Page 47 of Brenna, Brat

“I don’t like anything about this,” my oldest sister broke into my thoughts, “but we have other problems. The shoes you ordered for JuJu don’t fit.”

“I’ll make them fit,” I said, and Nicola told me that if I tried anything like toe amputation, she would amputate my head. Before we escalated into actual violence, I hung up. There was plenty I had to do for this wedding that didn’t involve cutting off parts of people’s feet. The bridesmaid dresses had arrived at the salon and I was going to check them over and pick them up, and then I’d have to start alterations…

In my mind, I heard Campbell’s voice telling me that it was ok. I walked to the basement steps, though, because I needed more.

“Campbell?” I yelled.

“What’s up?” he called back.

“Can you say it again?”

“You’re doing great and this is all going to work. I promise,” he told me, and I took a deep breath and nodded. So far, setting up shop in his basement, which I preferred to call the lower level, was working out fine. There was plenty of light, plenty of space, and plenty of support from the guy upstairs—not God, but the homeowner. It turned out that he really had paid attention when he went out with his dad’s construction and maintenance crews, because he knew how to build things. He had made a wonderful cutting table for me, exactly the right height and exactly the right size, and he was working on racks and shelves for fabric storage. He was also strong enough to carry machines, chairs, and everything else I needed. He’d even put Cleo into the back of his SUV and brought her over, which made my apartment feel a lot emptier.

Yes, I was totally set. It was all that I needed, nothing more was necessary at all, except maybe an extra set of hands to help me sew. Or, maybe, if Campbell had wanted to use his hands in other ways…

My phone started ringing again, and it was a different sister wanting to talk about wedding details, and also about why I’d let my former coworker move in with our mother. It helped them both, I kept saying, and then Sophie asked me a question which I didn’t care to answer: “When have you ever wanted to help people?”

I was too busy to worry about what she thought and I’d never cared, anyway. I rushed out to the bridal salon in Campbell’s SUV, which had a lot more room to hang the dresses that I was picking up. Then I had to stop at the fabric store for thread, and then I had to talk to the caterer (again), and there were eighteen thousand other important things that I had to get to, immediately, or everything might have fallen apart for this wedding. If that happened, I thought that Juliet might fall apart, too. She’d come over to my new lower-level workroom the night before to try on her dress and I had discovered that she’d lost more weight.

“JuJu, you better start eating!” I’d told her. “You’re going to look like a scarecrow if you don’t.”

“I don’t have any appetite,” she had answered, which wasn’t like my sister at all. Due to her devotion to athletics, she’d always eaten mounds of food, more than at least two or three of the rest of us, combined. She’d pressed her palm against her stomach.

“Don’t tell me,” I’d said, rolling my eyes. “You’re pregnant, too?”

Then her own eyes had filled up with tears, which was something I still couldn’t get used to seeing with her. “I wish I were,” she said. “I just got my stupid period.”

“You’re bloated and the dress still fits like this? Holy Mary.” I’d eyed the waistline, considering how much more I could take it in. “I’m going to make you eat a sandwich before you leave here. Juliet, calm down! You’ll have plenty of time to have babies with Beckett. Aren’t there enough of them in our family already? Why would we need more?”

“Brat,” she’d said, and then she told me if I poked her with another pin then I was going to have a real problem on my hands. But she’d stopped crying, and she had eaten with me and Campbell. Then, when she’d gotten home, she’d sent me a message.

“What’s going on with you two?”

And the answer was obvious: nothing. Nothing like any of my sisters were thinking, anyway, but my indispensable plan—my plan to become an essential part of his life—was working even better than I could have imagined. He’d admitted that he’d opened his lower level for my use because he was bored and needed structure, and I certainly had things for him to do, like errands to run and calls to return. He seemed to have plenty of other activities, though. Like, he was volunteering at his favorite kids’ charity because he loved it, and he’d been so upset about cancelling the big fundraiser that his former company had sponsored. He was also heavily invested in finding a new joband he was looking all over the country. He had looked all over the world, actually, and he’d told me that he didn’t mind the thought of moving very far away. No one would know him, he’d said. It would be a relief.

My phone rang, again, and now I wasn’t ignoring it like I used to. I thought fondly of the days when I used to look at the screen and think, “I’m not picking up and she can suck it.” Times had changed and I was always picking up, even from numbers I didn’t recognize—like right now.

“Hi!” a voice told me.

“Alecta?” I asked suspiciously. “You have a new number? What do you want?”

“Guess where I’m calling from?”

I really wasn’t in the mood to play this game with her, or actually, even to bother to speak. That didn’t affect our conversation.

“I’m at the airport on my way to Laos! Isn’t that exciting?” she asked, and again, she didn’t bother to wait for my reply. “I know,” she continued. “It’s like I’m in a movie, right?”

“You business just burned down,” I was goaded to say. “What film genre were you thinking about?”

She ignored that, just like she’d always ignored my requests to have a plumber come fix the sink in the employee bathroom so that it had running water all the time, instead of only sporadically. “I was trying to get in touch with Dion but he’s not answering, and neither is his mom,” she announced. She meantthe woman who was her own sister, but Dion had told me that they didn’t get along at all.

“Maybe they’re mad that you ran away while he was in danger and then never talked to him about his lost job,” I suggested, and wondered why I was bothering.

“I need someone to go see my mother,” she told me. “It’s going to be you.”

“You want me to go see Chic Cathay?”

“Ugh, I can’t stand when people call her that. Her name is Shyril Stanke,” she said. She had momentarily forgotten to use her excited, upbeat voice. It was a tone she employed to make sure that we were all aware of how much fun she was having and how much she was enjoying herself, because it was important that everyone was jealous. In the same flat voice, she continued, “I can’t stand when people have to use fancy pseudonyms to prop themselves up.”

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