Read Online Odessa Again by Dana Reinhardt - Free Book Online Page B

to her in the middle of the night when she woke up with the feeling like her knees were on fire, or sometimes her ankles, and occasionally her feet. The doctor called these “growing pains,” but Odessa was never any taller in the morning.

    She also took chewable grape Motrin when she had a fever or her teeth hurt and that time she’d stepped on a bee when she’d gone outside in bare feet right after Mom had said, “Put some shoes on, you could step on a bee!”
    Odessa knew Mom’s medicine cabinet was off-limits. She knew never to take any medicine all by herself, without adult supervision—that was why medicine came in bottles most adults had trouble opening. But chewable grape Motrin came in a box, and anyway, giving it to a hamster was different from taking it herself.
    Odessa held the purple pill in her hand. She braced for the feeling of Mud’s nose and whiskers on her palm, but he had no interest in her offering.
    “Maybe we should crush it up and put it in his food,” Odessa suggested.
    Oliver shook his head. “He’s not eating.”
    When Truman needed medicine Mom would pry his mouth open, shove the pill down his throat, and hold his jaws closed until he swallowed it.
    She looked at the pill and at Mud’s mouth. The pill was almost half the size of his little face. She couldn’t see how this could possibly work.
    “Maybe put it into his water,” Oliver said.
    Odessa nodded. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, he did have brilliant ideas.
    Oliver crushed the pill into the top of Mud’s water bottle and gave it a good shake, then put it back on the side of the cage. He placed Mud in a patch of sawdust just under the small metal spout.
    He sniffed it.
    His whiskers twitched.
    He sniffed it again.
    Then Mud stuck out his tongue—so little and pink—and started to drink. Odessa couldn’t believe how small his tongue was. And his teeth! No bigger than grains of rice. She had to admit, he was sort of cute as he stood on his hind legs and held on to the drinking spout with his tiny little paws.
    Oliver breathed a sigh of relief as a third of the purplish water slowly drained from the bottle.
    He looked at his sister. “Thanks,” he said.
    Odessa smiled.
    She went up to her attic, her chest swelling with pride. It felt good to help someone, even if that someone was a rodent who belonged to a toad.
    She called Sofia, but Sofia’s mom said she was doing homework and that they could talk about Dreamonica later. Odessa didn’t say: I need to talk about Sadie and why she’s all over Theo, not my fake mansion with the waterslide!
    She sat at her desk and pulled out her folder. Perplexors: math problems disguised as word problems. They made her brain hurt. She put those back and took out her word-study sheet. The quiz, as always, was on Wednesday. Tomorrow. She looked over her list.
neighbor
brought
tongue
height
weird
believe
    And her favorite: misspell
    It was nice to know that Mr. Rausche had a sense of humor.
    Odessa stretched out her legs and caught the cord of her desk lamp with her sneaker, pulling the plug clear out of its socket and plunging her room into almost-blackness. That was one thing about living in the attic that Odessa did not love—her small window didn’t let in much light.
    She grabbed her pen that was also a flashlight and crawled underneath her desk. Her father had given her this penlight. It said Clark Funds on it. She’d always wondered why Dad had given her Mr. Funds’s pen, but now she was glad he did, because she’d have had a hard time finding the socket without it.
    Just as she went to put the plug in, Odessa spied a little door. Well, maybe it wasn’t a door, because it had no handle, but it was a small square framed space, just big enough for somebody to crawl through.
    She shined the light of Mr. Funds’s pen on it.
    How peculiar, Odessa thought.
    She reached over to give the door a shove, and just as she did, she heard a bloodcurdling scream come from beneath