School here started two weeks ago. Two weeks—that’s not even long enough to have a transcript. I prop my pillow against the window, lean against it, and close my eyes. We’re going to be on the road for a while, and it’s still dark out. I might as well get some sleep.
When we move, the new town always has to be at least 250 miles from the last place we lived. Often Mom goes farther, but it’s always at least 250 miles. Then we get off the interstate highway and start driving into the country, because our new town also has to be least twenty miles from the interstate. Once we’ve found a town that’s far enough out of the way, Mom starts looking for places we might be able to rent.
We’re running from my father. Mom told me this in ninth grade, after years of pretending she just liked moving. My scary, dangerous, violent father, who burned down our house (though they couldn’t prove it) and spent two years in prison for stalking when I was little. I still don’t know what actually sets off the moves. I don’t think she’s seen him. I don’t know if she moves when she sees somebody who looks like him or if she just gets a feeling like he’s getting close. I don’t know how she thinks he finds us. If we’re running because she has a real reason to think he’s getting close.
Mom doesn’t say where we’re heading. When I wake up from my nap, we’re getting onto I-94, and I watch to see if we’re heading west, toward North Dakota, or east, toward Wisconsin. East. So Wisconsin is probably going to be our next state.
The last time I lived in Wisconsin was in seventh grade, I’m pretty sure. We were there for two months in a town called Rewey. The main thing I remember about Rewey is that my bus ride to school was really long, and there was this thing where all the other girls wore plaid leggings and wouldn’t talk to you if you wore anything else. Also, it wasn’t just plaid but these very specific patterns that were acceptable—like the red-and-black-check type plaid was good, and also for some reason there was a blue one that was okay. I didn’t have any plaid leggings—I mean, they weren’t something I’d ever felt like I needed in any other town—but while I was there, another outcast girl got a pair of plaid leggings that had green stripes as part of the plaid, and those were just completely unacceptable. For reasons.
I still don’t have plaid leggings, and I know it’s ridiculous that I’m worrying about plaid leggings being a Wisconsin thing that’ll come up again. At least I should quit worrying about this until I know that we’re actually staying in Wisconsin, and not turning abruptly south when we get to I-35 and heading to Iowa instead. But instead I remember the feeling of sitting in my seventh grade math class, staring at the leggings of the girl in the chair next to me and wondering whether I might be able to convince my mother that I really needed plaid leggings.
Firestar, my best friend from CatNet: Firestar would definitely understand this. Even if they would totally wear whatever the exact opposite of plaid leggings are, just to show how much they did not care at all that Plaid Leggings Are the Thing You Wear at school. Maybe back in seventh grade, they’d have wanted plaid leggings. To fit in and be like everyone else.
Today, Mom is nervous enough she doesn’t even want to stop for lunch, though she agrees to let me pee and grab some snacks at a gas station. Sometimes gas stations have actual real food or they adjoin a little fast-food place, but this one basically sells fishing bait and candy bars. The closest thing they have to real food is two slightly dried-out oranges in a basket near the register, and some sort of locally packaged granola with a picture of a chalkboard with GUARANTEED TO MAKE YOU POOP! in cursive writing across it.
I buy the granola and the oranges. I notice the gas station cashier looking at my mother’s hand—she doesn’t have a left pinkie due to an accident years ago—and I shoot him a glare.
Once we’re past the Twin Cities, where Mom doesn’t stop ever, I ask her where we’re going.
“I’m thinking Wisconsin,” she says. “I think that’s far enough.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Not Riley, though. Was the town called Riley?”
“Rewey.”
“That’s right. The place with the mean girls who wore plaid.”
“You remember that?”
“Yeah. Because I remember thinking, what the hell kind of teenagers think the coolest possible outfit is plaid? What a weird fad.”
“It had to be the correct plaid,” I say.
“Right. Royal Stewart, which is like the plaidest plaid in the universe of plaids, that one was nerdy. I’m so glad we didn’t stay.”
“Maybe everyone outgrew the plaid thing,” I say. “It was seventh grade.”
“What was the deal at your next school?”
The town after Rewey was in Nebraska. “We didn’t stay long enough that I even figured it out,” I say.
She’s silent for a little while.
“Can we stay in Wisconsin long enough that I can finish my semester?” I ask. “It’s going to be really hard to graduate from high school if we keep leaving.”
She sighs heavily. “We’ll see,” she says, which is basically no for cowards.
“Do you have a work project coming or anything?” Sometimes a big project will hit and she’ll get a lot more reluctant to go anywhere until she’s done. Mom does freelance computer programming involving computer security.
“Yeah. Your aunt Sochie called last week with some work. She’ll have details soon.”
Aunt Sochie isn’t really my aunt, and I’ve never actually met her. If I have any real extended family, Mom keeps them stored down the memory hole along
