Catfishing on CatNet Naomi Kritzer (reading strategies book txt) 📖

“I don’t know how to drive.”

“It’s really not that hard. I mean, it’s not that hard when you’re not doing it for ten hours at a time. Get in the driver’s seat. You can practice in the parking lot.”

I get out and walk around to the driver’s side. “What if we get pulled over?”

“Then we’ll be in trouble. But if they pull us over and I’m driving, we’ll still be in trouble, because they’ll assume we’re runaways or something.”

I take the driver’s seat, and she sits down in the passenger seat. “First,” she says, “adjust the mirrors so you can see behind you.”

I spend a really long time on the mirrors. Then I realize I need to move the seat forward, and that means I have to adjust all the mirrors again.

“Okay,” I say when it’s clear I can’t put this off any longer. “What do I do?”

“Did you take any driver’s ed in your previous towns?”

“I did take two classes, but they were about stuff like stopping for school buses, not how to actually drive.”

“Okay. Put your foot on the brake and then shift into drive—that’s the D—and then take your foot off the brake and you’ll start to roll forward. Try it.”

I do. It does. I slam the brake back down. “Yep,” Rachel says. “Try it again.”

We spend an hour and a half driving around the parking lot as Rachel reassures me that I’m doing fine. The thing that helps the most is that she trusts me to do this.

“Do you feel ready?” she asks finally.

“No,” I say.

“Then let’s not start you on the interstate,” she says, and she directs me to a road like the one we used to get around Chicago, except this one is less suburban and mostly just passes cornfields.

For the first hour that I’m driving, I won’t let Rachel talk to me at all unless she’s telling me something like, “Pull over and let this guy pass.” The second hour, we trade and she gets back onto I-90. The third hour, I drive some more, and this time I get onto the interstate, like Rachel. Every time a truck passes us, I hold my breath because it feels approximately like a three thousand–pound dragon is trying to get by me on the stairs. But an hour on, I feel a little less like I’m going to die.

We are passing signs for exits to Toledo when both our phones go off at once. Rachel is driving, so I pull up the messages.

Rache, I hope you’re far, far away, Bryony says. Scary dude apparently checked out of the hospital.

Hey, is this your cell phone? I hope this is your cell phone, says a text from a California number I don’t recognize. I mean you called me from this, and it might be a landline, but anyway, Orlando just told the Clowder that your psycho dad is on the loose again.—Ico

“What?” Rachel says when I don’t say anything. “What is it?”

I swallow hard, my hands shaking, trying to steady myself enough that I can talk without sounding like I’m about to lose it.

“It’s my father,” I say. “He’s after us again.”

Something’s gone wonky with the Clowders, and I keep getting the wrong one, but on my third or fourth try I get my own. It’s a weekday, so everyone really ought to be in school, but almost everyone is online, and they’re all worried I haven’t heard about my father. “Does anyone know where he went after he checked out?” I ask. No one knows.

I really miss having a practically omniscient computer intelligence on my team; it made everything easier.

We all agree that he has no way of knowing that I’m on my way to Massachusetts, but that we also aren’t sure that he doesn’t have some way of figuring out where we are. As long as we’re moving, he’ll have a hard time figuring out where we’re headed, but we’re definitely going to have to sleep at some point.

“We should probably try to come up with somewhere tonight that has a door that locks,” Rachel says.

Hermione suggests that we find a museum, hide in the bathroom at closing time, and spend the night in the museum like the kids from From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Rachel and I agree that we are deeply skeptical that this would work outside a book. A book written in the 1960s, before online security cameras and motion detectors were a thing.

Marvin tries hunting online for dodgy-looking motels, but it’s not like anyone exactly puts in their ads, “We totally rent for cash and don’t sweat IDs. Come one, come all.” Also, if they’ll take a bribe from me to rent to us without checking IDs, they’d probably take a bribe from my father to unlock the door.

We stop at a rest area to pee, get sodas, and trade seats. “Are you sure you want to keep going?” I ask as we walk around, stretching our legs. “Maybe you could drop me somewhere and I can find a bus the rest of the way. I mean, you hardly know CheshireCat.”

“I don’t need to know CheshireCat. I know you, and I know CheshireCat saved you.”

“We might not be able to do anything.” I haven’t been wanting to think about this, but I probably should. “I’m hoping that CheshireCat is just … disconnected. Isolated. Not dead.”

“Not erased?”

“Yeah, I mean … if you’re an AI and you’re a consciousness that lives on a computer, if they erase your code, you’re dead, right? Killing a human is kind of erasing our code.”

“I feel like it’s more like destroying our hard drive, but I’m not sure how far I want to go with this metaphor, anyway.” Rachel finishes her soda, crumples the can, drops it in the bin, and wraps her arms around herself. It’s a sunny day, but windy. “Do you think CheshireCat is alive? Like alive