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

didn’t make me do anything. I just need to know … what’s out there now.”

“No one’s mentioned your name in anything I’ve seen. Most of the kids at school don’t even know your name, you know? You’re safe.” She puts the bird back in his cage. “What do you know about your father? Do you know what he looks like?”

“I guess I know he has brown eyes because I have brown eyes and my mother has blue eyes. According to biology class genetics, anyway, which, according to my mother, are about 50 percent lies to make it all simpler.” I stare at the bird, thinking about bird color genetics. One of the birds I saw zipping around downstairs was blue, and one was partly yellow, but the rest were green, and I wonder if parrotlets are most often green or if this is just a disproportionately green flock.

We go back down to her kitchen, and she makes us a frozen pizza and heats up some soup. “Dad’s working overtime, and Mom’s in her studio,” she says.

“Are they going to mind that I’m here?”

“No, they’ll be fine with it. I’ll tell them your mom had to go to the hospital and skip the part about you being on the run from an evil dad, though, okay?”

“That sounds reasonable.”

A bird flies into the kitchen and perches on top of the fridge. “Noodle,” the bird says.

“I’m not making noodles,” Rachel says irritably. “You can have a pizza crust if you want.”

“Noodle.”

Rachel pulls the pizza out and cuts it into slices. “How long has your mom been running?” she asks.

“As far back as I remember.”

“How far back do you remember?”

“I’m not sure.” The further back I go, the more it’s just a blur of faces and places and endless car rides. I try to sort through, come up with something that feels young, and hit on one. “Okay, I definitely remember a kindergarten, because it was in a nice room with a rug.”

“My earliest memory is from when I was three,” Rachel says. “My father took me to a family-visits day at the factory, and I watched the big machine that shrink-wraps the pallets of cereal bars. I only know it’s three because my parents told me we did this when I was three, though, and I only remember it because it was special.”

Rachel’s mother comes downstairs. She’s wearing blue jeans and a paint-splattered button-down shirt. “Who’s this?” she asks Rachel.

“My friend Steph,” Rachel says. The “Steph is here because her mom’s in the hospital” thing does not run quite as smoothly as Rachel expected; her mother wants to know if I have family I should be calling? Friends? Is there someone staying with my mother in the hospital? She offers to try to rustle up some ladies from her bowling league to visit Mom starting in the morning, which strikes me as something my mother would find more alarming than comforting.

“Doesn’t the hospital have nurses?” I ask.

“Oh, you don’t want to just leave someone to the nurses; they’ll be the first to tell you…” She trails off, eyes me, finally shrugs and says, “Did Rachel give you the tour?”

There are two upstairs bedrooms in this house: one is Rachel’s bedroom, and one is her mother’s studio. Her parents’ actual bedroom is apparently down in the basement. The birds aren’t allowed either in her mother’s studio or in the basement.

“Too much poop,” her mother says cheerily. Her studio has a corner with woodworking tools for making the boxes: assembling, sanding, painting. I’d thought maybe she harvested dropped feathers from her pet birds, but in fact, she buys them in sacks from a supplier. “They’re chicken feathers from the processing plant down the road,” she says matter-of-factly. “I dye them in batches.”

She started making these little boxes after listening a few too many times to a song about building a little birdhouse that was also about love and affection. She gave them away to friends for a while, then tried selling them online. She tells me they’re not sold in galleries but in this chain of gift shops owned by a guy in Minneapolis. Artsy gift shops. I’m not entirely clear on how an artsy gift shop is different from an art gallery, but she seems to think it’s important, so I nod and act like I get it.

There are a dozen finished boxes hanging up on the wall near the door, covered in a drop cloth to protect them from dust; she pulls the cloth off and shows them to me. They’re all painted in vibrant, candy-bright colors. My favorite is computer-themed. The birds are surrounded by pieces of technology; there are keys popped off an old keyboard, old SD cards, widgets that I recognize as computer bits even if I’m not quite sure what they do. There’s also literal hardware, tiny nuts that go with screws and bolts and stuff but strung on wires that crisscross the upper part of the box. “You can touch if you want,” Rachel’s mom says, and so I carefully tap the little metal nuts with one finger to see if they slide along the wire. They do.

“How much do these cost?” I ask, and then immediately worry that was a rude question.

“I sell them for $150, and the guy who buys them from me sells them for $250,” she says.

“How long do they take you to make?”

“I try not to think too hard about that,” she says and then laughs.

Back downstairs, some of the birds have switched from tweeting to shrieking. It sounds like I’m listening to an argument in a language I don’t speak. Rachel’s mother is feeding one of the pizza crusts to a bird when another bird lands on her shoulder and promptly poops on her. She sees my eyes go to the bird and laughs and doesn’t even wipe it off, just says, “This is both a paint shirt and a poop shirt—no worries.”

“Let’s go get your stuff,” Rachel says.

I dig out my PJs