"They just think we're plotting out a really bizarre book," Corny said. "Or roleplaying. We could be LARPing, you know." He crossed his arms over his chest. "Now I'm obfuscating, and you have to pay for my dinner.”
Kaye caught the eye of a girl hunched over a table. The tips of her stringy hair trailed in her coffee and she was bundled in a series of coats, one layered over another, until it seemed like her back was hunched. When the girl saw Kaye looking, she held up a slip of paper between two fingers and slipped it into a drawer in front of her. Then, with a wink, she slugged back the last of her coffee and got up to leave.
"Hold on," Kaye said to Corny, rising and crossing to the table. The girl was gone, but when Kaye opened the cabinet, the paper was still there: The Queen wants to see you. The Fixer knows the way. Page him: 555-1327.
Corny and Kaye walked over to the club just as it started to snow again. The building had a brick front, papered over with posters in tattered layers worn by rain and dirt. Corny didn't recognize any of the bands.
At the front door, a woman in black jeans and a zebra-print coat took the five-dollar cover charge from a short line of shivering patrons.
"ID," the woman said, tossing back tiny braids.
"My mom's playing," Kaye said. "We're on the list.”
"I still need to see ID," said the woman.
Kaye stared, and the air around them seemed to ripple, as if with heat. "Go right in," the woman said dreamily.
Corny stuck out his hand to be stamped with a sticky blue skull and walked toward the door. His heart thundered against his chest.
"What did you do to her?" he asked.
"I love this smell," Kaye said, smiling. He wasn't sure if she hadn't heard his question or if she'd just decided not to answer it.
"You have got to be kidding." The inside of the club was painted flat black. Even the piping high above their heads had been sprayed the same matte tone so that all the light in the room seemed to be absorbed by the walls. A few multicolor lights strobed over the bar and across the stage, where a band wailed.
Kaye shouted over the music. "No, really. I love it. Stale beer and cigarette residue and sweat. It burns my throat, but after the car and the subway ride, I barely care.”
"That's great," he shouted back. "Do you want to say hi to your mom?”
"I better not." Kaye rolled her eyes. "She's a bitch when she's getting ready. Stage fright.”
"Okay, let's grab a seat," Corny said, weaving his way toward one of the tiny tables lit with a red electric votive that looked like a bug light.
Kaye went to get drinks. Corny sat and observed the crowd. An Asian boy with a shaved head and fringed suede chaps gestured to a girl in a knitted wool dress and tarantula-print cowboy boots. Nearby, a woman in a moiré coat slow danced with another woman up against a black support pole. Corny felt a wild surge of excitement fill him. This was a real New York club, an actual cool place to which he should have been forbidden according to the rules of nerd-dom.
Kaye came back to the table as the other band cleared off the stage and Ellen, Trent, and the other two members of Treacherous Iota strode on.
Moments later, Kaye's mother was bent over, raking the strings of her guitar. Kaye watched in rapt fascination, the pools of her eyes wet as she chewed on a plastic stirrer.
The music was okay—candy punk with some messed-up lyrics. Kaye's mom didn't look like the faded middle-aged woman Corny had seen a couple of hours ago, though. This Ellen looked fierce, like she might lean out and eat up all of the little girls and boys gathered around the stage. Even though it made no sense, as she screeched through the first song, Corny thought he could see a lot of Kaye in her.
Watching her transformation made him uncomfortable, especially because his fingers were still stained with black dye from his own. He looked around the room.
His gaze ran over the beautiful boys and the insect-slender girls, but it stopped on a tall man leaning against the far wall, a messenger bag slung over his shoulders. Just looking at him made gooseflesh bloom on Corny's arms. His features were far too perfect to belong to a human.
Looking at that stiff, arrogant posture, Corny thought it was a glamoured Roiben come to beg Kaye's indulgence. But the hair was the color of butter, not salt, and the tilt of the jaw was not like Roiben's at all.
The man stared at Kaye, so fixedly that when a girl in pigtails stopped in front of him, he moved to the left to continue watching.
Corny stood up without really meaning to. "Be right back," he said to Kaye's questioning look.
Now that he was walking in the man's direction, Corny was no longer sure what to do. His heart beat against his rib cage like a ricocheting rubber ball until he thought he might choke. Still, as he got closer, more details added to Corny's suspicions. The man's jaw was as hairless as a girl's. His eyes were the color of bluebells. He was the most poorly disguised faery Corny had ever seen.
Onstage, Ellen bellowed into the mike, and the drummer went into a solo.
"You're doing a crap-ass job of blending in, you know that?" Corny shouted over the rhythmic pounding.
The faery narrowed his eyes. Corny looked down at his borrowed sneakers, suddenly remembering that he could be charmed.