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

River Falls, Minnesota, since that’s the last place I left. Someone has an uncle there and wants to know if I ever went tubing (no) or to the pioneer village (also no) and whether robots are taking all the jobs there.

“There’s actually a company there building robotics components, so kind of the opposite, actually,” I say.

“Robots haven’t taken over the Suncraft Farms factory, but they probably will in a year or two,” Bryony says, and everyone nods.

“What do you think of New Coburg?” someone asks.

“People here are very friendly,” I say, which manages to be both accurate, since here I am at lunch sitting with people who are talking to me, and the sort of thing everyone wants to hear you say about their small town.

Another girl wants to gossip about fallout from a party they all went to over the summer at some ex-farm with an abandoned house. I try to look interested even though I’m not. High school is always better when I have people to sit with at lunch.

Bryony is wearing a sleeveless shirt and has an ink vine trailing down from her shoulder, wrapping around her left arm. I’m pretty sure it was done in Sharpie rather than a henna pen that would stain more permanently, but it’s better than most of the art I saw kids wearing back in Thief River Falls, and I immediately wonder if Rachel drew it. One of the other girls we’re sitting with has a pack of fine-line Sharpies. She passes them over to Rachel as they’re all chatting, and Rachel draws a detailed butterfly on the other girl’s hand.

Even when I’ve had friends, I’ve never had anyone who particularly wanted to give me art. The one time anyone even offered, we were at a school where it was against the dress code to have ink on your skin anywhere visible; I’d have had to wear long sleeves until it wore off. Not much point to that. I always feel envious, watching this sort of casual intimacy between friends, and today is no exception.

The bell rings; Rachel adds a few last details to the butterfly and caps the pens. “Let’s go,” she says to me.

We’re drawing again in Global Arts and Crafts. Today, we’re being encouraged to try different materials, and the teacher has set up workstations with charcoal, pastels, oil pastels, and colored pencils, along with small, postcard-sized pieces of nice drawing paper to use as we move from station to station. I trail after Rachel, who heads straight for the pastels and props up a postcard of a hummingbird in flight to work from.

Other than Rachel and me, I think possibly everyone in this class is high.

“How did you learn to draw so well?” I ask.

She rakes a critical eye over my utterly half-assed drawing of an iris. I’d picked out something that looked simple to draw. Simple-ish. “Did you draw when you were little?” she asks.

“Yeah.” I’d drawn people, mostly. I’d drawn them badly. For a while I drew anthropomorphic rabbits. Those weren’t so great, either. My mother kept me in crayons and blank paper as we’d gone from town to town, although I don’t think my art usually made it into the car when we moved.

“How old were you when you quit drawing for fun?”

“I don’t remember. Sometime in grade school, I guess.”

“Most people quit drawing when they’re little kids, so their drawings never stop looking like a little kid’s art. If you keep drawing, you get better.”

One of the stoned girls comes over with a Sharpie, hoping Rachel will do some body art for her. “Just a butterfly?” she pleads.

“Come find me at lunch sometime,” Rachel says and goes back to smudging the bird’s wings with her finger to make them blurry.

“You’re really good, though,” I say. “Clearly.” I gesture at the disappointed girl, who’s gone back to her own table.

“Well, I draw a lot.” Rachel starts to push her hair out of her face, looks at her color-smeared finger, and thinks the better of it. I reach across the table and tuck her hair behind her ear, and she gives me a sidelong smile. “So if you don’t draw, do you do something else?”

“I take pictures sometimes.”

“I thought you didn’t have a phone.”

“I have a digital camera, just no phone attached. Do they let us do photography in this class?”

“No, but you don’t have to draw well to get an A. You just have to show up and look like you’re trying.”

I glance around and lower my voice. “It kind of seems like a class for the kids they’re afraid are going to flunk out.”

“Yeah, it sort of is. But it’s also for the kids who like art. Which one are you?”

“Oh, they’re definitely worried I’m going to flunk out. I mean, I’m on my fifth high school.”

“Wait, your fifth? What grade are you in?”

“Eleventh.”

“Were you thrown out of the other four or something?”

“No, my mom and I just move a lot.”

Rachel looks at me, interested, then back down at her drawing. “Does she have a job that moves you around all the time?”

“No.”

“Are you fugitives on the run from the law?”

That’s a really unusual question, and when I look up, I can’t decide if Rachel is joking or not. “If we were, would I tell you that?”

“You might,” Rachel says. “There was actually someone who passed through town back when I was in sixth grade who said her parents were fugitives from the law, but it turned out they were just mentally ill.”

“Really?” I’m intrigued. It’s rare I hear about another chronic transient like me. “We’re on the run from my father, not the law. He’s scary. I don’t know why my mother doesn’t talk to the police or something, instead of moving.”

“Well, the police suck here,” Rachel says. “There was this party last spring that got busted—”

“Was that what you were talking about at lunch?”

“No, that one was in the summer. Last spring, there was one of those big high school