Arabella was in her third year at Bowdoin College, which meant it was nearly three a.m. in Maine. Then again, my sister was no stranger to keeping odd hours. I had spent so much time in my youth staring at the wall that had separated our two bedrooms, listening as Bella perfected Vivaldi on the violin and printed one design after another on her 3D printer.
That had been during her interior design phase.
Simply said, my sister was a low-maintenance woman with high-maintenance interests. She collected hobbies like baseball cards, and at twenty-two-years-old, she had one hell of a mint collection. Five instruments, seven languages—including French, Mandarin, and Russian—plus a countless number of additional skills.
“My meringue isn’t stiff enough.”
And baking now, apparently.
“Your meringue?”
“Yes, Jared. For my pie,” she said with the same matter-of-fact tone, acting as if it were the obvious answer to my otherwise ridiculous question. “The apiary club is having a bake sale tomorrow on the quad.”
“Apiary?” That was one she hadn’t mentioned before, and Bella and I talked at least once a week.
“As in bees.”
“Bees?”
“Bees. The American bumblebee population has declined by eighty-nine percent in the last two decades.”
My sister never ceased to amaze me. I would never understand why the rest of the world—including ignorant assholes like our dad—didn’t see that.
“Speaking of bees,” she said. “Do you think Mom would let me get a hive for the yard?”
“I don’t know about that one,” I told her.
I leaned back against the bricks, soaking up the dark and quiet downtown, save for the nearby field full of crickets. As a born-and-raised city boy from the East Coast, Rose City, Oregon, was a far cry from home. And as much as I hated to admit it, it was growing on me more and more every day.
After our mom had divorced the asshole-who-shall-not-be-named, she’d moved us into a cozy, three-bedroom cottage on the border of Vermont and New Hampshire. Bella still spent summer vacations with her.
“Or I could always move in with you?”
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Belles, we’ve talked about this.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t satisfied with the outcome of that discussion.”
I smiled to myself. That was Bella speak for “I didn’t get the answer I wanted.”
My sister knew how to press my buttons better than anyone. She knew that I would do just about anything for her or my mom. If they asked for it, I made it happen, be it a new roof for mom’s cottage—which I’d built myself after watching a dozen or so YouTube tutorials—a new computer for Bella, or a family trip to New Orleans during Bella’s ghost hunting phase.
To be fair, that last one was my idea. Ghosts, gators, and gumbo? Sign me the fuck up.
I owed the women in my life everything. The least I could give them was the world.
However, Bella knew that the one thing I wasn’t willing to budge on was her education; she just didn’t like it.
“You’re not dropping out of school, Belles.”
She heaved an exasperated sigh. “Jare-bear.”Uh oh. She’s pulling out the big guns.“I can’t do it.”
“You can.”
This wasn’t a new conversation for us. Even before being diagnosed as autistic, Bella had never been a fan of the formal classroom setting. Not because she couldn’t understand the subject matter being discussed. In fact, nine times out of ten, she understood the material better than her instructors. She just didn’t know how to communicate her point of view effectively. At least, that was what every teacher had written on her report cards year after year.
Bella lived by absolutes. She excelled in math, science, history, even. Any subject that had a black-or-white, clear-cut solution. Anything beyond that was a different story.
“Belles—”
