'Thank you,' she says, instead of finishing her sentence. 'I'll check it out.'
'You like it out here,' Sam remarks, looking at her and then around them. 'Even though it's ruins. Your posture is more confident. You look happier. You're not a town mouse. You like it better in the open.'
Olivia remembers that story from when she was young. The town mouse and the country mouse are friends, but each hates everything about where the other lives. They try to compromise for the sake of affection, but neither is really happy visiting the other. She always thought it was a sad story.
'What about you?' she asks Sam. 'Are you a town mouse or a country mouse?'
He scuffs at the ground with his foot. 'Neither, really. I'm a robot mouse.'
9
She opens the paper bag in her bedroom that night, when there's not much chance of anyone disturbing her and seeing what she's doing. Her pulse is a nervous flutter as she takes the ancient, half-collapsed paperback out of its wrapping.
Dark Carnival by Ray Bradbury. The cover is lurid, black and red, grey photos picked out in halftone dots and collaged with no sense or order.
Olivia begins to read and doesn't stop until her alarm clock goes off at 6:30am the next morning. She hides the book on the top shelf of her closet, behind her rarely-worn, most expensive formal clothes.
The stories in the book are little slivers cut with a sharp and gleaming knife — vampire families having happy reunions, scythes reaping fields of souls. Nightmares pinned down with ink, seeping blackly into Olivia's spongy brain and clattering heart.
The one she returns to time and time again, that haunts her through her days, is called The Small Assassin. It's about a mother who thinks her baby's trying to kill her. It cries at night to stop her from getting any rest, so she'll end up sick and tired and catch pneumonia.
When the mother falls down the stairs and dies, her doctor decides she was right all along, and the story ends with the doctor getting his scalpel out of his bag. Getting ready to kill the baby.
The story lingers like a taste in the back of Olivia's throat, like grit in her eye. She thinks it might be the saddest story in the world. The baby didn't ask to be born bad. Nobody can help it, being born however they're born. If a mother won't love it and a doctor won't care for it, what's left? Who takes care of the babies that are born wicked, the stepsisters and queens and black knights of fairy stories, the small murderers of horror fiction? Who makes sure they're fed and warm and safe?
Even the ones born strange need someone who loves them, don't they?
Sometimes she is very, very lonely.
Her mother is disappointed that she doesn't wear her contacts anymore. 'Your glasses make you look so plain. Ordinary.'
Her mother talks of disappointments and her father doesn't talk at all, preferring to punish her with silence and lack of attention. Olivia's always grateful to leave for school in the mornings, and lingers away from home as long as she can in the afternoons. At least at school she doesn't have to feel guilty about resenting the teachers that dislike her. When biting rage wells up against her father and mother, it always makes her feel she's failed at something important.
Sometimes her father doesn't speak to her for weeks on end, and then without warning he'll tell her all about his day over the dinner table. He makes it clear through this renewed attention that she has been forgiven for the C in History or the messy handwriting or the torn stockings at an important child's birthday party.
Olivia is so tired of being forgiven.
10
After school the next day, she goes to the souvlaki place and walks through to the kitchen at the back. One thing she's learned from knowing people like her father is that if you appear to know where you're going and why you belong there, nobody will stop you or ask questions.
Sam's refilling the salt shakers from a larger container. He looks up as she comes in, then back at his work. He doesn't seem surprised to see her. Olivia gets the feeling that Sam has known the secret about going where you want even longer than Olivia has.
'I'm reading The Iliad. From your list,' she says.
'Good,' Sam says.
'I'm not far into it. There was a summary on the download site though. The Trojan horse — that's the big one they all hide inside, right?'
Sam looks up again and nods.
'I'd only heard that term in computer class before. Trojan horse,' she admits. Sam gives her a momentary smile, skittish and fleeting.
'Me too,' he tells her. 'That's why I wanted to read the story. To know why it was called that.'
'It's a cool name. For a computer thing, or a real thing. All the names in the book are good,' Olivia agrees. 'Do you want my help?'
Sam shrugs, but he makes room for her to join in beside him.
'I like the name Erida best,' he says. 'Of the names in the story. It's a girl's name.'
'I'm not up to her yet. But it's pretty.'
'She's the goddess of hate. She lets out a scream so fierce and bitter that all the soldiers forget everything they used to know — their fathers, their families. All they can think about is doing battle. If I ever got to name a girl, I'd name her Erida.'
'If I got to name a girl,' Olivia offers. 'I'd call her Arcadia. That's from a play.'
'It's not a girl-name, though. It's a place-name.'
Olivia shrugs. 'I like it.'
'Stoppard, right? The play. It's about mathematics.'
'Chaos, yes,' she agrees.
'The ending's sad. I remember that. I didn't think there were any modern stories with sad endings in the legal archives.'
'No.' Olivia shakes her head. 'Not sad. Perfect. Even though you already know that she dies and he goes crazy, that's not where it ends. It ends with them dancing. Whatever comes next, it stops them in that perfect moment. That's the secret to a happy ending. Knowing where to stop.'
Sam gives her a long look, like she's a puzzle he wants to understand. They finish his work without further conversation.
11
Visiting Sam becomes something Olivia looks forward to right from the moment she wakes up in the morning. It gets her through boring classes, through bullies shoving and pushing and calling her nasty things.
It's not the books — though she loves the books and is infinitely grateful for them, and will happily skip buying lunch for the rest of her life in order to afford them — it's Sam himself. Hannah was the first real friend Olivia ever had, and Sam's the only person she's met since who could be the second.
The room where he lives, upstairs from the café, is always a complete mess, but a comfortable mess. His clothes are all soft and worn and made of fine, smooth textures, so all the piles on the floor in his room are nice to sit on.
'I don't like anything rough or itchy or bright,' he explains, frowning as if even the thought of it makes him feel bad.
Olivia, remembering the wool coat left behind in the cell, thinks Sam's attitude is an eminently reasonable one.
Sam's hobby is drawing shapes with many sides, laid out in orthographic projections. The mathematician in her is enchanted by the clean poetry of his lines. The diagrams remind Olivia of honeycombs.
'A three-dimensional shape with twenty sides is an icosahedron,' Sam explains, pointing imperiously at one of the pictures which decorate his walls. His pictures help him with his words, because the desire to explain them to Olivia is strong