Page 7 of Brenna, Brat

I hadn’t been on ice in at least fifteen years, since I was around nine. I remembered wobbly ankles, frozen sticks that you could trip over, and Grace falling on her face and getting a bloody nose. The crimson gore had spattered across the snow and Juliet had almost fainted, and that had been a pretty fun day.

I wasn’t doing anything else right now, so why not? “Where and when?” I wrote back, and he gave me the name of a rink, not a lake, in the suburbs. I hurried upstairs and chose what I believed to be a good outfit for this excursion, although I wasn’ttotally confident in it and that was a feeling I didn’t enjoy. Everyone knew that I was the person to turn to for issues of style, which was why I had been over at Juliet and Beckett’s house to give advice on the kitchen design. I wondered how he was feeling…

The trip to the suburbs was slushy and boring, but when I arrived, I had to admit that it was a pretty area. I was used to my parents’ house, which had one of the biggest yards in our neighborhood in Detroit, but it was nothing compared to the places I drove past. Some of them even rivaled Juliet’s mansion where she lived with Beckett. We hadn’t seen him there today, but it didn’t mean that he was off sick somewhere. She always talked about how he was a fiend for work and he was probably at the office. His absence hadn’t signified anything bad.

Anyway, I parked at the rink and as I did, I saw the second car that Campbell had brought to the gallery, the SUV into which we’d loaded the sculpture. Like his other vehicle, it was new and perfect, no dents, no scratches, no ugly bumper stickers or stupid magnets. I rubbed my arms, remembering the strain of carrying that load, and I also remembered running back inside and quickly jotting down my name and number on the business card and then stapling it to his receipt. It was certainly presumptuous that he had assumed I’d meant for him to reach out like he had.

But whatever, I was here and as I’d noted, I had nothing else to do. Was this outfit ok? Was I still so pale? In my mirror at home, I’d been disappointed by my pastiness. I tried to check my reflection in the back window of a car I passed, but it wascoated in too much winter dirt and salt to see anything except that my hair was still auburn and yes, my skin still appeared ghostly white. My blue eyes, lighter than Sophie’s and not the cornflower shade that Nicola had, were just smudges and I couldn’t see any of the makeup I’d put on.

The driver’s window rolled down. “Why are you looking into my trunk?” a man asked, and I quickly walked away.

Campbell Bates was waiting right where he said he’d be, near the skate rental counter. He smiled at me as I walked in, and I remembered him doing that when he’d been in the gallery, too. It was because he was so confident, so self-assured. And I was angry at myself when I realized that he was correct to feel that way, because I had jumped in to take my turn in whatever game he was playing with me—I couldn’t immediately understand what it was, but he had to have a reason for wanting me to meet him like this.

Anyway, I hadn’t had other plans, and he’d paid for this outing. He had even rented skates for me, and he held them up as I approached. “Brenna Curran,” he announced. “Hello and welcome to the rink. I got you a size seven like you told me.”

“Hello.Thank you.”

“You’re here right when you said you would be,” he continued.

I wasn’t the sister who ran late—that was Juliet and sometimes Grace, who could have been lost or could have lost her keys or her car. “I’m timely,” I answered.

“Are you also really a size seven?” He looked down at my feet, which were in the black Schöne boots that I loved.

“Why would I have lied about my shoe size?”

“I’ll tell you a family secret,” he said, and led the way over to a wooden bench. “My sister says that she wears an eight, but she’s actually a ten. She hates her big feet so she lies.”

“That’s your family secret? That’s as bad as it gets?”

I swore that for a split second, his face changed, but then he shrugged. “That’s all we’ve got, Carrington and the shoes that pinch.”

“Every time you say her name, it reminds me of something.” I carefully took off my boots and put them under the bench. “I can’t place it, though.” Also, why was this skate so stiff? How was someone supposed to get her foot into it?

“Carrington is also a city in North Dakota. It always pissed her off a lot that they had already used her name,” he said. “By the way, she liked the sculpture.”

I stopped trying to fight my way into the stupid skate. “Really? I thought she hated everything.”

“Not everything,” he answered. “She loves me a lot, but who wouldn’t?” He laughed after he spoke. “I wish I’d had my phone out to get a picture of your face when I said that. I never had someone call me an asshole like you just did, without saying the word or even using her middle finger.”

“I know I look like that,” I admitted. “My sisters are always telling me to stop glaring at people and in high school, I won the award for Best Bitch Face. It was an online thing, not in the actual yearbook.”

“I thought it was funny. Hold on.” He suddenly got off the bench and knelt in front of me, and he pried open the skate as wide as it would go. “Now try.”

With Campbell’s help, I got them onto my size seven feet, and he put on his own skates in a second. “I used to play hockey,” he commented as I looked at them. They seemed well-used, and if he’d been a hockey player, then he did know how to use them.

“I haven’t done this in a while,” I admitted as we walked over the rubber flooring toward the ice. It was fairly full of people, some carefully marching and some whizzing around like they were racing.

“It’s like riding a bike.” He stepped out onto the ice and stood there confidently.

Well, I wasn’t good at that, either. I stepped a lot less confidently onto the slippery surface and then held the wall.

Campbell glided backwards a few feet and then returned. “Can you skate at all?”

“Of course!” I told him, and let go. I pushed off with one foot, slid for a shaky yard or so, and went down.

“Whoops! Here we are,” he said, and literally picked me up, off the ice. “You ok?”

Maybe, except for my butt, my hands, and my self-respect. “Great,” I muttered.

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