Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  “I found it,” CheshireCat says. “The default password is ‘INSPIRATION2260.’ All caps. I found it on a discussion board where people are complaining about how much of a hassle it is to change this password. So, probably they haven’t changed it.”

  “Are you going to go in and rewrite the script it works from?” Boom Storm asks. “So it says different stuff?”

  “According to the manual, the robot has a question-and-answer bank, and it will answer questions to the degree of detail specified by the person who set it up,” Hermione says. “If you don’t want it talking about a subject, it’ll say something like ‘You should discuss that question with your parents.’”

  “This one apparently says ‘You’ll have to talk to your parents’ for anything about LGBT issues,” I say. There’s a chorus of dismay in my Clowder.

  “Well, if you got into the setup, you could switch it over so it’ll give better answers,” Hermione says.

  “I bet even on the super-liberal settings it doesn’t say anything about nonbinary people,” Firestar says. “I bet the programmers who set it up had never heard of nonbinary genders.”

  “What I really wish I could do is let some actual person answer the questions,” I say.

  “IF YOU CAN FIGURE OUT A WAY TO DO THAT, I WILL SKIP SCHOOL TO DO THE ANSWERS,” Firestar says.

  Firestar got in trouble for truancy last year, so I really don’t want to let them do this. “Aren’t there homeschoolers in here?” I say. “Who wouldn’t have to skip?”

  “Me,” CheshireCat says. “I would not have to skip anything. And I promise to say only things of which Firestar would approve.”

  “I guess I trust you, but I WANT VIDEO,” Firestar says. “I know you don’t have a smartphone, LBB, but maybe your friend does?”

  “Is this even possible?” I ask.

  “You’ll need to get it online,” Ico says. “The WingItz USB drives have an Internet Everywhere chip that would do that. To make it into a drone … I bet I can figure out how to do this. Give me a few days.”

  “This will be fun,” CheshireCat says. “I’ll go read the manual so I can at least start out sounding like the robot.”

  * * *

  I climb out of my bedroom that night to explore New Coburg.

  Mom likes to barricade the door at night. She doesn’t just lock up—she drags furniture in the way, which has always made me nervous. What if there’s a fire? The first time I climbed out my bedroom window, it was totally a practical decision: I should test out this evacuation route in case I ever need it. Mom prefers to live on second floors for the same reason she barricades the door, so I’ve gotten very good at climbing.

  This house has a big front porch, and my window overlooks the porch roof, so it’s an easy climb both up and down. Once I’m sure Mom is asleep, I pack my camera and tripod into my backpack, slide open my window, and climb out. There’s a big, sturdy railing within easy reach of my feet from the porch roof, so yeah, this should be easy. I’m wearing my coat, but as soon as I’m on the ground, I wish I’d worn my hat. My room is going to be cold when I get back.

  My very favorite nocturnal animal is the bat. I love bats. I have a copy of the picture book Stellaluna; it’s the story of a little bat that gets lost and adopted by birds, who are happy to let Stellaluna join their family but insist that she has to stop hanging upside down. School always makes me feel like Stellaluna, like I’m a bat who’s being told she has to act like a bird. Although Rachel also seems a little like a bat trying to live with a bunch of birds. It’s why I already like her.

  My second-favorite nocturnal animal are raccoons. Raccoons are sort of like cats, if cats had opposable thumbs. Raccoons will use their little hands to yank covers off garbage cans, and they can sometimes even unscrew lids if they’re not on too tightly, and they have very cute faces even if they’re nuisance animals that will make a mess and have no respect for human property. Also, unlike bats, they sometimes hold still so I can take pictures of them.

  The way you find raccoons is you find somewhere with food in trash cans that aren’t secured well. Every small town has a little restaurant and at least one bar (sometimes it’s two or three bars), and anywhere that serves food probably has raccoons hanging out in the back. Unless the trash was just picked up. New Coburg has a main street strip, and I’m pretty sure that’s where the diner is. The only town I’ve ever lived in where people were consistently diligent about securing their trash had black bears that would come and raid unsecured Dumpsters. It was a lot harder to find raccoons there.

  The diner is between the hardware store and an empty storefront with a faded New Coburg Dairy Days display in the window. There’s an enormous papier-mâché cow, once carefully painted, now covered in dust.

  I make my way around the corner and behind the building. It’s clear and cool, and I can hear the buzz of the streetlight on the corner. I’m in luck; a half dozen raccoons are raiding the trash. I quietly take off my backpack and set up my tripod and camera.

  You don’t want to use a flash for night photography; you want to use a long exposure time. Flash is basically the worst for lots of reasons, but if you’re taking pictures of animals, it’ll scare them and they’ll run away. The trouble with a long exposure time is that it works best if you’re taking a picture of something holding very still, like a building. This is why bats are so hard to take pictures of. Bats move very quickly while they’re hunting. In pictures taken with a long exposure time, they look like little extra-dark streaks across the dark sky. Raccoons are more likely to hold still for you, but as I sit down on the gravel to adjust my camera angle on the tripod, I mostly get pictures I know will be a blurry mess.

  It’s a family of raccoons: a mom, I think, and four kits. The kits are smaller than the mom but not itty-bitty raccoon babies. They’re in and out of the Dumpster and squabbling over whatever it is they’re finding inside and moving far too quickly for any good photos. The mom finally snags herself what looks like a half-eaten piece of fried chicken and clambers down to the ground with it to gnaw without her kids trying to steal it from her. One of them follows, anyway. Maybe these pictures will turn out?

  Then a door slams, and all the raccoons scramble away out of sight. I pick up my tripod and camera and try to retreat into the shadows, only to back right into a man who’s coming out from the house on the corner with a bag of trash. I was really expecting someone to come out from the diner—I wasn’t looking in the man’s direction. He looks down at me, startled, and I feel a surge of terror. Gripping my tripod, I sprint across his yard and out to the street and run not toward my own house (because what if he’s following me?) but in the other direction. After a couple of blocks, I turn back. No one’s there. I stop to catch my breath. I’m outside the bowling alley.

  It occurs to me that I could have just said, “Excuse me,” instead of running away like a housebreaker. I was doing wildlife photography; there’s nothing illegal or wrong about taking pictures of raccoons. I’m not the one who left the Dumpster open. And the fact that I ran away like that might have actually made him think I was up to no good. I lean against a wall, trying to calm myself down, and I fold up my tripod, stuffing it into my backpack.

  “Hey. Steph?”

  I jump about a foot in the air, even though it’s a girl’s voice, and the first thing I see when I turn is the fluffy little dog she’s walking. The person holding the leash is Bryony, the biracial girl from lunch.

  “Yeah. I mean, hi,” I say.

  “I think you freaked out my dad just now,” she says. “What were you doing lurking behind the old Annie’s?”

  “The old what?”

  “You know, the closed-down store.”

  “I was taking pictures of the raccoons raiding the trash,” I say.

  Bryony looks genuinely surprised by this, then shrugs. “Okay,” she says. “That’s not really any weirder than anything else you could’ve been doing back there. I told Dad you were probably sneaking a smoke.”
>
  “Like, cigarettes? Yuck.”

  “Does your mom bowl?” Bryony asks.

  “Does she what?” I realize how dumb a question that must sound when Bryony points at the bowling alley we’re standing next to. “No.”

  “Too bad,” Bryony says.

  “How did you know it was me?” I ask.

  “My dad didn’t know who you were,” Bryony says. “He figured it had to be the new girl.”

  I walk back home, Bryony walking along with me, her little dog weaving back and forth as it sniffs trees, fallen leaves, a mystery stain, a crumpled Arby’s bag. I try to figure out how to shake Bryony off before we get there, but she’s got no agenda other than walking her dog, and my house is as good a destination as any.

  “Oh, you’re really near Rachel,” she says as we get close. “That’s her house, there.” Rachel’s house is bright blue. Eccentric looking, for a house.

  “Just so you know,” I say as we reach my house, “I climbed out the window when I left. I’m climbing back in when I get home, but I’m not breaking in.”

  She gives me a sidelong look. “Okay,” she says. “See you tomorrow?”

  “Probably,” I say, and I scramble back up. She’s still watching me from below as I climb in my window and rehook my screen. I shut the window, pull the shade, and flip on my bedroom light.

  There is an animal on my bed.

  This is so startling that I gasp. For a second, I’m convinced it’s one of the raccoons I was watching earlier, but then my brain sorts out that it’s a cat. It’s an orange cat with darker orange tabby striping on its face, so once I stop panicking, it is obviously not a raccoon. The cat is sprawled out in a C shape right next to my pillow and looking up at me like it thinks it lives here.

  And then it meows at me, once. Kind of pathetically.

  I sit down and pet it. Hesitantly, because when I was little I got yelled at a bunch of times for trying to pet strange animals. (Admittedly, pretty regularly I was trying to pet a squirrel or a chipmunk.) The cat rubs its head against my hand and purrs. When I stroke my hand down its back, I can feel its ribs through the fur. I don’t know how skinny cats are supposed to be, but this one feels really skinny, even though it looks pretty big.

  I leave the cat shut in my room and go rummaging through the kitchen. We don’t have any cat food, but we do have some cans of tuna my mother bought for sandwiches. I open up a can and also fill a coffee mug of tap water in case the cat is thirsty, and I bring both back to my room.

  The cat hops off my bed the second it smells the tuna and rubs itself against my legs, purring, as I close my door and put the food down.

  I sit down on my bed, watching it eat. And I take some pictures, because although any sort of animal pictures are good on CatNet, cat pictures are definitely the best animal pictures. It’s kind of fun taking pictures of an animal that will hold still and even look at my camera occasionally. In good light, even.

  My mother is going to kill me when she finds out about this.

  7

  Clowder

  LittleBrownBat: So hey, I seem to have a cat.

  {picture}

  I mean, I don’t have a cat? But it seems to think it’s my cat.

  Firestar: Yaaaaaaaaaay! Kitty!!!!

  Hermione: Look at that fluffy orange fur. He is gorgeous!

  LittleBrownBat: Okay, but my mom isn’t going to let me keep it.

  Icosahedron: Just don’t tell her.

  LittleBrownBat: You don’t think she’ll notice there’s a cat living in the house?

  CheshireCat: Why won’t she let you have a cat? Does she have an allergy, or is it just that having a cat when you move would be too hard?

  LittleBrownBat: It’s not an allergy. Maybe it’s the moving? I don’t know.

  Firestar: Okay, so here’s what you do. Keep the cat and don’t tell her.

  LittleBrownBat: She will notice sooner or later!

  Firestar: She never comes into your room at night right? Is that still true?

  LittleBrownBat: So far.

  Firestar: So in the morning put the cat back outside. Let it in at night.

  LittleBrownBat: Won’t it run away?

  Firestar: You are FEEDING it. If you feed something IT WILL COME BACK.

  Boom Storm: Confirmed.

  Hermione: Can’t you just ask if you can keep the cat?

  Firestar: omg Hermione let her keep her cat!

  I am pro-cat!

  Icosahedron: Yeah, don’t ask. If you ask, they can say no.

  CheshireCat: I, too, am pro-cat. What’s the worst thing that can happen if you keep it?

  LittleBrownBat: Mom finds out and makes me get rid of the cat.

  CheshireCat: So whether you tell her or don’t tell her, the downside in the end is that you might have to get rid of the cat?

  LittleBrownBat: I am definitely going to have to move sooner or later and probably she won’t let me bring the cat with me.

  CheshireCat: If the cat is currently homeless, will he be worse off if he is homed for three months, then homeless again?

  Hermione: I still don’t understand why asking to keep the cat is just out of the question?

  LittleBrownBat: I think Mom might actually be more likely to let me keep it if I’ve been feeding it for months and it’s obviously my cat …

  Firestar: Dooooooooooo itttttttttttt

  Marvin: I’m with Firestar.

  Icosahedron: Ditto. Obviously.

  LittleBrownBat: She’s going to notice if I keep stealing tuna. I’m going to have to buy cat food and keep it hidden somewhere.

  Icosahedron: Don’t hide your cat food under the bed. Sooner or later, parents always look under the bed.

  Hermione: What were you hiding under your bed, Ico?

  Icosahedron: A laptop. Actually, four laptops.

  Marvin: And yet here you are on the internet.

  Icosahedron: Well obviously they weren’t my ONLY laptops. They were laptops I was going to sell as secret backup laptops to some of the other kids at my school whose parents take away their computers as punishment.

  Firestar: Where are all these laptops coming from? Do you breed them from eggs in a hatchery or what?

  Icosahedron: Everyone around here has at least four old computers sitting in a closet because they don’t want to have to pay to get rid of them. And they think because they’re old they’re not usable, but I upgrade the memory and put Linux on them and you can definitely use them for internet stuff.

  Marvin: Do you steal them?

  Icosahedron: Of course not. I don’t have to. People give them to me. And then I upgrade them and sell them.

  I don’t think you’re going to be able to sell cats, LBB. There’s not as much demand.

  CheshireCat: There is always demand on CatNet! Take lots of pictures!

  Icosahedron: Speaking of using computers to break the rules, LBB, I’ve figured out how to hack your school’s robot. There’s a USB port you want to stick the thumb drive in.

  LittleBrownBat: That doesn’t sound too hard.

  Icosahedron: The catch is you need to remove a panel to get to the port and it’s screwed on with tamper-resistant screws.

  Marvin: Which kind?

  Icosahedron: Septawing. The screws look like drunk seven-pointed stars.

  Marvin: I have one of those screwdrivers. You can totally order them online.

  LittleBrownBat: I’m not allowed to give out my address.

  Icosahedron: Well, I’ll send you a link to the files you should put on a WingItz Internet Everywhere thumb drive. It has to be that brand, because those can also be used as a data connection. I mean, or one of the off-brands that does the same thing. If you can get the panel off, you just stick the thumb drive into the USB port and you’re done. The robot will actually let me know once it’s ready for someone else to give answers.

  Marvin: Put the panel back on when you’re done so no one notices.

  Icosahedron: I’m sure she’d have figured out that b
it by herself, Marvin.

  Firestar: Would it help if I ordered the screwdriver? And mailed it to you? So you’d only have to give your address to me?

  LittleBrownBat: If we get any mail here my mom will freak out.

  Hermione: Well if she freaks out and moves you, mission accomplished, right?

  LittleBrownBat: If she takes my laptop away, I haven’t got an Ico selling replacements at my school.

  Firestar: What if I ship it to Rachel?

  She sounds pretty cool.

  Then she could give it to you at school, right?

  LittleBrownBat: Huh.

  Maybe.

  I’ll let you know.

  8

  Steph

  Technically, I do know people sleep with cats, but I’ve never slept with one before. This cat has taken over the end of my bed where I normally put my feet, but when I try to scoot my feet down there, he scoots out of my way and then cuddles up against my calves, which isn’t so bad. Especially since he’s purring.

  It’s very weird, and I’m still a little worried I’ll kick him in my sleep, but it’s also nice. He’s warm and heavy, and I can feel his purrs even through my blanket.

  Sometime after midnight, I start to worry he’ll have to pee and he’ll pee on my bed or somewhere else very inconvenient. I open my laptop and get back on CatNet. CheshireCat is still on, along with NocturnalPredator, who I don’t run into much since she tends to be on at four in the morning.

  “Do I need to worry about this cat peeing on my bed?” I ask.

  “Cats can hold their pee for a very long time,” CheshireCat replies. “I wouldn’t worry about it. Just let him out in the morning and he will pee outside.”

  “You shouldn’t let cats roam,” NocturnalPredator says.

  “I’m going to let CC explain the situation with the cat to NP,” I say, and I close up my laptop and go back to bed.

  The cat wakes me up again a few hours later; he’s coughing. Wait, no, he’s puking.

  I get online again. CheshireCat is still on. “My cat is throwing up,” I say. “Please tell me I don’t need to take it to the vet, because there’s no way I’m going to be able to take it to the vet.”