Small Spaces: Chapters 1–5

Point one eight seven five, thought Olivia idly, but she did not raise her hand to rescue Coco.

Or what if the Brewsters’ Halloween skeleton decided to unhook himself from the third-floor window and lurch out the door?

“Actually I wanted to talk to you about chess club. We’re missing you this fall. The other kids, you know, really appreciated that you took the time to work with them on their opening gambits last year, and there’s the interscholastic tournament coming up soon so—”

She pedaled hard past the hay bales in the roundabout on Main Street, turned onto Daisy Lane, and raced past the clapboard houses, where jack-o’-lanterns grinned on every front porch.

Ollie, completely bewildered, decided to ignore the stranger elements of the conversation.

It felt fragile under her fingers, gritty with dust.

Ollie, poised on the edge of flight, said, "Tell me what?”

Her signs were exuberant blobs of paint in which the letters were barely visible.

Simon and Garfunkel crooned on the speakers, accompanied by the clanking of pots.

He couldn’t maintain angry-dad voice even when he was trying; now he just sounded exasperated.

“I got an earful, let me tell you. And then the school called. You have to go to the principal tomorrow. Ollie, you could have really hurt that boy.”

The next page only had an epigraph:
When the mist rises, and the smiling man comes walking, you must avoid large places at night.

She poked her bleary head out from under the covers, heard the rain rattling the roof, said, “Nope,” and pulled her head back in.

After she finally went to sleep, she woke up twice from the same nightmare: gray skies and burning grass and trying frantically to run to someone she couldn’t see, while an endless stream of giant people holding casseroles crowded around her, saying, I’m so sorry, Olivia.

You may judge for yourself. But I believe him. Listen now, but do not condemn your father. He meant well.

They began vying for my attention, and eventually to grow suspicious of each other.

And then he added, in a coaxing sort of bellow, “I made bacon and oatmeal! I know you’re hungry.”

“I shouldn’t go out in the rain,” she added. “I might catch pneumonia.”

She managed to shove her book under the covers, huddle down into the blankets, and assume a pathetic expression a second before he walked in.

She coughed once, bravely. “I am feeling a little better.” She tried out a noble expression. “I don’t want to get behind in school.”

“Five minutes,” said her father, bounding back down to the kitchen, from which drifted the smell of now-burning bacon.

Linda Webster’s only been in business for five years, but she’s really doing well for herself. The farm’s revitalized the county.

Her dad snorted and glanced at the rain sluicing down the windows.

Ben Withers Middle School always looked shabby, its paint peeling around the windows, its roof drooping in.

“A comma,” he informed her, "is a pause at the end of a clause.”

“But a cat,” her dad finished blithely, "has claws at the ends of its paws.”

Ollie gaped at Brian but hastily arranged her face to vigorous agreement when Principal Snyder looked her way.

Ollie bristled. Implying that Brian was only sticking up for her (Why was he sticking up for her?) because she was a girl: that was dumb.

Brian looked lofty. “I didn’t want to get a girl in trouble. You could say thanks, you know. I just got you out of detention until Christmas.”

“You could have just stuck up for Coco. Then I wouldn’t have been in the principal’s office in the first place. Where was your chivalry then?”