It’s the first time since Utah I’ve had a friend over, I realize, and she’s trying too hard to be normal.
Take it from me: trying to be normal, trying really hard to be normal, is an express ticket to absolute weirdness.
While I wait, I take a look at the other site Nell mentioned, the Catacombs, because I’m kind of curious about whether her church is, in fact, totally a cult. I have to register to look around, so I tell it my name is Arabella Dinglehoffer, although I admit to living in Minneapolis. I don’t have to cross against the light (or pretend I did) to take a look around. It really does have a similar interface to the Mischief Elves but with groups you can join that are all called things like Tribulation Teams Central and Prepping 101.
I hear a car idling outside and look out to see Nell getting out of a rusty, very small hatchback. Nell walks quickly away from the car and up the steps. She’s so tense. It’s weird how much tension I can see even looking down from above. The car waits until I’ve opened the front door and greeted Nell before pulling away. I try to catch a glimpse of the driver, wondering if it’s Thing One or one of the others.
“I don’t know how people live in cities,” Nell says. “It took us almost as long to get here in the car as it would have walking. Thing Three said this was normal traffic this time of day.”
“If you’d walked, you could have crossed against a light,” I say.
“Did you really actually do it?” she asks.
“I did. And it gave me a gold star for not cheating.”
She gives me a sideways look. “Huh. I wonder if I should have cheated less in the Catacombs.”
“Does the Catacombs give you missions, too?”
“Yes,” she says. “Bible verse memorizations, exercise, prayer. I mostly just checked off that I did them whether I did or not, unless it was something my mom was checking up on. The Elf site just gave me a mission that’s Make your space your own, which is super weird, actually, because did I tell you about my room?”
“No?”
“It’s a huge house, but there are four adults living in it. So Thing Two moved out of her art studio to make space for me, and the walls are the exact same shade of yellow as hot dog mustard. Everyone talked about how we could paint it, but you only paint if you’re staying, and I’m definitely going back to Lake Sadie to live with my mom once they find her.”
“Right.”
“But now I’ve got this mission.”
“Well, you could paint, then,” I say.
“But painting is a whole thing. You have to move the furniture and cover everything up and there’s stuff with tape and they will probably want me to look at paint chips.”
“I mean you could just fake the mission,” I say. “Like you did with the Christian site.”
She bites her lip quietly for a second. “Now I’m wondering if it knew I was cheating,” she says. “Somehow. Because my missions never got very interesting. And I did not get a gold star from the elves in the app.”
“Does it matter if it knows you’re cheating?”
She lowers her eyes and mumbles, “I don’t know.”
“Well, worst case, you have a room that’s not mustard yellow anymore. What color do you want?”
“Blue, I guess. Some sort of sky blue.”
I have literally never picked a color for a room, and I find myself looking around at the apartment, speculatively. Are we allowed to paint? Mostly the walls in our many apartments have been white and beige, although I do remember the one Mom called the Circus House where every room was something incredibly bright. My room in that house was sort of an electric lime. By two weeks into our stay there, I wasn’t even noticing the colors anymore.
We sit down with the questionnaires and work for a while. I feel like I’m on steadier ground when we get to academics. As promised, I show Nell how to plunge a toilet, and she checks that one off.
“Do you maybe want to come over to my house tomorrow?” she asks. When I look up, her cheeks have turned sort of pink, and she adds, “That way, you could see I’m telling the absolute truth about the mustard color.”
“Okay,” I say, and she looks relieved.
When Mom comes out to offer pizza, Nell rockets to her feet and says, “What time is it? I should call someone and get a ride home,” and my mother’s admittedly klutzy attempts to assure her that she’s welcome to stay for dinner do not persuade her to stick around.
“Is it dangerous to walk in Minneapolis?” I ask after Nell’s gone.
“Not particularly,” Mom says. “A lot of people don’t like walking at night for one reason or another, though.”
“Am I allowed to walk at night?”
Mom gives me a narrow-eyed look. “Since when have you cared whether I allow you to walk at night?”
“I mean at 6:00 p.m. When you’re still awake and I’m not going to be able to sneak out without you noticing.”
“Yes, you’re allowed.”
We sit down to eat pizza, and I think about Nell’s mission. Is it personalized, or does it just seem personalized?
Over on the Catacombs, there’s a message from someone named Sister Eloise. Dear Sister in Faith, you’re in my neighborhood, which means you’ll be in my squadron. No pressure, but if you’d like to get together for the group workouts, or need support with a mission or a quest, just let me know.
I feel the prickle of intense paranoia and my heart rate shoots up, and I stand up and close the blinds without really thinking about it and then try to sort through this rationally. There’s probably an automatic notification feature. This is creeping me out because I’ve spent years running and hiding along with my mom, not because there’s
