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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.