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

“I love this,” I say. “Your artwork is amazing.”

“It’s a tessellation,” she says. “I got the idea from M. C. Escher’s drawing, Liberation.” She caps the pen and takes a minute to pull an image of it up on her phone. In Liberation, triangles morph into ghostly shapes that turn into birds and fly away.

“I like yours better,” I say.

“That’s just because it’s got bats,” she says, but she’s smiling.

She uses up two pens and most of a third.

“Don’t mess with it until tomorrow morning,” she says. “No showers or anything like that; try not to get water on it. In about two hours, you’ll want to wipe it down with this wipe.” She gives me a little sealed packet, like you sometimes see in restaurants if they’re serving something very messy, only this one says HENNA FIXATIVE on the front.

“Can I put my sweater back on before we go back to your car?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “That’s fine.”

I really want to do something for Rachel. When Firestar took a picture of a fruit bat for me, I found a photo of a spider for them, but I’m not sure how to reciprocate art like this. Photography seems too quick and easy, but I decide to offer it, anyway. “Can I take your picture?”

“Yeah,” Rachel says. “Where?”

I have no idea, since I don’t know the area really at all. “Do you have a favorite place?” I ask.

Rachel takes me to this abandoned, falling-down farmhouse five miles outside of New Coburg. There’s a driveway leading in and a lot of huge, overgrown bushes and enormous cornfields on either side. We park behind the half-collapsed barn. The house is in slightly better shape, but only slightly. The door is locked with a padlock and the windows are boarded, but one of the back door boards has been pried off and we can duck under the other. The house reeks of mouse droppings. “Bryony held a party here back in July,” Rachel says.

“I can’t believe Bryony gave you crap about your birds but brought you here.”

Rachel stifles a grin. “This was after the big bust. It’s across the county line, so not only do New Coburg cops not come here, we get a different sheriff, too. Also, the upstairs is kind of neat.”

I worry about the structural integrity of the whole house, but the stairs feel solid and there aren’t any holes in the floor. Upstairs, the boards over the windows don’t cover them very well, so there’s a decent amount of light coming in through the cracks. I have my tripod in my backpack, which means I can use the magic of the tripod to make the most of the low light.

Photographs are made with light—carefully limited amounts of light. It’s literally right in the name: photo means light. They were made with light in the days when everyone had film tucked inside their camera and had to take it out in a pitch-black room to develop into negatives. It’s still true with digital photography. If you’re taking pictures at night, or inside a building full of dust and shadows, there’s still light, just not very much light.

The late-afternoon light here is slanting through the windows, catching on layers of cobwebs and dust and the fragment of red gauze curtain that used to hang there. “Where do you want me to stand?” Rachel asks.

“Where the light will fall on you,” I say. “I mean, unless you’ll fall through the floor if you stand there.”

Rachel moves over by the window. I study the way the light crosses her face and carefully place my camera for a picture. Then another. There’s a spiderweb behind her, and I realize that from just the right angle, I can get a picture of both her face and the delicate web. Moving around sends up a puff of dust that catches on the sunbeams, making them look almost tangible.

“Can I see?” she asks when I’m done.

The camera’s view screen is pretty small, but Rachel peers down at the pictures, and I hear her catch her breath with delight. “I want to use this one as my senior picture,” she says.

“Will you get in trouble for having it taken here?”

“I don’t care. This is the best picture anyone’s ever taken of me.”

Back at Rachel’s house, her mother’s in the studio and her father is working late again. Rachel makes us macaroni and cheese while I copy the pictures over to my computer so we can see them on a larger screen. I’m pretty sure I smell like mouse droppings, but Rachel’s house has its own dusty smell thanks to all the birds, so I try not to worry about it too much.

I take out the clipping I retrieved from my mother’s car this morning and pull up the Los Angeles Times website. “What’s that?” Rachel asks.

“It’s the clipping from earlier. The one about my dad, with the fake names. I’m just wondering whether it’s at least based on something real.”

She nods and watches over my shoulder as I pull up the archive to search. I use full-text searching and type in one of the sentences—“more passionate than threatening.” It doesn’t have the name Taylor in it, anyway. I have to watch four ads before I can see my results, so I start them playing and go to the bathroom.

When I come back, CheshireCat has also sent me a message:

“I think I might have found your father. He lives in Milpitas, California. He’s been looking up plane flights to Boston, Minneapolis, Durham, and Portland, Maine.”

Boston is near Firestar; Portland is near Hermione; Durham is near Marvin; and Minneapolis is the biggest airport near New Coburg.

“Is he in the Clowder?” I write.

“No, absolutely not. No. I think he has his website set up to capture IP addresses, so when everyone went to look, he could see everyone’s approximate location. Except for yours—yours is hidden because your mother’s always used a VPN—but Rachel’s isn’t.”

“But maybe he’s not evil?”