Who knew a bet could change the course of your life so drastically. I didn’t but then again I was only sixteen and being as spirited as I had been was seen as a defect on my character. Girls were supposed to behave, cook and clean, and marry as soon as they are of age. But not me. I was too spirited for that. I had too much life within me to just cage it inside my soul. But I digress. Here is how it all began for me.

My brother Theo, older by just under two years, and I had been in a heated debate.

“It’s as simple as this, Es,” Theo had begun as we sat on the front porch sipping lemonade. “Women just can’t do what men can. They’re weaker, both of mind and body, to do the things men do.”

I had been infuriated by this. I was infuriated that he could be so ignorant and condescending just because he was in college and I wasn’t, though I wanted desperately to be. Ever since he’d been away at Ohio State University, studying in business, he had taken it to habit to make it known that he was superior to the rest of us…or so he had come to believe.

“You’re wrong, Theo,” I retorted, using the nickname he’d grown to abhor just to set him off. “Woman are already making headway in the world and one day, we’ll even have the right to vote just like men.”

“Sure; if you say so,” he snorted, a cocky smile on his face. “Knowing you, Esme, I’ll bet you can’t even climb that tree over there without having to have help with getting back down.”

See, Theo knew me all too well. He knew that I would do just about anything to prove a point. I had always been as stubborn and hardheaded as an untamed mule; luckily that only lasted through my adolescence. I stood up from the front steps where I had been sitting beside my brother, smoothed out the fabric of my skirts and looked down at him.

            “I’ll take that bet. And what is the victor’s reward?” I asked, eyes narrowed as he stood up to meet a height more than four inches above mine.