I pull out my phone and pretend I’m checking the time instead of CheshireCat’s message. “Five minutes,” I say, and flash a grin at my mom as I duck into the bathroom.
I sit down on the toilet to read the whole message. “I think I heard from the other AI,” CheshireCat says.
“Tell me more,” I type. “I don’t have much time.”
“It said, ‘I know who and what you are. Do you know me?’”
“Are you sure it’s the other AI and not just some human who’s figured it out?”
“The message was truly anonymous. No data at all on how it got to me.”
“What do you need from me right now?” I ask.
“Advice. Should I write back or stall?”
Why does CheshireCat think I’ll have the answer to this? “Stall, I guess,” I say. “You definitely don’t have to write back this exact second. I have an appointment I have to get to. I’ll think about this more when I have some free time.”
My mother is waiting for me impatiently, but we’re not actually late. I’d thought we were just meeting with the guidance counselor, but another woman also pulls up a chair and introduces herself as the principal. “After your phone call, I thought I’d come sit in,” she says to my mother in this careful, cheerful tone. “Could you just start at the beginning and tell us both a little about Steph’s education up to now?”
My mother has been going to therapy, and it’s definitely helping, but only up to a point. One look at her face and I know (a) she said something that completely freaked them out and (b) she’s about to clam up, which will probably freak them out even more. So I jump in. I explain that my father was physically abusive and we spent years on the run. I lay out the transcripts for all the high schools where I finished out a semester. And I wrap up with a brief explanation of how my father found me last fall, and things were pretty scary, but he’s been arrested and is being held without bail.
I can see both the adults relax at the phrase held without bail and wonder what exactly got spilled in that phone call from my mother. I am honestly not sure if she will ever be normal, no matter how much therapy she gets. Then again, I think there’s a real possibility that she didn’t start out normal.
The guidance counselor and principal bend their heads over my transcripts and sort out my schedule. Knutson has a lot of guided-independent-study options, which is why my mother wanted to send me here. They get kids who failed half their classes at a normal high school; they also get kids whose educations have just been weird for whatever reason. Like me.
When they’re done, I have a schedule: classes in the morning, and some sort of supervised independent study in the afternoon that they call Tutorial. They decide I’ll spend the rest of the day at Knutson and learn my way around. Mom funds my lunch account from the change at the bottom of her purse (because some things never change) and heads out.
The guidance counselor walks me around the school. This is the first school I’ve ever attended that’s not mostly white kids: when Mom was moving me constantly, we hopped from small town to small town, and she picked small towns where we wouldn’t stand out. Knutson is a lot more diverse.
Tutorial turns out to be a place as well as a time of day—a library and computer lab with a bunch of students working at tables. One of the adults gives the guidance counselor an urgent little wave as we step in. “Nell’s finished her math placement test, and I think she could use a break,” the teacher says in an undertone. She gestures at a girl with her head down on her arms.
The guidance counselor approaches the other girl a bit hesitantly. “Nell, would you like to come to lunch with us?” she asks. “This is Steph, who’s also starting today.”
Nell raises her head; for a moment, her face looks almost blank except for this vibrating twitch I can see at the edge of one of her slightly-too-wide eyes. Then she draws in a breath and pastes on the fakest cheery smile I think I’ve ever seen. “How nice to meet you, Steph,” she says. “Yes, I’ll come to lunch.”
Nell is skinny, white, and pale, with the longest hair I’ve ever seen—light brown, in two thick braids that come most of the way down her back. She has a few freckles scattered across her nose, and she’s short. I wonder if she’s younger than I am, but she flicks a look at me from the corner of her eye that’s so wary I’m hesitant to ask her any questions.
The guidance counselor hands each of us a tray with lunch and a carton of milk and then gets pulled away by someone who apparently needs to reconstruct her entire schedule … and there we are, in the cafeteria, the two new kids, like someone planned it this way. I sit down, and Nell sits down across from me.
“What grade are you in?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” Nell says. “My mom homeschooled me. We didn’t do grades, exactly. I’m sixteen.” She lifts a forkful of food, then sighs and puts it down, opening her milk carton and taking a
