Chapter 29
October 22, 2023
Corey:
brYNN WHERE ARE YOU
Corey:
SERIOUSLY SOS! PICK UP!
My phone beeps in my bag as I stick it in the lockers at Dogue’s.
‘You’re in the big room,’ Hilde says as I come in.
‘Thanks,’ I say, but I just stand there. I’m so tired. I tossed and turned all night, making the bed roll around the room, while I thought about Sienna and the kiss. I went through a million stages in processing the kiss: I was drunk and shouldn’t have led her on. But actually, what if I am queer? Nah, I like men. But the kiss was so good. Nah, definitely straight. But Brynn, it’s 2023 and everyone’s a little bit queer, right?
Just the thought of the kiss makes me burn with something—lust or shame, I haven’t figured it out yet.
‘Yo, earth to Australia, you hear me?’ Hilde says. ‘Big dog room with Angelo. That’ll be fun for you, right? You guys are dating now, yeah?’
I snap back to reality. ‘Wait, Robert’s not working today?’
She shrugs. ‘Had to change his shift, got a doctor’s appointment.’
I’m about to ask her to swap rooms with me so I don’t have to see Angelo, when Doug sticks his head in the airlock.
‘Brynn, my office, please.’
I follow Doug into his office and he gestures for me to take a seat. His face is unreadable, but the energy in the room is chilly.
‘So, Brynn,’ he begins in a low tone. ‘You’ve been quite busy lately, it seems. I saw you at the Halloween dog parade.’
I smile at him. ‘I thought I saw you there! It was so much fun. We should organise something like that here, I bet the clients would love it.’
But Doug doesn’t crack a smile. Instead, he reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a clipboard with a wad of papers attached. As he slides it over, I recognise it as Corey’s petition. The pages are full of signatures. When I’d come to collect it, I’d assumed someone else from the parade committee had beaten me to it, but now I see that it’s been intercepted. Fuck , I think. Lucky the parade didn’t end up relying on the printed petition to get passed.
‘Brynn, when you were first hired here, you were told not to take on any other positions in the pet care industry. Your involvement with the parade is a blatant conflict of interest.’
I frown in confusion. ‘But it’s a volunteer committee. I wasn’t paid to help out.’
‘The parade has corporate sponsorship.’
‘It didn’t when I put the petition on the desk.’
‘Brynn,’ he huffs. ‘Must we get into the semantics of things?’
Anger begins to coil in my stomach. I clench my fists and take a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry, I should have asked about the petition.’
He sighs and peers at me over his glasses. ‘It appears that you also approached a Dogue’s client to utilise their social media to promote the petition, and Sarah-Jane also tells me that you’ve been posting about Perdita on your social media. Our special clients are not your own personal mouthpiece.’
I bite my lip. Perdi’s mum had been so lovely when I messaged asking about the parade. She’d even texted me pictures of her and Perdita at last year’s parade in costume. Plus, Perdita followed me on TikTok first!
I’m about to defend myself when Doug holds out his hand to stop me. ‘Then there’s the matter of you accepting a private pet sitting job.’
I grit my teeth. How did he find out about that?
Doug continues, ‘And lastly, fraternisation. Both with other staff members and , most worryingly, with a pet parent.’
My mouth opens and closes. ‘What?’
‘There were rumours about you and Cruz, who has since been let go, but you’ve also been seen out with Angelo.’
‘I never dated either of them,’ I say. Not knowingly, at least , I think.
‘But you did date Lucas Bennett,’ he says and takes another sheet of paper from his drawer. He slides it over the desk and my heart stops. It’s a printed screenshot of what looks like a Substack. ‘Mully and Dad: Dating the daycare girl’.
My stomach turns. He wrote about me? My vision blurs but not before I see sentences like: ‘wide-eyed and na?ve’ and ‘A native Australian girl planning to take the literary world by storm—from a TriBeCa doggy daycare . ’
I am breathing heavily, the room going in and out of focus when Doug speaks again. ‘Here’s your final payslip,’ he says, passing an envelope over. ‘Clean out your locker, Brynn. I’m no longer in need of your services.’
I call Corey as soon as I’ve walked out of Dogue’s. But she’s been trying to get hold of me all morning and her words rush out before I can speak. ‘Brynn, that guy, Lucas—’
‘He wrote a Substack about me,’ I interrupt.
She pauses. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because Doug gave me a printout while he was firing me,’ I answer, looking down at the piece of paper in my hand. I’ve been gripping it so tightly that it’s creased. ‘How did you find out about it?’
‘Um, because Jake forwarded it to me. Apparently he’s been following Lucas for a while and then realised who he was when he saw the post about you.’
‘Jake recognised me?’
‘Sorry, sis,’ she says. ‘But that’s not the end of it.’
I take a deep breath. ‘What?’
‘Maybe you should come home. I’m working here today. Have you got an inhaler? Are you warm enough?’
‘I’m not going to have an asthma attack,’ I say, but just for good measure, I reach around to the front pocket of my backpack and take my Ventolin out. ‘Just tell me already.’
‘It’s gone a bit viral.’
‘A bit viral?’ I screech. ‘How does something go a bit viral?’
‘He did a storytime on TikTok.’
I put her on speaker and open up TikTok as I walk. I search for ‘Lucas Bennett’ and nothing comes up, then with a sigh I search for ‘Mully and Dad’ and it’s the first result. Luckily, he doesn’t have a huge number of followers, but I can see the video titled ‘Dating the Daycare Girl’ has 10,000 views and as I’m swiping the screen to refresh, the number ticks up steadily. Corey interrupts before I can click on the video.
‘It’s not completely viral,’ she says. ‘But someone in the comments has connected you to the story somehow and they’ve tagged your account. It’s also showing up in the search bar.’
‘You didn’t give me a chance to watch it. What does he say about me? Does he call me a na?ve Native again?’
‘Pretty much,’ she says.
‘What do I do? What the fuck do I do about The Paris Review now?’ I screech into the phone and my voice is so high pitched and hysterical that people on the street stop and look at me.
‘Come home and we’ll talk. I’ll call Sienna and we can cook up a plan together.’
‘NO!’ I shout and this time my outburst causes people to give me a wide berth. ‘Things are weird with her right now. It’s best if you don’t call her.’
Corey is silent for a second. ‘Um, Brynn? I’m sorry but I already called her.’ In the background, I hear the sound of our apartment buzzer going.
My heart flutters. ‘That’s her, isn’t it?’
‘Just come home, Brynn, we’ll sort it out. Doug, Lucas, The Paris Review, all of it.’