The Invited(31)

    Riley smiled at her. “I thought maybe you were searching for Hattie’s treasure.”

Olive looked at her aunt, thought of telling her the truth. Riley believed in stuff like ghosts and old folktales. Riley and Mama had loved telling each other Hattie stories they’d heard, turning this woman who lived by the swamp into a witch with superhuman powers, a ghost who could come back and wreak terrible revenge. Mama and Riley agreed that that poor woman who died after nearly drowning in the bog had definitely been lured out there by Hattie, but that she must have deserved it in some way. In their minds, Hattie enacted revenge only on those who had crossed her in some way—maybe simply by trespassing or not giving her the respect she so obviously deserved. And Riley and Mama loved to tell stories of the supposed sightings of Hattie over the years, and, of course, the disappearances. As obsessed as Mama had been with Hattie, Riley might have been more so. She talked about Hattie like she’d known her, like she was an old friend no one but her understood.

“Nah,” Olive said then, looking at her aunt. “There is no treasure. Mama said.”

Riley looked at Olive for a few seconds. “She said that, huh?”

“Yeah,” Olive said. “Mama was pretty sure. And I believe her. I mean, really, what are the chances that it actually exists and hasn’t been found yet?”

“I don’t know. I just think it seems kind of sad. Finding that treasure was a dream of your mom’s for such a long time.”

Olive remembered Mama telling her that they were the ones who would find the treasure, that it was their destiny.

There was this long, awkward pause again while Riley watched Olive, seemed to study her, really.

The kid in the next aisle had won: his dad was buying him the fancy drone with the camera he wanted.

“Dreams change,” Olive said matter-of-factly as she reached for the boxed metal detector on the shelf.

“I guess they do,” Riley said, and she looked so sad for a minute that Olive was sorry she’d said what she had. Sorry she’d brought up Mama at all. It was easier, safer, to not mention her, to pretend she’d never existed. Sometimes Olive got so caught up in her own grief that she forgot other people were grieving, too. Olive wasn’t the only one Mama had left.

    “Gonna do some treasure hunting?” the salesclerk asked Olive when she brought the box up to the register, a little gleam in her eye.

“Absolutely,” Olive said.

She and Riley got into Riley’s car and drove back home. In the car, Riley moved on to asking Olive all about school and how her daddy was doing. And Olive lied. It scared her sometimes, how good she was at lying. Even to Aunt Riley, who was way swifter than Daddy.

“School’s great,” she said. “We’re learning about this thing called natural selection. Do you know about that?”

“Sure” Riley said, getting on the on-ramp for the highway. “Survival of the fittest. Charles Darwin and his finches, right?”

“It’s all about adaptation,” Olive said. “I like that.” She loved this idea that some humans might be evolving right now, in minuscule ways, ways you couldn’t even see at first.

“I guess when you think of it, that’s what survival is really all about, right?” Riley asked. “I mean, not just as a species, but on a mundane, day-to-day level. Life throws shit at us and we roll with it. We adapt and evolve.”

Olive nodded. Riley got it so completely.

“Of course, some people are better at adapting than others,” Riley said, giving Olive this knowing, laser-eyed look. “Your dad, even when we were kids, always had trouble with change. He’d pretend to be doing okay, but when things changed, when something upset him, he’d get thrown off, sometimes go into one of his funks where he wouldn’t leave his room, didn’t want to eat or talk to anyone. Sometimes he’d get so mad, he’d punch holes in the walls. He broke his hand once, hitting the wall so hard.”

Olive nodded; she’d heard this story a hundred times. She tried to ready herself for what she knew was coming.

“How’s he doing?” Riley asked, glancing at Olive in the passenger seat beside her. “The no-bullshit answer, please.”

And there it was. But Olive was ready with a smile.

“Dad’s doing okay, really,” Olive said. “He makes dinner every night. Helps me with my homework, even. He’s getting me a computer of my very own soon.”

“And the renovations? Is he still spending all of his time with that?”

Olive shrugged. “Sure, we’re working on the house, but it’s not too bad. The living room’s nearly done. And I’ve decided to go ahead and do some work on my own room. Make it a little bigger, you know? So there’ll be room for bookshelves and a built-in desk for the new computer.”

    Was being a really good liar a form of adaptation? Olive wondered.

Cleverness was, she believed.

But was Olive really being that clever? She wasn’t sure if Riley bought it, but her aunt pretended to, at first, and said, “That’s real good, Ollie. I’m glad things are going well. I know high school can be tough—it definitely was for me.”

“Really?” Olive asked.

Riley paused a minute, keeping her eyes on the road ahead, then said, “Yeah, you know, not everyone is designed to fit in. For those of us who don’t, those of us destined to blaze our own paths, well, other people can be downright shitty to us. Especially in high school.”