Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

LittleBrownBat: So hey, I moved again.

  Marvin: I don’t know why you can’t ever tell us where you are. I mean even if your dingo father’s on CatNet he’s not going to be in your Clowder.

  LittleBrownBat: If I told you where I live and my mom found out, she’d make me stop using social media entirely.

  Hermione: Hadn’t school started in your old town?

  LittleBrownBat: It’s started in the new one, too. It’s OK. We’re reading The Scarlet Letter in English class, it’ll be great to find out what happens. Again.

  Hermione: Oh, that is JUST NOT FAIR.

  LittleBrownBat: RIGHT?

  Boom Storm: What’s the weirdest thing so far?

  LittleBrownBat: SEX ED TAUGHT BY A ROBOT.

  That’ll start next week

  Icosahedron: Why would they have a robot teach sex ed?

  Because robots don’t get embarrassed?

  Firestar: ooh ooh I know

  Because they can make the robot say all the homophobic and transphobic stuff that a real human being might just refuse to say

  AM I RIGHT?

  LittleBrownBat: That’s basically what I’m expecting.

  Marvin: btw my parents told me today we’re driving to California for Christmas again.

  Since we live in North Carolina, this means I will once again spend almost all of winter vacation in the car.

  Firestar: Why don’t you fly?

  Marvin: Mom’s afraid of flying.

  LittleBrownBat: How far of a drive is it?

  CheshireCat: It is approximately 36 hours in total. But I assume you don’t do it all in one session. Right?

  Marvin: They always say it’ll be three days and it’s always four.

  Firestar: Wow

  Hermione: Wow.

  Marvin: If we had a self-driving car, we could take roads where it’s legal to let the car drive while you sleep and maybe it would be faster. Except we’d still have to stop to pee. And eat.

  LittleBrownBat: How many times have you done this?

  Marvin: Five. Last year I convinced them to stay home. But Mom’s sister lives out there and my aunt doesn’t like to fly either.

  Hermione: You should meet in the middle!

  Unfortunately it looks like that’s Oklahoma

  Everyone loses if you go to Oklahoma.

  Firestar: Have you even been to Oklahoma Hermione?

  Marvin: Seriously she’s right. I’ve driven through Oklahoma five times and it is LAME.

  Hermione: omg Marvin don’t say it’s LAME, that’s ableist.

  Marvin: Sorry, I meant to say it’s gay. Totally gay.

  Firestar: not funny

  Marvin: Okay okay sorry.

  Boom Storm: You could say it’s naff. Then you’ll sound British.

  Marvin: How do you know that’s not ableist or homophobic or something else bad?

  Hermione: I just looked it up and they don’t know exactly where “naff” came from, but maybe it came from Polari, which was this secret gay language used in Britain in the 19th century.

  Firestar: Hold up. THERE IS A SECRET GAY LANGUAGE?

  Hermione: Not anymore. It fell out of use in the 1960s.

  Firestar: I WANT TO REVIVE IT. What does naff mean?

  Marvin: It means lame

  SORRY

  It means, “This sucks, but not enough to bother saying it SUCKS.”

  LittleBrownBat: Oklahoma is definitely naff. The parts I’ve lived in, anyway.

  Firestar: What are some other Polari words or do we not know any because it’s lost?

  Hermione: Corybungus means your butt. Fantabulosa means that something’s awesome.

  Firestar: Okay let’s bring those back. Naff, Corybungus, and Fantabulosa.

  Marvin: I’m reading through the list of words and I just got to naff.

  In addition to meaning super unimpressive it means STRAIGHT. Like HETEROSEXUALLY STRAIGHT.

  Firestar: BEST WORD EVER!

  4

  Steph

  Walking to school the next day, I think about getting in trouble.

  I had this run in sixth grade where I got in trouble at a bunch of schools in a row. In middle school, other kids start really noticing whatever it is that makes you weird, and there were all sorts of things that made me weird. I never had the right clothes. I never had the right hair. I raised my hand when I wasn’t supposed to and I didn’t raise my hand when I was supposed to, and I had no idea how to tell which was which. And of course, I was new. I was always new.

  So for a while in sixth grade, I tried punching anyone who made fun of me. And the good thing was, if I punched someone and got caught, Mom would pick me up from the office, load everything into the van, and just move to a new town. It wasn’t worth the risk of staying somewhere I’d attracted that sort of attention.

  But it got exhausting. So after a while, I tried just keeping my head down instead, and that worked better. Even at the school in seventh grade where one girl called me “Staff the Stick”—she was making fun of my name, not my body type—and she and her friends got everyone to call me “Sticky,” and then some of the boys started writing things on the board at the beginning of class that were supposed to be reasons I was sticky.

  In retrospect, I really should have just punched someone at that naff school. Because the next school was way better.

  Anyway, I’m a little old for punching, but I could get myself in trouble here, and then we’d move and maybe the next school would have Spanish and an English class without The Scarlet Letter.

  It’s hard to get out of the habit of just keeping your head down, though. I’ll have to work to find a good opportunity.

  * * *

  History class offers no real scope for misbehavior; the teacher sets up slides full of notes for us to copy down, sticks his feet on his desk, leans back with a book, and—I’m pretty sure—takes a nap. I copy the notes and then take out my own book to read. Most of the students around me are on their phones, except for a few very diligent people in the front row who look like they’re doing homework for other classes.

  My animal science class features gruesome animal diseases. We look at pictures of something called “lungworm.” It’s absolutely disgusting and also interesting enough that I’m distracted from my “get in trouble” plans. But then comes English.

  Ms. Campbell, the teacher, is young, blond, and pretty but has the bored, world-weary air of a crabby, ancient teacher counting days till retirement. She tries halfheartedly to get the students to discuss the book. No one bites. She gets more and more irritable as she lectures. I don’t think she likes the book, either.

  Rachel is drawing again. Today it’s a picture of a dragon, wings spread, neck arched. She’s sketching, experimenting with different ways to do the wings and the neck. She draws in the face as I watch, giving the dragon a look of sly interest, like it’s willing to have a conversation with you before it eats you.

  Ms. Campbell is talking about themes from The Scarlet Letter. This go-round, I think I could give the lectures on guilt, vengeance, redemption, the letter A, any of it. I watch Rachel drawing instead, and unfortunately that might be what draws Ms. Campbell’s attention to Rachel’s notebook, because she strides over and snatches it off Rachel’s desk. She looks it over disdainfully. “This doesn’t look to me like any of the note-taking methods you all learned in ninth grade.” Rachel doesn’t answer. The teacher rips out the page with the picture, then tosses Rachel’s notebook back onto her desk. “Miss Adams, are you under the impression that there are dragons in The Scarlet Letter?”

  “No,” Rachel mutters.

  “When we discussed last week the idea that American literature treats the wilderness both as the source of purity and the home of the devil, did you decide that possibly this meant you’d find a dragon on your next trip to the arboretum?”

  She’s doing that thing mean teachers do, where they try to be nasty to one kid to get the other kids to laugh at her victim, except she’s not very good at it.
No one’s laughing. Rachel raises her head from her desk and shoots a look of absolute burning fury at Ms. Campbell. Ms. Campbell’s lips tighten and she moves her hands, and I realize that she’s about to tear the picture in half.

  I jump up and grab the picture out of her hands. “Nope!” I yell, and I shove the picture inside my own notebook so she can’t grab it back. “Not yours!”

  That makes everyone laugh. I fold my hands and wait for the teacher to send me to the principal’s office, wondering if I’ll have a way to get Rachel’s picture back to her before the principal suspends me and Mom whisks me off to the next place.

  Instead, Ms. Campbell yells “Be quiet!” at my classmates and “Sit down!” at me and then goes on with the lecture like nothing’s happened.

  After the bell, once we’re out in the hallway, I give Rachel her drawing back. “Thanks,” she says, and she tucks it carefully into a folder full of other drawings. Then she glances at a girl with heavy eyeliner who’s come up. “Sit with us at lunch?” she says.

  Everyone shifts over as I come with my tray and Rachel introduces me. The girl with the eyeliner is Bryony. She looks biracial to me, although I’m not sure. Rachel and the rest are all white. I think Bryony might be the only nonwhite girl at this school.

  “So why’d you move to New Coburg?” Bryony asks. “Seriously, this would not be my choice of where to move.”

  “Rent is cheap here,” I say, which is what my mother tells me to say when people ask what brought me to some particular town. It’s both true and not very interesting.

  I notice that everyone else at the table has cereal bars as part of their lunch: Suncraft Farms Quinoa & Açai cereal bars, which have a NEW IMPROVED TASTE according to the wrapper. Suncraft Farms is the brand made at the local factory. Probably everyone’s parents work there and bring home freebies.

  They want to know where I’m from. I say Thief River Falls, Minnesota, since that’s the last place I left. Someone has an uncle there and wants to know if I ever went tubing (no) or to the pioneer village (also no) and whether robots are taking all the jobs there.

  “There’s actually a company there building robotics components, so kind of the opposite, actually,” I say.

  “Robots haven’t taken over the Suncraft Farms factory, but they probably will in a year or two,” Bryony says, and everyone nods.

  “What do you think of New Coburg?” someone asks.

  “People here are very friendly,” I say, which manages to be both accurate, since here I am at lunch sitting with people who are talking to me, and the sort of thing everyone wants to hear you say about their small town.

  Another girl wants to gossip about fallout from a party they all went to over the summer at some ex-farm with an abandoned house. I try to look interested even though I’m not. High school is always better when I have people to sit with at lunch.

  Bryony is wearing a sleeveless shirt and has an ink vine trailing down from her shoulder, wrapping around her left arm. I’m pretty sure it was done in Sharpie rather than a henna pen that would stain more permanently, but it’s better than most of the art I saw kids wearing back in Thief River Falls, and I immediately wonder if Rachel drew it. One of the other girls we’re sitting with has a pack of fine-line Sharpies. She passes them over to Rachel as they’re all chatting, and Rachel draws a detailed butterfly on the other girl’s hand.

  Even when I’ve had friends, I’ve never had anyone who particularly wanted to give me art. The one time anyone even offered, we were at a school where it was against the dress code to have ink on your skin anywhere visible; I’d have had to wear long sleeves until it wore off. Not much point to that. I always feel envious, watching this sort of casual intimacy between friends, and today is no exception.

  The bell rings; Rachel adds a few last details to the butterfly and caps the pens. “Let’s go,” she says to me.

  * * *

  We’re drawing again in Global Arts and Crafts. Today, we’re being encouraged to try different materials, and the teacher has set up workstations with charcoal, pastels, oil pastels, and colored pencils, along with small, postcard-sized pieces of nice drawing paper to use as we move from station to station. I trail after Rachel, who heads straight for the pastels and props up a postcard of a hummingbird in flight to work from.

  Other than Rachel and me, I think possibly everyone in this class is high.

  “How did you learn to draw so well?” I ask.

  She rakes a critical eye over my utterly half-assed drawing of an iris. I’d picked out something that looked simple to draw. Simple-ish. “Did you draw when you were little?” she asks.

  “Yeah.” I’d drawn people, mostly. I’d drawn them badly. For a while I drew anthropomorphic rabbits. Those weren’t so great, either. My mother kept me in crayons and blank paper as we’d gone from town to town, although I don’t think my art usually made it into the car when we moved.

  “How old were you when you quit drawing for fun?”

  “I don’t remember. Sometime in grade school, I guess.”

  “Most people quit drawing when they’re little kids, so their drawings never stop looking like a little kid’s art. If you keep drawing, you get better.”

  One of the stoned girls comes over with a Sharpie, hoping Rachel will do some body art for her. “Just a butterfly?” she pleads.

  “Come find me at lunch sometime,” Rachel says and goes back to smudging the bird’s wings with her finger to make them blurry.

  “You’re really good, though,” I say. “Clearly.” I gesture at the disappointed girl, who’s gone back to her own table.

  “Well, I draw a lot.” Rachel starts to push her hair out of her face, looks at her color-smeared finger, and thinks the better of it. I reach across the table and tuck her hair behind her ear, and she gives me a sidelong smile. “So if you don’t draw, do you do something else?”

  “I take pictures sometimes.”

  “I thought you didn’t have a phone.”

  “I have a digital camera, just no phone attached. Do they let us do photography in this class?”

  “No, but you don’t have to draw well to get an A. You just have to show up and look like you’re trying.”

  I glance around and lower my voice. “It kind of seems like a class for the kids they’re afraid are going to flunk out.”

  “Yeah, it sort of is. But it’s also for the kids who like art. Which one are you?”

  “Oh, they’re definitely worried I’m going to flunk out. I mean, I’m on my fifth high school.”

  “Wait, your fifth? What grade are you in?”

  “Eleventh.”

  “Were you thrown out of the other four or something?”

  “No, my mom and I just move a lot.”

  Rachel looks at me, interested, then back down at her drawing. “Does she have a job that moves you around all the time?”

  “No.”

  “Are you fugitives on the run from the law?”

  That’s a really unusual question, and when I look up, I can’t decide if Rachel is joking or not. “If we were, would I tell you that?”

  “You might,” Rachel says. “There was actually someone who passed through town back when I was in sixth grade who said her parents were fugitives from the law, but it turned out they were just mentally ill.”

  “Really?” I’m intrigued. It’s rare I hear about another chronic transient like me. “We’re on the run from my father, not the law. He’s scary. I don’t know why my mother doesn’t talk to the police or something, instead of moving.”

  “Well, the police suck here,” Rachel says. “There was this party last spring that got busted—”

  “Was that what you were talking about at lunch?”

  “No, that one was in the summer. Last spring, there was one of those big high school parties with everyone, you know, out near this cave. Everyone split when the police pulled up, and I’m sure totally by coincidence they decided to chase Bryony. And I was with Bryony, so we both got
busted. And then they made us both take a Breathalyzer test, and I swear they were even madder that neither of us had been drinking. So then they said we must have been using harder substances.”

  “Were you?”

  “No! Anyway, my mom and Bryony’s mom went in on a lawyer and the whole thing got dropped, but there are only five cops in this town, and they all hate me. And Bryony, who they already hated because her mom’s black.”

  What an awesome town. I like Rachel, but she seems to be about the only good thing about it. Well, maybe also Bryony. Still. The sooner I can get my mom to move, the better. I wonder why our English teacher didn’t send me to the principal’s office? So weird.

  * * *

  Mom is sleeping when I get home, which is probably a step down from yesterday when she was sitting up and staring at the wall. I make myself a snack and then go out with my camera. The house we’re living in has a front yard but not really a backyard. There’s a light on a post in the middle of the front yard. Someone’s used bricks to build sort of a planter around the base of the lamppost and planted flowers in it, but it’s been a dry summer and no one’s been watering, so the flowers are straggly and sad. The grass in the yard is crunchy.

  Across the street, I can see the lush green lawn of someone who diligently waters. That neighbor also has a statue of a goose, which has been dressed up in a bonnet sewn out of cloth.

  I take pictures of the goose and the flowers, and then I notice there are a ton of spiders living on the lamppost, with webs strung on the fancy little iron curlicues under the light itself. You don’t normally see a lot of spiders living together, but the light attracts bountiful insects, enough to feed every spider on there.

  I take pictures of the spiders and their webs, wondering what the term is for a whole lot of spiders. A colony of spiders. A creepy-crawly of spiders. A spider condominium. A spider collective. I’ve never been a fan of spiders the way Firestar is, but looking at them through the camera makes me appreciate them more: their clever legs, which they can use two at a time or four at a time to manipulate webs and prey. Webs are cool, but these are tangled and dusty and full of leftover moths. Firestar has this picture they took once of an absolutely glorious web that a spider put in the corner of their family’s front porch; it’s damp from dew and catching the morning light. Spider artwork. Rachel-level spider artwork, not Steph-level spider artwork.