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

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