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

“Kind of.” I wonder if I should tell Annette about seeing Rajiv at the compound. Is that the sort of thing she’d be interested in? What’s my mother going to do if I tell her? Explaining that I’d spent my weekend with my girlfriend on a rescue mission to a cult compound would also be complicated.

“Is Annette the programmer in Boston?” Nell asks.

“Yeah,” Rachel says, and then remembers that’s how she described CheshireCat. “I mean, no, she’s a different programmer in Boston.” My mother’s friend Xochitl is also a programmer in Boston. To be fair, there are legitimately a lot of programmers in Boston.

“I really want to hear this whole story sometime,” Nell says with obvious interest, but to my relief drops the subject.

Bryony excuses themself to the bathroom and a second later my phone vibrates with a text. So Cat = CheshireCat and they know there’s a Cat but not that they’re an AI? Bryony says.

Yes, I send back.

Did I catch that Cat TALKED TO YOU IN THE CAR bc are you SURE they don’t know that Cat’s an AI?

Yes, I send back and add, Everyone was kind of distracted.

There’s no response to that. I imagine, but can’t actually hear, a strangled sound from the bathroom. Bryony comes back out. “Would anyone like ice cream?” they ask.

We’re all exhausted but also too wound up to sleep, and it’s not actually that late, so Rachel decides that Nell and Glenys need to see some of the TV that they should have seen when they were young enough to properly appreciate it and puts on Fast Girls Detective Agency. It’s the one where Jesse the K jumps onto a float in a parade and gets into a fistfight with Sourdough Sam. Nell is mostly watching Glenys rather than the screen. Glenys stares at the screen with a sort of glazed, detached interest.

When we finally shut off the lights and lie down, Rachel pulls me close and whispers, “Bryony can avert their eyes like I did.”

“Thanks for coming today,” I whisper. “I was really glad to have you there.”

“Don’t go running into danger without me, okay?” Rachel whispers back.

“I’ll try to avoid it.”

The snow passes through overnight, leaving six inches that we help Bryony shovel before we go. The temperature has plummeted; yesterday we could be outside for a long time before we really got cold, but today the cold sinks through our coats and into our bones in minutes. The snow squeaks under our boots as we clear the front walk up to the house and the driveway.

I thank Bryony for putting us up for the night, and Rachel gives me a long hug and a kiss. “Don’t let Nell get you in trouble CheshireCat can’t get you out of,” she says.

“I’ll try not to. Thanks for coming along.”

“That’s the other thing. If you are in trouble CheshireCat can’t get you out of, be sure you let me know so I can at least try to come to the rescue. If I have to join a parade and punch my way through thirty-six sportsball mascots, I’m there.”

“I know.” I reluctantly let go of her to get in Nell’s car.

On the outskirts of the Twin Cities, we stop at a grocery store and pick up sacks of food that Nell is going to hide under her bed for Glenys to eat. They drop me outside my house. I wonder if Mom is going to be watching, if she’ll notice the extra person in the car and what I’ll tell her, but it’s so cold I don’t want to suggest that they drop me off around the block. Instead, I jog across the street and get inside as quickly as I can.

There’s a stranger sitting on the sofa, petting Apricot: a woman with gray hair, glasses, and a long red coat that she hasn’t taken off yet. She gives me a long look before she remembers to smile.

“Mom,” my mother says. “This is Steph. Steph, this is your grandmother.”

26•  Nell  •

My father and his partners in iniquity sleep late on weekends, and we’re home at 10:30, which leaves me with a dilemma: Scout out first, then bring Glenys inside, or just scoot her in as quickly as possible and hope for the best? I go with “scoot in,” and praise the Lord, the downstairs is dark and quiet. Glenys carries half the groceries, and I get the door to my bedroom closed just as Thing Two comes down the stairs in her bathrobe, yawning like it’s early.

“How was your grandmother?” Thing Two asks, and it takes me far longer than it should to remember that supposedly I went up to Lake Sadie this weekend.

“Fine,” I say. Fortunately, she doesn’t press for more details. I don’t want to open my room back up while she’s standing there—hopefully, Glenys has made some effort to conceal herself so she wouldn’t be seen from the open doorway, but I can’t chance it—so I go sit at the dining room table and pretend I feel like being social.

I barely slept last night in Bryony’s living room, lying on the rug listening to every noise, from everyone else’s breathing (and snoring and coughing) to the jingle of the tags every time the dog got up. I lay awake wondering if Glenys was also awake, thinking about my mother, replaying the conversation we’d eavesdropped on in my head.

She left me. She left me on purpose. Just like my father left me when I was ten. Thinking about this makes me feel like I’m adrift on Lake Sadie in a boat without oars. My father abandoned me with my mother; now my mother has abandoned me with my father. At least when my father left, I knew he wasn’t dead. I knew he wanted to see me, even, just not enough to ever do anything about it other than send me letters my mother didn’t let me read.

But she also might come