Excerpt: Olly As It Were

I’m chasing it again. It’s tippling around on its stupid, tiny little feet, making a crazy pathway that might lead me to its nest, and it’ll be like Christmas, baby. Chris-mouse! It’s so hard not to just reach out and snag the little beastie with my sharp claws and feel it wriggling, flinging it about and watching it squirm, but I’m trying to exercise patience here. If I just wait, then the whole toybox will be mine. I’ll have my own little store of fun to make a beeline for anytime I feel like exercising my predatory rights. Ahhh, there goes the little morsel — right underneath the Anderson kids’ sandbox! Superb. I sit on my haunches like the cat that ate the canary, licking my paw and congratulating myself on my successful sleuthing... and...

I wake up licking my hand and grooming my bangs! Ughhh, not again! These dreams are getting more and more real, and it’s really driving me crazy. I mean, what kind of mental case repeatedly dreams that she’s a cat? Me, that’s who. Olivia Elvira Mattenson. I know – nice name eh? I think my parents watched too many cheesy horror flicks when I was cooking. Nobody calls me Olivia. Or not when they want me to answer, anyway. It’s Olly or Livvy.

I live in a boring house in a boring suburb in a boring city and have a boring life. My mom would kill me if she heard that. “Your life is what you make of it!” she likes to say, along with all those other momtastic sayings like, “Keep making that face and it’ll freeze that way,” and “Put your retainer back in, don’t you know your teeth cost us a bloody mint? I could have bought a decent car for what your teeth are worth!” OK, maybe not everybody’s mom talks like that. Mine can be a little strange. And I am not kidding about the little part, either. I get to gaze down on her with superior height, which is kind of funny. I lean on her head with my elbow, and call her my little PLP, which means Public Leaning Post. She gets this goofy smile but acts all exasperated and says how unfair it is everybody in her family is taller than she is.

So back to my boring life, which I realize I was already describing, but let’s go to a new paragraph. My house looks boring from the outside. It’s beige and white and there are like a million other ones just like it all around here, so my parents like to sing this song called Little Boxes, which I don’t really get, but I sort of do. But inside it’s actually kind of cool, even though it’s way too small. We like colour around here, so there is funky art on the walls and sculptures and posters and weird old fashioned stuff, which my parents would probably call “retro” but to me it looks just plain old. Like, we have this really ancient pinball machine with this creepy chick painted on it who looks like she would probably stub a cigarette out on your soul given half a chance. Me and my friend Kayla have talked about what if the pinball machine was like a time machine, and it could suck you into whatever the time was that it depicts. My mom says it’s like the 1930s. We would get spat out in London, in Picadilly Circus, because that’s what the Pinball Machine is called. The lady has this green dress on with like a fur collar, and ruby red lipstick an these arched eyebrows. We’re all like, oh, we could use our knowledge from the future and totally make a ton of money so that the future course of our lives would alter and we’d be rich, which is something my family is so very definitely NOT. And it sucks. At least it’s not like all my friends are wealthy. Some of them are. Some of them aren’t. Trav is def worse off, plus his mom smokes, which is totes gross. His screen door is ripped, his bedroom walls have dents in them, and the walls are all a dirty shade of white, and the furniture is shabby, plus we all suspect that his stepfather-to-be is some kind of bottom dweller. Trav doesn’t talk much about him, but he gets this look on his face that’s like a mix of fear and revulsion and he refers to him as The Donkey.

You might wonder why I’ve been in Trav’s bedroom. See, it’s OK. He’s a little confused, if you know what I mean. And he took a lot of crap over it at school. Got called Fag constantly. Homo, fruitbat, Gayday, you name it. He’s really changed in the past year. I want to really dig into his head and figure out why, you know? It’s not just that he’s grown, like, 8 inches taller or something like that, from when he was just this pipsqueak blond-headed kid just six months ago. He started talking differently. He started exaggerating his esses. He wears eye make up. He dyed his hair black and it looks all stuck up and flat at the same time, like Edward Scissorhands. He carries a little kid backpack. It’s supposed to be ironic. He has a sticker on it that says Homosexuality is Gay. My mom said that was very clever. She’s pretty good about Trav. Some other people’s parents get pretty freaked out about him being part of our group. Like, Jessa’s even said he wasn’t allowed to come in the house anymore. They think he’s “strange.” Yeah, Jessa’s brother eats erasers and her dad paints tiny soldiers, and Trav’s the strange one? Whatever.