Small Spaces

“Numbers and throwing things, those were the two talents of Olivia Adler. She’d quit the softball team last year too, but her aim was still on.”

Ollie has just thrown a rock at the back of Brian’s head as a distraction to get everyone to stop making fun of Coco. She has already demonstrated that she’s a math whiz. This quote demonstrates her disengagement from the pursuits that used to give her joy. After her mother’s death, Ollie withdraws from the chess club and from sports. She may be good at both, but engaging in them might make her happy, and this isn't a desirable emotional state for somebody who wants to brood. 

“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.