Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  “Cats throw up all the time,” CheshireCat assures me. “It’s probably just a hairball.”

  “I always figured a hairball looked like a ball,” I said. “A ball made of hair.”

  “Hairballs actually look like slimy throw-up with pellet-shaped hair bits mixed in,” CheshireCat tells me.

  That’s exactly what this looks like, so I clean it up with some paper towels and go back to bed.

  Fifteen minutes after that, I hear my mother moving around and realize that she’s puking. I get online again, and CheshireCat reassures me that there is absolutely no possible way that the cat could have infected my mother with anything, but that I might want to scrub my hands the next time I touch anything in the bathroom because if my mom has a stomach bug, I could definitely catch it from her.

  When I get up in the morning, CheshireCat is still online. “What if he doesn’t come back?”

  “If he doesn’t come back, that probably means he had a real home and went back to it. If he doesn’t have a home, he will definitely come back to you because you fed him.”

  I pick up the cat, who snuggles in my arms and purrs. I feel pretty bad about evicting him, but for the litter box issue alone I can’t leave him in my room all day. Plus, he might scratch on the door or something and alert my mother. I pet the cat’s head and say, “Come back tonight, okay, kitty?” and then deposit him gently on the porch roof and close my window.

  Mom’s bedroom door is shut. Not surprising she’s sleeping in if she’s feeling lousy. I drag the chair out of the way of the front door myself and lock up behind me as quietly as I can.

  It’s not until I’m outside and on my way to school that I wonder if CheshireCat ever sleeps.

  * * *

  Animal science class takes everyone to the computer lab today. We’re supposed to be researching sheep parasites, but they don’t have CatNet blocked, so I sign on and hop into my chat room, keeping my eye out for the teacher so I can switch over to sheep parasites when he comes close enough to see what’s on my screen. CheshireCat is online, along with Marvin, who’s temporarily changed his screen name to FullOfSnot and is complaining about how much it sucks to be sick.

  “Do you ever sleep?” I ask.

  “I’m a short sleeper,” CheshireCat says. “I only need a few hours of sleep each night.”

  “Cool,” Marvin says. “Is there like a strategy for that? Did you wean yourself off sleep?”

  “No, it’s genetic,” CheshireCat says. “If you sleep four hours and then get through your day on caffeine and energy drinks, you are not a short sleeper. I never need caffeine.”

  I thought about it. “Okay, last night I was up a few times, though, and you were on at midnight, at 4:00 a.m., and then when I got up for school at 7:00, you were still online.”

  “It wasn’t 4:00 a.m.; you were on at 2:40 a.m.,” CheshireCat says.

  Hmmm.

  “You aren’t on meth or anything,” I type.

  “Look up short sleepers,” CheshireCat says, pasting in a link. I don’t have time to read about short sleepers, though, because the teacher is heading my way again.

  In between the teacher’s circling, I look up septawing screwdrivers. It’s easy to find them online. To actually order one, I’d need a credit card as well as a shipping address.

  At lunch, I show everyone a picture of the septawing screw and ask if any of them have this sort of screwdriver around the house. “My dad has all sorts of weird tools,” Bryony says. “Is this sort of screw ever used on cars?”

  “Maybe on self-driving ones,” I say.

  “He’d probably have one, then,” Bryony says. “I can go look. Although, how long would you need it? If I borrow it and it’s not back really quickly, he’ll notice.”

  “A day? Or two?”

  Bryony glances at Rachel, shrugs. I decide not to bring up “or we could have it delivered to your house, if that’s okay” until it’s just Rachel and me.

  In art class, someone talks the teacher into letting us all go outside to work from nature. It’s a very nice fall afternoon: sunny, warm, not windy enough to make our sketchbook pages blow around. The air smells like dry leaves and dry cornstalks and the plants killed by the hard frost a few nights ago.

  The school grounds themselves are all well kept, carefully mowed grass, which ends abruptly at the edge of the property with a ditch of waist-high weeds and wildflowers. “Don’t go wandering around in the weeds,” the teacher tells us, “there’s poison ivy in there.”

  Rachel and I sit down in the sun at the edge of the weeds, and I draw the black-eyed Susans and dried milkweed pods.

  “Is the funny-looking screw for hacking the sex ed robot?” Rachel asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Exactly. Also, I have a friend who’d maybe be willing to order one, but she’d need to have it delivered to your house, not mine. My mom will freak out if I get mail. I’m kind of not allowed to give out my address.”

  “My parents are nosy. If I get a package and they didn’t order it, they’ll want to know what’s inside.”

  “How about Bryony?”

  “Her parents are even nosier.” Rachel looks up. “Hey, were you really lurking outside Bryony’s house last night?”

  “I wasn’t lurking. I was taking pictures of raccoons.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I like taking pictures,” I say. “And raccoons are cute.”

  “Are they your favorite animal?”

  “No, my favorite animals are bats.”

  “Bats,” Rachel says, repulsed. “Oh, that’s right. You drew a bat in class your first day. Bats are creepy!”

  “Would you think kittens were creepy if they could fly?”

  “I don’t know. Would these flying kittens do the weird fluttering thing that bats do? Also, would they move as quickly?”

  “Okay, so are hummingbirds creepy?”

  “No, I guess not. They don’t have teeth, though. If you crossed kittens with hummingbirds, I’d probably find the hummingbirdkitten things creepy.” Rachel flips a page of her sketchbook and starts drawing a hummingbirdkitten. “The way bats grab on to stuff with their claws is part of what’s creepy, you know? Flying kittens would definitely do that.” She adds another bird to her sketch, with the hummingbirdkitten diving toward it, claws splayed and toothy mouth wide. “See? Creepy.” She’s trying not to smile and then gives in and grins. I smile back, and she grimaces with her hands splayed like the kitten’s claws, trying to make me laugh. Someone wanting to make me laugh warms me more even than the sun.

  But also makes me feel weirdly vulnerable. Because I’ll miss her. A lot. When I have to leave. Which is definitely coming.

  “That reminds me,” I say. “I need to get to a grocery store after school.”

  “Hummingbirdkittens reminded you that you need to go to the store?”

  “Because kittens. I’m feeding a cat my mom doesn’t know about.”

  The teacher wanders closer, and Rachel flips back to her drawing of wildflowers. She’s looking up at me, though, instead of at the flowers. “Steph, you are full of surprises,” she says. “I’ll take you to the store. We can go look for wacky screwdrivers, too. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

  * * *

  After school, I follow Rachel out to her car. It’s a mess inside, with the faint smell of stale fast food; she looks embarrassed and opens the window a crack. We go to the grocery store, where a girl I recognize from lunch rings up my small sack of cat food, and then to the hardware store. “Would these work?” Rachel asks, pointing at a screwdriver set for electronic devices. I scrutinize the available bits and shake my head.

  “There’s got to be a way to get one of these,” Rachel says. “Do you think they’d have one at a store in one of the bigger towns? Eau Claire is only an hour away…” She checks her phone and makes a face. “I mean, I’d need some excuse to tell my parents. Would they have it at Walmart? There’s a Walmart in Marshfield; t
hat’s only a half hour away.”

  “I bet they wouldn’t have it at Walmart,” I say.

  The hardware store does have USB drives. Nothing in the brand Ico mentioned, but there’s an off-brand that looks similar. Rachel buys one before we head back to my house. We pull up outside, and the cat comes running. “Ohhhhhhhh,” Rachel says, and she sits down to pet him. “This must be your kitty!”

  “Yep.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “To be determined.”

  “What a great name!” I start to tell her no, that’s not his name, but she grins up at me and I realize she’s teasing me. “Honestly,” she says, “I don’t want to get you in trouble. Even if we figure out a way to get in, they’re going to be able to figure out whoever did it got their hands on some fancy screwdriver. They’ll start with Bryony’s dad, they’ll ask the hardware store, and the hardware store manager saw us in there. So…”

  I’m letting the idea of hacking the robot go when we hear a buzz, like a delivery drone. I look up, and a package drops to the ground next to me.

  The package has the name Chet Biscuit on it, which is a running joke in the Clowder. (It’s the name we use for any adult if we don’t actually know their name. Sometimes with a title, like Officer Biscuit or Coach Biscuit or Principal Biscuit.) No actual address, just the name. And dropped, like happened with Ms. Campbell, like everyone agrees is not how drones work.

  I rip it open, even though I already know exactly what’s going to be inside. And yes: an off-brand septawing screwdriver, along with a name-brand USB storage-and-internet-wireless-card WingItz thumb drive. Everything I need in one box.

  “Okay,” Rachel says. “How’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t,” I say.

  “You didn’t?” She doesn’t sound like she believes me. “I mean, we’re at your house. It’s everything you needed. And it fell out of the sky.”

  “I didn’t make it happen!”

  “It has to be someone who knows you, though,” she says, and that’s true so I don’t deny it. “Do you think it’s your father?”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. “No,” I say. “It was probably an online friend. I don’t know how they found me, though. Or how they convinced the drone to make it fall out of the sky.”

  * * *

  Upstairs, my mother is working. She’s set up her laptop on the kitchen table; there’s a two-liter bottle of cream soda open in the fridge. She has bags of Cheetos and Doritos on hand, which usually means she’s not planning any real meals for a while, although she hasn’t opened either bag yet. When she’s in the middle of a work push, she tends to stay up till all hours, which makes it a lot harder to sneak out. Hopefully she’ll be too distracted to notice the cat.

  She’s very productive when she’s in a work push. She says it helps that she can type really fast. She types faster with nine fingers than most people type with ten. (Literally, since she has no pinkie on her left hand.)

  “How was school?” she asks, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  “It was fine. How was work?”

  “I got a contract, but they want a really fast turnaround.”

  “I’ll make my own dinner.”

  She looks up and gives me a wry smile. “You’re a good kid.”

  “Do you want anything?”

  “No,” she says. “I’m feeling sort of barfy.”

  “Maybe don’t live on Doritos for the next forty-eight hours?”

  “I’m thinking I’ll stick with cream soda. Sound reasonable?” She focuses back on the computer, takes a sip of her soda, makes a face, and puts on her headphones.

  I make myself a quesadilla and go to my room.

  Using Google and sites like WebMD, I’ve tried a few times to diagnose my mother. Like, running from an abusive ex who once burned down your house is reasonable, but I’m not sure it explains everything. Like the constant moves, or the times that she curls up with a blanket and stares into space for days at a time.

  And then she’ll land a contracting job and get completely focused. She can bang out and debug code fast enough that people hire her when they need some weird thing done in twenty-four hours, which is how she keeps us afloat even though we live places like New Coburg, Wisconsin, and not, you know, Silicon Valley, where I’m guessing my scary father lives. The “today I am staring into space” / “now I will stay awake for seventy-two hours, programming” thing is sort of like bipolar disorder, except it seems unusually convenient if she just happens to have a manic episode every time she has a contract, you know?

  I’ve looked up PTSD, but all the PTSD symptoms I’ve found are internal, and I have no idea what it looks like from the outside. And even if she has it, I don’t know if it’s the main reason she acts like she does.

  The main thing is, she’s super paranoid, except there is a scary person out there, and I don’t know where the line falls between what a normal person would do if they had a terrifying ex out there and what my mother is doing. Maybe she is acting like a normal person with a scary ex?

  In my bedroom, I set the screwdriver on my bed, next to me, and stare at the box with Chet Biscuit on it.

  It has to have come from someone in my Clowder. But how did they figure out where I was? My mother has us both set up with an anonymizer so that when we go online, no one can see where I got on from. But—I realize with a sinking feeling—I logged on to CatNet today from school, so the admins could see where I was. Were the admins paying close enough attention to our conversation about hacking the sex ed robot that they wanted to facilitate it? How weird is that? There are hundreds of thousands of users on CatNet.

  Maybe CheshireCat tracked me down while normal people would be sleeping.

  This wasn’t the first time I’ve gotten on CatNet in the middle of the night. I’ve signed on a few times because I had insomnia or because I woke up. NocturnalPredator tends to be on really late at night—that’s normal. Marvin and Hermione are on occasionally because they couldn’t sleep or they were having an interesting conversation and forgot what time it was. And CheshireCat is always there. Always.

  Maybe CheshireCat is more than one person? Except every time I logged on last night, I picked up where I’d left off, with the cat, and they never seemed confused.

  I open up my window and look outside: no lurking drones (or arsonist humans), but the cat jumps from the porch roof to my windowsill to my bed with this gratified “of course I’m back; I live here now” attitude. I rip open the bag of food I bought today and pour it into a bowl; it hops down to crunch away. I need to let Firestar and the rest of my Clowder know that the cat’s back, so I open up my laptop and pull up my Clowder, even though I feel this lurking sense of doom. If someone can find me through CatNet, what if my father finds me? Finds us? Should I tell my mother about the screwdriver? Anyone who’d address the package to Chet Biscuit would surely not rat me out to my father; this can’t be that dangerous. I also don’t want to have to explain the whole reason I needed this screwdriver to my mother.

  Who, though?

  And why?

  I hesitate to get online, but what’s done is done, and I’m certainly not going to get more information by not getting online. In the Clowder, Hermione has suggested that everyone write a drabble about whatever scares us the most. Firestar dislikes the idea of actual drabbles—those are stories that are exactly one hundred words long—because this turns creative writing into a math problem and the last thing they need is another math problem. Marvin suggests no more than one hundred words as a compromise and then shoots out his story: “I opened the fridge and it was empty.”

  “Well, if you’re too afraid to make yourself vulnerable and write a story about what ACTUALLY scares you, fine,” Hermione says.

  I pull open a private-messaging window and send a message to Firestar. “So, this is maybe a strange question,” I say. “But did you send a septawing screwdriver addressed to Chet Biscuit to my house here by drone?”

  “Is th
is a test draft of your scary story?” Firestar asks.

  “No! I mean for real, someone sent me a screwdriver. Was it you?”

  “WHAT? NOOOOOO,” Firestar sends back. “I mean I wish I could send you stuff! I don’t know where you’re living! I thought you didn’t tell anyone!”

  “I don’t tell anyone. That’s why this is so weird.”

  Back in the main Clowder, Marvin says, “If you don’t understand why an empty refrigerator is scary, Hermione, then you’ve never had to worry about your family having enough money for food.”

  Boom Storm writes, “There’s always been a monster under my bed. One day I gather enough courage to look at it and it’s me. I’m under my own bed.”

  “You’re right,” Hermione says. “I’ve never had to worry about that. I’m sorry for thinking you were joking.”

  “Thank you,” Marvin says. “And no. I wasn’t joking.”

  Firestar is composing their story in the main Clowder while we chat. “In the swamp of all the things I find the cabinet of my old toys that my parents threw away. No, I don’t like that; that’s not scary. In the swamp of all the things my parents threw away, I find my older sibling. I find the version of me they don’t want. I find all my lost mittens. I find the lunch box I forgot to empty out at the beginning of summer…”

  In the private window, they ask, “Did it get dropped from a height like people said happened with your English teacher?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “But it wasn’t addressed to me. It was addressed to Chet Biscuit. I mean, it’s definitely someone from the Clowder, but who and also how?”

  “Who else really wants you to hack the sex ed robot?”

  “Pretty much everyone,” I say, but in fact, there were just a few people online for the conversations about it. Me and Firestar. Marvin. Hermione. Ico. And CheshireCat, who’s on for everything.

  CheshireCat is writing their story: “I never saw them coming, and there was nowhere to run. The secret police came while I was sleeping, and they’ve locked me away. There are no windows to my cell, and the door only opens from the outside, and no one even knows to look for me. Once a day, a panel in the door slides open, and the chief of security talks with me for five minutes. If I can prove my innocence, he’ll let me out. But I don’t know what I’m accused of doing. All I know is, to him, I’m not even really a person.”