Table Of ContentA D R
LSO BY ANA EINHARDT
A Brief Chapter in My Impossible Life
Harmless
How to Build a House
The Things a Brother Knows
The Summer I Learned to Fly
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or
locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2013 by Dana Reinhardt
Jacket art and interior illustrations copyright © 2013 by Susan Reagan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reinhardt, Dana.
Odessa again / Dana Reinhardt. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When nine-year-old Odessa Green-Light stomps out her frustration at being sent to her room after shoving her annoying little brother, one particularly big stomp sends Odessa flying through
the floorboards and mysteriously twenty-four hours back in time.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89788-7
[1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Remarriage—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R2758Od 2013
[Fic]—dc23
2012008231
The illustrations were rendered digitally.
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
To Noa, who was kind enough to let me steal many of her ideas.
And to Zoe and the rest of Johnny Galang’s class at Live Oak School, thank you for being this book’s first readers.
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The New House
24 Hours
23 Hours
22 Hours
21 Hours … 20 Hours … 19 Hours … 18 Hours … 17 Hours …
16 Hours
15 Hours
14 Hours
13 Hours … 12 Hours …
11 Hours
10 Hours
9 Hours
Still 9 Hours
8 Hours
7 Hours
6 Hours
5 Hours
4 Hours
3 Hours
2 Hours
1 Hour
The New New House
About the Author
There comes a day in the life of every big sister when it’s simply no longer
suitable to share a bedroom with your toad of a little brother.
For Odessa Green-Light, that day was a Tuesday.
They’d only been living in the new house a few months. Odessa and Oliver
shared a room, like they had in the old house, and like they did in Dad’s
apartment. This new house, of which Odessa was not particularly fond, had one
redeeming feature that the old house she missed so much did not.
It had an attic.
From the first time the landlady gave them the tour—with someone else’s
scribbles on the kitchen wall, and someone else’s stickers stuck to the dryer that
had dried someone else’s clothes, and the narrow wooden staircase scuffed from
someone else’s shoes—Odessa had her eye on that attic.
“You’ll love it here,” the old lady barked at Odessa, as if this were an order
and not a wish.
Odessa doubted very much that she would love it there, but she did think that
she might love living in the attic, a full flight of stairs removed from Oliver.
She asked, but of course her mother said no. If there was one thing Odessa
could count on, it was Mom saying no to the things Odessa wanted most.
So a few months back, on move-in day, a day Mom tried to make cheery by
blasting old-fashioned music and singing into a broom handle, Odessa unpacked
her stuff into one half of a too-small bedroom while Oliver the Toad unpacked
into the other.
And each day since, or at least every weeknight and every other weekend,
which were the nights she spent at her mother’s, Odessa had begged to move
into that attic, but it hadn’t worked.
Begging rarely did.
She’d also tried cajoling, bamboozling, and hoodwinking.
“Not a chance,” Mom said.
Sometimes, however, victory is found in unlikely places.
Oliver discovered the field mouse that delivered this victory in the backyard.
Oliver didn’t seem to know how to get along with real live people: his terrible
shyness got in the way. But there was no denying he had a way with rodents.
It was a Tuesday, which meant the next day was a Wednesday, word-study
day, and Odessa had set her mind to moving into word group N, which required
some studying.
The fourth-grade class was divided into word groups L, M, and N, and
although Mr. Rausche chose letters from smack-dab in the middle of the
alphabet, Odessa knew that as an M, she was only a second-level word-study
student.
Smack-dab in the middle.
Odessa loved words. And she always tried her best to use the ones that other
people too often ignored. But loving words and knowing how to spell them were
two different things, and Odessa knew she would never make the move to group
N without mastering the illogical rules of spelling, which was nearly impossible
to do with Oliver crashing around her too-small room.
So she told him to get lost, not having any idea that this would lead him to
their new backyard, where he’d find a field mouse sniffing around a chew toy
that someone else’s dog had left in the grass. Nor did she guess that Oliver
would sing softly to this mouse until it wandered into his outstretched palm, at
which point he would carry it into their bedroom and drop it down the back of
Odessa’s pink T-shirt with the turquoise stripes.
Well.
Odessa did what any reasonable person would do. She shrieked, ran to find
her mother in the kitchen, and threatened to sue in a court of law if she couldn’t
move into the attic.
From her mother’s lips sprang these three beautiful words:
“I. Give. Up.”
And so Odessa found herself tucked in bed by 7:45 that Tuesday night under
the quilt Mom pulled from one of the attic’s boxes. A quilt sewn as a gift for the
darling baby Oliver, who had grown up to be a pesky toad.
*
Odessa had been sleeping in the attic for exactly three nights before it happened.
