Catfishing on CatNet, Naomi Kritzer [best e ink reader for manga .txt] 📗

My phone rings almost instantly. “Where are you right now?” Rachel asks. “Are you still at the hospital?”

“No…”

“Just please tell me where you are.”

I squint at a sign. “Fourth Street.”

“Stay there,” she says. “I’m coming to get you.”

I hang up and jam my phone and my hands into my coat pockets. I’m next to a house with a really big tree and a wooden swing hanging from one of its branches; the swing sways in the wind. My ears are freezing, and I’m ravenously hungry, which makes me think of my cat, which is probably waiting for me at home. Except I can’t stay at home, not if I’m supposed to hide, and where am I supposed to go? How am I even supposed to do that?

Down the street, I can see headlights, and then Rachel’s car pulls up next to me. I stare at it stupidly for a second, because part of me is still convinced I’m alone, with no one I can rely on but myself.

Rachel rolls down her window. “I’m here,” she says. “Want a ride?”

Inside Rachel’s car, the heater is on full blast. I take my hands out of my pockets and uncurl them.

“So did the hospital say if it was a ruptured appendix?” she asks.

I blink at her, replaying our conversation in my head. How did she know this? Did she have a police scanner? Did she—

Rachel pulls out her phone and brings up an app with a picture that looks like a smiling cat face and hands it to me.

Marvin:

I learned about a new danger today!

HYDROGEN HYDROXIDE.

Greenberry:

Isn’t that literally water again?

Firestar:

Has anyone heard from Georgia?

Rachel takes the phone back and types with her thumbs.

Georgia:

she called n I got her.

Firestar:

LBBBBBBBBBBBB ARE YOU THERE?

I guess I did know there was a phone app for CatNet, but I’ve never had a real phone, so I’d never used it. I type with my thumbs—it’s really slow, because I’m not used to it—and my message pops up as from Georgia.

Georgia:

I called an ambulance and it took Mom to the hospital, but she told me to hide, and I have no idea where to hide.

“You can hide at my house,” Rachel says firmly. “Even if your father comes to town, he definitely won’t know to look for you there.”

“I need to get my computer.”

“That’s fine. We’ll stop at your house for your stuff.”

The apartment is dark, just like I left it. We turn on the lights, and I start packing up my stuff. The cat meows loudly; I’m late with dinner. I pour kibble into a bowl for him.

“What the hell am I going to do with this cat?” I ask Rachel.

“Maybe put him out again,” she says regretfully.

But when I look under the bed, the cat has had kittens.

“I thought orange cats were always boys!” I said, appalled. “Now what?”

Rachel heaves a sigh. “I can’t bring cats back to my house. Leave the window open enough that he’ll be able to get in and out,” she says. “I mean, that she’ll be able to get in and out. You can’t evict a cat with kittens, but you’re not going to be here to feed it, right?”

“Maybe I can stop in?” I say. My bed is going to wind up soaked with rain, but it doesn’t matter; I can’t imagine I’ll be sleeping here again. I pack up my clothes and books and retrieve my mother’s driver’s license from under the litter box. I do a quick look around—the ambulance crew knows where Mom came from, so what here could be used to find her name? There’s her wallet, her laptop, and the plastic file bin that has our important documents in it, like my school records. I pack everything up and check her bedroom for anything I’ve forgotten. She has a bedside table with a drawer in this apartment, so I check the drawer: it’s empty.

“Georgia,” I say to Rachel. “You’re Georgia. You showed up the other day in the Clowder and barely stayed two minutes! How did you wind up knowing what was going on?”

“I went back. I must have just missed you, because everyone was super worried about you and your mom.”

“How did you find the site in the first place?”

“I got an invite. It sounded cool. A little overwhelming the first time I checked it out.”

“How did you even know it was me they were talking about?”

“Little Brown Bat?” she says. “And Hermione said you move constantly? And they all knew you were in New Coburg?”

I whirl around. “What? They knew I was in New Coburg? How? I’ve never told anyone…”

Rachel pulls up a site on her phone and hands it to me, and I watch a CNN reporter talk about the hacking of the Robono Adept 6500 instructional robot in a health class in New Coburg, Wisconsin, this afternoon. “They figured it out.”

When we pull up outside of Rachel’s house, she pauses for a minute, hands on her steering wheel. “There’s something I need to tell you before you come inside.”

This sounds really dire, and I wonder—drugs? Bodies? What? “Okay,” I say.

“We have a lot of birds.”

“Birds,” I say, repeating to make sure I heard right.

“And they’re not in cages, and they poop kind of freely, so unless you’re going to walk around with an umbrella, you might get bird poop in your hair.”

“Oh.” I digest this. “It doesn’t burn your skin or anything, does it?”

“What? No!”

“I can just wash it out?” She nods. “That’s fine. I’ll take a shower if I need one.”

Rachel takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go in.” I grab the laptops and the bag with my mom’s wallet and follow her up her front steps. She swings the door open into a little coat-closet-foyer. There’s a sign inked on white cardboard and tacked up to the door: REMEMBER TO CLOSE THE AIRLOCK.

“We have to close the outside door before we open the inside door,” Rachel says. “Like an airlock, but for birds.”

We shut the