Odessa Again (15 page)

All these questions raced through Odessa’s mind as she stood on the porch, but they turned out to be all for nothing because Mrs. Grisham answered quickly, dressed and with a full set of teeth.

“What brings you here at this hour?” she asked.

“I can’t find my green velvet headband. Maybe I left it over here?”

Mrs. Grisham let her in.

Odessa made a show of looking around the room, all the while waiting for Mrs. Grisham’s attention to somehow get diverted.

“And you need this headband at a little past seven in the morning?” Mrs. Grisham arched an eyebrow.

“Hair emergency!”

Odessa looked underneath the sofa.

Mrs. Grisham stared.

Odessa lifted up and then replaced a pile of books on the coffee table.

Mrs. Grisham cocked her head.

Then a miracle occurred. Miracles, like answers to mysteries, don’t usually fall from the sky or materialize out of thin air.

But this one did.

A teakettle whistled someplace in the back of the house.

“I’ll be right back.” Mrs. Grisham turned to follow the sound.

Odessa ran to the front window and undid the lock.

6 Hours

At first, breaking into Mrs. Grisham’s house was exciting.

Odessa
the
Gumshoe.

After watching her neighbor leave for the farmers’ market, Odessa went to the front porch, heart pounding. The window she’d left unlatched that morning slid right open and she crawled inside.

In the attic Odessa found boxes, musty furniture, and old-lady stuff. She shined Clark Funds’s penlight all around. Nothing interesting. She cleared a space on the floorboards and jumped, over and over, as hard as she could, waiting for that over-under, inside-out, upside-down feeling.

Nothing.

When she crept back down the attic steps and out that front parlor window, what she’d done suddenly seemed wrong. Inexcusable. It felt way worse than taking the one-hundred-dollar bill. She ran home and hid in her room and vowed she’d never burgle anyone ever again.

*

The next Monday she could hardly look Mrs. Grisham in the eye.

She’d come home on the bus alone, because Oliver had gone to Jack’s house. He’d listened to her! And now he was going to play with a friend! Project Oliver was right on track.

“I have homework,” Odessa said as she passed through the kitchen. She didn’t even pick up one of the oatmeal cookies still cooling on the rack.

“Wait,” Mrs. Grisham said. “You might need this.”

She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out Clark Funds’s penlight.

“You seem to have left it upstairs,” Mrs. Grisham said. “In my attic.”

This was a huge Odessa Red-Light moment. Maybe the worst ever.

“I … I … I …”

What to say? She wanted to run. Flee up to her attic and jump through the floorboards. Erase this moment. Wipe it off the map.

But she couldn’t.

There was nothing she could do to prevent Mrs. Grisham from finding her penlight and figuring out that she’d violated her trust by
burgling
her house. It was too late. Too much time had passed. She didn’t have enough hours left to go back that far.

“I’m sorry,” Odessa said. “Really sorry. I just … I was just … I was just trying to figure something out.”

“Did you?” Mrs. Grisham asked.

“Did I what?” Odessa asked.

“Figure it out?”

“No.”

“And does it matter?” Mrs. Grisham asked.

Odessa thought about this. Did it matter? Did the
why
of it all
really
matter? She had to admit, now that she thought hard about it, that despite her desire to understand why and how things worked, it didn’t. What mattered was the
what. What
she did with her power.

“I guess it doesn’t,” Odessa said.

“Okay then.” Mrs. Grisham pointed to the cooling rack. “Cookie?”

Odessa took two.

*

Odessa developed a Grand Master Oliver Plan.

A
GMOP
.

It came to her while she was sitting in the principal’s office. She’d never been to the principal’s office, but despite all the things she’d learned this year—three-digit multiplication, world capitals, how to apply deodorant—she still hadn’t figured out how to control her impulse to shove.

It was a Thursday.

PE day.

This meant that the fourth graders ate lunch earlier than usual, overlapping with the second grade in the cafeteria.

Odessa watched Oliver walk in. Before Project Oliver she would have pretended she didn’t know him, but today she waved to him from across the room.

Odessa could see that his shoelaces were untied. He hadn’t mastered the art of tying his own laces. How a boy could be as skilled as Oliver at building with Legos and yet so
ham-handed
Odessa could not understand.

She stood on her chair so he could see her and she mouthed the words:
Your
shoelaces.

He looked at her with befuddlement.

This time she whisper-yelled:
“Your shoelaces!”

In addition to not being able to tie his shoes properly, Oliver apparently could not read lips.

Odessa cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted:
“YOUR SHOELACES!”

He heard her.

So did Blake Canter.

Rather than stopping in his tracks and bending town to tie his shoes—rather than listening to his sister—Oliver took a step forward with his tray in his hands, and when he did, Blake Canter took her little hot-pink sneaker and stood on his dangling shoelace.

Oliver’s fall was
epic
.

The clatter of the dishes. The crashing of the silverware. The tray sliding ten feet across the cafeteria floor. It was a
cacophony
—but the laughter was the loudest sound of all.

It echoed off the cafeteria walls.

Oliver lay on the floor. Odessa could see that he wasn’t hurt, so she ran right by him and up to tiny Blake and gave her a shove, hard enough to knock her off her hot-pink feet.

The evil little she-troll burst into tears.

And now Odessa sat face to face with Ms. Banville, the principal.

While Ms. Banville remarked on how
surprised
she was, how
puzzled
to see Odessa in her office, when Odessa had always been such a
model
student and blah, blah, blah—Odessa wasn’t listening.

She was doing math in her head.

If she went straight to the attic after school she’d have time to go back and catch Oliver before lunch and tie his laces for him.

She saw no point explaining Blake Canter’s trolliness. Why bother, when Odessa would erase this visit to Ms. Banville’s office, Oliver’s epic wipeout, and the echoing laughter in the cafeteria?

She’d wipe it all off the map.

Odessa took stock of Ms. Banville’s office. Her big swivelly chair, the photographs of curly-headed children, the diploma on the wall, and the big banner above her window that said
FEBRUARY IS PRESIDENTS
’
MONTH
.

This meant many things. It meant that they ate cake for George Washington’s and Abraham Lincoln’s birthdays. It meant a week off when some people did boring things like visit relatives, while others did awesome things like go to the Harry Potter theme park.

And it meant that someone at school got to be President for a Day.

It worked like this: they had an all-school assembly at which Ms. Banville would read a riddle, and whoever solved it first got to skip the next day of classes and sit in the principal’s office acting like the principal, or the president, which meant making announcements over the loudspeaker and signing attendance slips, but—most important—it meant you were cool, for one day, and usually that coolness lasted for a long time.

As Ms. Banville rattled off Odessa’s various punishments—a written apology to Blake Canter, an essay on how words, not fists, are the way out of conflict, and no recess for two weeks—Odessa studied that sign.

FEBRUARY IS PRESIDENTS
’
MONTH
.

Her GMOP started to take shape.

She would help Oliver win President for a Day! She would hand him a moment of triumph. Make up for the one she’d taken away.

Odessa had some planning to do, but for now, she needed only to go home and back six hours so that she could start this day over and tie her little brother’s shoelaces in triple knots.

5 Hours

When the time came to select the President for a Day, Odessa was so excited to begin her Grand Master Oliver Plan, so proud of herself for coming up with it, that she failed to account for the problem of the shrinking of time. Since there were only five hours left, and since the assembly took place first thing in the morning, Odessa couldn’t wait until she got home from school to jump through the floorboards. That wouldn’t leave her enough time to give Oliver the answer to Ms. Banville’s riddle.

None of this was on Odessa’s mind that morning. She ate her cinnamon toast and rode with Claire to school, all the while picturing herself the hero. The one who saved her brother, who put his needs above her own. After all, Odessa wanted to win President for a Day herself. Who wouldn’t? All that attention! Even better than pale blue eyes.

She was filled to the brim—to the very top of that tank inside her—with pride. She was such a good person.

Odessa
the
Selfless.

She arrived at school and filed into the gym along with everyone else.