Based (loosely, asthis is a very minor character) on Holly Black's awesome book, Tithe. She owns everything, even lovely Natasha... sigh. Umh, for those of you wondering... While I was rereading Tithe for the umpteenth (is that an actual word?) time, I got kind of interested in the girl taking money at the rave Kaye and Roiben attend on the Jersey shore, so obviously, I created a little story about her:

Chapter 1: "Feeling a Little Blue"

The beehive wig had taken forever to find. For once however, cleaning out her mother's attic had been profitable to both parties, when usually it was useful to neither. It wasn't like her mother actually bothered to come up here in the first place. The only purpose the attic served was that of a dusty storage bin, occasionally yielding a prize like the wig she'd just unearthed.

So blonde it was almost white, the mass of fake hair that had almost been mistaken for a rolled up blanket rose from the mannequin's head in a mountain of silvery-blonde strands, pulled tightly into a beehive shape. Even coated in dust, the twisted hair shone in the feeble lamplight that served as Natasha's beacon in the sea of junk she'd been wading through for the past hour.

It didn't take her long to finish though. Her mother living alone caused much less junk to accumulate than a family of three would give off, and so there was much less cleaning to do. Natasha took the beehive downstairs, getting a wide-eyed stare from her mother.

"What… where did you find that?"

"In the attic, where else?" Natasha replied scathingly. It was just like Sara to ask her daughter to come over and clean, then be shocked with the girl's findings in the rarely used attic. Natasha watched as her mother pushed herself delicately off the couch she'd been lounging on, watching soap-operas. Sara still believed she was twenty most days, a belief called into question every time she found herself forgetting things, or feeling pain in her bones every time she moved.

Natasha held the wig possessively under one arm, backing up a step, away from her mother. Sara caught the movement and stopped a few feet away from Natasha, a small confused frown on her pursed, painted lips.

"Dear," Natasha cringed inwardly at the childish pet name, "You cannot seriously want that thing." Her mother held out her arms for the wig, raising an eyebrow when Natasha shook her head.

"Oh yes I do. And by the look of things, you haven't wanted it in a very long time." She paused, watching the frown deepen on her mother's face, sending up a string of wrinkles between the woman's eyebrows and around her pursed mouth. The confusion quickly left the woman's pale blue eyes, identical to her daughter's, replaced by anger.

"Kaylie - "

"Don't call me that."

"It's your name."

"No. Nobody calls me that but you anymore; it hasn't been my name for a very long time."

"It's the name you were born with." Sara spoke tiredly, almost dully, as if she were repeating lines in a play that she'd repeated over and over already.

"And I don't want it anymore." Natasha realized that she was edging into bitch-mode, and felt a flush of guilt at doing exactly what dad had always told her not to do- get in fights with mom.

A month before Natasha was supposed to leave for college, her father had gone to the local doctor's office for some chest pains he'd been experiencing. In six months, he was dead. Nobody- not the doctors, Sara, nor Natasha, still Kaylie then- had been able to do anything at all about it.

Her father's parting words to her, spoken on a hospital gurney, were not what she had expected. Not even an "I love you," or, "Take care of your mother for me," like she heard all the time in those made-for-TV movies. Dad knew all about the fights Kaylie and Sara often engaged in, as he was usually the one left to break up their spats. Now, there would be no one to play as referee, since he was dying. This was a fact Natasha knew, but had not been able to accept at the time.

"Trust you instincts." Almost a cliché, the single sentence was the only thing she heard before a nurse came to take the girl away. The doctors had work to do, and the last thing they needed was a teenager hanging around while they were trying to save a doomed life.

As the nurse gently pulled on her arm, Kaylie watched as her father's mouth continued to move, this time in silent murmurs. Even when she tried to lean close, with the nurse still yanking on her arm, she could hardly make out his words over the bleeping machines surrounding his bed, and the nurse's words of "c'mon dear".

"Natasha… Find Kaylie. Tell her about herself." The words were so softly spoken, with her father's eyes shut tightly against the pain in his chest. Kaylie had hardly enough time to hear them before the nurse gave one final tug on the girl's arm, pulling her successfully away from the dying man. For hours, Kaylie sat in the waiting room with her mother, silently turning the words over in her mind. Spoken together, they meant nothing to Kaylie. Worse, she doubted that they would make sense to anyone. Why would she need someone to tell her about herself… especially someone with a name like Natasha? She'd never met anyone with that name before, but it sounded Russian, so maybe it was someone from her father's home country…. The questions spun around her brain for hours, until around midnight when a short little doctor approached them, his mouth turned down and his eyes heavy with the information he had to bear to the two sleepless women waiting patiently for news.

After her father's death, Kaylie, for reasons unknown even to herself, changed her name to the one her father had spoken, in conjunction with her own. Now, almost two years later, everyone she knew called her Natasha, except for her mother, who insisted on calling the girl by her birth name.

The same mother with whom she was fighting with over a dusty beehive wig, of all things.

"Please, mom?" She asked, letting a whine creep into her voice.

"I've no idea why you even want that mangy old thing in the first place." Sara's tone softened slightly as she added, "God knows, it hasn't seen any sunlight in years."

Natasha grinned, taking the softening of her mother's voice as an unspoken "okay."

"Thank you, mom."

Dying the wig was another matter entirely, but one for which Natsha thought she was at least mostly prepared. Since she was majoring in art at the college she'd been attending for the past couple of years, she had full access to all the amenities the campus had to offer. Several of the art professors had looked at her strangely when she explained her goal, but were willing to help if things got out of hand.

At the end of the day, she was left with blue stained fingertips and a bright cerulean blue wig that she knew would kill her mother on sight if Sara ever ended up seeing it.

"We need a door girl."

"What?" Natasha was shaken out of her reverie by her roommate, Lisa. The girls had become fast friends during their freshman year, and were now often referred to as Snow and Rose around campus. Like in the fairytale, it was rare to see Lisa without Natasha being somewhere nearby, and vice versa. Natasha was fair, with pale blonde hair that hung curtain style half-way down her back, while Lisa's skin was cinnamon colored, and her dark hair so unruly that she was forced to keep it relatively short, else it would become completely unmanageable. Complete opposites, and best friends. Natasha had found herself taking Lisa for granted, as if she'd known the girl her entire life. She had to admit that it was nice to have someone to talk to.

Lisa had barged into their room only a half an hour ago, talking about a rave a bunch of kids were putting on in celebration of the holiday. Apparently, Lisa had been roped into helping, and was trying to get Natasha to do the same.

"A door girl." Lisa repeated, brushing a curly strand of brown hair off her face. At the look of Natasha's confusion, Lisa clarified, rolling her eyes comically. "You know, someone to take money at the door. You can show off your costume, and you won't have to dance…" It was common knowledge to most of their friends that Natasha hated dancing, and would rather just stay on campus and work on her clothing designs than go out and party. "C'mon, Nat! It's Halloween. You can't stay locked up inside on Halloween…" Lisa trailed off, looking hopeful, and Natasha knew, even before the words came out of her mouth, that she was going.

The abandoned club, once named 'Galaxia', straddled the Jersey coast and Atlantic Ocean on a burned-out pier only an hour from the college Natasha attended during the day. Natasha parked carefully, out of the way. She didn't want to imagine how many cars were going to be shoved into the tiny parking lot when the rave beagn in earnest. But she was here early to set up, and was grateful not having to search for a place to park. She noticed Lisa's car already in the lot, and wondered for the twentieth time why exactly she'd bothered to show up at all.

As she walked toward the building, the memory of her father's last words came unbidden to her mind. "Trust your instincts… Find Kaylie, tell her who she is…." Shaking herself, Natasha wrapped her arms around herself to shield from the bite of the old memory and the snap of the wind that had suddenly picked up off the sea. It was a holiday, and one of her favorites at that- she didn't want to be reliving one of the worst nights of her life now.

Natasha strolled into the abandoned building, watching as a couple of young men, obviously from the college, rigged up strobe lights near the bar. She had hardly been watching them for a minute when Lisa pounced on her, grabbing her arm.

"Ooh, Natasha. You look awesome." The words gave Natasha pause as she glanced down at her outfit. The dyed blue wig completely hid her hair from view, and she'd matched it with blue colored makeup and jewelery. Her new lip piercing was still a little tender, and she had been wary about changing her ring, but the blue one matched so well that she'd decided to go along with it anyway. Since she hadn't had any blue dresses, she'd thrown on a black tube top over a hugely flouncy black tulle skirt left over from a play she'd been in last Christmastime.

The pair of them walked around the huge room that made up most of the club while several people flurried around, putting the finishing touches on the "décor."

"Look." Lisa commanded, bringing Natasha's attention to where her finger was pointing. Natasha followed the line of her sight and noticed for the first time a large wooden deck jutting out the side of the club.

"Is it safe?" Natasha asked, glancing apprehensively at the old boards making up the bare patio deck.

"Who cares?" Lisa immediately replied. She glanced at Natasha, and winced at the scathing look her friend was giving her. "'Course it is. I mean, it should be. As long as nobody goes jumping off the edge, you know what I mean? I don't want to even think of all the toxic shit floating around in the water down there." She shrugged, pulling Natasha in the opposite direction so that she could see the place she would be stationed at throughout the night, taking people's money.

"And I don't have to dance?" She asked Lisa an hour later, after night had properly fallen and the first "customers" were stepping out of their cars, ready to party. Lisa's hair was now in two brown pigtails, crowned with a pair of sparkly plastic antennae bouncing around her head. She looked like a cross between Pippi Longstocking and the teletubbies' hot little sister. That is, if Pippi Longstocking had ever worn a neon pink mini dress with matching go-go boots.

"Don't worry about it." Lisa replied laughing, disappearing into the quickly growing group of dancers on the floor.

"Oh, I love your hair."

"Nice wig!"

"That is one kick-ass updo."

The greetings of the 'customers' made Natasha grin, and she was easily able to murmur appreciation for their outfits as well. Anyone who had bothered to dress up had gone all out, or at least, that's what it seemed like to her. After all, it was Halloween, the one day of the year you wouldn't get stared at for walking down the street in a rainbow Mohawk and chicken suit, complete with feathers.

Or maybe that guy dressed like that every day.