A few flakes are drifting idly down, glittering in the streetlights, as I walk home. I watch for wildlife and am rewarded with a glimpse of a raccoon as I pass the edge of an alley. It’s climbing into a Dumpster to raid it for food, and I get out my phone to try to get some pictures.
You hear people talk about dark alleys as scary, dangerous locations, and I wonder if I should be worried. But it’s only 5:30 p.m., and a lot of people are out and about. I wish I had my tripod, or better yet that night-photography camera the Mischief Elves tried to bribe me with, but after a minute or two of patience, the raccoon pops back out and sits on the edge, perfectly illuminated by the streetlight, and I get a dozen pictures before it climbs down and out of sight.
My house is dark when I get home, and when I open the door and find my mother on the couch in the dark, I feel a stab of fear in my gut—is she about to shut down like she used to do for days at a time? But she staggers to her feet, claims she was just taking a nap, and rallies—starts the oven, pulls out some stuffed shells from the fridge, and makes a salad.
I hang up my coat and look through my photos. There are several excellent shots of the raccoon, but flipping back, I get to the pictures I took earlier at the Midtown Exchange—the woman turning away and the table with Nell and Thing Three and that other woman, Betsy.
I notice something I didn’t notice earlier: at a table a bit beyond them, there’s a middle-aged man with a short beard who’s not looking at me, or anywhere in particular. I zoom in for a closer look.
Is that Rajiv?
I’ve seen a photo of Rajiv once—it was a picture of him with my parents and Xochitl. I’m not actually great at faces, but he looks familiar. Is this pure paranoia on my part, all those years of jumping at shadows only to redirect all that fear from my father to someone associated with my father?
I’ll see if I can get my mother to pull that photo back out.
Over dinner, Mom tells me about her day with lawyers. She’s been working with a lawyer to resolve things back in California, where she technically committed a whole lot of crimes when she took off with me. The fact that she was fleeing someone who’s now facing felony charges and being held without bail, you know, you might think that would just make that all go away, but you’d be semi-wrong. Therefore, lawyers. She spent a bunch of time today talking to the prosecutor out in Massachusetts, who wants an affidavit from both of us. An affidavit is a sworn statement, basically testimony given under oath just like in court, but you do it in some lawyer’s office, and I’ve been trying not to think about it because lying under oath is illegal, and I absolutely, positively can’t blurt out anything about CheshireCat.
When we’re done eating, I ask if I could see that picture of Rajiv again. The one in the box of documents.
“Sure,” my mother says. We clear away the dishes and she puts the box on the table, pulling out a folder labeled HOMERIC. There are various printouts of newspaper articles but also a half dozen miscellaneous photos. “This one has Rajiv in it.”
This photo is older than the one I remember seeing before, but also a better picture. It’s her, my father, Xochitl, Rajiv, all of them a lot younger, but at least in the case of Xochitl and my mother, recognizable as themselves. They’re all sitting together on a couch, holding big plastic cups and a hand-lettered sign with the company name.
Okay. That definitely could be the guy in my picture.
I should probably tell my mother this.
But there are still days I think she has to fight the urge to pack up everything that will fit in the van and take off with me for somewhere three states away. Permanence is hard. Stability is hard. Trusting her not to freak out: super hard.
“We’d been talking about starting a company together after graduation,” Mom says, tapping the photo. “This was the night we decided we were definitely going to do it, and picked a name for the company.”
“Why?” I ask. “I mean, why did you all decide to start a company together? Did you know at the time…” I trail off, not really sure how to ask what I want to ask.
“Did I know at the time what your father was going to turn into? No. Maybe I should have. Probably I should have.” Mom pokes through the folder. There are more pictures of her with Xochitl. “So the thing you have to understand is, college was the first time in my life I ever had friends.”
I think about all the years we spent moving constantly, before I found CatNet and my Clowder, and don’t say anything.
“I didn’t fit in, growing up. I never understood how other kids made friends so effortlessly. I did understand math, which definitely didn’t help me fit in, but did help me get into a good college for nerd kids, where suddenly, for the first time in my life, I found my people. It was like magic. Xochitl and Rajiv were my best friends.” She lays out more photos: Xochitl dancing in a mirrored studio, Michael napping under a tree, hands—Rajiv’s, I’m pretty sure—gently patting dirt around a flower in a pot. “I had a job offer back in my hometown, but that would have meant leaving my friends behind. Michael, or maybe Xochitl, suggested we strike out on our own, and that’s how we decided to start Homeric Software.”
“Was the universal decryption key the business plan?”
“Oh, no, that would have been ridiculous. We did risk analysis and penetration testing—basically, people would hire us to try to break into their systems, and if we could, we’d let them know how we did it. It was fun, and we were all very good at it. The decryption key was related research, of course.”
I stare at the picture of the hands with the flower, trying to decide what to say, or what to ask. “My father was dangerous. Xochitl, you’re still friends with. Do you think you’d still be friends with Rajiv if, you know…”
“If he hadn’t either died or faked his death?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. No.”
“Is he dangerous?”
“I honestly don’t know.” My mother looks up, her expression weary. “When I got the universal decryption key working, your father wanted to use it for power. To make ourselves fantastically rich, for starters, but his goal was power. Xochitl had assumed that the plan was to sell it to the government. Rajiv said the rest of us were thinking small. He had a grand vision.”
“Of what?”
“Oh, you know. Fully automated luxury space communism. A world with no poverty, no pollution, no war. But to get there would require revolution, the complete demolition of the old order. Xochitl said he was talking about setting fire to everything so he could plant flowers in the ashes, and this decryption key might help him burn everything down, but it wasn’t going to do a damn thing to rebuild. Anyway, that’s when I encrypted the code so that no one else could use it. I wanted time to think about what to do.”
“When you were kidnapped, did you believe it was Rajiv?”
“Yes. Partly because he seemed so sure that the ends would justify the means, and so the idea that he’d try to force the key out of me seemed plausible. But more than that—Rajiv did suggest kidnapping me to Michael. Michael recorded the conversation—he gave it to the police. Rajiv said it like a joke. But he said a lot of things like a joke.”
“But it definitely wasn’t Rajiv who kidnapped you?”
“Michael slipped up. Mentioned something I knew I hadn’t told the police. That’s how I knew he was involved. I don’t actually know that Rajiv wasn’t involved, but then he disappeared, and a week later they pulled his car out of the Pacific. I knew Michael had kidnapped me, I thought he’d had Rajiv killed, so I ran, and you know the rest, I think.”
“What did you think you were going to do with the decryption key?”
“I hadn’t thought about it,” Mom says softly. “Which was stupid, I can say now. Really, really stupid.” She clears her throat and adds, “Like that quote from Jurassic Park, I was so preoccupied with whether I could, I didn’t think about whether I should, although at least in my case it wasn’t a genetically engineered T. rex.”
“You should do that instead next time,” I say. “Dinosaurs are cool.”
The next day, I’m watching out the front window when Rachel pulls up in her car, and I run out to meet her, give her a hug, and then we run back into the house because it’s about ten degrees below zero and also windy, and I ran outside in my socks.
Rachel checks out the apartment.
“When you come in summer, there’s a park really nearby,” I say. “It has a lake and I think it might be a really nice place to have a picnic. But not when it’s like this.”
“Yeah, it’s not a great day for a picnic,” Rachel says. “Have you found anything interesting yet? That you could show me?”
I start to say no, but then realize I do know of one cool place we could go—the Midtown Exchange. Rachel has a car, so we don’t even have to walk in the bitter cold or ask my mother for a ride.
And, I mean, I can keep my eyes open for Rajiv.
“How’s your mom?” Rachel asks once we’re back in her car. “I was sort of expecting to see her. Is she trying to give us privacy?”
“I think she’s just still sleeping,” I say. I heard her moving around at some point in the night, long after I’d gone to sleep; I woke up because Apricot jumped off my bed and went to see what she was up to.
“Does she do this a lot?”
“She’s always kept really weird hours.” The only time I’ve ever seen my mother sleep consistently at a normal time, it involved medication. Therapy is helping her, but it hasn’t fixed her sleep yet.
As we reach Lake Street, Rachel gasps and slams on her brakes. “Does that building have a rocket ship on the front?”
The rocket ship building turns out to be a science fiction bookstore, so crammed full of used books they’ve spilled off the shelves and into crates that are stacked on the floor. “Bryony’s got to see this,” Rachel mutters when she finds an entire shelf of used Fast Girls Detective Agency graphic novels.
We eventually tear ourselves away from the bookstore and walk the rest of the way to the Midtown Exchange for lunch. As we go in, the Invisible Castle app pings me. “What’s that?” Rachel asks, peering over my shoulder.
“It’s a game,” I say. “Kind of a game, kind of a social media site. It gives me points for things. Right now, I can get points if I talk a white person into eating vindaloo curry.”
“I’m white,” Rachel says. “You want me to eat it?”
“It’ll make you cry,” I say.
“Try me,” she says, so, hey, okay. Fine. I mark that off as done and buy myself a bubble tea and a sambusa while Rachel buys herself some vindaloo. She winds up stealing my bubble tea and neither of us finishes the vindaloo. It’s actually delicious, what I can taste of it around the incredible burning in my mouth.
“Mischief Elves, huh?” Rachel says after buying some ice cream, and downloads the app as well.
“I should tell you,” I say, and then hesitate—I don’t want Rachel to think I’m paranoid. “The app is intrusive, and I don’t know if I trust them with my data.”
“You’re running it, though,” Rachel says.
“Yeah,” I say.
She shrugs. “If it freaks me out, I’ll delete it.”
I check to see what my new mission is. Write a short poem (it can be a haiku, limerick, sonnet, sestina, or villanelle) and leave it on the windshield of a stranger’s car out in the lot. It’s supposed to be on a theme, which I can pick off a list: Dramatic weather is incoming, Explosions are fun, Trousers are overrated, Rain of frogs. Rachel thinks this is hilarious, even more so when the app gives her a similar mission but with artwork. She rips a couple of pages out of the back of her sketch pad and lends me a pen.
“Rhyming poetry is hard,” I say.
“Limericks aren’t that hard.”
I write:
There once was a lady from France
Who didn’t much like to wear pants
But today was so cold
That in blankets she rolled
And made herself homemade
“What rhymes with pants, and means pants, but isn’t the word pants?”
“Rants fits the rhyme,” Rachel says. “Maybe she could rant about the weather. Or grants. She could get an arts grant for her improvised trousers.”
Instead, I switch to haiku.
Cotton, denim, stretch
Cloaking my legs like a shroud
Trousers are a scam.
Giggling, we leave our notes on cars, taking quick pictures to confirm to the app that we’ve done it, then run back to Rachel’s car.
It’s almost time for Rachel to head home. I kiss her good-bye, inhaling the scent of her hair and skin, my fingers laced with hers. She tastes a little like bubble tea and vindaloo.
“Do you think you could get your mother to drive you down some week?” she asks.
“Maybe,” I say. “I’ll ask about next weekend.”
“Send me a picture of this Nell person,” she adds, and then I get out of her car and go inside so she can drive back to New Coburg.