Page 16 of Brenna, Brat

“Don’t be a brat,” she said shortly, and hung up. It was probably pregnancy hormones that made her so irritable, because I hadn’t been bratty at all.

No, I wasn’t a brat, and I was getting tired of hearing that word. I wasn’t going to serve as Campbell Bates’ personal challenge in his quest to have everyone like him, either. I looked across the room at the silk crepe draped over Cleo and then I got up, walked the two steps to the dress form, and yanked it off her. I waded the fabric into a ball and tossed it into the corner, next to the garbage can. I hated it; everything about that yardage was ugly.

This whole night felt that way. “I don’t care,” I told Cleo, and she believed me.

Chapter 4

If we had ever been curious, now we knew what happened to chewing gum statues/commentaries on urban life when the heat went on too high and stayed that way over a weekend.

“Fucking hell!” Dion breathed. His eyes were huge and I was sure that mine were, too, as we surveyed the damage. “I better get Alecta to come in.”

Yes, our boss needed to see this, the result of her ignoring my repeated requests to have someone fix the out-of-whack HVAC system, or to talk to the landlord (her mother) and ask her to get it done. “It’s set at sixty-eight,” I said, looking at the ancient thermostat. I had removed my coat and was holding my hair up and off the back of my neck as I fanned my face with my hand.

Dion had taken off both his coat and his shirt, thus revealing a skinny body that was already glistening with sweat. “Sixty-eight? More like a hundred-eight.” He went to the front door and opened it, letting in some cold air. “I’ll do the windows upstairs, too.”

He was motivated by personal comfort and not a sense of responsibility to his job, but I was glad that—what? I stared. “Dion, what’s on your back?” I asked.

“Huh?” He stopped and turned his head, trying to see what I was talking about. “What’s wrong with my back?”

Unless he had the neck flexibility of an owl, he wouldn’t have been able to read it. “Look,” I said, and took a picture.

“Fuck you whore,” he read from my screen. There was a smiley face, too. “That looks like permanent marker.”

“How did this happen?” I asked, and he shrugged.

“I’m a heavy sleeper.”

“Where have you been sleeping?” I wondered, but he made a dismissive sound and waved his hands before he disappeared upstairs. I ventured to the door to the basement, and the rush of heat that emerged when I opened it nearly knocked me over. I also removed my shirt, deciding that the tank top I’d worn as a base layer was appropriate when my workplace approached the temperature of Death Valley at noon in the middle of July. I bent and took off my boots, too, the leather Schöne pair that Campbell had given me.

Since we’d gone to dinner, I’d heard from him. I’d been surprised by it, given how he’d dismissed me at the end of the evening, but then he’d texted. It was only to say something dumb, though.

Ok, it had been something funny, something about seeing a piece of gum stuck to a street sign and how he considered itto be a commentary on urban life, making him reflect on the loneliness and absurdity of human existence in this city. I wasn’t going to fall for overtures like that as easily as I’d fallen on the ice at the rink. I didn’t exist as a friendship challenge for him to feel good about his abundant charm, so I hadn’t answered. I had looked at that text a lot, though, and smiled. The gum statues had been pretty absurd, and they were worse now that they were sticky puddles.

Our boss made it to the gallery a few hours later, by which time we’d managed to get the temperature back to a normal level so that Dion had put on his shirt and I’d returned to wearing all my clothing. We’d left the melted gum, though, which now served as a commentary on the heating failures in our building.

Alecta parked illegally in the loading zone, right behind her nephew’s car, and then breezed through the front door. “What’s the disaster?” she called. I had disconnected the scream since it had scared me so much when Campbell had last been here, but I had made sure that it was working again for our boss’s arrival today because I didn’t feel like arguing about it. She smiled when she heard it, then she opened the door again to repeat the noise. “Hilarious,” she chuckled. “You guys, look! I got a new tattoo on my arm.” She pulled up her sleeve and showed off a design that looked like a child had drawn on her in the dark.

“Aunt Alecta!” Dion said, making a sweeping gesture toward the multicolored streams of goo on the white display pedestals. “The art is gone!”

She finally noticed. “Did I get robbed? What is that stuff?”

It took a while to make clear that the temperature in the gallery had been so high that the sculptures had melted, and it took another while to convince her that she was going to have to call the artist to explain the situation. I also tried to impress upon her that she or Chic, her mother, would have to talk to the insurance company and it was going to be a big problem. Very big, and very hard to clean off the wood floors. Those were original to this 1912 building and they needed to be refinished anyway, since (like everything else) no one had bothered to keep them in good repair.

“So, old gum was running all over the gallery,” my sister Sophie summed up later that day. All of us Currans were at our parents’ house for dinner, something that our mother forced upon us fairly regularly.

“It was melted gum that had been chewed by thousands of strangers, mixing it with their bacteria and spit,” I said, and Juliet looked like she felt sick. “So much saliva,” I said with relish, and she got up and left the table. We had all come without spouses/significant others tonight, so her fiancé Beckett wasn’t here, and neither were Addie’s, Sophie’s, and Nicola’s husbands. My mom had requested it because she said she had an important announcement to make, which was unusual for her. No, not the announcement part—she loved to cause scenes with dramatic declarations at our family get-togethers, and that was what I didn’t understand. Usually, she wanted the biggest audience possible, so why would she have excluded my sisters’ partners?

She was always good in front of a crowd because she commanded everyone’s attention, and that was a hard thing to do in our family. I found myself talking louder and making stories bigger to get them to notice what I was saying, to notice me, but Mom didn’t have that problem. She had an innate sense of spectacle.

Anyway, the dinner had been pretty good, because my mom was also a competent cook. She had been very quiet throughout the meal and again, that wasn’t like her. My siblings were rarely quiet themselves and they’d had a lot to talk about. They had focused on their children (as always) but we had also discussed Juliet’s wedding a little bit, without anyone mentioning that we were worried about her fiancé. I’d brought up some problems at work—with Dion, specifically, and his extreme laziness. But yes, mostly the topic was kids, kids, and more kids. I’d had to pinch myself awake and Nicola told me not to be rude, because I’d done it very obviously.

“That was bland,” Grace said to me as we got up to clear the table.

Sometimes she hit the nail right on the head. “You’re right, dinner was so boring,” I said, nodding in agreement. “I wish they would talk about normal things again.”

“I meant how Mom forgot to put salt in the mashed potatoes. Something’s wrong,” she explained, and then drifted off toward the back yard. I watched her and thought about what she’d said, and now I agreed that the side dishes had been a little tasteless. That had been unusual, also.

After the clean-up was done, our mother carried in a large platter to where we had regrouped in the living room, all seven of us Curran children and Dad in his usual chair. “Dessert,” she announced.

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