Once we’re over the state line and into Wisconsin, Mom relaxes a bit. We get off the highway in a town called Osseo, and Mom unfolds an actual paper road map she picked up at a gas station and runs her finger along the two-lane highway we’re going to be following from here.
“Can we get something to eat?” I ask.
“Next town,” she promises.
Twenty more minutes gets us to a “restaurant and saloon” in a tiny town not quite far enough from the interstate to look for an apartment. I check the menu for an all-day breakfast and don’t find one. They do have Wi-Fi, though. While my mother is in the bathroom, I open my laptop and check CatNet quickly. “Moving again,” I tell Firestar, and I send the message before Mom gets back.
We’re past the lunch rush, and it’s not really time for dinner yet, so the waitress doesn’t have a lot to do, and when she comes over to refill our waters, Mom asks her if she knows of anyone renting out a house or a basement or anything like that in Fairwood, New Coburg, or any of the other towns around here.
“What brings you in?” the waitress asks. “Work?”
Mom does the thing she does with landladies—the significant look followed by, “I’m looking for somewhere to start over.”
The waitress nods slowly and then writes down an address on a napkin. “This is right on the edge of New Coburg,” she says. “If you get to the river, you’ve gone too far. This lady rents out the upstairs of her house.”
Sometimes that’s the end of the conversation, but sometimes the waitress stops back to chat. To ask if Mom’s doing okay, if she needs anything else (and she doesn’t mean a refill of coffee), to tell her own story, in brief. I always listen without interrupting because sometimes Mom fills in some detail I don’t already know. This time, as she folds the napkin and tucks it into her wallet, she tells the waitress, “In retrospect, his ambition to become an actual global dictator definitely should have been a red flag.”
They’re joking around a little, so it’s hard to know if she’s serious. Like always, Mom tips generously when we leave.
There’s a laminated fifteen-year-old newspaper article in the glove box of the car, which Mom keeps in case she gets pulled over and needs a good explanation for why she maybe doesn’t have an actual up-to-date driver’s license with anything like a current address on it. The article is from the Los Angeles Times and says, SAN JOSE MAN PLEADS GUILTY IN STALKING CASE. There’s stuff about the fire that uses the phrase alleged arson and also no conclusive evidence and Taylor’s wife and child barely escaped the flames and the body of the family cat was found in the rubble.
And an image of a text message saying You’re never going to stop being sorry for betraying me.
“These text messages were more passionate than threatening and should not be read literally,” according to my father’s lawyer.
As part of his plea agreement, my father agreed not to seek shared custody or visitation with me after his release. He was sentenced to two years in prison.
Nothing about wanting to be a global dictator, but still, I get why my mother finds him scary. I find him scary. I guess what I don’t understand is why staying in one place and talking to the police isn’t an option.
Our new apartment is the upstairs of a two-story house with a sagging front porch and a gravel driveway. It’s got grimy white paint in every room and a floor that squeaks when we walk around, but it’s furnished, which means I won’t have to sleep on a pile of my clothes on the floor, and it has two bedrooms, which means I get my own.
I heave the laundry sack full of bedding onto my bed and the laundry sack full of my clothes onto the floor (half of them are dirty; I’ll have to sort it out later, but at least nothing reeks of sour milk), and I plug in my laptop and turn it on. The battery died sometime after I turned it on at lunch, so it takes a while to start up again, and I go ahead and put the sheets and blankets on my bed. Then I pull up CatNet.
My profile says Name: Steph. Age: sixteen. Location: a small town somewhere in the Midwest, probably. Even on CatNet, I don’t give out my location. Animal pictures are the currency of CatNet, and I don’t have any right now, so I take a picture of Stellaluna—my stuffed bat—in my new bedroom. It’s a way of saying, “Soon, I promise.” I upload it, then open my Clowder.
Clowders are one of the neat things about CatNet. Clowder means a group of cats. CatNet has chat rooms, of course, but once you’ve been using CatNet for a while, the moderators assign you to a customized group chat comprised of people they think you’ll like. I’d been using CatNet for about two months when they put me in this one. My Clowder has sixteen people, but four of them don’t come online much.
“LBBBBBB!!!!!” someone writes as I come in. My name on the site is LittleBrownBat, but all my friends shorten it to LBB. Or LBBBBBB if they’re feeling enthusiastic. I tried using BatGirl as my online alias, but people kept assuming I was into Batman comic books.
“How do you like your new house?” Firestar asks. “Do you know if school’s started in your new town? My school starts tomorrow, and I hate eleventh grade already.”
I’ve never actually met Firestar in person. I met them on CatNet, and they’re probably my best friend there. We both like creatures that other people think are creepy—I like
