Riley might be older than her parents, but she was much cooler than them, and one of Olive’s very favorite people in the universe. Olive always gloated a little walking around town with her, hoping kids from school might see them and it would somehow elevate Olive’s status. Riley had tons of tattoos, an asymmetrical haircut with bangs that were dyed blue, and often wore blue lipstick to match it. She lived in an apartment in a funky old Victorian, worked at a building salvage yard, went to college part-time, and volunteered at the historical society and for Habitat for Humanity. She’d even gone down to Nicaragua one summer to help build houses for poor people. For a while, Riley was apprenticing to be a tattoo artist and kept sketchbooks full of designs: carefully inked drawings of skulls, flowers, and animals, and page after page of fancy lettering. Riley had this I’m gonna be my own person and not give a crap what anyone thinks kind of attitude that Olive totally admired and aspired to. And she really did boss Olive’s dad around (or tried to, anyway). She was always telling him what to do, and he usually nodded and went along with whatever it was, whether it was something like “Time to cut the grass, Dusty,” or “That shirt looks like shit, go put on a clean one.” Olive knew her dad and Riley didn’t have the best childhood—their mom drank and their dad was hardly ever home, so Aunt Riley basically raised Daddy and had been taking care of him and bossing him around his whole life; it was just a matter of habit now.

After Mama left, Riley suggested to her dad that maybe she could move in. “Just for a while. To help you guys out until Lori comes back.” Daddy said he appreciated the offer but that they were doing fine, really.

Riley was always bringing Olive strange gifts: kumquats, a slide rule, a piece of amber with a bug trapped inside. “What can I say—weird stuff always makes me think of you,” Riley would say with a wink and a ruffling of Olive’s hair as she handed the gifts over.