“Jay Dove Boy is a minister, he got a paper off the internet that says so, and he’s Mack’s best friend from when they were nine years old and he’s going to marry us and make us one. He says it’s the biggest honor of his life and he knows exactly what he’s going to wear: his favorite motorcycle leathers. It’ll be awesome.”

Jules’s real name is Julie, but no one ever calls her that. I started calling her Jules when I first started talking, and it stuck. We don’t look anything alike. I have black hair halfway down my back and golden eyes, she has long blonde hair and the dark brown eyes of my mother and aunts. She’s five eleven, I’m five three.

My sister launched a company ten years ago in Seattle. She did not like school, because she has a mild case of dyslexia and she felt like “a damn failure, and stupid.” She was super popular in school because she is like my mother and aunts: always up for a party, willing to dance, game to laugh. But continually getting poor grades in school no matter how hard she tried, no matter how hard she cried with frustration, was simply too discouraging.

But she was always, from the time she was three, an artist. We couldn’t believe the pictures and portraits she drew. She utterly loved art, and she drew pictures of me all the time with a huge smile that took up most of my face. At three years old she started calling me her “love-sister.”

After high school she worked in a coffee shop in Seattle and created her art at night. She fell in love with motorcycles when she was nineteen because of a boyfriend. She later ditched the boyfriend, not her motorcycle. She painted her own motorcycle with a picture of her as a horse/woman, her long blonde hair flowing, and people loved it. Her business, custom paint jobs for motorcycles, Jules’s Daring Designs, was born.

She’s painted everything on motorcycles from skeletons wearing jeans to flames to the galaxy to people to flowers to plaids and checkerboards to swirls and twirls. Sometimes people want simply one color, pink or blue or red, and she’ll do that. Most of the time, though, they’ll ask for more, and the customer and Jules will create a design together.

She is so talented and has a wait time of six months.

Jules has tattoos. She has a pink rose, which is for me, on her left arm. She said she never thought of me as any other flower than a pink rose. Next to the rose, in a bouquet, is an iris for Aunt Iris, a camellia for Aunt Camellia, and a poppy for our mother. She has a small orca with our dad’s name, Henry, below that.

She has a heart near her privates with an arrow pointing down (don’t ask any questions then I don’t have to answer them); a picture of Rose Bloom Cottage on her left shoulder blade; and her fiancé, Mack, and she got matching tattoos of their two motorcycles together, which are on her right shoulder blade. On her right arm she has a tattoo of Mack’s face, smiling and sweet, and he has a tattoo of her on his left arm, smiling and sweet, so when they stand next together, their tattoo faces smile at each other.