“Kaye, you sure you’re okay with this?”

“Yeah, of course! You can’t control the parents.”

Jeremy shrugged one shoulder, pulling up the overstuffed duffel with it, and sighed. “I can’t, but I coulda just waited a few months…”

“Fuck ‘em,” Kaye responded, pulling open a door in the two-bedroom apartment to reveal a surprisingly-furnished room.

“I thought you said this place was empty,” Jeremy said, slowly. He hadn’t wanted to make anyone uncomfortable or have to deal with his baggage. He’d been asking around and Kaye had been the first one to say she could put him up in an “empty room.”

Which, now that he was here, obviously didn’t make much sense. Why the hell would Kaye have extra space? For that matter, why did she have this?

“This is yours for as long as ya gotta stay.”

“There’s no way. How much is rent here? I’m going to start working soon anyways…”

“You’re gonna finish high school first, or my dads won’t pay half the rent is what you’re gonna do.”

Finally, Jeremy had to cough out a laugh. It was very her, to come up with a way to make helping him out cheaper than the alternative. And at this point, he wasn’t about to turn her down because she was partially just passing along her parents’ kindness to do so. “Still, I need to do something. I can work a part-time or something…”

“Hon, your parents might be living thirty years ago, but you can’t. Where the hell would you get hired, huh?”

It was a fair point, and one he’d been worrying about since before he’d even had the beginnings of the plan that had ended up with his abrupt departure. With the automation of so many jobs, finding something part-time was a matter of finding a business that needed odd jobs around the office for a while to catch up on something rather than an actual possibility for longer-term employment.

He’d been fed up, though, and willing to take that trade.

“I… wasn’t really thinking that far.”

“Oh, and you’re pretty good at ATR, I hear, so the pod’s open. I play like a game a day, and while you’re gonna be at school, too. Cleaned it even.”

“Okay, but you need to at least let me clean and cook or something.”

“Fuck, if you can cook, I’d put you up til you feel like leaving. Actually…” she turned to face him, an eyebrow raised conspiratorially. “You think once you’re outta here I can turn this place into a halfway house for runaway gays who c’n cook? Dads’d approve, probably.”

It wasn’t that funny.

It wasn’t really funny at all, actually. Kaye wasn’t very good at jokes, and this was no exception.

Jeremy found himself laughing anyways, struggling to get any words out for half a minute. She just stood there, not saying anything and visibly ignoring when he’d started crying, a little, in the middle of it. Finally, he composed himself enough to respond, even if his voice was still a little shaky.

“Probly not; think you’d have trouble finding enough of them to keep one in the house all the time.”

“Damn. Guess I’ll just need to keep you around for as long as I can then, huh?”

He had to roll his eyes at that. “I was hoping to not impose on you for too long.”

“A year and a half, kid. Minimum. Else I’m calling the cops to come drag you back here.”

He paused for a moment, staring at her. “And how would you convince them to do that?”

“I’d tell ‘em I’m your bio-aunt.”

He actually sputtered, that time. Kaye was great, and absolutely his best friend for the past four years– she was also five-two, a hundred twenty pounds soaking wet, and visibly Latina, while he was six-five, fairly well-muscled, and about as white-with-blond-hair-blue-eyes as it was possible to be.

“You think they’d believe you?”

She squinted one eye, as though thinking.

“Half-bio-aunt.”

Maybe she was better at jokes than he gave her credit for.

“And the age thing?” he asked, almost more curious about the answer than expecting any backing off of the position.

He was not disappointed.

For the next half-hour, after she walked down to the couch and sat down on it and he followed that lead, she regaled him with a long, detailed, complicated, and completely made up family history– complete with the loss of two different family fortunes, one on each side, a fratricide just two generations ago, and a man so afraid of being done in that he maintained three different families with three different women, having kids at different times all so that if his brother killed him, the money, should it ever be found, was passed on to his next of kin instead of the conniving brother.

By the end of it, he was more impressed than anything.

“Hey, if the money every turns up, at least you’re, what? Mom, deadbeat wall street investor… third in line for it?”

“Fourth. You’re forgetting about the first wife’s second son, who I have a blood feud with over his gerbil killing my lizard.”

“Ah yeah, what was his name?”

“Hans dan Jark the third.”

“That’s not even a real name.”

“Was it supposed to be?”

Jeremy shook his head. “You mind if that’s my family story from now on?”

“Hell no! And record that shit if you ever tell anyone! I wanna see that!”