Kaye was surprised to hear that her grandmother thought that her mother had talent. "I'm not relying on luck," Kaye said numbly.
"Oh really? What are you doing then?"
"I don't know," Kaye said. She was tired, and she could feel a whine creep into her voice. She was afraid that she was going to cry, and if she started crying right now, she wasn't sure she could stop. Worse, she knew she sounded petulant, upset only that she was caught. It wasn't far from the truth. "We needed the money."
Her grandmother looked at her in horror. "What money?"
"Is that what you think? Don't even talk to me," Kaye said, burrowing her face in her folded arms. She mumbled into her own skin, "I was working at a fucking Chinese restaurant, okay? In the city. Full-time. We needed the money."
Her grandmother looked at her in confusion.
"I don't have a job yet here," she confessed, "but I thought I might go work over at the gas station where Janet's brother works. I put in an application there."
"You are going to high school, young lady, and even if you weren't, a gas station is no place for a girl to work. What kind of boy is going to go out with a girl like that?"
"Who cares about boys?" Kaye said. "Look, Mom will sign any form I need to get my GED."
"No, she will not!" Kaye's grandmother said. "Ellen!"
"What?" the annoyed shout came from above.
"Come down here and listen to your daughter! Do you know what she's planning to do? Do you know what she's been doing?"
A couple of minutes later, Kaye's mother was there too, hair pulled back with a red leather kerchief. She was wearing a black T-shirt and sweatpants. "What were you doing?"
"I wasn't doing anything," Kaye said. She should have known this fight was coming, but now she felt distant from it, as though she were watching from far, far away. "I wasn't going to school and I wasn't telling Grandma about it."
"Don't be smart," Kaye's grandmother said.
Ellen leaned against the doorway to the kitchen. "Look, it doesn't matter what she's been doing because we're going to be in New York the beginning of next week. I'm fronting Meow Factory."
Both Kaye and her grandmother graced Ellen with almost identical looks of horror. Ellen shrugged, moving past them to fill the coffeepot with water. "I was going to tell you last night, but you never showed up for dinner."
"I'm not going to New York," Kaye said, disgusted at how childish she sounded. This was the same girl who had insulted the Unseelie Queen's favorite knight? Who had talked down a kelpie?
"Ellen, you can't seriously mean that you don't care that your only daughter has not been attending high school?" Kaye's grandmother's lips were pressed in a thin line.
Ellen shrugged. "Kaye's a smart girl, mom. She can make those decisions for herself."
"You're her mother. It's your job to make sure that she makes the right decisions."
"Did that ever work with me? You tried to make all my decisions for me, and see where it got us both. I'm not going to make the same mistake with Kaye. So what if she doesn't want to go to high school? High school sucked when I had to go, and I can't imagine it's any better now. Kaye can read and write—that's more than plenty of high school seniors can say—she's probably read more books than most girls her age."
"Ellen, don't be stupid. What's she going to do for a living? What's in her future? Don't you want something better for Kaye than what you have?"
"I want her to have the future she wants." Kaye slid out of the room. They would be arguing for long enough that they wouldn't notice or care for a while. She just wanted to sleep.
The phone rang close to her head, where she'd dropped it. Kaye groaned and pressed the on button.
"Hello," she said groggily. She hadn't managed more than a fitful sleep, tossing and turning. The blankets were too warm, but kicking them off had made her feel unsafe, exposed. Her dreams were too full of slit-eyed things poking her with clawed fingers.
"Fuck. You're there." She recognized the voice as belonging to Corny. He sounded astonished and very relieved.
"Corny! I got thrown out. I couldn't find a way back to you." She looked at the clock. It was one o'clock in the afternoon. "I thought maybe the hill was only open at night."
"I'm coming over."
She nodded and then, realizing he couldn't see her, spoke the thought aloud. "Yeah. Definitely. Come over. Are you okay?"