He smiled at her, ruffled her hair. “You’re right, kiddo. We do deserve a treat.”
The timer went off and Olive took the rolls out of the oven, put them on top of the stove to cool.
“You got plans after school?” he asked.
Funny question. When did she ever have plans after school? She didn’t play any sports, wasn’t in the drama club or anything like that. She sometimes got invited to a classmate’s house after school, but since her mom left, she always said no, made up some excuse for not going. Easier that way. Because once you went to someone’s house a couple of times, they’d kind of expect to be invited to your house. And no way was she inviting any of the girls from school to her house. She didn’t want people to know about the constant state of construction, to see the torn-open walls and ceiling, the exposed plumbing and wiring, the plywood subfloor, the plaster and drywall dust that covered everything. Proof that once her mama left, everything really did fall apart. Literally.
She even made excuses to keep Mike away. He used to come over all the time. Her mom loved Mike and got a real kick out of his encyclopedic knowledge of weird and random facts. He’d come over and tell her all about the life cycle of some parasite in Africa he’d been reading about, and Mama would ask all kinds of questions and tell him how clever he was for knowing so much while she fed him fresh-baked oatmeal cookies (his favorite). Olive’s dad never knew what to make of Mike (a kid who neither hunted nor cared about sports)—they were weird and awkward around each other, and Olive thought it was best if she just avoided the whole scene. Also, she didn’t want Mike to see how bad the house really was. He’d freak and tell his mom, who might call the Department for Children and Families or something.
But she and Mike hung out at school and in the woods. And the truth was Mike was about the only real friend Olive had these days, and Olive was Mike’s one friend.
“Odd Oliver,” that’s what everyone at school called her—even the older kids she didn’t know. The kids in her class had been calling her Odd Oliver since fifth grade, and she’d thought she’d lose the name when they all moved on to high school, but it carried over, got worse even. High school was so big and strange—a world where the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. When she walked the halls, she was reminded of another story she’d learned about in English: the labyrinth that held the Minotaur. Only in her version, there were Minotaurs everywhere, around every corner, and they wore letter jackets, or cheap perfume and pounds of makeup. The high school served three towns, so there were a lot of kids Olive had never seen before, and originally, she’d looked forward to this, thought it would help her to blend in, to hide, but really it just made her stick out more. News of her nickname and what had happened with her mother spread fast during the first weeks of school.
“What ya huntin’ for, Odd Oliver?” kids would tease when she came to school in her camouflage jacket and pants.Screw them,she thought. Sometimes she’d even mumble a quick “Fuck off,” but then they’d coo and chortle and say, “You’re such a freakazoid! No wonder your mom left you.” That was the worst—when they brought her mother into it. Sometimes she’d get to her locker and find stuff there, stuff she hadn’t put in: lip gloss, eye shadow, little notes that said, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Sometimes the notes were crueler. “Your mother’s a whore. She opened her legs for half the men in this town.”
Mike told her not to pay any attention to it.
“You know, I’ve got this game I play sometimes,” he told her once, when she’d found an especially crude note taped to her locker. He pretended he hadn’t seen what it said, just took it down and crumpled it up. “I come to school and pretend that I’m not one of them. That I’m this alien, from way off in some other galaxy. I’ve just been sent here to observe.”
Olive nodded.
“But see, the creatures from my home planet are coming back soon to pick me up, and after, they’re gonna destroy the Earth. One big fireball,” he said, making an exploding noise and waggling his fingers. “Poof!”
Olive smiled but cringed a little. She didn’t want to think ofeveryone all burned up like that, not even the girls who’d left the cruel notes.
“But the thing is, I get to pick people to come back with me. Everyone else will be disintegrated.” His eyes glittered. “The only one I’ve picked so far is you,” he told Olive, and gave her a big goofy smile.
“Umm…thanks, I guess,” she’d said. The second bell rang, and they ran to class, already late.
. . .
“I thought maybe we could start in on your room,” Daddy said now.
Olive blinked at him. “Huh?” she said, thinking she’d misheard him because she’d been daydreaming about Mike and the aliens.
“Your room,” he repeated. “I thought we could get started with it. No need to keep putting it off, right?”
Her stomach knotted. Not her room. That was her one safe space. He had suggested making it bigger a couple of weeks ago, when Riley was over for dinner. She said her room was fine, she was happy with it the way it was.
“Don’t you want it bigger? Better? A higher ceiling? A bigger closet?”
“For god’s sake, Dustin,” Riley said. “She said she was happy with it the way it is. Can’t you just leave one room alone?”
Her dad had backed down. But after Riley left, he kept talking about all the changes they’d make someday to Olive’s room, though he hadn’t gone as far as suggesting they actually start work. The walls and ceiling of her bedroom remained intact. And it was clean. Dust free. It was the one place of order in the whole house. The one place that had been left exactly the same as it was the day Mama went away.
“Don’t you think we should finish up in the living room first? Put the rest of the drywall up? Paint, maybe?” She tried not to show how frantic she felt. How desperate.
Not my room. Anything but that.
Her dad looked disappointed. “I just want you to have a nice room. We can make it bigger, go into the spare room a little ways. You can have a walk-in closet. You know? Like we’ve been talking about?”
It was Daddy who’d been doing all the talking, all the daydreaming, promising how nice, how perfect, things would be if they knocked out a wall here, put up some shelves there. As if true happiness could be brought about with a sledgehammer and new drywall.
“My closet’s fine the way it is,” she told him. She didn’t have much clothing. Not like some of the girls in her class who seemed to have a different outfit for every day of the month. Olive was fine with her two pairs of jeans (patched in places), camo hunting pants with tons of pockets, a few T-shirts, a hoodie, and her camo jacket. She owned two pairs of shoes: hunting boots and sneakers.
“I thought—” he said, looking lost, profoundly disappointed.
“I really think we should concentrate on finishing some of the projects we’ve started,” she said, realizing how funny it was, her talking like she was the adult and he was the little kid with his crazy, impractical ideas. “Let’s work on the living room today after school, okay? That’ll be the first room Mama sees when she walks through the door. Don’t we want it to be perfect?”
