Page 44 of Brenna, Brat

He didn’t say, “Unlike me,” but I knew what he was thinking. “Your reputation is fine,” I said sternly. “If people have questions about it, they’re stupid. I’ll tell them so.”

“You already told the woman at the grocery store to mind her own business or take it out to the parking lot to discuss it with you there,” he reminded me.

“I didn’t like how she was staring at you. When she mentioned that she knew your father and how he was always, um…” She’d said in a loud voice that she’d always known that something was off about Ghregg Bates, ever since they’d worked on fundraising together for their sons’ hockey team. I’d told her to move along, and that had worked after I also said that I’d be happy to talk to her out of the range of any surveillance cameras. She’d understood my hint. Campbell and I been forced into grocery shopping because although he’d gotten a delivery, he had forgotten a few things for the dinner we were going to cook. He was staying in, alone, for more of his days than was healthy. That was why I kept saying “yes” to meeting him at the rink. He needed to leave and experience human contact, didn’t he? Sure, that was one reason, but it was also fun to spend time together.

But that made me wonder.

“Where are your other friends?” I asked.

“Do you want their exact locations?”

“I mean, why haven’t they shown up for you? Why aren’t they wanting to go skate instead of me?”

“You don’t have to come with me,” he said.

“I want to be here,” I quickly told him. “But why don’t they?”

Campbell kept gliding and I looked up at his face to—

“Whoops! That was a bad one.” He knelt down on the ice, where I’d fallen forward onto my knees, hands, and elbows before ending up flat on my chest. “Are you all right?”

I nodded.

“Did you hit your head? Can you move everything ok?” he asked, and I nodded again. Very carefully, he helped me sit up. “What happened?”

“I was watching you instead of where I was going, because I thought that I’d made you upset by talking about the friends who had abandoned you.”

He shook his head slightly. “I’m not upset because my friends have abandoned me. A lot of them have reached out to see how I’m doing and to say that they have faith in me. I feel bad that I haven’t answered most of their messages. It’s the same reason that I’m worried about meeting Beckett for lunch at a restaurant tomorrow. I don’t want to talk about it, not about any of it.”

“But—”

“Even if you say, ‘It’s not your fault,’ it was,” he told me. “I should have seen something. I was too stupid and blind, and look where it got us.”

I shook my head, but he nodded again.

“You’re getting cold,” he pointed out, and helped me all the way up.

“I want to sit out for a minute, but you should skate by yourself a little,” I suggested. I thought that his time on the ice was like when I talked to Cleo and got something off my chest. It was his outlet. The rink was pretty empty today, since the weather had turned warmer and other people were switching from winter to spring/summer mental modes. I stepped onto the rubber floor and he set off, faster than I’d ever seen him go, skating forward and backward, flying over the ice. When he came to the boards where I waited, he was out of breath.

“Do you want to come out again?” he asked.

I was stiff and achy from that last fall. “No, but I’ll wait more if you want to keep at it.”

“I think I got it all out,” Campbell told me. “Let’s go see what we can do in your atelier.”

Reluctantly, I nodded. I had gotten to the point that I hated to be there. The leak had only worsened, and the smell of mildew or mold (or whatever it was that made the walls and ceiling so discolored) made me sick. I certainly couldn’t bring over fabric or the new machine I’d bought, not to a place where they could get ruined by dampness and stench. It was a huge, unhappy waste that made me furious, which I’d let the landlord know about. Many times. None of my complaints had made a difference.

But today, Campbell had said that he was going up on the roof to see what he could do about the problem. We drove to the building and hiked to the top of the stairs, where a broken door allowed roof access. Then I waited and watched anxiously as he walked over the guano-encrusted, trash-scattered tiles.

“This is…” He shook his head as he glanced back at me. “It’s a mess. There should be flashing all around here…look at the size of this puddle! When was the last time we had a big storm?” He stepped carefully, looking at everything and reporting on it, and it didn’t sound like the problems were getting better as he approached the area over my atelier. “There’s an actual hole here,” he called. He suggested some ideas for a temporary fix and he kept moving, poking at things, and scaring me until I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Please come back here. Campbell, please. Just stop,” I said. “I’m so afraid that you’re going to fall through into the floor below us!”

“I’m ok,” he said, but he did start coming back toward me and the stairs, still stepping cautiously. Obviously, no one was going to fix the whole roof. Much like Chic and Alecta had let the gallery building turn to crap, the same thing had happened here, and I had been stupid enough to rent a unit at the top floor of this rotten place. Once I saw that he was safe, I turned and started to walk down to my unit. More like, I started to stomp back down.

“Hey,” he said, and I paused because I remembered my first pair of Schöne boots. Losing those hadn’t been his fault, and the building’s lack of upkeep wasn’t, either.

“I’m not mad at you, I’m just really upset,” I said. “I’m upset about the roof and about my bad decision to rent here. I wanted to get my new sewing machine and I got all caught up in the idea of having a place of my own to work…I kept calling it my ‘atelier’ and really, it’s only a dark, dank little room with a hole in the ceiling and mold growing in the wall. I’m angry at the landlord but mostly I’m angry at myself for making this dumb mistake.”

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