Chaos on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [bill gates books recommendations txt] 📗

We make our way over and pretend to browse through stores along the edges of the seating area. There’s one selling Mexican candy and another selling vintage-style purses and hair accessories, so there’s plenty of stuff to pretend we’re looking at while we actually try to spot a face in the crowd. Nell spots her first and then sucks in her breath and whirls to put her back toward the table. “She’s sitting with Thing Three,” she whispers. “How am I supposed to take this without Thing Three seeing me?”

“Selfie?” I suggest. “Keep your back to them and take it over your shoulder?”

She flips her camera around, holds it as far out as she can, and takes a couple of photos. “It’s no good,” she mutters. “They’re too far away to be in focus.” She hands me her phone. “Can you do it?”

“I don’t know what Thing Three looks like,” I say.

“Short dark hair.”

“Half the people here have short dark hair.”

“Part of it’s in a buzz cut and part of it isn’t.”

“Still not narrowing it down. What’s she wearing?”

“I’ll just point her out.” Nell turns around. “The woman I’m supposed to be getting pictures of is blond and wearing a green vest, and Thing Three has a button-down blue shirt … oh, fiddlesticks.”

The woman in the blue shirt has just turned toward us, and her eyes have gone a little wide, looking at Nell.

“I’ll get the pictures,” I say. “Go keep them occupied.”

Nell heads over to the table. I’m half-hidden behind a rack of candy, and I rest the camera on the edge of the rack to stabilize it. I zoom in, focusing on the blond woman, who’s greeting Nell with a mix of warmth and puzzlement.

A message flashes across the screen from the app. Kindly take a picture with the target and her companion in the same shot.

I zoom out slightly, but Nell is in the way, and I don’t have any way to tell her to get out of the way, since I’m holding her phone. I wait, and she sits down, and I get a picture: you can clearly see all the faces except for Nell’s.

Good enough. The next step in your quest: approach their table, getting close enough that you can overhear their conversation. Wow: this app is amazingly creepy. Fortunately, approaching their table is kind of on my to-do list, anyway, since that’s where Nell went. I stick Nell’s phone in my pocket so I can head over … and then stop and take a quick picture with my own phone. “Who is this?” I ask CheshireCat, send the picture, and walk toward the table.

“She’s been living up in Lake Sadie with her mother,” I hear Thing Three explaining as I get close.

“I see,” the blond woman says.

I approach like Nell and I were walking around together and Nell wandered off while my back was turned. “Nell?” I say. “I didn’t know where you’d gone. Are we going to get lunch while we’re here?”

“Is this one of your classmates?” Thing Three asks.

“Yes, ma’am,” Nell says with this weird rigid formality. “Miss Garcia, this is Steph. Steph, this is my stepmother’s girlfriend, Miss Garcia.”

“Please call me Shevaun,” Thing Three says in an apologetic tone. “Spelled S-I-O-B-H-A-N, pronounced Shevaun. Nell was just saying you came over here on some sort of school assignment?”

“Yes, they want us to learn how to ride the bus, and”—I don’t want to tell her about the quest, obviously—“this place isn’t too far from my house and it sounded kind of cool.”

“Oh, yeah, you live right by Powderhorn, don’t you? I work at Abbott—that’s the hospital next door. I’m on my lunch break. This is Betsy. Since you’re here, how about I buy both of you lunch?”

I politely demur, she insists, and we go back and forth until Nell breaks in to ask if she can get bubble tea. For a minute, I wonder where she’s had it before and then realize she’s looking at the Invisible Castle page I looked at earlier.

“Sure, but you need some actual food. Come on, I’ll get you both tortas.”

“I’d better get going,” Betsy says, and leans in to kiss Siobhan on the cheek. “Text me later!”

Tortas turn out to be the Mexican version of sub sandwiches—and delicious—and Siobhan buys me a bubble tea as well, which turns out to be a chilled milky tea with chewy little spheres bouncing around in it. Nell starts drinking the tea with a determined look on her face, slurps up one of the squishy little balls, and almost gags on it in surprise. I hold it up to the light for a better look, then fish one out with a spoon and chew it up.

Siobhan watches both of us with badly disguised amusement. Nell is too focused on her tea to notice.

“What are these?” Nell asks finally.

“Tapioca balls,” Siobhan says. She does not ask why Nell wanted bubble tea if she didn’t know what it was.

I like the bubble tea, but there are a lot of the chewy tapioca balls, and I hope I’ll get credit from the Mischief Elves for trying them even if I don’t finish them. The torta is delicious. I’ve had good Mexican food before—every now and then, we’d land in a town that had a good Mexican restaurant, and when we did, Mom always got us food there at least once a week. I don’t remember having tried tortas before, though. Here in Minneapolis, I realize, I can have good Mexican food anytime I want.

“So are you going to ride the bus back to school, or ditch the rest of the day?” Siobhan asks. When neither of us answers she adds, “You can tell me! It’s not like I never ditched school when I was a kid!”

“They are expecting us back by 1:00 p.m.,” I say. Siobhan, I decide, is a little too eager to be cool.

“Oh, sure, okay.”

We need some souvenir as proof we made it,