The Bellbottom Incident by Maslakovic Neve

Author:Maslakovic, Neve [Maslakovic, Neve]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Westmarch Publishing
Published: 2015-03-31T07:00:00+00:00

As the campus clock struck 2:00 a.m., I left Abigail gently snoring in the easy chairs and Dr. Little prone on his sleeping mat, and snuck out of the library. Not having Abigail’s questionable skill for breaking and entering, I made sure to leave the door unlocked behind me. I hoped campus security wouldn’t swing by to check.

I didn’t have any particular purpose in sneaking out; rather, I just wanted to clear my head a bit after reading for two hours straight. I picked a destination at random—Hypatia House, where my office would one day be—and set a brisk pace. The rain had stopped. The night air was cool, but there wasn’t even a hint of wind, which made the cold tolerable. Despite the late hour, I crossed paths here and there with a student on a bicycle or a couple intertwined in a dorm doorway. Occasionally I heard the unmistakable sound of a Friday-night party through an open window or glimpsed campus security as they made their rounds by car on the well-lit campus streets.

Seeing another of the intertwined couples—not my parents—made me wonder if their argument really had been about who was having dinner with whom, or if there was more to it. I hoped the issue wasn’t my impending arrival, though I still had the feeling Dad didn’t know about it yet, not at this earlier book club meet nor the later one I had gone to first. I had always thought that my parents seemed to get along very well, in a sort of cheerful, half-exasperated way, as though their very quirks and differences were what drew them to each other. Mom was chattier than Dad. Dad liked to be up and about early, while she liked to sleep in a bit. He liked spicy food, she preferred plain. And yet they had lived and worked together harmoniously for years, first running the Thornberg paper and now the retirement community. It was a situation that might have fractured the strongest couple, but all their rough edges and sharp points worked to their benefit. They were two irregularly shaped puzzle pieces that fit just right.

As I swung around the north end of Sunniva Lake, where the dock was, I found myself thinking of the Fourth of July picnic, the one that had been the source of the photo Sabina had taken along. Tonight the wooden dock was a dark strip in the calm surface of the water, and the reeds where it met the sand were bare and stark. On the Fourth of July the reeds had been tall and green, and we had all met up just before dusk, as it was a decent spot for viewing the town fireworks.

The day had started off on the wrong foot because of a morning dentist appointment for Sabina. It had been one in a long sequence of appointments intended to bring her teeth up to modern standards in health and appearance. By afternoon the Novocain had worn off

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