Small Spaces (Small Spaces, #1)

by Katherine Arden

Peter Blood outsmarted everyone, which was a feature she liked in heroes, although she wished Peter were a girl, or the villain were a girl, or someone in the book besides his boat and his girlfriend (both named Arabella) were a girl. But at least the book had romance and high-seas adventures and other absolutely not Evansburg things. Ollie liked that. Reading it meant going to a new place where she wasn’t Olivia Adler at all.

Ms. Carruthers had tried to call Ollie Olivia at the end of fifth grade, and a few teachers had tried since, but Ollie refused to answer. All the best heroines of Ollie’s books were stubborn as rocks, or roots, or whatever the author liked to call them. Only her mom called her Olivia and that was that.

Ollie lined up with everyone else, but she was almost bouncing with impatience. She wanted so badly to read, it felt like her book was burning a hole in her backpack.

Heroines in books always sounded brave, but to her own ears, Ollie sounded scared.

Too late. Brian put a hand on the man’s shoulder, and then yelped and jumped back. The arm flopped, the head fell sideways. It wasn’t a person at all, only a scarecrow. The blank face scowled at them, hazy in the gathering dark. “I thought it was a person,” Brian whispered. “Well,” said Ollie, trying to be reasonable, to ignore her rising panic, “a scarecrow means we must be near the farm.”

Coco screamed. Brian and Ollie spun. Coco stood with her hand over her mouth, pointing up at the tree trunks. WE SEE YOU was written on a tree overhead in ragged, dripping white letters.

Strong hands, Ollie realized. Coco didn’t cry because she was weak. Coco cried because she felt things.