” Rachel grumbles.

  “I wasn’t allowed to have sleepovers with my boyfriend,” Bryony says. “How come you get to have sleepovers with your girlfriend, anyway?”

  “Because she moved to Minneapolis, so I hardly ever see her, plus we can’t get each other pregnant,” Rachel says primly. “That’s what my mother said to my father when they thought I was upstairs and couldn’t hear.”

  I glance over at Glenys, and her eyes are so wide I think I can see the whites around the irises. She has one hand over her mouth and the other wrapped around her torso to hug herself.

  “My mom has no idea what a normal mom would think was okay or not,” I say. “I mean, I spent most of my childhood not allowed to have friends, basically.”

  “So what’s up with your dad, anyway?” Bryony asks. “Is he going to jail or what?”

  “He’s in jail. No bail because he’s a flight risk. Eventually, there’ll be a trial. The prosecutor out in Boston said it could be a while. Months. Possibly a year.”

  “Are you still in touch with Annette?” Annette is CheshireCat’s creator.

  “Kind of.” I wonder if I should tell Annette about seeing Rajiv at the compound. Is that the sort of thing she’d be interested in? What’s my mother going to do if I tell her? Explaining that I’d spent my weekend with my girlfriend on a rescue mission to a cult compound would also be complicated.

  “Is Annette the programmer in Boston?” Nell asks.

  “Yeah,” Rachel says, and then remembers that’s how she described CheshireCat. “I mean, no, she’s a different programmer in Boston.” My mother’s friend Xochitl is also a programmer in Boston. To be fair, there are legitimately a lot o
f programmers in Boston.

  “I really want to hear this whole story sometime,” Nell says with obvious interest, but to my relief drops the subject.

  Bryony excuses themself to the bathroom and a second later my phone vibrates with a text. So Cat = CheshireCat and they know there’s a Cat but not that they’re an AI? Bryony says.

  Yes, I send back.

  Did I catch that Cat TALKED TO YOU IN THE CAR bc are you SURE they don’t know that Cat’s an AI?

  Yes, I send back and add, Everyone was kind of distracted.

  There’s no response to that. I imagine, but can’t actually hear, a strangled sound from the bathroom. Bryony comes back out. “Would anyone like ice cream?” they ask.

  We’re all exhausted but also too wound up to sleep, and it’s not actually that late, so Rachel decides that Nell and Glenys need to see some of the TV that they should have seen when they were young enough to properly appreciate it and puts on Fast Girls Detective Agency. It’s the one where Jesse the K jumps onto a float in a parade and gets into a fistfight with Sourdough Sam. Nell is mostly watching Glenys rather than the screen. Glenys stares at the screen with a sort of glazed, detached interest.

  When we finally shut off the lights and lie down, Rachel pulls me close and whispers, “Bryony can avert their eyes like I did.”

  “Thanks for coming today,” I whisper. “I was really glad to have you there.”

  “Don’t go running into danger without me, okay?” Rachel whispers back.

  “I’ll try to avoid it.”

  * * *

  The snow passes through overnight, leaving six inches that we help Bryony shovel before we go. The temperature has plummeted; yesterday we could be outside for a long time before we really got cold, but today the cold sinks through our coats and into our bones in minutes. The snow squeaks under our boots as we clear the front walk up to the house and the driveway.

  I thank Bryony for putting us up for the night, and Rachel gives me a long hug and a kiss. “Don’t let Nell get you in trouble CheshireCat can’t get you out of,” she says.

  “I’ll try not to. Thanks for coming along.”

  “That’s the other thing. If you are in trouble CheshireCat can’t get you out of, be sure you let me know so I can at least try to come to the rescue. If I have to join a parade and punch my way through thirty-six sportsball mascots, I’m there.”

  “I know.” I reluctantly let go of her to get in Nell’s car.

  On the outskirts of the Twin Cities, we stop at a grocery store and pick up sacks of food that Nell is going to hide under her bed for Glenys to eat. They drop me outside my house. I wonder if Mom is going to be watching, if she’ll notice the extra person in the car and what I’ll tell her, but it’s so cold I don’t want to suggest that they drop me off around the block. Instead, I jog across the street and get inside as quickly as I can.

  There’s a stranger sitting on the sofa, petting Apricot: a woman with gray hair, glasses, and a long red coat that she hasn’t taken off yet. She gives me a long look before she remembers to smile.

  “Mom,” my mother says. “This is Steph. Steph, this is your grandmother.”

  26

  • Nell •

  My father and his partners in iniquity sleep late on weekends, and we’re home at 10:30, which leaves me with a dilemma: Scout out first, then bring Glenys inside, or just scoot her in as quickly as possible and hope for the best? I go with “scoot in,” and praise the Lord, the downstairs is dark and quiet. Glenys carries half the groceries, and I get the door to my bedroom closed just as Thing Two comes down the stairs in her bathrobe, yawning like it’s early.

  “How was your grandmother?” Thing Two asks, and it takes me far longer than it should to remember that supposedly I went up to Lake Sadie this weekend.

  “Fine,” I say. Fortunately, she doesn’t press for more details. I don’t want to open my room back up while she’s standing there—hopefully, Glenys has made some effort to conceal herself so she wouldn’t be seen from the open doorway, but I can’t chance it—so I go sit at the dining room table and pretend I feel like being social.

  I barely slept last night in Bryony’s living room, lying on the rug listening to every noise, from everyone else’s breathing (and snoring and coughing) to the jingle of the tags every time the dog got up. I lay awake wondering if Glenys was also awake, thinking about my mother, replaying the conversation we’d eavesdropped on in my head.

  She left me. She left me on purpose. Just like my father left me when I was ten. Thinking about this makes me feel like I’m adrift on Lake Sadie in a boat without oars. My father abandoned me with my mother; now my mother has abandoned me with my father. At least when my father left, I knew he wasn’t dead. I knew he wanted to see me, even, just not enough to ever do anything about it other than send me letters my mother didn’t let me read.

  But she also might come for me, and that thought makes me want to run to the bathroom and throw up.

  She knows about Glenys and me—and she thinks it’s my fault. What will she do to me if she does come for me? Locking me up in a shed is the least of it.

  My phone pings, and I pick it up. It’s a number I don’t recognize, sending me a photo of a sign that says, YOU CANNOT HIDE FROM GOD. My stomach lurches, and I cover my mouth until it settles back down. Would they be able to hide me from Cat? Cat found the Fatherhold and Glenys’s family car. Would Cat be able to track my mother’s car and find me?

  Would Steph and Rachel mount a rescue if I were the one in trouble?

  Why should they? says a part of me that’s been silent for years now. My father never did.

  Thing Two comes out with two cups of coffee and hands me one that tastes like coffee ice cream. Hers is black. She sips it for a minute, then asks, “Do you want pancakes? I could make some, but only if you’re going to eat them. Your dad and Siobhan got up early and went cross-country skiing, and they usually go for brunch after, so they won’t be around to help eat them.”

  Siobhan is Thing Three. “She’s not even his girlfriend,” I say, distracted by the illogic of this.

  Thing Two’s mouth twitches like she’s suppressing a smile. “They’re the ones who like skiing,” she says. “We all like each other’s company. That’s why we live together.”

  “Okay,” I say, not really wanting her to get any further into this. “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

  “Maybe another hour?” She pauses. “Is there something you need right now?”

  I don’t even know how to ask for what I need, or what to say. After two silent beats pass, she pulls out a chair and sits down across from me to drink her coffee.

  I still don’t know how to start. She waits.

  “I found something out this weekend,” I say finally, hoping she doesn’t demand excessive details like how I found this out. “My mom definitely wasn’t kidnapped. She just left. Which means she could show up whenever and just take me, I think. And I really don’t want that to happen.”

  Thing Two is silent for a second, starts to speak, cuts herself off, and finally asks, “Do you have some reason to think she might show up? Has she contacted you?”

  I pull out my phone and hand over the picture of my mother, holding the TURN AROUND OR FACE JUDGMENT sign.

  Thing Two looks at the photo for a long moment, then hands me back my phone, her face sober. “Okay,” she says. “I’ll make an appointment with a lawyer. I don’t actually know all that much about how custody stuff works, but there’s got to be something we can file or claim or … I don’t know. But I’m sure we can keep your mom from just showing up and taking you.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and then, because I know she prefers this to “Ms. Hands-Renwick,” I add, “Jenny.” My voice creaks a little, but I don’t think she notices.

  Thing Two puts her coffee down and looks searchingly into my face as I don’t quite meet her eyes. “I’m happy to do it, Nell. We’ll call today.”

  27

  • St
eph •

  “What should I call you?” I ask my grandmother.

  “You called me Mimi, when you were little,” she says.

  My grandmother is seated on the couch. I sit down on the chair opposite her, too tense to settle back. Apricot rubs up against my ankle, and I lean down to scratch her head. My mother stands in the doorway, hands clasped, clearly trying not to fidget.

  “Do you remember me?” she asks.

  “No,” I say, and then add apologetically, “I really don’t remember much from before we started running.” How do you even have a conversation like this? Usually when I’m meeting a new person, they don’t bring any expectation that I’m going to know who they are. Mom said she grew roses competitively, but I have no idea how to turn that into a conversational topic.

  “I thought you were coming later this week,” I say.

  “That was my plan, but Dan—that’s my husband, your mother’s stepfather—saw how wound up I was, waiting, and suggested I just rebook my ticket and go right away. I couldn’t get over the fear that if I waited, you’d disappear again like you did that time in Oklahoma.”

  “I mailed that postcard on my way out of town,” Mom says. “I didn’t disappear; I told you I wouldn’t be there.”

  “Can’t blame a mother for trying. Imagine how you’d feel if your daughter up and disappeared.”

  “Sounds stressful,” Mom says dryly, and shoots a sideways glance at me. “Are you going to take off your coat, Mom?”

  “It’s freezing here,” my grandmother says. “Even indoors. I don’t know how you live like this!”

  I hand her a throw blanket, and my grandmother—Mimi, I say silently to myself—shrugs out of her coat and delicately unfolds the throw blanket across her lap. “Have you considered moving home to Houston?” she asks.

  My mother starts to say something noncommittal and then catches my eye and says, “No. I like Minnesota. We’re going to stay here.”

  My grandmother launches into a digression about things that Houston has that Minneapolis doesn’t, and I excuse myself to the bathroom as my mother points out that “flooding” and “enormous flying cockroaches” and “alligators” should all be on the list. While on the toilet, I text CheshireCat and ask, Is this actually my grandmother? She’s not some imposter sent by my father?