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 this 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.”
I take a second to count. One hundred words exactly. Not everyone hates writing drabbles like Firestar does, but most people have to take some time counting words and deleting or adding stuff here or there to make it come out exactly right. CheshireCat wrote theirs really quickly.
I pull open another private chat window.
“Did you send me a screwdriver?” I ask CheshireCat.
“Did someone send you the screwdriver you need?” they ask.
“Yes,” I say. “And it was definitely someone from the Clowder, and definitely to me, which is weird because no one has my address.”
“Did it come to your house?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very strange.”
None of that was a reply. Not a yes, not a no.
I start working on my drabble.
I knew my father was a monster, but when he finally caught up with us, I saw that he actually really is a monster, I
