Catfishing on CatNet

by Naomi Kritzer

  “You can hide at my house,” Rachel says firmly. “Even if your father comes to town, he definitely won’t know to look for you there.”

  “I need to get my computer.”

  “That’s fine. We’ll stop at your house for your stuff.”

  The apartment is dark, just like I left it. We turn on the lights, and I start packing up my stuff. The cat meows loudly; I’m late with dinner. I pour kibble into a bowl for him.

  “What the hell am I going to do with this cat?” I ask Rachel.

  “Maybe put him out again,” she says regretfully.

  But when I look under the bed, the cat has had kittens.

  “I thought orange cats were always boys!” I said, appalled. “Now what?”

  Rachel heaves a sigh. “I can’t bring cats back to my house. Leave the window open enough that he’ll be able to get in and out,” she says. “I mean, that she’ll be able to get in and out. You can’t evict a cat with kittens, but you’re not going to be here to feed it, right?”

  “Maybe I can stop in?” I say. My bed is going to wind up soaked with rain, but it doesn’t matter; I can’t imagine I’ll be sleeping here again. I pack up my clothes and books and retrieve my mother’s driver’s license from under the litter box. I do a quick look around—the ambulance crew knows where Mom came from, so what here could be used to find her name? There’s her wallet, her laptop, and the plastic file bin that has our important documents in it, like my school records. I pack everything up and check her bedroom for anything I’ve forgotten. She has a bedside table with a drawer in this apartment, so I check the drawer: it’s empty.

  “Georgia,” I say to Rachel. “You’re Georgia. You showed up the other day in the Clowder and barely stayed two minutes! How did you wind up knowing what was going on?”

  “I went back. I must have just missed you, because everyone was super worried about you and your mom.”

  “How did you find the site in the first place?”

  “I got an invite. It sounded cool. A little overwhelming the first time I checked it out.”

  “How did you even know it was me they were talking about?”

  “Little Brown Bat?” she says. “And Hermione said you move constantly? And they all knew you were in New Coburg?”

  I whirl around. “What? They knew I was in New Coburg? How? I’ve never told anyone…”

  Rachel pulls up a site on her phone and hands it to me, and I watch a CNN reporter talk about the hacking of the Robono Adept 6500 instructional robot in a health class in New Coburg, Wisconsin, this afternoon. “They figured it out.”

  * * *

  When we pull up outside of Rachel’s house, she pauses for a minute, hands on her steering wheel. “There’s something I need to tell you before you come inside.”

  This sounds really dire, and I wonder—drugs? Bodies? What? “Okay,” I say.

  “We have a lot of birds.”

  “Birds,” I say, repeating to make sure I heard right.

  “And they’re not in cages, and they poop kind of freely, so unless you’re going to walk around with an umbrella, you might get bird poop in your hair.”

  “Oh.” I digest this. “It doesn’t burn your skin or anything, does it?”

  “What? No!”

  “I can just wash it out?” She nods. “That’s fine. I’ll take a shower if I need one.”

  Rachel takes a deep breath. “Okay,” she says. “Let’s go in.” I grab the laptops and the bag with my mom’s wallet and follow her up her front steps. She swings the door open into a little coat-closet-foyer. There’s a sign inked on white cardboard and tacked up to the door: REMEMBER TO CLOSE THE AIRLOCK.

  “We have to close the outside door before we open the inside door,” Rachel says. “Like an airlock, but for birds.”

  We shut the outside door. I see a look of intense dread cross her face as she swings open the inside door and we step into her house.

  There’s an explosion of wings around me as Rachel closes the second door behind us, and for a second I think there are a lot more birds than are actually in the room. The downstairs is mostly just one really big room, with gauzy drapes over every window, plastic covers on every couch, and pictures painted on every wall—enormous, elaborate murals. On the biggest wall, there’s a picture of Noah’s Ark, except the giant boat has wings and eyes on eyestalks, and the creatures being loaded on include unicorns, pocket-sized dragons, and swamp monsters.

  I look around for a long moment, speechless.

  Then a bird swoops down and lands on my head.

  “Shoo!” Rachel says, and she waves the bird away from me.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “No, you don’t want that one to land on you,” she says, “That’s Caravaggio, and he bites.”

  “Who painted the walls?” I ask.

  “My mom,” Rachel says. “She’s an artist. Do you want to come upstairs? It’s a little less chaotic because there’s only one bird. And mine doesn’t bite.”

  Rachel’s bedroom also has murals, as well as these weird little boxes hanging up. I stop for a closer look at one. It’s a box made out of wood, painted and furnished inside with tiny toy birds. They’re toys, I’m pretty sure, not stuffed dead birds, but they’re made with real feathers. The bird is settled in an easy chair and smoking a pipe.

  “That’s one of my mom’s pieces,” Rachel said, “It didn’t sell, so she let me keep it.”

  “Your mom sells her art?”

  “Yeah.” Rachel heaves a sigh, like this is another secret, like the birds. “Mom didn’t go to art school or anything; she used to just make these as a hobby, but a few years ago some guy saw her stuff and thought he could sell it. It’s not enough to live on or anything. Mom says she’s putting it away for college for me.”

  “That’s really cool.” The other box also has a tiny sculpture of a bird in it. “Which came first, the birds or the art?”

  “Well, she had birds before she started making boxes, but she made art before she had birds. She’s always done murals. When she gets tired of one, she paints over it and starts fresh. I’m still mad she got rid of the kitchen dragon. I really liked the kitchen dragon. She said he made her feel intimidated while she was drinking her morning coffee.”

  “How many birds are there?”

  “Downstairs there are four parrotlets and a conure. Plus my parrotlet lives up here.” She draws her curtains and then lets her parrotlet out of its cage. “This is Picasso.” Picasso is a tiny green bird who willingly hops onto her hand. “Do you want to hold him?”

  I sit down on Rachel’s bed, which is not covered in plastic, and she has me hold my hand out flat, shakes some seeds out of a jar into my palm, and then tips the bird into my hand. He scarfs up the seeds, turning his head sideways to look up at me.

  “He’s really cute,” I say. “You should upload some pictures of him to CatNet. Not while I’m holding him, though.”

  “What if I zoom way in so it’s just your hand?”

  “That’s probably okay.”

  Rachel takes her phone out, carefully angling it away from my face.

  “So where does the name Georgia come from?” I ask. “Were you born there?”

  “No, it’s after Georgia O’Keeffe. The artist. All our birds are named after artists. Downstairs there’s Caravaggio, Vermeer, Chagall, and Monet, and the conure is named Frida Kahlo.”

  “How on earth are you afraid of bats when you have birds flying around your head all the time?”

  “Well, I had to get used to the birds.”

  “Why are the birds such a secret?”

  “I told you. Because they poop on people. The last time someone came over…” Rachel sighs, heavily enough to startle the bird, which flutters up into the air and comes back to roost on her head. “The last time I had anyone over, it was Bryony, actually, back in seventh grade, and Da Vinci pooped on her head, and it was years before I heard the end of it. Years. Also, technically we have more birds in the h
ouse than we’re supposed to. You aren’t supposed to have more than four animals as pets in New Coburg, although no one really cares if you’re keeping them in your house.”

  “Is that why you keep all the curtains shut?”

  “No, that’s because birds will fly into windows. It’s weird; birds are actually pretty smart, especially parrots. And parrotlets are parrots, just tiny, tiny versions of parrots. But they’re not smart enough to figure out windows. Hey, birdbrain.” This last is directed at her bird, which hops back onto her finger and lets Rachel pet its feathery little head. “Wanna show my friend how we play peekaboo?”

  The bird chirps, and Rachel plucks a Kleenex out of a box by her bed. She drops the tissue onto her bird. “Where’s Picasso? Where’s Picasso?” She pulls the tissue off. The bird trills. It’s not a word, exactly, but it also sounds exactly like “peekaboo.”

  “Could you hear it?” Rachel asks.

  “Yeah!” I say.

  She goes through the routine a few times. The bird starts joining in with her on the “where’s Picasso” bits. It’s not quite forming words, but the intonation is exactly right.

  I really want to keep listening to the bird more than I want to think about running, or my mother, or the news coverage of the stuff with the robot, but I need to know what Rachel knows, at least about the last bit. “So the news reports are saying New Coburg, but is anyone saying I did it? Or has my name been in any of the reports?”

  “No.” She glances up at me, then back at the bird. “I’m so sorry; I shouldn’t have tried to get you to—”

  “It’s okay. I mean you didn’t make me do anything. I just need to know … what’s out there now.”

  “No one’s mentioned your name in anything I’ve seen. Most of the kids at school don’t even know your name, you know? You’re safe.” She puts the bird back in his cage. “What do you know about your father? Do you know what he looks like?”

  “I guess I know he has brown eyes because I have brown eyes and my mother has blue eyes. According to biology class genetics, anyway, which, according to my mother, are about 50 percent lies to make it all simpler.” I stare at the bird, thinking about bird color genetics. One of the birds I saw zipping around downstairs was blue, and one was partly yellow, but the rest were green, and I wonder if parrotlets are most often green or if this is just a disproportionately green flock.

  We go back down to her kitchen, and she makes us a frozen pizza and heats up some soup. “Dad’s working overtime, and Mom’s in her studio,” she says.

  “Are they going to mind that I’m here?”

  “No, they’ll be fine with it. I’ll tell them your mom had to go to the hospital and skip the part about you being on the run from an evil dad, though, okay?”

  “That sounds reasonable.”

  A bird flies into the kitchen and perches on top of the fridge. “Noodle,” the bird says.

  “I’m not making noodles,” Rachel says irritably. “You can have a pizza crust if you want.”

  “Noodle.”

  Rachel pulls the pizza out and cuts it into slices. “How long has your mom been running?” she asks.

  “As far back as I remember.”

  “How far back do you remember?”

  “I’m not sure.” The further back I go, the more it’s just a blur of faces and places and endless car rides. I try to sort through, come up with something that feels young, and hit on one. “Okay, I definitely remember a kindergarten, because it was in a nice room with a rug.”

  “My earliest memory is from when I was three,” Rachel says. “My father took me to a family-visits day at the factory, and I watched the big machine that shrink-wraps the pallets of cereal bars. I only know it’s three because my parents told me we did this when I was three, though, and I only remember it because it was special.”

  Rachel’s mother comes downstairs. She’s wearing blue jeans and a paint-splattered button-down shirt. “Who’s this?” she asks Rachel.

  “My friend Steph,” Rachel says. The “Steph is here because her mom’s in the hospital” thing does not run quite as smoothly as Rachel expected; her mother wants to know if I have family I should be calling? Friends? Is there someone staying with my mother in the hospital? She offers to try to rustle up some ladies from her bowling league to visit Mom starting in the morning, which strikes me as something my mother would find more alarming than comforting.

  “Doesn’t the hospital have nurses?” I ask.

  “Oh, you don’t want to just leave someone to the nurses; they’ll be the first to tell you…” She trails off, eyes me, finally shrugs and says, “Did Rachel give you the tour?”

  There are two upstairs bedrooms in this house: one is Rachel’s bedroom, and one is her mother’s studio. Her parents’ actual bedroom is apparently down in the basement. The birds aren’t allowed either in her mother’s studio or in the basement.

  “Too much poop,” her mother says cheerily. Her studio has a corner with woodworking tools for making the boxes: assembling, sanding, painting. I’d thought maybe she harvested dropped feathers from her pet birds, but in fact, she buys them in sacks from a supplier. “They’re chicken feathers from the processing plant down the road,” she says matter-of-factly. “I dye them in batches.”

  She started making these little boxes after listening a few too many times to a song about building a little birdhouse that was also about love and affection. She gave them away to friends for a while, then tried selling them online. She tells me they’re not sold in galleries but in this chain of gift shops owned by a guy in Minneapolis. Artsy gift shops. I’m not entirely clear on how an artsy gift shop is different from an art gallery, but she seems to think it’s important, so I nod and act like I get it.

  There are a dozen finished boxes hanging up on the wall near the door, covered in a drop cloth to protect them from dust; she pulls the cloth off and shows them to me. They’re all painted in vibrant, candy-bright colors. My favorite is computer-themed. The birds are surrounded by pieces of technology; there are keys popped off an old keyboard, old SD cards, widgets that I recognize as computer bits even if I’m not quite sure what they do. There’s also literal hardware, tiny nuts that go with screws and bolts and stuff but strung on wires that crisscross the upper part of the box. “You can touch if you want,” Rachel’s mom says, and so I carefully tap the little metal nuts with one finger to see if they slide along the wire. They do.

  “How much do these cost?” I ask, and then immediately worry that was a rude question.

  “I sell them for $150, and the guy who buys them from me sells them for $250,” she says.

  “How long do they take you to make?”

  “I try not to think too hard about that,” she says and then laughs.

  Back downstairs, some of the birds have switched from tweeting to shrieking. It sounds like I’m listening to an argument in a language I don’t speak. Rachel’s mother is feeding one of the pizza crusts to a bird when another bird lands on her shoulder and promptly poops on her. She sees my eyes go to the bird and laughs and doesn’t even wipe it off, just says, “This is both a paint shirt and a poop shirt—no worries.”

  “Let’s go get your stuff,” Rachel says.

  I dig out my PJs and toothbrush from the bag in the back of Rachel’s car. When I straighten, I’m startled to see that Rachel looks really upset. “Are you okay?” I ask. Did I do something wrong? “Thank you for inviting me to stay. I really … I mean, I like your birds.”

  “They keep promising that we’ll go down to fewer birds,” Rachel says, her voice furious, and I feel a wash of relief as I realize she’s definitely not mad at me. “This is a lot of birds. They wake me up every morning talking and fighting and the house is always a mess because they don’t live in cages except for Picasso. We were down to three parrotlets after Da Vinci died and Van Gogh got out, but then Caravaggio laid an egg and neither one of my parents noticed, so now we’re back up to four downstairs parrotlets plus the conure. T
hey thought Caravaggio was a boy; that’s why they weren’t paying attention.”

  “I’ve never had birds,” I say uselessly. “Or any other pet. Other than the cat that my mother doesn’t know about.”

  “I just wish I had somewhere to have you over that wasn’t a mess.”

  I can’t believe she cares what I think. Should I say it’s fine? That doesn’t seem right, because it sounds like I’m disdainfully accepting what she’s offering. It really is fine, though. Everything about this house is fine, including the parts Rachel finds excruciatingly embarrassing.

  “Thank you for being my friend,” I say. “I don’t know where else I’d go.”

  “Please don’t tell anyone at school if you get pooped on.”

  “I will not tell a soul,” I say. “Ever, no one, not a soul. Not even CatNet.”

  “You can tell CatNet about the birds,” Rachel says. “They seem like people who would think they were neat.”

  * * *

  In Rachel’s room, we close the door, and I fold up my quilt to make myself some padding on the floor. Rachel’s mother has yelled at her to do her homework, and I plug in my laptop and get onto CatNet.

  Everyone’s been watching the news coverage of the hacking incident. That’s what the news stations are all calling it now: the Hacking Incident. Emily’s interview is being played and replayed, alongside an interview with Bryony, where Bryony says that the real scandal is that we were being taught sex ed by a robot programmed to say, “I don’t know; ask your parents” for any question other than “What are the benefits of abstinence until marriage?” It started out as strictly local news but got picked up somehow by a newspaper in Seattle that found it hilarious (they were totally on Bryony’s side), and by 7:00 p.m. it was on CNN.

  Rachel grabs a tablet from her desk drawer and pulls up some of the news reports so we can watch them ourselves.

  The CNN reporter got in touch with the communications director of Robono, who forlornly insists that this shouldn’t happen, mentions a security patch that was apparently not installed, and also says that the claim the principal is making—that it was some sort of outside attack—is not plausible. “This isn’t something you could do with, you know, an email Trojan horse,” he says. “What happened today requires hands-on access to the robot. So unless they’re saying someone broke into the school, it was definitely someone from their own community.”