Small Spaces

“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.”

Ollie is talking about reading Captain Blood while isolating herself by the river. Aside from simply withdrawing, as the first quote suggests, in this statement, she reveals that she is actively trying to distract herself from real life. The fact that she uses reading to do this will hold particular irony later in the story. Once Ollie gets pulled into the book called Small Spaces, she may well be trapped there forever. This is a permanent escape that she didn’t anticipate. 

“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.”

This quote demonstrates yet another of Ollie’s adaptive strategies. To have someone else call her Olivia would both reawaken painful memories of her lost mother as well as signal that somebody else is usurping her place. The quote also refers to stubbornness as a valuable quality in a heroine. Ollie will demonstrate this once she is forced to save her classmates in the smiling man’s realm. 

“‘Ollie, you can’t hide in your books forever. There are all kinds of people, and good things, and life, just waiting for you to—’ She had known he was going to say that, or something like that. She was on her feet. ‘To what? Forget? I won’t, even if you have. I’ll do what I want.’”

Ollie’s father is trying to get her to move forward, but Ollie remains stuck in the past. She rationalizes this move by insisting that she wants to remember her mother. All her behavior in the novel indicates that she’s trying multiple strategies to forget. Hiding and reading are acts of denial, not an acceptance of tragedy.

“She needed a better distraction. Distractions were good. Then she wouldn’t have to think of her dad, pale under his beard. She wouldn’t have to think of Mr. Easton and his too-sympathetic face. She wouldn’t have to think about fire in a torn-up field beneath the rain. She wouldn’t have to think at all.”

In this statement, Ollie is being somewhat more truthful about her motives. Everything she does is an attempt to distract herself from the memory of her mother’s plane crash. She is equally intent on denying the aftermath of the event. When adults show her sympathy, they are confirming the reality of the tragedy, but Ollie will have none of it. 

“Principal Snyder looked again from Ollie to Brian. Ollie thought of Coco Zintner and tried to look angelic. Maybe it worked. Abruptly Principal Snyder’s face softened. Sympathy face. Ollie almost let her innocent expression slip. She hated sympathy face.”

Ollie and Brian are being lectured by the principal, but Brain denies that Ollie threw the rock. For her part, Ollie mimics innocence, but the ploy backfires. Her pitiful expression evokes the sympathy that she tries so hard to avoid. Once again, she is being confronted with the reality of her mother’s accident. 

“Ollie looked up. Was Brian trying to be nice again? People’s parents did sometimes tell their kids to be nice to that girl because you know what happened to the poor thing.”

Brian and Ollie are riding on the school bus, and Brian has just asked what Ollie is reading. By sticking her nose in a book, she is yet again attempting to isolate herself while surrounded by others. The pity of her classmates is just as hard for Ollie to accept as the pity of the adults in her life. This is the main reason why she’s withdrawn from the school activities that she previously enjoyed.

“You might get to know characters in books, Ollie thought, but getting to know a human was an entirely different thing.”

Brian has just surprised Ollie by quoting an entire passage from Alice in Wonderland. She had pegged him as a brainless athlete, but he surprised her. Ollie will later be equally impressed by Coco’s hidden skills. While books might be entertaining and distracting, people are unpredictable. 

“‘It doesn’t seem fair that it gave us the best and yummiest mushroom and now it’s just going to die.’ She buried her face in her pillow. That was back when she could cry over dumb things like elm trees. Her mother sighed and said, ‘No, it’s not fair. But the tree gave us a gift. Even bad things can lead to good. Maybe in sad times, it helps to think of that.’ ‘Maybe,’ said Ollie, unconvinced.”

Ollie is recalling a mushroom-picking expedition with her mother from years earlier. A dying tree has been the incubator for the best mushrooms, but Ollie mourns the tree’s demise. She is just as unable to let go of the loss of a tree as the later loss of her mother. Mrs. Adler’s advice is prophetic. Ollie’s horrible experience in the shadow world will be the means for her to reconnect with her mother’s spirit in the real world.

“‘It’s not like we’re running around digging up hundred-year-old graves. Just for the sake of ghost stories.’ ‘So there is a ghost story?’ When Seth smiled, it softened the angular bones of his face. Ollie found herself warming to him. ‘Come on, kid,’ said Seth. ‘There’s always a ghost story.’”

Ollie has just had an unnerving conversation with the bus driver. Ironically, it is Seth who arrives on the scene to offer comfort. As she will later observe, he is kind and approachable. An innocent child would never perceive him as a source of danger. His own offhanded comment seems to mock this possibility. This denial makes him doubly dangerous. 

“Mr. Easton looked concerned. ‘Did you need some quiet time?’ Ollie suddenly wanted to yell. Quiet time, always quiet time, as if she could make her own head and heart be quiet.”

Ollie’s teacher has just discovered that she wandered away from the class during the milking demonstration. Easton projects concern. This is just as abhorrent to Ollie as sympathy face or understanding voice. Ollie’s comment is an indicator of how much effort it takes her to suppress her memories and emotions. It’s a full-time job to forget her past.

“‘Is it because your mom died?’ Coco pressed. Ollie looked up, stomach churning. She didn’t hate her classmates for the most part, but she did hate Coco just then. Pretty Coco with her pink hair and her stupid crying eyes and her mom at home.”

No one has had the audacity to mention Ollie’s tragedy to her face except for tactless Coco. Ironically, Ollie doesn’t dislike her for raising the dread subject of her mother’s death. Instead, she is revealing the jealousy she harbors toward anyone whose mother is still alive. Ollie sees Coco as clueless because she doesn’t understand disaster.

“Ollie’s phone was a heavy thing that flipped open. She had to text by scrolling through numeric options, and it took forever. But the phone had been her mother’s. Dad had tried to get her a new one for her birthday, but she had screamed at him and thrown it across the room.”

While on the bus, all the students are trying to get cell signals to summon help. Ollie’s phone is yet another indicator of her inability to let go of the past. The cumbersome nature of the phone itself is analogous to the cumbersome weight of carrying grief every moment. Ollie’s violent reaction to her father’s attempt to substitute a new model is another indicator of her unwillingness to let go of her mother.

“She yelled and grabbed the watch and ran, ran for her bike, pedaled to their house, never mind the freezing rain. She had run upstairs soaking wet, shivering, to hide in her window seat. She hadn’t cried. She couldn’t bear to cry. Crying meant it was all real, and she didn’t want it to be real. Instead she opened a book at random, read until her eyes went blurry, and then read some more.”

This quote describes Ollie’s memory of the day that her father came to school to break the news about her mother’s accident. He was carrying his wife’s watch at the time. Since Ollie never got the chance to say goodbye to her mother, she latches onto the watch immediately as a way to keep her close. In this passage, Ollie also describes the birth of her other coping mechanism. She immediately dives into a book to distract herself from dealing with reality. 

“He brought her pies, cakes, all of her favorite things. She didn’t touch them. Maybe, she kept thinking, when she came back from one of those other worlds, when she woke up from book dreaming, she would come back to a world where her mother wasn’t dead. She hadn’t.”

In the days that follow her mother’s accident, Ollie continues to read obsessively. This passage foreshadows future events in the novel. Ollie hopes to find her mother alive in the world of a novel. This is exactly what happens to her when she reads Beth’s book, Small Spaces, and enters the smiling man’s domain. Ollie finds her mother again in spirit and forges continuity in their relationship. 

“‘That might take too long,’ Coco pressed. ‘They were kidnapped by scarecrows! We have to help them.’ Apparently Coco held no grudges for the gum, or the notebook, or a dozen other things. Ollie felt a reluctant admiration for Coco Zintner.”

Once Coco recognizes the danger to her classmates, her first instinct is to help them. While Ollie is mired in sadness and resentment, Coco easily lets go of past injuries. Other students have been unkind to her on multiple occasions, but she dismisses these petty slights as insignificant. Ollie’s glimmer of admiration is a sign of her desire to move forward too. 

“She wondered if she should tell Brian and Coco about her watch. About what she thought it might mean. But she couldn’t. She was afraid of seeing pity in their eyes. Sympathy face. Of having them tell her that hope had clouded her judgment. That her mom wasn’t really talking to her.”

Once again, Ollie worries about eliciting a specific reaction from others, so she guards her behavior. She is hypercritical of herself for daring to hope that her mother is communicating with her through the broken watch. In anticipating a pitying reaction from Brian and Coco, she is actually projecting disapproval of her own gullibility. 

“While they were at it, Coco changed the Band-Aid on her chin and Ollie changed the one on the back of Brian’s head. They all felt better after, not because they had such bad cuts or anything, but more because the last twenty-four hours had been so full of mysteries and impossible problems and being scared. It was a relief to deal with an ordinary problem, like a scraped knee.”

The three children sustained minor injuries while fending off the scarecrows and climbing into the barn’s hayloft. The fact that they treat one another’s cuts and scrapes indicates the bond they are forming with one another. Also, such mundane behavior is a relief from the supernatural horrors they have faced together in the shadow realm. Ollie’s preference for the mundane is a distinct change from her usual desire to escape into the world of the imagination.

“At the funeral, they had her mother’s casket closed. It was easy to believe that her mother wasn’t in there at all […] Easier to imagine that than to imagine the ground coming up, big bigger biggest. Falling. Ollie was halfway across the bridge, high above the creek, and memory had paralyzed her. Mom fell. I could fall.”

Ollie is trying to cross the rotting bridge that leads to the Webster farmhouse. She confesses that she never feared heights until after her mother’s accident. Once again, she is allowing past trauma to color her actions in the present moment. While imagination has been her escape in the past, it now promises to be her undoing. 

“She wasn’t going to fall. Coco’s blue eyes promised it, and her thin hands. Strong hands, Ollie realized. Coco didn’t cry because she was weak. Coco cried because she felt things. Ollie never cried because she didn’t feel things. Not anymore.”

Fragile little Coco comes to Ollie’s rescue to help her cross the bridge. Up to this point, Ollie views herself as the rescuer since she had to come to Coco’s defense in the schoolyard. Ollie despises weakness and interprets her own grief at her mother’s death as something to be avoided. This quote represents a turning point in her attitude. 

“‘I wrote a book,’ said Beth thoughtfully. ‘I think that’s why. I put myself into it, all my days and nights and hopes and dreams. My whole life. I think my book is the reason I still remember. Although maybe it would have been easier to forget.’ Maybe that’s why the smiling man wanted Linda Webster to get rid of the book, Ollie thought. To stop Beth from hanging around.”

Ollie has found Beth’s ghost haunting an upstairs bedroom in the farmhouse. In some sense, she is encountering her own future if she doesn’t change her self-destructive attitude. Beth articulates the dilemma of remembering and forgetting. Ollie wants to hold onto her mother, but she actively suppresses memories associated with her loss. In doing both these things, she remains immobilized, just like Beth. 

“‘How is she the clumsiest person ever on the ground, yet a squirrel when she’s climbing?’ muttered Ollie. Brian grinned. ‘You’re kind of grumpy most of the time, but when things get bad, you’re the bravest. People can surprise you, Ollie-pop.’”

Ollie’s admiration for Coco grows throughout the story when she sees how brave and agile the little flower fairy really is. Part of Ollie’s problem is that she makes snap judgments about conditions and other people, always assuming she’s right. She made the same mistake about Brian earlier in the book. He hints that Ollie ought to revisit some of her self-limiting assumptions. 

“His eyes were as deep and his smile was as lovely as they had been at Misty Valley Farm. […] ‘You’re the smiling man,’ Ollie said slowly. She could barely believe it. […] She’d imagined a skull smile, a pumpkin-head smile. A scarecrow smile. She’d not imagined a kind smile, the sort that would make a scared kid not scared anymore.”

Ollie has just learned the smiling man’s identity. The images she uses to describe him all evoke menacing Halloween iconography. The reality is quite different. Seth appears not only approachable and harmless but charming. Since Ollie has made so many snap judgments based on superficial appearance, this is a lesson in not judging a book by its cover. 

“She held up her wrist with the watch. ‘My mother is already with me. Helping. Maybe she’s a little easier to hear in this weird ghost world of yours. But I’m pretty sure she never left me, not at all.’”

Seth has just offered to bring Ollie’s mother back to life. This is a test of her desperation. Ollie has already seen the results of what happened to Jonathan and Caleb, and she isn’t about to make the same mistake. More importantly, she is ready to interpret a digital display as proof that her mother remains with her in spirit. Previously, Ollie’s dependence on external reality made her reject that possibility.