“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.