Page 32 of Brenna, Brat

“And then, depending on what they say, you could be rude right back to them. Like, if they pretend to be concerned, you could answer, ‘I’m sure that’s so deeply felt. I’m touched by all your truly genuine emotion,’” I said, my voice dripping with sarcasm, and then nodded. “See what I mean?”

“What if they really were concerned, and it wasn’t only pretend?” he asked.

“Then they would have already texted to say, ‘Hey, Campbell, I’m on your side.’ They wouldn’t wait to talk in a public place where they could call attention to the situation and you could be humiliated. Have a lot of people been in contact with you?”

“Enough,” he said briefly, and lost whatever hint of a smile he’d had while I’d talked about poo. “Let’s go.”

I was glad that we were going down the dark stairs together, and I was also glad that his car was totally intact when we got to street level. “We could eat at my apartment,” I suggested.

“That sounds good,” he answered, and he followed me to our next destination. Now he seemed even more tired than before, but there were a few more stairs ahead of us. We went slowly up to my room, where I offered him the couch. I’d spent a lot of time choosing furniture that was comfortable and built to last, and my sister Juliet had spent a few weeks sleeping there not that long ago with no complaints…except for the size. In order to fit into my apartment, it had to be short and of petite proportions, so with Campbell on it? He looked huge and the couch looked ridiculously tiny. The whole room did but it didn’t seem to bother him, even though he must have been mentally comparing it to his own beautiful house.

I thought about that as I started taking things out of the refrigerator. It wasn’t full-sized either and there were only two cabinets in my kitchen, so I didn’t have a ton of food to cook. I did have a burner and a toaster oven, but again, it was nothingcompared to his gleaming kitchen. “How is all this going to affect you personally? Like, in the near-term,” I said. “Are your bank accounts frozen? Are you going to be able to keep your house?”

“Right now, I’m solvent. The deed is in my name but I have no idea what will happen in the future,” he said. “I have no idea at all. As of today, I have zero income. I have investments and savings, but I don’t know what the government will try to claw back. My mother is probably burying her jewelry in the yard.”

“They probably have ground-penetrating radar,” I pointed out. Well, at least he’d always have a place to go. If the couch had been short for my sister, it was definitely going to suck for Campbell—but maybe I could take that, and he could use the bed. Although, that would be small for him, too.

“There’s press in front of my house, news vans on the street,” he mentioned. “I hate the idea of going back there.”

“For now, you don’t have to,” I said. He was fine where he was. “Since there’s no table, you can eat on the couch. I have a tray.”

He was hungry and scarfed down everything I’d prepared. I gave him more, saying that no, I wasn’t too hungry myself, and he also ate my share. Afterwards, he did look better.

“Thanks, Brenna. I better head out of here,” he said. “I can sneak into my house under the cover of darkness, like a thief.”

He was no thief. “You should stay here.”

“Here?” He looked at the petite sofa.

“I’ll take that and you’ll have the bed, because you’ll fit better,” I directed. “There’s no reason to drive home and tangle with reporters if they’re still hanging around.”

“I can’t stay,” he said, but it didn’t take much to convince him. He was already yawning a ton, and I bet that the thought of an empty house with predatory press panting on the sidewalk didn’t appeal in the least.

“Just for tonight,” he finally agreed, and I found an extra toothbrush.

It was funny to have him there with his feet hanging off the end of my bed, but I didn’t mind it. I found it nicer to be with people, real ones and not just Cleo. “Thank you,” Campbell told me. “Thanks, Brenna.” Then he took a deep breath and sighed, and I tried to think of how to help him even more. There had to be other things I could do.

This was how someone became indispensable, after all. A person could come to depend upon you, to need you, and then suddenly? They couldn’t let you go.

Chapter 7

Holy Mary. This wasn’t what I’d meant by “helping,” and it was certainly not the way to become indispensable. It was the way to disappear out of someone’s life forever.

“I can’t believe this happened,” I said, and the feelings of powerlessness and indignant anger almost made me cry. It was exactly like when my first pair of Schöne boots had turned up missing—except, of course, that this was a lot bigger in scale. At the rink, I had walked around looking under all the benches, getting more and more frustrated as the seconds ticked past and the realization set in that they were actually gone.

And I’d done the same thing this morning. I’d stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking at the open area next to the curb. Then I’d strode up and down the block, hurried around the corners at either end, and walked back and forth again, checking and rechecking with my eyes huge and disbelieving…

It was gone.

“I shouldn’t have parked it out here for the night,” Campbell said. “This is my fault.” He didn’t even sound that angry, but I was.

“This is totally and completely the fault of the people who stole it!” I insisted, and it certainly felt better to blame them instead of myself. After all, I was the one who’d encouraged him to stay over. I’d said that it was a safe neighborhood, that leaving his car in front of my building was fine. I’d even put my own car right behind his, so close that it would have been nearly impossible to extract either one of them. My bumper was now streaked with black paint, but his beautiful vehicle?

It was gone.

I turned to look at him to see if he was stomping off and glaring, the way I might have acted at the rink when my boots had gone missing. But instead, Campbell was looking at his phone. “Let’s go back upstairs so I can sit while I file all this paperwork shit,” he said, and now I thought that he sounded just…glum. Like, if things hadn’t been bad enough with his dad as a criminal, his job gone, and his future in tatters, now his freaking car had been stolen, too?

We trooped up to my apartment, which felt even smaller and stale, somehow. He took the couch and typed for a while before he looked up at me. “I should have known better,” he commented. “It was stupid to leave it out there.”

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