Frigid Bitch: It's like a 12-step program for assholes.
Lunch Lines: A noontime sentence.
Joseph Campblog: Exploring the books of Joseph Campbell.

The door was opened by Ferl, but as Olive and Styg stepped into the musty foyer, she barely even noticed him. Instead, it was his companion that seized her attention -- a black shape, suggestive of a large-dog and so dark she couldn't tell, even as sharp sunlight cut into the house, where the creature stopped and its shadow began.

Ugh, the Grayling mansion. Other families Olive simply ignored, but this old viney estate -- she could feel a growl come over her every time she passed. The Grayling grounds stretched from one end of the Winding Woods to the other, curved around the longer shore of Sunken Lake, and once a year -- around August, usually -- a Cyclorn's nest would inevitably hatch in the clouds directly above.

In other words, it touched three different realms of Creatures. Four, if Styg's hunch about the Pit were correct; and if you could even consider the Pit a realm.

So when Olive overheard the Grayling's Proxy, a stumpy little Rock-Gnome named Ferl, first mention a summer job at the estate to the headmaster of her school, she felt instinctively that it was a bad idea. And when Styg's mom started talking it over with to hers, after one of Ferl's visits to the medicine wagon for Heart Wash, Olive's feeling of dread only grew. And grew. And grew until finally it became a certainty as she stood before the gates of the estate in late June, her family days gone on the Medicine Circuit and nowhere for her and Styg to go but in.

"You'd better be right about the pit being here," she said.

"I can't wait to find out!" Styg replied, grinning hugely at the mansion as he struggled with Olive's bookbag on one shoulder and his own on the other.

"Do YOU want to be there?" asked Styg.

"I don't want to be anywhere," Olive said into the lapels of her coat, staring at the sharp lump in the lining.

"Well, then, why don't you give yourself a nice summer by --"

"Look." Olive lifted her eyes to his. "I don't care. I don't care what I do this summer. I don't care what you do. I don't care if you drag me to the garden. And I don't care if YOU care. So stop it, stop caring."

"I'll try," said Styg. He looked confused. "Or ... I think I'll try. Maybe I won't. Whatever. I don't care?" He paused, then leaned forward and whispered, "but I really really want you to come."

"No," said Olive. And she thought it over and over again in her head, each one washing away the last like endless colorless coats of paint.

In her mind, she was six, clutching an empty bassinet with tears in her eyes. Her mom laid her sharp hand on Olivia's head, fingertips flared like peacocks. "I love my daughter more than anything else that there will ever be in the world," she said, and twelve-year-old Olive on the train sniffed and trembled, but invisibly. It was six years later, and her mother now continued the sentence, "but what I don't love is this darn attitude, and I wish you'd knock it the heck off."

"They don't want me there," she said, and she said it fast and it hurt.

"Anyway," he went on, "it's that or another summer with your folks on the caravan." Olive's parents sold snake oil -- actual oil made of snakes -- and every summer they traveled on the Medicine Circuit from town to town. When she was an adorable little child, Olive made for a convenient prop during their sales pitch. That was before she learned to scowl.

"Will you?" said Styg, repainting his nails for the third time that day. The jitter of the train left a rough purple edge on his cuticles. "It's only once a week. My mom knows the Graylings' butler, and he's supposed to be nice. Plus, aren't you curious about The Pit?"
Olive lowered her face around an arched eyebrow. "The Pit? For real? Do you know it's really ... real?"
"Oh, maybe," Styg waved the tiny paintbrush around in his flared-out fingers like a bobbing peacock, "there's only one way to find out."
"Yeah ... if it is," said Olive, "if it ... hm." The Pit wasn't much talked about among humans because nobody knew if it was true; and among the Creatures, it wasn't polite to mention. "A hole to nowhere," is how Olive's mother had once described it, and Styg's mother had put the topic to rest by adding, "a fine way to say goodbye for good."
Olive fingered the lump in the hem on her coat again, and thought.

- Olive's latest thing was rolling her eyes without actually moving them -- sort of shrugging her whole body with disdain around her stationary eyeballs. She savored this gesture now at Styg. "I'll get by," she said.

"What'll you do all summer?" he continued, "Without a job to keep you busy, and some money to keep you happy?"

Whenever he tried to blend in, those nails were a dead giveaway. But his preferred camouflage was that of a human, so the colorful fingertips didn't stand out like they would against, say, a herd of goats.