The Seven Pieces of a Feuilleton

Chapter 6

He had been awoken by a raucous vibration, which shrilled in his ear and carried a ringtone matching his mood.

The blurry numbers of the alarm clock had read two-thirty.

He had calculated nine hours ahead.

Eleven-thirty.

He had jumped to answer.

"Brenda? About time you called. Couldn't do it at a more reasonable hour?"

"Brandon."

He swore every chamber of his heart deflated, hearing Donna's trembling voice coming through the other line instead of the sister he missed an indescribable amount.

"Bran, it's really bad."

"Donna? What's wrong?"

"It's Dylan."

His veins had dug a trench in Siberia. His hand had clenched his phone.

"Don, I thought you weren't talking to that ass."

"I wasn't. I'm not. It's just, he -" she had begun to cry and Brandon heard the rustle of the phone changing hands.

"Brandon? Hey, it's Robinson. I'm with Donna. We're at the LAPD. Dylan was arrested for drunk driving."

"Who cares?"

He didn't mean it, not really. He both cared considerably and couldn't care less.

It was Dylan's fault that Brandon was going on two months without his sister, without his other half. At least in her year at RADA, she answered his emails. When he had transferred to Stanford and she had attended CalArts, she answered his calls.

Two months in Paris and he had received one letter, just one. No calls, no emails, no answer to his calls or emails.

One single, solitary letter containing the words of an actress fighting to put on a charade.

It was all Dylan McKay's fault.

"I think you care, Walsh," Robinson had quietly murmured. "He called Donna because he knew she'd be the only one who would come."

It had been the other way around, once. He'd been the one arrested for driving whilst drunk. Dylan had been the one comforting his sister when she confessed the transgression to their parents.

Now Brenda was gone, her husband was behind bars and their once cohesive octagon was fractured beyond repair.

"I don't care," he lied, still on edge from the moment he had shared with Kelly the previous evening.

He hated himself for letting her get that close.

"Brandon, he almost crashed into a police car."

Brenda had crashed into the LAX airport shuttle.

And it was Dylan's fault.

"He better hire a great lawyer," Brandon had snarked before ending the call - until he remembered his Midwestern roots, called Donna back and apologized to Robinson for hanging up on him.

Then he went down to the station.

He had returned to Casa Walsh, exhausted and frustrated. He hadn't spoken to Dylan. He hadn't seen him. But he had gone down there. He had spoken to the arresting officer. He had helped Robinson track down Dylan's lawyer. He had comforted Donna who, determined to help in some way, called the local rehabs.

Not that Dylan would agree to any of them.

And Brenda still hadn't called.

Dylan's life frequently slid into the sewer whenever he lost her. Brandon refused to be the one left picking up the pieces this time.