I grab the septawing screwdriver and the one other thing I will need: the WingItz Internet Everywhere USB drive that came out of the package, onto which I’ve loaded a set of programs given to me by Ico, following some instructions to make sure there’s nothing on there saying “Steph Taylor Made This.” (“If the FBI gets involved and has a search warrant for your actual laptop, they’ll still be able to identify you, but since you’re just hacking a robot and not confessing to being a serial killer, that’s pretty unlikely,” Ico said.) If I can get this plugged into the robot’s USB port, the files on the thumb drive should take it from there.
I come out of the house, pulling up my hood and bracing myself to go out in the rain when I see that Rachel is waiting outside my house in her car.
I wasn’t expecting this. I’m not expecting my reaction, either; when I see her car, I feel a flush of warmth all over, even as my stomach flips over because what if Mom sees someone hanging out waiting for me? That seems like the sort of thing that would make her paranoid. Except, I want her to move. Right? Isn’t that half the point of the hacking? I’ll get in trouble, she’ll move me, I had a plan here, and seeing Rachel’s car has made me realize that I like Rachel enough that I’m suddenly unsure that I want to leave New Coburg.
She rolls down her window a crack and calls, “Want a ride?”
“Yeah,” I say, and I run out to her car, almost stepping in a large, deep puddle. How long was she waiting? Will she come again? Will Mom notice if she does? There’s a big wire-bound sketchbook on the passenger-side seat, which I move to my lap as I slide in. “Thank you.”
“I figured, you know, it’s raining pretty hard…”
“Yeah.” I glance at her and grin. “Yeah, I’d have gotten really wet.” Rachel usually drives to school, which means she normally leaves later, which means she must have gotten ready really quickly just so she could come get me.
I shift the sketchbook so it doesn’t get damp from the raindrops rolling off my backpack. “You can stick that in the back, if you want,” Rachel says.
“Is it your sketchbook?” I ask. This is probably a dumb question, as it says SKETCHBOOK on the front. It’s bigger than a lined notebook like we’d use in math class and as thick as a full three-ring binder.
“Yeah,” Rachel says, glancing at it in my lap instead of keeping her eyes on the road.
“Can I look?” I ask.
“Please don’t,” she says.
“Okay,” I say. We stop behind a delivery truck that’s blocking the road. She’s tapping the steering wheel with her thumbs like she’s really uncomfortable. I wonder if I should just stick it in the backseat. “Would you rather I put it in the back? Seriously, I won’t look if you don’t want me to.”
“I trust you,” she says.
When we get to school, the rain has started coming down in sheets, and we’re early, so she pulls into a parking space and turns off the motor, and we wait to see if it stops or at least lightens up. She plucks the sketchbook out of my lap and rips out three pages, tucking them into a folder in her backpack. “Now you can look,” she says, handing it back to me.
I open it. There are sketches of flowers, of cats and dogs, of people. There’s a really beautiful one of a spider in her web. “I have a friend who’d really love this,” I say.
“From your old school?”
“No, from this online site I go to.”
“Does she like art?”
“They like spiders. And pictures of spiders. Especially orb weavers, you know, the kind that make webs like this one.”
“Are you talking about one friend or more than one friend?”
“One friend. They use singular-they pronouns because ‘they’ is non-gendered and my friend is nonbinary.”
Rachel makes a face, and I wonder if I’m going to have to explain nonbinary genders. But instead she says, “Bryony said last year she wanted everyone to use xie instead of she, but her father threw a fit and told the teachers at the school they weren’t allowed. They didn’t want to, anyway. Does everyone just call your friend ‘they’ and it’s not, like, an issue?”
“Bryony is nonbinary?”
“I don’t know. She stopped talking about it after her father threatened to kick her out.”
I mull that over. “I think Firestar gets misgendered a lot, actually, but not on the online site.”
“Do you know if they’re really a girl or really a boy?”
I glance over at Rachel, trying to decide how to answer that. Should I just say no, or should I try to explain why this was a bad question, or …
“Sorry,” she says, blushing, so I guess she figured out it was a bad question.
I look back down at the sketchbook. Rachel’s drawn lots of pictures of art that’s wrapped around someone’s arm or leg. “Mostly I just use permanent ink,” Rachel says. “Because henna pens are expensive and the lawsone gets used up really fast. Also, with ink I can do colors. Someday I think it would be fun to be a tattoo artist, although I’m not sure I’d want to jab people with a needle.”
There’s a feather coiled around someone’s arm. A cat curled up in the crook
