“Odd Oliver,” that’s what everyone at school called her—even the older kids she didn’t know. The kids in her class had been calling her Odd Oliver since fifth grade, and she’d thought she’d lose the name when they all moved on to high school, but it carried over, got worse even. High school was so big and strange—a world where the normal rules didn’t seem to apply. When she walked the halls, she was reminded of another story she’d learned about in English: the labyrinth that held the Minotaur. Only in her version, there were Minotaurs everywhere, around every corner, and they wore letter jackets, or cheap perfume and pounds of makeup. The high school served three towns, so there were a lot of kids Olive had never seen before, and originally, she’d looked forward to this, thought it would help her to blend in, to hide, but really it just made her stick out more. News of her nickname and what had happened with her mother spread fast during the first weeks of school.

“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.