She shrugged. The rat stirred, moving around behind her neck to the other shoulder. “No. No hithtory. I had a little bit of a cruth. You know when you’re in a bad plathe and any boy with a nice voice and cute butt is nice to you, you get hopeth up?”

Not so much, I thought.

“And these messages, you thought about this sort of thing?” Tattletale asked.

“Doeth it matter?”

“We’re not sure you sent them,” I told her. “People are going around messing with people. Maybe something more insidious.”

Ratcatcher tilted her head to one side. The rat perked up, reaching up to her ear.

“Nothing in the data,” Tattletale murmured. “No weirdness in injections, outgoing data. No patterns in the static, basically. This stuff lines up with things you’ve thought before? Or did it feel off?”

Ratcatcher motioned, and Tattletale handed her back the phone. Ratcatcher slumped against the wall beside me, putting her rat in fairly close proximity to me. She held it up so I could see too.

“Yeth, yeth, maybe, yeth, yeth…”

“Clarify?” Tattletale asked.

Ratcatcher was busy scrolling.

“Uhh,” I said. “Go back? Okay, so, opening prelude… rats mate more than once a minute, so even if he finishes quickly, he’d have a good thing going.”

“Pickup line,” Ratcatcher said. “Yeth, thoundth like me. There’th more.”

“Rat climaxes last five minutes—”

“—pretty thure it’th not true but thoundth good—”

“—which he might find fun, but if he doesn’t want to, ahem, take a rat to bed and attempt the physiologically impossible, he can take a girl instead.”

“Me. Thatht the pickup line. Thee? I rate mythelf an honest three out of five and thay I’ll do thith, becauthe even a bad one ith pretty good, and then no thtringth attached—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get it, I see.”

“And thith part, we’ll thkip thith part, if that’th okay? Personal.”

“Sure,” I said. I cupped a hand to block my view of the phone while she scrolled.

“It still reads like you?” Tattletale asked.

“Yeth. I don’t remember, but I thought about it a lot. Even wrote thome but never thent them. Until that night. He rethpondth here,” she said.

I read it. This is inappropriate, Ratcatcher. Drink some water and rest. We’ll talk about this tomorrow.

Pretty reasonable for a response to unsolicited texts in this vein at five in the morning.

“I apparently thent thome more, thith… leth me.”

Less her?

I read the texts, flinched, and looked away, which meant I was looking at Tattletale, who smirked.

“I thought you liked mice and rats,” I said.

“I do! I wouldn’t do thomething like that, if you’ll reread it—”

“No thank you.”

“Thome guyth like thith thtuff. I offer an alternative. Rather than put a rat, thereth a potthibility of uthing a thnake inthtead. Theemth more practical, you can hold on to the end of the tail.”