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

Mr. Well, it’s yes, sir, to the men, yes, ma’am, to the women, and what I’m supposed to do when I can’t tell and the person is Mx. Gwinn, like the person who teaches drawing at Coya Knutson, was not covered. My mother would be five hundred varieties of horrified if she knew that not only was I living in a den of iniquity, I was being taught by a Mx.

Surely my mother did not just leave me. She would never leave me behind, on purpose, knowing that I could wind up living with my father.

Thing Two sighs heavily and drops all efforts at conversation, which is perfectly fine with me. I check my phone for texts from Glenys. Still none. I send Glenys a text saying, Can’t wait to tell you about my so-called school, so she’ll see it when she gets her phone back, and then scroll up through the texts. I stop scrolling before I get to the panicked messages I sent when my mother first didn’t come home.

I feel abandoned. Not by Glenys. I know Glenys would text back if she could. By her parents, who surely know about my mother by now. By her siblings, who haven’t slipped her a phone or a tablet so she can get in touch with me. By the rest of the Abiding Remnant. I haven’t heard from anyone.

Thing Two lets us in and flips on the porch light. I wipe my feet carefully and hang up my coat, then sit down to take off my boots while Thing Two goes into the kitchen. “Do you want a snack? Oh—” She breaks off into a string of appalling obscenities. “Kent was supposed to do the dishes before he left. He swore he would do the dishes before he left.”

I struggle to get my boots off quickly and present myself at the kitchen door, feeling a surge of anxiety at the sound of her voice. “I can do them,” I say.

“No, don’t be ridiculous It’s Kent’s turn,” Thing Two says, and points at an extremely detailed chart posted on the wall. “I’ll wash the ones I need. Do you want a snack?”

I do, but I want to get away from Thing Two more. “No, thank you,” I say, and retreat to the living room, where I listen to the sound of furious dishwashing that finally resolves into more peaceful sounds of a carrot being peeled and cut into carrot sticks.

I hate it here, I think. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. At home, I know what’s expected. At home, I know what people want from me. At home, I know what the right thing to do is, even if I can’t always do it, even if I don’t agree, even if I don’t want to.

I text Glenys again. The definition of ridiculous: complaining about undone dishes, but not letting you do them.

I go get my laptop and bring it into the living room. I’m not sure anyone here cares what I’m doing on my computer, but it feels wrong to use it somewhere private. I log in to the Catacombs, the social media site that Glenys and I use because our parents approve of it. Sometimes Glenys has her laptop but not her phone, and even when she’s being very closely supervised, there are ways that she says hi to me, like sending me the “I prayed for you today!” message that takes just one click. She hasn’t, and that means she hasn’t been on her computer at all.

I try voice-calling my grandma, but she doesn’t pick up.

The front door opens; it’s Thing Three coming home from work. She hangs up her coat but tracks snow across the living room floor to talk to Thing Two, who yells a bunch about the dishes. “Well, don’t blame me,” I hear Thing Three say. “Kent said he’d do them for me since I was running late!” She comes back out with half a toasted bagel with peanut butter on it and says, “How was your first day at Coya Knutson?”

I give her a long, stony look and say, “Good news: they think I’m at grade level or ahead in every subject.” Thing Three was the one who suggested that I should go to Coya Knutson Learning Center because they can help kids with “deficiencies,” which is a word she used right in front of me.

“Glad to hear it,” she says, her smile wavering, and her gaze drops to her bagel.

Mom, wherever she is right now, would want me to pray.

When we all woke up on New Year’s morning and my mother hadn’t come home, my grandfather’s first thought was that she’d had an accident, and they called the police to go look for her car. The police came to the house instead of calling when they found the car, and from the look on my grandmother’s face, I thought they were going to tell us that she was dead, and I told God that if he’d just make sure she wasn’t dead, I’d never ask for anything else as long as I lived.

And then she wasn’t dead. Or at least, she wasn’t in the car. Nothing about my mother’s disappearance made sense. The police hadn’t come to give us bad news in person—they’d come to ask questions, to try to understand where my mother might have gone.

“We’ll search the woods, of course,” they said. But they hadn’t found her.

It was clear to me that either my faith was being tested or everything was ashes and dross and lies. I haven’t been able to bring myself to pray for anything since.

No one here has looked over my shoulder at my computer screen even once. It’s appalling. Clearly, they don’t care about the state of my soul—which, given the state of their souls, should not surprise me. I close the Catacombs completely and pull out my phone to check out the site suggested by that girl at school today—the Mischief Elves.

4•  Steph  •

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