"Irony upon irony," she muttered. "Wait, who do you know?"
"His granddaughter is my best friend," Jamie told her. "I only found out about all this shit last year, and not in a great way." He didn't feel like rehashing everything from the summer.
"Of all the gin joints in the world," Roxanna said, shaking her head. "I didn't mean to dump all this on you, I just...I don't have a lot of friends in the city, and like I told you, Alice doesn't believe me."
"It's OK," Jamie said, squeezing her hand. "Kat says they still like to play power games sometimes, like it's still Greece and they're still all-powerful. It's why I've never met him."
"It was OK, at first," she said. "She wanted to test me, I guess, so she made the ghosts appear, and I almost fell out of my chair. And, you know, I freaked out. God, I'm not even 19 yet, and I find out all this shit, and apparently I'm some sort of whining child to her, and I should respect her just because she says so-which, fuck that-and her mother turned into an island and she had it so much worse than me. And I should just get used to the fact that parents leave, and play favorites, and in all likelihood, don't give two shits about the daughter they left behind!" Her voice had been rising, in both volume and pitch, the longer she talked.
She sank back onto her stool, hands shaking as she reached for her coffee cup. "Sorry. I'm sorry. And everything just kind of spiraled from there, and that's when she stole my blood. So I could never hide from her."