“Was I talking in my sleep again?”
“No, I—sorry.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, too groggy—and too relieved to have a plan to get back to Caleb—to wonder why he’d burst into my room in the middle of the night.
Chapter 10
That morning, I bounced down the stairs, skipping steps along the way. It was about breakfast time, and the smell of blueberry pancakes had managed to reach all the way up into my room, beckoning me. Maeve, Mickey, and Bridgette were all gathered around the circular table, gawking as I plopped myself in the chair across from Maeve.
“Hey, Bridgette. Guess you and Mickey made up?” I smiled at her.
Bridgette’s eyes widened.
I looked over to Mickey, his forkful of pancake paused halfway to his mouth.
“You invited her over for breakfast, right?” I asked.
Neither one of them seemed to know what to say, so I shrugged my shoulders and got busy piling three pancakes on top of each other.
“You’re…” Maeve said, looking from Bridgette to Mickey. “You seem to be in better spirits.”
“Yep,” I said as I squeezed a diabetic’s death sentence over my pancake stack.
“By the way,” I said between shoveled mouthfuls, “I need to call Deena, but her number’s not on the fridge anymore.”
Maeve glanced once more at the other two. “What do you need to call her about?”
“I want to get emancipated,” I said as I reached for the bowl of cut melon and spooned a generous helping onto my plate.
Mickey’s forked pancake paused halfway to his mouth, and Bridgette choked on the orange juice she was sipping.
Maeve gave both of them a stern look before shifting her gaze back to me. “I see,” she said, drawing the word out.
“It’s nothing personal,” I added quickly, cutting the stack of pancakes with my fork. “You guys have been great and all, but I need to get back to Caleb.”
“How are you going to do that?” Mickey asked, setting his fork down on his plate.
I shrugged. “That’s why I need to talk to Deena. I don’t know how all that works with me being in foster care. I think I have to show that I’m not living with a parent, which,” I said, gesturing to them with a forkful of syrupy pancake, a few drops landing on the vinyl place mat, “shouldn’t be a problem.”
Mickey’s mouth worked as if he was about to protest, but Maeve shot him another look.
“And the second?” Bridgette asked, her eyes lit with interest—the way they were when she’d met a potential challenger on the soccer field.
“I also have to show that I can support myself.” Which really sucked, because I’d had enough savings to prove it just one month ago. Now, I had nothing—except for job experience.
Maeve sipped her orange juice. “Getting a job when you’re already behind in your schoolwork doesn’t seem like an ideal plan.”
On the surface, Maeve sounded completely reasonable. But I didn’t miss the way her shoulders stiffened—how the corners of her mouth tilted downward, giving her a stubborn look.
“I’ve been working since I was fifteen. I’ll be fine,” I said. “And besides, I have less than a year until I’m on my own. I need to start saving for stuff. You know, an apartment, school, a car…”
Maeve shook her head. “Don’t worry about all of that. We’ll be here to help when the time comes.”
I snapped my head back, unable to hide my surprise. Who promises to help out with all that stuff after knowing a kid for only a few weeks?
Maybe she was one of those Florence Nightingale types that helped people pathetic enough to elicit their sympathy. That was great and all, except for the fact that Maeve would get to know the real me pretty well between now and when it was time for me to leave. She’d change her mind about helping me once she realized that snarky, impulsive Kella was a heck of a lot more common than depressed, hurting Kella.
“Well, that’s really nice of you, but,” I said, drawing the last word out while I pieced together a thought, “…but I need to build my resume, too. You know, for future jobs. I need to have a track record of being dependable and all that.”
There were a couple seconds of stilted silence—long enough for me to go over what I might have said wrong—before Mickey said, “Well, it’d keep her too busy to get into trouble. That’s a plus.”
“Right, because a job wouldn’t add a complicating layer to things,” Bridgette said, her brows twisting in and down.
“What would it complicate? It’d just be a part-time job. Nothing that would be bad for my grades or…” I trailed off, not sure what else Bridgette could be talking about, but I felt sure it wasn’t about grades.
Maeve smiled her skinny-jeans smile. “Sure, dear. You can look for a job. But make sure you are able to attend Homecoming. I don’t want you to miss something so important to you.”
“That’s okay, it’s not. I’ve never been into dances. They’re not really my thing.”
Maeve’s mouth dropped in surprise. “But…I mean…” After a few moments, she regained her composure. “Well, I insist you go. It is an important event in your life. You are not skipping Homecoming.”
An important event in my life? Were we talking about the same thing? Homecoming was just a bunch of overdressed girls who spent too much money on mani-pedis going to a school gym in a limo so they could grind on dates that hoped to get lucky. My desire to go: zero.
“It’s really not a big deal. Besides, it costs a lot of money, and—”
“Don’t worry about the money.” Maeve cut me off. “It is my responsibility as your foster parent to provide for your extracurricular activities, after all.”
“But I don’t want—”
“And if you agree to attend, there is
