Odessa Again (4 page)

Odessa had her attic and she had privacy from Oliver, and she was starting to like the new house. The afternoon school bus route took her by her old house, and she’d see someone else’s shoes on the front porch, or someone else’s bike out on the lawn, or deflating balloons tied to the mailbox, and though in the first days these discoveries made her feel like she’d swallowed a brick, lately she’d just think:
Look, someone must have had a birthday.

Jennifer, the woman Dad was
re
marrying, had moved into his apartment. Jennifer was different from Mom. She wasn’t tall and bony with soft parts Odessa knew how to find. Jennifer was soft all over, in a nice way, and she had brown curly hair and smelled good and her lips were always shimmery and her eyelids sparkled. Odessa had met her lots of times, and she was always really friendly, and once she even let Odessa wear some of her gloss when her lips were chapped, but Jennifer was like the shoes on the porch or the bike on the lawn—she belonged to someone else’s family.

Odessa preferred her time at Mom’s house. She liked the Green House more than the Light House. Especially since she’d moved to the attic.

She’d begged for a rug, and even though Mom wasn’t usually quick to buy her what she wanted, she’d gone out and gotten her a purple cheetah print, which brightened up the room while also hiding the floorboards.

It was a win-win.

Odessa returned Oliver’s pottery cupcake and collected her ice cream cone. She took her clock and another one from the living room that nobody seemed to miss. This way, she could be doubly sure of the time.

Mom had gone on half a dozen job interviews. She’d wear a blazer with her jeans and tie her long hair up in a bun. Sometimes she’d even put on makeup. But so far, nothing seemed to work out. What luck!

Odessa and Sofia were moving up in
Dreamonica,
an online game world in which they’d built identical mansions and between them owned a dozen puppies. They were best friends in
Dreamonica,
like they were in real life, and their characters looked exactly the same, the opposite of real life. Mom allowed Odessa twenty minutes a day online, an improvement from the fifteen minutes she’d been allowed in third grade.

Odessa and Theo Summers had been moved to adjoining seats in the hexagon and assigned to each other as math buddies. Math was easy. It made sense. It was the opposite of silly or strange or inexplicable. Odessa was good at it, and what a lucky thing that she could be good at something with Theo Summers by her side.

So all was going pretty well, until another fateful Tuesday.

Tuesday meant the next day was a Wednesday, word-study day. It was to be the fifth quiz on which Odessa would get a perfect score
.

But she forgot to study.

This time she couldn’t blame Oliver. Or a field mouse. Or the fact that Dad was
re
marrying. The only person to blame was herself.

This sort of thing happens, but it didn’t happen often to Odessa. So when she arrived at school on Wednesday morning and Mr. Rausche said, “Best feet forward,” Odessa felt a sudden chill. Sofia stared across the hexagon at her.

What’s wrong?

Sofia knew how to read Odessa’s face. They were best friends. They could communicate without using words.

I
forgot
to
study!

Sofia cringed. She knew how important this quiz was to Odessa.
Oh
no!

Maybe she could have scored perfectly anyway, but she was upset, and her fate was sealed with the pesky word
thorough,
into which Odessa inserted a
w.

It wasn’t a failure, exactly, but that’s how it felt.

And anyway,
scrupulous
was a much better word than
thorough
.

She sulked for the rest of the day. Sofia reminded her that in
Dreamonica
it didn’t matter if you knew how to spell
thorough,
you could still live in a mansion, but that didn’t help much.

On the bus ride home, Odessa almost sat on Claire’s backpack, just to see what she’d do about it. She almost tapped her on the head and said, “Hey? What gives? We were friends last year, not best friends, but friends. Now you won’t even talk to me.” But of course she didn’t. She chose a seat alone and stared out the window. When the bus passed her old house, she cursed the new owners for not cutting the roses before they died on the vine.

Odessa couldn’t even be cheered up by butter-brickle ice cream.

She stared at the dish in front of her as Oliver inhaled his while babbling on about recess handball.

She took a taste.

It reminded her of something.

Not of the ice cream parlor where she discovered that butter brickle was her favorite, where Dad first allowed her a cone in place of a cup. Unlike Mom, he didn’t care if ice cream wound up on her dress.

No, this taste reminded her of something else.

Of those strange days when she fell through the floorboards and sat down not once, but twice to a piece of carrot cake. Those days when she figured she must have been struck by a terrible fever, because nothing about them made any sense.

Those days when she must have been hallucinating.

But … what if she hadn’t been?

What if she really did fall through the floor? What if she really
could
go back? If she’d gone back twenty-four and then twenty-three hours, the next time she’d go back twenty-two. She could live this day again and study for the test and get her fifth consecutive perfect score, so that she could move up to group
N
.

What if?

That night, when Odessa went to bed under the quilt with the teddy bears, she had a dreamless sleep, the kind from which you wake up full of energy. Just what you need when you set your alarm for four a.m.

Tweet. Tweet. Tweet.

How she loved the sound of birds.

She didn’t love waking up early, but she needed time to go over those words, to remember that there is no
w
in
thorough.
And she wanted to make certain there weren’t any other words on her list that sounded as though they should contain letters they did not.

She wanted to be
scrupulous.

She turned off the alarm. The ink-black sky gave her nothing to see by. She stumbled to her desk, the one her mother had finally moved up to the attic, with Uncle Milo’s help. She flipped on her lamp and looked at her calendar with the cats on it.

She removed Wednesday’s picture of two Siamese kittens wrestling in a flower bed to reveal a fat Calico reaching for a ball of string. He was Thursday’s cat, and it was Thursday. More specifically, it was Thursday at a little past four in the morning, one day after Odessa had failed to get a fifth consecutive perfect score on her word-study quiz.

She threw Wednesday’s kittens in the trash and stepped into the center of her purple cheetah-print rug. She’d been walking around it for a month now, avoiding the floor underneath. It felt soft and inviting between her toes.

She tapped her foot lightly.

She got down onto her hands and knees and pushed at the boards beneath the rug, listening to them creak. She stroked the cheetah print with her fingers.

Odessa loved this rug, and wouldn’t it be a terrible thing if she jumped through the floorboards and lost it? If the rug became stuck someplace between today and yesterday? Trapped in the
betwixt
?

Her attic would look so dull without it.

But worse, what if
she
got caught in the
betwixt
? What if
she
never made it back to yesterday? How would it feel to never see her family again? Mom? Dad? Uncle Milo?

Odessa was a reader, and she’d read books about kids opening doors or climbing through wardrobes into other worlds, and though she loved these books, she didn’t think she’d like to live in any world other than her own. She wanted to live with her own family, even if that family lived in separate places, and even if that family included Oliver.

She rolled up the rug and stashed it out of the way. Then she walked back into the center of the attic, quickly, before her fears could get the better of her, and she closed her eyes, held her breath, and jumped.

The next thing Odessa knew, she was lying in her bed.

She opened one eye and looked at her alarm clock.

6:07

She opened the other and looked with both eyes at the clock she’d taken from the living room.

6:07

From her dormer window she spied the first light of day—orange and pink and blue blended together like a watercolor painting.

She’d made it! It worked!

It was almost one full hour before she usually woke up. Far too early to start the day—unless it was a Wednesday, with a word-study quiz to prepare for.

Odessa climbed out of bed and kept to the edges of her room, avoiding the center of the floor. She raced over to her desk and stared at the picture of a long-haired white cat asleep on top of a washing machine.

Tuesday’s cat.

This made no sense at all. How could it be Tuesday? It was supposed to be Wednesday.

Word-study day.

But then Odessa understood. It was 6:07, after all, so it took a moment to remember that she always removed yesterday’s calendar page first thing when she woke up.

It was time to remove Tuesday’s cat, because it was Wednesday morning.

She ripped the long-haired white cat from the pad, and there they were: two Siamese kittens wrestling in a flower bed.

It was twenty-two hours earlier.

Wednesday morning at seven minutes past six.

Odessa sat down at her desk with her word list and quizzed herself.

Over and over and over again, until it was time for breakfast.

Downstairs, Mom gave her cinnamon toast again (luckily, Odessa loved cinnamon toast), and she climbed aboard the bus and watched Claire block the seat next to her with her backpack. She arrived at school, where Mr. Rausche said, “Best feet forward.” Sofia didn’t have to read her face. She wasn’t panicked. She took her quiz and aced it.

There is no
w
in
thorough.

That afternoon she was sent home with a new packet of words to study.

She was now a proud member of group
N
.

Odessa Green-Light was no longer smack-dab in the middle
.