“They’re homeschooled,” I say, like that’s an answer, and Rachel says, “Oh, okay,” so I guess it is.
Rachel’s mom knocks on her bedroom door. “Don’t forget it’s a school night!” she says. I look guiltily at the time and realize it’s midnight. We’re lying in the dark a few minutes later.
“Put a notebook by your hand,” Rachel whispers. “Tell yourself to remember your eighth birthday and write it down when you wake up.”
* * *
I wake with the uneasy sense that I’ve spent the night running away from who-knows-what in my sleep and no better recollection of my eighth birthday. It’s raining again.
“Do you want to go see your mom?” Rachel asks.
The thought is overwhelming. “I don’t know if she’ll be glad to see me, or if she’ll freak out, and if I go back there, they’re going to want her Social Security number and stuff that’ll identify her.” I swallow hard and shake my head and immediately feel relieved.
“Does she have a phone? Some way to contact you?”
“I didn’t find her cell phone in the apartment when I cleaned up, so … I think so? I don’t know if she has a charging cable for it.”
I don’t tell Rachel that I don’t even know what I would say to my mother if I saw her right now, and “Why did you lie to me about practically everything?” is probably not a comforting, supportive thing to hear when you’re recovering from surgery.
Rachel looks at me, her brow furrowed, and says, “Okay.”
I check in online before I head to school to ask CheshireCat if they’ve learned anything new about Michael. CheshireCat tells me that they’ve found 621 people named Michael Quinn, and they are currently monitoring all of them and will let me know if any of them start moving toward New Coburg.
“Can’t you narrow it down?” I ask.
“I already have,” CheshireCat says. “I eliminated everyone too young to be your father, and I’m working on more elimination criteria. In the meantime, I’m trying to keep tabs on all of them.”
We leave Rachel’s house early and stop off at my apartment so I can feed the cat and fill her water dish. No one’s been there. On impulse, I run out to the van and take the laminated article out of the glove box where Mom keeps it. Sure enough, it’s about a man named Taylor. Taylor this, Taylor that. I shove the article in my bag so I can give the details to CheshireCat later.
“What’s that for?” Rachel asks.
“I think she kept it in case she gets stopped by the police. Like, her license won’t ever be up to date, you know?”
“Oh. Yeah, that might work.”
“Maybe not if it’s Officer Olson who pulls her over.”
“Well, she’s white and not a teenager, so who knows.”
The news crew is long gone, but everyone at the high school is still talking about it: who got interviewed, what they said. In health class, the principal is there instead of the robot and delivers a stone-faced lecture on sexually transmitted diseases, reading off a printout. Emily is sitting in the front row, her legs crossed at the ankles, tapping her pen against her lips. I think the principal still thinks I did it somehow, but she doesn’t know how, and she knows she can’t prove it. The rumor this morning was that the blame had focused on Robono, so she isn’t going to offer up a student scapegoat. Her glare makes me feel guilty, though. Guilty, nervous, and small.
But midway through the class, I see that Rachel’s drawn a picture of the robot with a speech bubble saying, “I’m Robono, hacked by HEROES to provide you with accurate sex ed!” and I feel a flush of warmth. I think the principal sees the drawing, too, but she tightens her lips and pretends she hasn’t noticed.
At lunchtime, everyone’s moved on from the robot scandal to the basketball game that’s happening later this evening. Our team is called the Wranglers, and our mascot is a cowboy. Wisconsin has very few cowboys despite all the cows, but a lot of high school team names make no particular sense. I never go to games; I don’t like watching, I don’t like yelling, and I especially don’t like being around a lot of yelling people, so the whole thing tends to be kind of exhausting and un-fun.
Apparently, our team is up against some team called the Cardinals, who were very good last year, and so maybe they’ll beat us, and I couldn’t care less about any of it. At lunch, I get a slice of pizza and a carton of chocolate milk, and when I finish eating, everyone is still talking about basketball.
I wonder where my father lives—if he still lives in Silicon Valley, where Mom said the fire happened. Ico lives in Silicon Valley and goes to a school full of nerds. I’m pretty sure they have sports, but they also have a D&D club and an anime club.
If my mother’s lying—if she kidnapped me and my father’s actually harmless—I could live with him. I could go to a high school like Ico’s or Firestar’s, with two years of calculus, five years of Spanish, a GSA, a D&D club. I picture Michael from the photo of Homeric Software; he’s young in the picture, but he looks like someone who smiles a lot. I try to fantasize about this properly, to imagine a whole conversation where I say, “I’ll never have to move again, right?” and he says, “No, darling, never,” only it’s hard to imagine an adult man calling me darling without it being creepy, and I wonder if it just seems that way because I grew up without a father or if darling is just not something fathers call their daughters. Mom calls me kiddo and sweetheart and honey bear, all of which would be embarrassing, probably, if it were anyone but us hearing.
The hospital would have found me if she’d died, right?
I mean, I’m not hiding very well. This is a really small town. They’d have found me if she’d died, and they’d have told me.
Art class turns out to be canceled today for a pep rally, and I realize this too late to avoid being herded into the gym. I don’t like basketball games, but pep rallies are a hundred times worse because the cheering is almost unrelenting. Also, at a game, you can always leave the stands and go take a walk, if you want, but pep rallies tend to have teachers at the doors to keep you from sneaking out, so you’re trapped. New Coburg High is one of the schools that posts teachers at the exit doors to keep you from taking the last hour of the day off, so I really have no escape. Bryony, it turns out, is a cheerleader. I find myself somewhere in the middle of the bleachers, my backpack by my feet, crammed in next to Rachel.
I wonder sometimes if other kids like these. They’re loud enough that they sound like they’re having fun, and maybe if I ever stayed anywhere for more than a few months, I’d have school spirit like you’re supposed to have. Around me, everyone is chanting, “Freshmen suck!” trying to drown out the freshmen, who are chanting, “Juniors suck!” as one of the teachers tries unsuccessfully to get us to chant “Juniors rule,” instead, and I breathe deeply and hope no one gives me any trouble about the fact that I’m not chanting anything.
The cowboy mascot is actually a person dressed as a duck with a huge foam cowboy hat. The duck comes in on one of those buzzing electric scooters. The cowboy duck rides the scooter in a circle around the open area in the middle of the gym, waving and making fist-pumping gestures and the “cheer louder, cheer louder” hand motion, which in fact makes people yell even more loudly than they were already yelling.
I lower my head and try to cover my ears as inconspicuously as I can.
Around me, people are singing something. Probably the school song. I think about how I’ll describe the pep rally to my Clowder later, then wonder if that will hurt Rachel’s feelings. The duck hops off the scooter and starts waving its hands around like it’s conducting the song everyone’s singing, and all the basketball players and cheerleaders run out. Rachel gives an extra yell when she sees Bryony.
I don’t remember pep rallies at my other schools being quite this unbearable. I think it’s because the ceiling in this gymnasium is a bit lower, or maybe there’s something else about the acoustics, because it’s certainly not that this school has more people yelling.
“I need to go
,” I mutter, and I climb down from the bleachers and head for the door. There’s a man in a sweatshirt with a whistle blocking it. Before he can ask me where I’m going, I clutch my stomach like maybe I’m going to throw up. He gets hastily out of my way.
The screaming and chanting and foot-stomping follow me down the hall to the bathroom, but when the door swings shut behind me, it’s mostly cut off. I step into a stall, lower my backpack to the floor by my feet, and sit down on the toilet.
The door to the outside is probably not being guarded at this point, but I can’t go back to Rachel’s house without her, and she’s still in the pep rally. I unzip my backpack and dig out a book to read; out comes my mother’s laminated clipping.
A San Jose man has been sentenced to three years in prison for felony stalking of his estranged wife. Michael Taylor, 34, pleaded guilty to stalking on September 13, as part of a plea agreement.
Taylor’s former wife, Dana Taylor, accused him of arson in May after her house burned down. The fire on May 21 was found to be arson, but nothing conclusive could be found tying Taylor to the blaze. Prosecutors said that Taylor sent email messages, letters, and texts to his ex-wife, threatening her with violence. Taylor’s lawyers said that Taylor’s messages were “more passionate than threatening” and “should not be read literally.”
The Taylors were business partners and owners of a technology security company. They have one child together. In an agreement reached in August, the company was liquidated, assets divided between the four partners.
The printout has the newspaper name and date. It’s the Los Angeles Times, which is a real newspaper, and it looks like a normal newspaper article, with links to other articles at the bottom and stuff like that.
I try imagining living in my father’s house, only this time I imagine him as the sort of parent who mostly just ignores you, like Firestar’s parents. Doing my homework in an upstairs bedroom in an empty house. Maybe he’d have a dog. Or a cat. Maybe he’d let me bring the cat with the kittens. He probably won’t want me to keep the whole litter of kittens.
The bathroom door swings open, and the noise from the pep rally rushes in like cold air. “Steph?”
It’s Rachel. I unlatch my stall and come out. “Hi. Sorry I ran away.”
“Are you okay?”
“I just really hate pep rallies.”
“Oh.” She digests this. “Do you want me to take you home?”
“You wanted to stay and watch Bryony, didn’t you?”
“No, her bit’s done. We can go.”
“I’m really okay just waiting in the bathroom.”
Rachel lets the door swing shut behind her and comes a little farther into the bathroom and rests her backpack on the sink. She stares into my face for a long moment and then says, “Don’t be silly. Let’s go. I want to take you to the store and buy a henna pen.”
* * *
Rachel drives us to the larger town nearby that has a Walmart. She counts her money and buys a fistful of the henna pens. “These run out of the lawsone really fast,” she says. “It’s super annoying when the ink works but the stain doesn’t, because it just washes off in a couple of days. Anyway, do you want me to do some art on you?” Her eyes are wide and a little anxious.
“I’d love that,” I say.
“This afternoon? If you don’t have time right away, that’s fine, but don’t tell anyone I bought new pens or they’ll all be after me, and I’ll run out of stain before I get to you.”
“I’ve got time,” I say.
The larger town has a shopping mall, the old-fashioned kind with an indoor area, and that’s good because there’s a bitingly cold wind outside today. We find a bench next to an empty storefront.
“What do you think you’d like?” Rachel asks.
“You choose,” I say.
“I really want it to be something you’ll like.”
“I’d like anything from you.” I’m not lying. Everything Rachel draws is beautiful. The thought of her bringing birds or flowers or anything into being on my body gives me butterflies in my stomach, but in a good way. She could use my whole body as a canvas, if she wanted. Every inch.
“Okay,” she says. “I have an idea. I was thinking I’d do it on your left arm.”
I take off my hoodie and roll up my sleeve so that she can start the drawing on my upper arm, and she has me rest my arm across the back of the bench to hold still and goes to work.
She uncaps the pen and kneels on the bench so she’s a little higher than I am to start, and draws a grid of diamonds on my shoulder, like a skewed checkerboard. Her head is bent close over my arm, and for a fleeting moment I worry that I forgot to put on deodorant this morning. She doesn’t wrinkle her nose or anything, though, and after a few minutes I forget to worry about it. The pen tickles slightly, but not so much I can’t hold still.
After a few minutes, she sits back on her heels and looks up at me. “If I were doing this as a tattoo, I’d want it to wind around your arm,” she says. “But if I had a tattoo studio, I’d have a proper chair for you to sit in and keep you comfortable.”
“You’d also be jabbing me with needles, though. That doesn’t sound comfortable at all.”
“Well, okay, not comfortable, but it would be easier for you to hold still.”
“Like, what do you want me to do?” I turn my arm palm-up, still resting on the bench.
“Can you turn it the other way, too?”
I twist a little. “I think so. How long will you want me to hold it like this? A few minutes?”
“I’ll give you a break if you need one,” she says, deciding, and takes my hand to turn my arm palm-up again.
She started the diamonds on my bicep; she curves the design around and under, coming back up the inside of my elbow as the diamonds start to skew and evolve into something with wings.
“Pretty sure that’s it for this pen,” she says, capping it.
“How can you tell?”
“I have a feel for it. I’ve done a lot of these.” She opens the next package. “I think I’ll need two and a half for this art.”
She turns my arm palm-down again when she gets to my forearm, and the winged diamonds turn into bats, then scatter across my arm. Some fly straight down toward my wrist, some veer left or right.
“I love this,” I say. “Your artwork is amazing.”
“It’s a tessellation,” she says. “I got the idea from M. C. Escher’s drawing, Liberation.” She caps the pen and takes a minute to pull an image of it up on her phone. In Liberation, triangles morph into ghostly shapes that turn into birds and fly away.
“I like yours better,” I say.
“That’s just because it’s got bats,” she says, but she’s smiling.
She uses up two pens and most of a third.
“Don’t mess with it until tomorrow morning,” she says. “No showers or anything like that; try not to get water on it. In about two hours, you’ll want to wipe it down with this wipe.” She gives me a little sealed packet, like you sometimes see in restaurants if they’re serving something very messy, only this one says HENNA FIXATIVE on the front.
“Can I put my sweater back on before we go back to your car?”
“Oh, yeah,” she says. “That’s fine.”
I really want to do something for Rachel. When Firestar took a picture of a fruit bat for me, I found a photo of a spider for them, but I’m not sure how to reciprocate art like this. Photography seems too quick and easy, but I decide to offer it, anyway. “Can I take your picture?”
“Yeah,” Rachel says. “Where?”
I have no idea, since I don’t know the area really at all. “Do you have a favorite place?” I ask.
Rachel takes me to this abandoned, falling-down farmhouse five miles outside of New Coburg. There’s a driveway leading in and a lot of huge, overgrown bushes and enormous cornfields on either side. We park behind the half-collapsed barn. The house is in slightly better shape, but only slightly. The door is locked
with a padlock and the windows are boarded, but one of the back door boards has been pried off and we can duck under the other. The house reeks of mouse droppings. “Bryony held a party here back in July,” Rachel says.
“I can’t believe Bryony gave you crap about your birds but brought you here.”
Rachel stifles a grin. “This was after the big bust. It’s across the county line, so not only do New Coburg cops not come here, we get a different sheriff, too. Also, the upstairs is kind of neat.”
I worry about the structural integrity of the whole house, but the stairs feel solid and there aren’t any holes in the floor. Upstairs, the boards over the windows don’t cover them very well, so there’s a decent amount of light coming in through the cracks. I have my tripod in my backpack, which means I can use the magic of the tripod to make the most of the low light.
Photographs are made with light—carefully limited amounts of light. It’s literally right in the name: photo means light. They were made with light in the days when everyone had film tucked inside their camera and had to take it out in a pitch-black room to develop into negatives. It’s still true with digital photography. If you’re taking pictures at night, or inside a building full of dust and shadows, there’s still light, just not very much light.
The late-afternoon light here is slanting through the windows, catching on layers of cobwebs and dust and the fragment of red gauze curtain that used to hang there. “Where do you want me to stand?” Rachel asks.
“Where the light will fall on you,” I say. “I mean, unless you’ll fall through the floor if you stand there.”
Rachel moves over by the window. I study the way the light crosses her face and carefully place my camera for a picture. Then another. There’s a spiderweb behind her, and I realize that from just the right angle, I can get a picture of both her face and the delicate web. Moving around sends up a puff of dust that catches on the sunbeams, making them look almost tangible.
“Can I see?” she asks when I’m done.
Catfishing on CatNet Page 13