CHAOS ON CATNET BY NAOMI KRITZER EXCERPT CHAPTER 1
“I have to pee,” I tell my mother.
“What, now?” she says, exasperated. “We have an appointment.”
I have never, in my life, at least that I recall, had an appointment to register for school. Every other time, and I’ve gone to eighty-four schools altogether if you count all the elementary schools that my mother pulled me out of because I’d punched someone, we just showed up with a folder full of records and my birth certificate. (The birth certificate that turned out to be fake.) But things are different now. We are no longer on the run. I’m registering under my real name. We’re living in Minneapolis, instead of hiding in small towns and paying rent in cash. And we make appointments.
I pull out my phone and pretend I’m checking the time instead of CheshireCat’s message. “Five minutes,” I say, and flash a grin at my mom as I duck into the bathroom.
I sit down on the toilet to read the whole message. “I think I heard from the other AI,” CheshireCat says.
“Tell me more,” I type. “I don’t have much time.”
“It said, ‘I know who and what you are. Do you know me?’”
“Are you sure it’s the other AI and not just some human who’s figured it out?”
“The message was truly anonymous. No data at all on how it got to me.”
“What do you need from me right now?” I ask.
“Advice. Should I write back or stall?”
Why does CheshireCat think I’ll have the answer to this? “Stall, I guess,” I say. “You definitely don’t have to write back this exact second. I have an appointment I have to get to. I’ll think about this more when I have some free time.”
My mother is waiting for me impatiently, but we’re not actually late. I’d thought we were just meeting with the guidance counselor, but another woman also pulls up a chair and intro duces herself as the principal. “After your phone call, I thought I’d come sit in,” she says to my mother in this careful, cheerful tone. “Could you just start at the beginning and tell us both a little about Steph’s education up to now?”
My mother has been going to therapy, and it’s definitely helping, but only up to a point. One look at her face and I know (a) she said something that completely freaked them out and (b) she’s about to clam up, which will probably freak them out even more. So I jump in. I explain that my father was physically abusive and we spent years on the run. I lay out the transcripts for all the high schools where I finished out a semester. And I wrap up with a brief explanation of how my father found me last fall, and things were pretty scary, but he’s been arrested and is being held without bail.
Copyright © 2021 by Naomi Kristzer
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