My mother has fallen silent; she’s sitting tight-lipped in bed.
“Can I borrow Steph for just a few minutes?” she asks my mother, who gives her a noncommittal shrug. “They’re going to be in in just a minute to check your incision. Steph doesn’t need to be here for that, anyway.” The DFS lady steers me into a little meeting room down the hall and closes the door. “I just need to ask you a few questions, Steph. About yourself and your mom, okay?”
“I guess,” I say.
“What grade are you in at school?”
“Eleventh.”
“And you go to the high school here, right?” I nod. “Do you do well in school?”
That’s a really impossible question to answer when you change high schools every few months. “I do okay.”
“So let’s talk a little bit about your home life,” she says, and I suddenly realize that the hospital has sent her to talk to me because, after everything they’ve seen from my mother, they’re not sure she should be trusted to take care of me. This woman could take me away and put me in foster care. Which would probably be in this county, and I’d probably keep right on going to my current high school. Mom would fight to get me back, but it would take time. I could probably stay here more or less indefinitely.
“Do you have enough to eat at home?” the social worker is asking.
I lift my chin. It will be annoying to be two and a half hours away from Rachel, but I’m not letting them take me away from my mother. “Always,” I say, and I answer every question she asks with whatever I think the right answer is, whether or not it’s true. Mom was doing her best. And we’re staying together.
When she finishes interviewing me, Mom’s door is closed. “You can go in in just a minute,” one of the nurses says. I take out my phone while I wait. Here’s one big new thing in my life: on the way home from Boston, Xochitl stopped and bought me a smartphone. I can check my email while I wait. I find another letter from Julie, full of pictures of her house and comments about the Clowder. I can’t believe it, Steph, it’s a whole group of weirdos. Why is this the first time I’ve ever felt like I fit in? Please come visit.
I pull up the Clowder app, though not much is going on, since mostly people are still sleeping or they’re in school. CheshireCat is on, of course.
“Good news,” they say in a private message to me. “Your father’s California girlfriend went to the police.”
“My father has a girlfriend in California?”
“Had. She also broke up with him when he called her from jail to ask her to come support him at his hearing.” CheshireCat explains that after they saw the beating, they transferred a bunch of money to the girlfriend and encouraged her to leave, and apparently it worked. The girlfriend also went to the police with additional evidence against Michael in the kidnapping of my mother.
“Can we tell her to call the prosecutor out in Massachusetts?” I ask. I already know I’m going to have to go back to out to Massachusetts to testify, probably, so why not have the California girlfriend add to the list of evidence against Michael?
“That’s a good idea,” CheshireCat says.
Mom’s door is open again, so I stick my phone back in my pocket and go back inside.
“By the way, I’ve been meaning to tell you,” I say. “I secretly adopted a cat.”
“What?” This is apparently totally unexpected. Mom laughs out loud, then grimaces and holds a pillow to her abdomen. “Was this in Boston?”
“No. Here! She’s living in our apartment. I’d let her out in the morning and back in in the evening, and I bought her cat food.”
“That explains why I thought I heard meowing. I assumed I was hallucinating from the fever.”
“No. You were actually hearing a cat.”
“If you’re asking if you can keep the cat, yes. You can keep the cat.”
“She also had kittens.”
“One cat is fine. You’re going to have to find homes for the kittens.” She looks over at the door, which is still standing open. “So, uh, did you have a nice talk with the social worker?”
I get up and close the door. “Yeah. I mean, she clearly wanted to make sure you were competent to take care of me, so I assured her that you were. What exactly did you do when you came out of the anesthetic?”
“I pulled out all my IVs and monitors, got out of bed, and when they caught up with me to try to stop me, I ripped open a box of used needles to try to use as an improvised weapon.”
“This was all right after surgery?”
“Yes. You can see why they were perturbed.”
“That’s … actually really pretty badass,” I say.
“Thanks,” Mom says, clearly gratified.
My phone buzzes, and I take it out to see what it is. It’s a text from Rachel with a photo of Bryony making a face and holding a sign saying, The sex robot is back, send help.
“Where’d you get the smartphone?” Mom asks.
“Xochitl bought it for me,” I say. “She said she was taking it out of your next paycheck, but I ought to have a phone made this century.”
“I’m sorry to separate you from your friends,” Mom says. “Again, I mean. And if you’d like to go to Utah some time for a visit, we can definitely, definitely do that. It was never about separating you from Julie. Her mother was really curious about us. I didn’t know what all she’d pieced together, but … too much. That’s why I didn’t want to go back there.”
“Maybe she’d have helped you,” I say. “Did you ever think of that?”
“She did want to help me,” Mom says. “It
