“That sounds terrible,” I say.
She pulls back and in a slightly unsteady voice quotes something with a wherefore and be ye in it that I’m still trying to parse out when her voice goes squeaky and she says, “I haven’t heard from her since I left Lake Sadie, and I don’t know why. I think it’s because I’m here, and not there, so maybe to all of them I’m part of the infernal rabble now, even though I didn’t leave, my mother was taken away from me.” I start to tell her again that I’m sorry and she waves me off and clears her throat. “So tell me how you wound up here. Why did you move so much?”
“We were on the run from my father.”
This at least temporarily diverts her from her own troubles. “What, really? Why?”
I tell her the version of the story that leaves in the kidnapping. I explain the trip to Boston with my girlfriend as the two of us were looking for a friend of my mother’s to help keep us safe. Now that my father is in jail awaiting trial, I have a phone, I’m attending school under my real name, and Mom’s hired a lawyer to straighten out all the paperwork. Including the part where she technically committed kidnapping when she took off with me.
I leave out the sentient AI, of course. I wonder if CheshireCat is ever going to be a secret I don’t have to keep. I haven’t even told Julie, my childhood best friend I reconnected with last fall, that part of the story.
Nell’s out of the question, obviously. I don’t know her at all.
I finish off with, “And now we’re both in therapy. Mom is getting treated for PTSD, and we’re in family therapy, plus I have my own therapist.”
Nell looks at me bleakly and says, “My father wants to put me in therapy, but he can’t, because my mom still has full legal custody.”
“But she’s missing! What if you have to go to the doctor?”
“That’s what Thing Two said. My dad said he’ll call a lawyer sometime this week for sure. Thing One doesn’t seem to trust him to actually do it, though.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I say. How is so much that comes out of Nell’s mouth so confusing? This time, I’m not sure I even heard right. “Who is it that doesn’t trust him?”
“Thing One is my stepmother, Thing Two is my father’s girlfriend, and Thing Three is my stepmother’s girlfriend. It’s in order of distance from me.” She furrows her brow. “Did you ever read the Dr. Seuss book with Thing One and Thing Two?”
That may be the first cultural reference point we actually have in common. “Oh, yeah,” I say. “The Cat in the Hat. I get it.”
She looks relieved that I understand this one for real, and her voice warms to something like actual cheer. “To their faces, I call them Mrs. Reinhardt, Ms. Hands-Renwick, and Miss Garcia, though. It would be disrespectful to call them things to their faces. But there are four adults who all live in the same house and all think they get a say in my life. It’s a whole thing.”
I’m glancing around, wondering where I’m supposed to go next, when a chipper girl in a bright yellow vintage jacket slides in next to me, a phone in one hand and an out-of-season Christmas mug in the other. I can smell the tea she’s brewing in the mug. “Hi, new people,” she says in a buoyant tone that reminds me a little of Firestar. “I’m Amelie. I need to connect with two new comrades on Mischief Elves—do you play?”
I shake my head automatically even as I curl my hand around my phone. For most of my life, phone games were one of those things that everyone else did that I couldn’t do. I am torn between that excited sense of I could do this now and fear that this will be like typing with my thumbs, that everyone else learned key basic skills when they were six and I’m going to be hopelessly behind forever.
“Even better,” Amelie says. “I get superlative bonus points if I recruit a new player!”
Okay. Why not. I unlock my phone and bump it against hers to sign up for whatever this is. “How about you?” Amelie says to Nell. Nell nods slowly and holds out her phone. “Don’t look so grim!” Amelie says. “This is a game. It’s fun, you’ll see!” She looks down at her own phone and winces. “I’m going to be late for biology. It was great to meet you, see you around!”
“Did she ask our names?” Nell asks in a faintly judgmental tone.
“Maybe she’ll get them from the game,” I say.
Nell glares down at her phone. “Hmm.”
Nell needs therapy so much more than I need therapy. But she also needs a friend, and having a queer friend seems like it could help her. I’m still a little worried that she’s going to turn on me, but I like her, and I feel a weird kinship with her—we’re both dislocated small-town girls suddenly moved to the city, even if Nell only lived in one small town and I’ve lived in probably a hundred of them.
At all my past schools, I needed someone to befriend me if I was going to have any friends at all. But here … there’s another new kid.
Anyway. Straightening out legal messes, never mind solving disappearances, is usually outside the scope of what CheshireCat can interfere in, but I’ll ask later if they have any ideas.
3• Nell •
Thing Two picks me up at the end of the school day. “Did you have a good first day?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say.
“Don’t call me ma’am,” she says, trying for a sort of jolly, joking tone. “It makes me feel five hundred years old.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say, which is what my mother told me to say to adults who asked not to be called sir or ma’am or Mrs. or
