Page 8 of Brenna, Brat

“Here,” he offered, and held out his own hands. “You hold on and I’ll go backwards.” Slowly, we started to move. He was just towing me but at least I stayed—

“Holy Mary!” I yelped as I wobbled.

“You’re ok,” he said, and kept me upright. “Hold onto my arms instead. When was the last time you skated?”

“When I was nine,” I answered. “It was on a pond so it was a lot bumpier. How about you?”

“Last weekend. Whoops! You’re ok,” he repeated, because I had nearly fallen again. “I played a lot of hockey, all through high school and college.”

“Really? My sister was a college athlete, too. She was a swimmer.”

“How about you? Were you good at sports?”

I clutched his arms and thought how weird this was for a first date. Although, it wasn’t really that. He hadn’t asked me out more than an hour in advance, which meant that he hadn’t been planning as he would have if this meant something, something other than killing time.

“Good at sports?” I repeated. I was focusing so much on not going down that I didn’t laugh at his question. “No, not at all. I was into art, though.”

“So that’s why you work in a gallery.”

I started to shake my head but then got scared that the movement would throw me off and make me crash again. My eyes were locked on the ice beneath my feet, that hard, unforgiving surface.

“Look up,” Campbell directed. “You’ll keep your balance better that way.”

I did look up, right at the middle of his chest where my gaze naturally rested. He was a lot taller than I was.

“There you go,” he complimented, and I immediately almost fell. “I can tell that you’re athletic. You couldn’t have been doing only arty things.”

“No, I’m not athletic and I wasn’t always doing ‘arty things.’ I had to swim for a long time.”

“You mean, you had to cross a lake, or…”

“I mean that I had to be on a team for a few years, until Nicola let me quit,” I said.

“Who’s Nicola?”

He wasn’t the only one who had a sister, so I explained all the people in my family, Nicola, Sophie, Addie, Juliet, Patrick, me, and Grace.

“Sophie,” he repeated. “That’s funny.”

“Why?”

He was checking behind us again, as he had been every few seconds so we didn’t bash someone over. A chain of little kids went by, shrieking and laughing, and he smiled at them. “Huh?” he asked, but I was busy falling and didn’t answer.

Despite the fact that it was cold, that my feet ached in the skates, that my butt hurt from impact, and that I had no skills whatsoever, I didn’t have a terrible time. We talked about the gallery and about his job, too. He worked for a large company that seemed to do a lot of stuff. Ok, it was more technical than just “stuff,” as he explained it. They were a major landlord herein Michigan and in other states, and they also did financial, transactional things. His division, which he seemed to run, was all about mortgages.

“Is that what you always wanted to do?” I asked him.

He laughed. “Has anyone ever said that they wanted to grow up and aggregate financial instruments? No, I wanted to be a hockey player and also a secret agent. That was the plan for a long time.”

“You couldn’t keep playing hockey?”

“Nope,” he said, shaking his head. Movement like that didn’t seem to throw him off-balance. “I was good enough to get recruited for a college team, but I wasn’t going any further. Also, it turns out that I’m about as sneaky as a rhino, so a career as a secret agent wouldn’t happen, either.”

“It would have been dangerous if you’re that loud.”

“Exactly. I’d probably also feel bad about arresting people.” He checked over his shoulder. “Anyway, I was done with hockey.”

“You’re still skating every weekend,” I pointed out. And he was really good at it, too. I could tell that he could have been one of the people flying around if he wasn’t encumbered by me.

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