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

cabins…” She runs her finger along a gap in the trees. “You can’t see them in this picture, but there are little cabins. The parents and the little kids slept in those. The teenagers all camped out down the hill, near the lake. Girls over here, boys over there.” She taps a clearing. “If I’m right, this is the spot at the top of the hill where Glenys and I hid from the terrorists.”

“Hid from who?” I am not sure if I misheard or if she means some different version of the word terrorist.

“They were fake terrorists,” she says, which answers one question while raising many more.

“You can’t tell me you hid from fake terrorists without telling me the rest of the story,” I say.

“Mm.” Nell bites her lip, but she’s got this faint look of satisfaction on her face, and after a second, she goes on. “I was sharing a tent with Glenys and two other girls. I was lying awake listening to the frogs when I heard someone coming, so I wasn’t startled out of a sound sleep when he started yelling, and I recognized one of the voices, so I knew right away it had to be fake.”

“What were they yelling?”

“Oh, ‘Get out of the tents,’ first of all, ‘Wake up,’ ‘We’re here for the Christians’—the whole idea was that this was supposed to be practice for the Tribulation? Since I knew it was fake, I assumed at first that everyone knew it was fake, but then I realized Glenys was shaking. They were making the prettiest girl kneel and demanding she renounce Jesus, so I whispered to Glenys that we should grab our shoes and escape while they were distracted. And we slipped our feet into our shoes and just sort of melted into the woods behind us as quietly as we could.”

“That’s brilliant,” I say. “I mean, if it had actually been terrorists, that would have been the smartest thing you could possibly do.”

“Well, yes,” Nell says. “And then we just hid out until morning. I mean, we heard voices calling us, but as long as it was dark, we couldn’t know for certain that people hadn’t been suborned into calling for us. Eventually, we went back down.”

“Were they angry?”

“There was a great deal of shouting,” Nell said, “but mostly it wasn’t at us, because no one could argue that escaping the forces of the Antichrist wasn’t the best possible choice under the circumstances they’d wanted us to believe we were in.”

Nell is smiling fondly to herself as she finishes the story. I have never been to summer camp—it’s on the long list of normal things I haven’t done—but I’m pretty sure normal summer camps are more about the campfires and sing-alongs and less about fake terrorist attacks. Nell looks up and meets my eyes, and her smile slips, like she saw all those thoughts on my face.

“I’ve never been to camp,” I say.

“If you had, it probably wouldn’t have been like this,” she says.

“Was Glenys your girlfriend when all that happened?”

“By morning, yes.” Her smile returns, but her brow is furrowed.

“So you want to go there?” I ask. “And rescue Glenys?”

“Yes,” she says. “If I can get there. If I can find some way to get there.”

I pull up the DMV website to look at what she needs to get her license. The log is just a table where you fill in dates, hours, and skills. There’s a blank at the bottom for the parent’s signature. “You could just forge it,” I say. “I mean, pretend it was in your suitcase or whatever and you found it. Your dad could take you for the test, I think. It just says it has to be a ‘parent,’ not ‘the parent with legal custody.’”

Nell takes my phone and studies the form. “Oh. Oh. You’re right.”

“Your dad will still have to take you to test.”

“If I get the Things to help me hound him, I think I can make it work.”

“And we’ll borrow their car?”

Her head snaps up. “We? Are you coming?”

As soon as it was clear that Nell was planning on going, I just assumed I would go along. Possibly because I orchestrated a rescue last fall. “Do you want me to come?”

“It might be really dangerous,” Nell says. “I mean—the guns were real. During that simulation. They weren’t loaded, but they were real.”

“Then you really don’t want to leave Glenys with them, right?”

Nell swallows hard. “Yeah,” she says very softly. “You’re right.”

When Mom rented this apartment, I was really happy to see that it had a balcony, because it would give me a way to climb out. I learned years ago how to climb out of second-floor apartments because Mom used to barricade the door every night and I was worried about getting out if there was ever a fire. Mom’s therapist convinced her to stop shoving furniture in front of the door every night, but I still like having a way to climb in and out, just in case she starts again. Also, it’s nice to be able to sneak out. This is mostly theoretical at this point. I haven’t done it from this apartment because when we moved up here in December it was already too cold to be fun.

The downside of the balcony turns out to be that the sliding glass door doesn’t fit quite right in its frame, and it’s drafty. When I get home today, I see that Mom has been shopping again and has brought home a stuffed snake that she’s nestled up against the door. I’m pretty sure it’s designed to go at the bottom of a door to stop the draft, but it’s also a stuffed snake, complete with a little felt tongue poking out. She also bought a chenille hassock. Apricot has decided that looks like a fine cat chair and is curled up on it.

CheshireCat pings me. “Do you have a moment to talk?”

“Yes,” I say.

“Did you get the idea to have Nell forge