Odessa Again

by Dana Reinhardt

  Mom hadn’t worked in an office since Odessa was born, and Odessa preferred it that way, so she didn’t much like it yesterday when she knew Mom was going off on a job interview, and she didn’t like it any more today.

  Odessa had already been here.

  Here in this moment.

  Today was yesterday. All over again.

  Odessa felt dizzy. Clammy. The smell of the eggs made her want to throw up, and she might have, if it weren’t for her absolute mortal fear of vomit.

  She swallowed. Hard.

  Eat up. The clock is ticking.

  Sure, but why was it ticking backward?

  At that moment, Odessa had two choices.

  One: she could stand up and run around in circles, screaming and tearing at her hair.

  Or two: she could shrug this off. Shake the dizziness right out of her head. Wipe the clamminess off of her palms.

  She could choose to believe that she’d only dreamed this day. That she hadn’t really lived it. That her dream from the night before was even more uncanny than she’d thought, because it had predicted what this next day would bring.

  Odessa decided to go with option number two.

  She kissed her mother good-bye out of sight of the school bus, and she climbed on board. She watched as Claire Deloitte placed her backpack on the empty seat next to her so that Odessa would have to sit someplace else. Thomas Macon folded a paper airplane and tossed it over his shoulder toward the back row, just like she knew he would, but this time Odessa ducked so that it missed hitting her between the eyes, as it had yesterday.

  (Or in the dream she’d had that she was mistaking for yesterday.)

  She went through the day like this. It was sort of like sleepwalking. She felt discombobulated.

  She ate spaghetti and meatballs in the cafeteria again, she listened to Ms. Gomez conjugate the verb to remember (recordar), and she watched the same film about earthworms that was no more enlightening upon a second viewing.

  She came home and ate a snack and went to her room and the phone rang and it was Sofia and they talked about homework and then Sofia asked if Odessa like-liked Theo Summers and Odessa admitted that she thought he was cute, especially since he’d stopped cutting his hair.

  And of course Oliver said something about Theo Summers under his breath, proving that he’d eavesdropped on her conversation, and even though what she wanted to do more than anything in the entire world was to reach over and shove him hard enough to knock him off his pigeontoed feet, she didn’t.

  She held her arms at her sides.

  She went back to the table, sat down, and caught her breath, and a minute later her mother placed a bowl of butter-brickle ice cream in front of her.

  She ate it.

  It was her favorite, after all.

  Odessa cleared her bowl and excused herself. She went upstairs to the attic, but not before grabbing a hammer from the tool drawer and slipping it under her shirt.

  She got down right next to her floorboards. She pushed them and listened as they creaked. She tried to pry one up, but couldn’t. She tried another. And another.

  The floor was solidly nailed down.

  She put the hammer on her shelf, next to Oliver’s pottery cupcake. She walked back and forth across the floorboards. She slid across them, as if she was skating on the pond near Uncle Milo’s. She reached for the cupcake. She held it up over her head, but then she put it back on the shelf. She didn’t have the I need to bite my monkey on the belly feeling. She was perplexed, not angry.

  Odessa poked at the boards with her toe. She put both feet together and jumped.

  Nothing.

  She jumped again. And again. She closed her eyes, held her breath, and jumped as hard as she could.

  And then … she fell.

  Over-under, inside-out, upside-down.

  She opened her eyes to find herself lying in bed.

  Maybe I’ve hit my head, she thought. And I’ve been in the hospital, and now I’ve been sent home, and everyone thinks I’m going to die, but here I am, finally, waking from my coma.

  That was the only explanation she could come up with, because she did not remember going to bed, and anyway, people in comas probably have strange dreams.

  She crept downstairs in her pajamas to find her mother in the kitchen, washing dishes.

  “Odessa, honey. I thought you weren’t feeling well. What are you doing out of bed?”

  She leaned into Mom’s outstretched arms. She closed her eyes against her mother’s chest and let her mother take in a few whiffs of her scalp. Typically, she didn’t let her mom get away with this sort of behavior. She was in fourth grade. She wasn’t a baby. Kids her age weren’t supposed to allow their mothers to smell their heads.

  But tonight it felt good.

  Because maybe Odessa had just woken up from a coma.

  “Mom?” she asked, without opening her eyes or disentangling herself.

  “What, honey?”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “It can’t have been more than an hour. You really should go back to bed.”

  Odessa could barely get out the next sentence. It caught someplace in the middle of her throat.

  “What did we have for dessert tonight?”

  Her mother chuckled.

  “Is this about the ice cream again?” She leaned back and took Odessa’s face in her hands. “I really didn’t know how much you hate carrot cake. I promise that tomorrow I’ll pick up some ice cream. Just for you. Deal?”

  Odessa nodded, but only because she was unable to speak.

  “Now, honey, I think you should go back to bed.”

  Odessa took the stairs slowly. Going back to bed meant sleeping only to wake up again on the same day for the third time in a row. She locked the attic door behind her. She grabbed her journal and sat on the floor, because she still had no desk. She took out a pencil.

  Despite being a group M speller, Odessa was excellent at math.

  She did some quick calculations, and as she did she felt a clicking in her brain. Just like when a difficult math problem suddenly made perfect sense. She was too smart to believe there were actual cogs and wheels turning inside her head, but sometimes that was how it felt.

  What caused this clicking was Odessa’s memory of coming to her room the night before, between dinner and dessert. She’d come to use the upstairs bathroom, the one she liked best, and while in there she’d thought about something she wanted to write in her journal, so she darted up to the attic, sat down on the floor, and wrote the following:

  If I stop caring that Claire won’t talk to me anymore, she’ll start talking to me again. Just like the way Oliver gives me back what I want right after I don’t want it anymore.

  Odessa flipped back a page in her journal and found the entry. She flipped to a fresh page and began to scribble furiously.

  The first fall through the attic floorboards had taken her back exactly one day.

  Twenty-four hours.

  She landed on the floor of the attic because that was exactly where she’d been twenty-four hours earlier, writing about Claire in her journal.

  She did some more calculations.

  The second fall took place on the same day as the first. Butter-brickle ice cream day. Although she had taken it later, after dessert, because she held her arms at her sides and did not shove Oliver. And this time, her math told her, she’d landed twenty-three hours earlier.

  Flabbergasting, she thought, tossing her journal and its scribbled equations across the room.

  Was this it?

  Was this her life?

  Would she always have to relive this day?

  Was she doomed to an existence of unappetizing cake made from a vegetable?

  No! She wouldn’t let that happen.

  All she had to do was not jump. Easy enough. The clock would tick forward so long as Odessa walked lightly on her attic floor. Better yet, she could avoid the middle of her room at all costs.

 
Yes.

  Avoid the middle.

  That was exactly what Odessa Green-Light did for the next month.

  Odessa had almost forgotten about those strange days of falling through the floor. She must have been running a fever. A high one, the kind that makes you hallucinate. Anyway, it was silly. Impossible. It didn’t deserve her attention. Not another thought. She’d even thrown away her journal after picking out a new one with a hummingbird on the cover from the stationery store.

  Odessa was moving forward.

  Mr. Rausche had promised she could make the switch to group N after five consecutive perfect scores on her weekly word-study quizzes. So far Odessa had taken four, and she’d spelled each and every word correctly.

  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 remarrying, 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 remarrying. 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 Oliver’s old baby quilt, 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.