“What ya huntin’ for, Odd Oliver?” kids would tease when she came to school in her camouflage jacket and pants. Screw them, she thought. Sometimes she’d even mumble a quick “Fuck off,” but then they’d coo and chortle and say, “You’re such a freakazoid! No wonder your mom left you.” That was the worst—when they brought her mother into it. Sometimes she’d get to her locker and find stuff there, stuff she hadn’t put in: lip gloss, eye shadow, little notes that said, “Are you a boy or a girl?” Sometimes the notes were crueler. “Your mother’s a whore. She opened her legs for half the men in this town.”

    Mike told her not to pay any attention to it.

“You know, I’ve got this game I play sometimes,” he told her once, when she’d found an especially crude note taped to her locker. He pretended he hadn’t seen what it said, just took it down and crumpled it up. “I come to school and pretend that I’m not one of them. That I’m this alien, from way off in some other galaxy. I’ve just been sent here to observe.”

Olive nodded.

“But see, the creatures from my home planet are coming back soon to pick me up, and after, they’re gonna destroy the Earth. One big fireball,” he said, making an exploding noise and waggling his fingers. “Poof!”

Olive smiled but cringed a little. She didn’t want to think of everyone all burned up like that, not even the girls who’d left the cruel notes.

“But the thing is, I get to pick people to come back with me. Everyone else will be disintegrated.” His eyes glittered. “The only one I’ve picked so far is you,” he told Olive, and gave her a big goofy smile.

“Umm…thanks, I guess,” she’d said. The second bell rang, and they ran to class, already late.

* * *

. . .

“I thought maybe we could start in on your room,” Daddy said now.

Olive blinked at him. “Huh?” she said, thinking she’d misheard him because she’d been daydreaming about Mike and the aliens.

“Your room,” he repeated. “I thought we could get started with it. No need to keep putting it off, right?”

Her stomach knotted. Not her room. That was her one safe space. He had suggested making it bigger a couple of weeks ago, when Riley was over for dinner. She said her room was fine, she was happy with it the way it was.

“Don’t you want it bigger? Better? A higher ceiling? A bigger closet?”

“For god’s sake, Dustin,” Riley said. “She said she was happy with it the way it is. Can’t you just leave one room alone?”

Her dad had backed down. But after Riley left, he kept talking about all the changes they’d make someday to Olive’s room, though he hadn’t gone as far as suggesting they actually start work. The walls and ceiling of her bedroom remained intact. And it was clean. Dust free. It was the one place of order in the whole house. The one place that had been left exactly the same as it was the day Mama went away.

    “Don’t you think we should finish up in the living room first? Put the rest of the drywall up? Paint, maybe?” She tried not to show how frantic she felt. How desperate.

Not my room. Anything but that.

Her dad looked disappointed. “I just want you to have a nice room. We can make it bigger, go into the spare room a little ways. You can have a walk-in closet. You know? Like we’ve been talking about?”

It was Daddy who’d been doing all the talking, all the daydreaming, promising how nice, how perfect, things would be if they knocked out a wall here, put up some shelves there. As if true happiness could be brought about with a sledgehammer and new drywall.

“My closet’s fine the way it is,” she told him. She didn’t have much clothing. Not like some of the girls in her class who seemed to have a different outfit for every day of the month. Olive was fine with her two pairs of jeans (patched in places), camo hunting pants with tons of pockets, a few T-shirts, a hoodie, and her camo jacket. She owned two pairs of shoes: hunting boots and sneakers.

“I thought—” he said, looking lost, profoundly disappointed.

“I really think we should concentrate on finishing some of the projects we’ve started,” she said, realizing how funny it was, her talking like she was the adult and he was the little kid with his crazy, impractical ideas. “Let’s work on the living room today after school, okay? That’ll be the first room Mama sees when she walks through the door. Don’t we want it to be perfect?”

More than looking disappointed, he looked tired. Old. He’d lost weight since Mama left. His skin looked sallow; there were dark circles under his eyes. His sandy-colored hair was a little too long. She needed to take better care of him, to make sure he ate more and to encourage him to go to bed earlier instead of falling asleep each night on the ratty old couch in front of the television in the living room.

For half a second, she thought about changing her mind, giving in, telling him sure, they could start in on her room just to make him happy, to see him smile.

    She bit her lip, waited.

“Sure,” he said at last. “We can finish the living room first. What color do you think we should paint it?”

Olive smiled, let herself breathe. She thought about it while she spread thick white frosting on the cinnamon rolls.