“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
