Odessa Again (3 page)

Mom slid a plate of scrambled eggs on rye toast in front of her and said, “Eat up, the clock is ticking.”

This wouldn’t have been odd if her mother said this every day, the way her teacher Mr. Rausche always started each morning by saying, “Best feet forward.”

But her mother had never said anything about the clock ticking, unless you counted
yesterday
morning, when she said this as she slid a plate of scrambled eggs on rye toast in front of Odessa right after Oliver stuck out his tongue from beneath a chocolate-milk mustache.

“I’m sorry to rush you, love,” her mother said, “but I have a meeting. Chop-chop.”

And yes, that was exactly what her mother had said the day before as Odessa reached for her fork. She said she had a “meeting,” which Odessa knew meant she had a “job interview.”

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 pigeon-toed 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 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.

22 Hours

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.