Breadcrumbs (10 page)

W
hen Hazel got home that afternoon, she found the house empty. This was the first year her mother had let her stay by herself, and she’d used to like being in the house on her own. But she had had enough of empty spaces today. And, anyway, her mom was the last one left.

The house felt strange. Altered. Like someone had come in during the day and shrunk all the furniture just a tiny bit. Or she’d gone through a closet door and come out in the living room of her button-eyed Other Mother.

Of course things like that did not actually happen. Not in the real world.

Hazel was heading to her room when the phone rang. Her mom, probably, asking Hazel to preheat the oven for some frozen slab of something. She went over to the desk and picked up the phone.

There was a moment of silence on the other end. The phone crackled. And then a voice: “Oh, Hazel . . . hi.”

Hazel’s fingers tightened around the phone. “Hi, Dad.”

“How are you?”

“Fine.”

“Good. How’s school?”

“Good.”

“Good. Good. I was thinking I should come visit you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I miss my princess.”

“When are you coming?”

“You know how it is right now. After the wedding, though. And you’re going to come up for that, right?”

“I guess so.”

“Great. I can’t wait to see you, princess. Is your mom there?”

“No. She’s not home yet.”

“Okay. Tell her I called.”

“Okay.”

And Hazel hung up and shuffled off to her room.

The next two days passed like this for Hazel—Jack-lessness and empty spaces and strange alterations in the furniture. The outside world obliged Hazel by being as gray and unpleasant as possible. Winter had seemed like such a new, bright thing just a week before. Now it felt eternal.

Mr. Lewis did call Hazel’s mom, and on Friday morning she drove Hazel to school and the three of them sat in his office while he spoke of referrals and evaluations and partnerships and time-outs. Hazel was surprised that he did not mention sticker charts. She sat, her arms crossed, and stared out into the gray-coated world while her mother nodded and listened and asked questions. And then they were done, and Mr. Lewis promised a glorious, sparkly, partner-y future, and Hazel and her mom walked off into the waiting area.

Her mom was quiet and did not look at her. Her lips were pressed together and her eyes were dark. She stopped for a moment, her eyes on the big flower arrangement that sat on the table.

“They’re fake,” Hazel said.

Her mom rolled her eyes. “Of course they are.” She glanced over to the office and then looked at Hazel seriously. “Are you okay?”

Hazel looked at the ground and shrugged. Wasn’t the whole point that she wasn’t okay? “They’re going to figure out what’s wrong with me.”

Something flashed over her mother’s face, and she leaned down and put a hand on Hazel’s shoulder. “Hazel,” she said, voice firm and grave. “Listen to me. There is nothing wrong with you. Got it?”

Hazel nodded. She understood. They were plastic flowers of words—but they looked nice on the surface.

“Good.”

Hazel walked back to her classroom through the hallways. They were empty, and it seemed like her steps should be echoing through them, a pronouncement that she was passing through. But her feet in her sneakers were silent, and Hazel moved through the hallways without making a mark, as if she was never there at all.

For once, the classroom door did not creak when she opened it, and no one turned to look at her when she slipped through. She crept across the room to her microscopically out-of-line desk and sat down silently in her seat, all without disturbing the air. Mrs. Jacobs kept talking, and everyone kept doing the things they were doing. Now she lacked weight, gravity, she was less than the air. No one noticed her at all.

Except one person.

Tyler had been doing this to her all week—staring at her like he wanted to gouge her with his eyes. It was getting a little tiring. And pointless. He had already won.

And now as she sat down she felt his eyes on her for a moment. At least it was confirmation that she was still there.

At the end of the day, Hazel gathered her things while everyone buzzed around her. She started to float out in the cloud of noise and energy created by people who affected the world, and was surprised to hear someone say her name.

“Hazel?”

It was Mrs. Jacobs. She braced herself.

“Are you all right?” The teacher was looking at her with concern in her eyes.

Hazel blinked. “Yes.”

“Okay,” said Mrs. Jacobs. “Okay.”

Hazel floated onto the bus, sat down in her usual seat, and pulled out a book. When she felt a body sit next to her, she half wondered if its owner even knew there was someone already there. Until she realized who it was.

“What now?” she asked Tyler.

She looked at him with all the weight and gravity she could muster. But he did not look triumphant or mocking. His cheeks were dark. His eyes were serious.

“What is it?”

“It’s Jack,” he said, his voice low and strained. “I saw something.”

She blinked. “What do you mean you saw something?”

“I mean I
saw
something.” He looked around and then leaned in and whispered. “I don’t think Jack’s with his aunt.”

Hazel wrapped her arms around her chest. “What do you mean?” she asked carefully.

“We were supposed to go sledding,” Tyler said, looking around again. “And I was early. There was no one on the street, it was weird, and it was like I didn’t want to go out either, like I had something else to do. But we had plans. So I went. And Jack was already there, at the top of the hill.” He stopped and shook his head.

“Tyler,” Hazel said. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“I know it sounds crazy, okay? But I’m not crazy. I’m not.”

“Okay. I get it,” she said, voice tight. “You’re not crazy. Now, tell me!”

“He wasn’t alone. There was a woman there. She was . . . she wasn’t right. She was tall and weirdly thin. She wasn’t real. She was all white and silver and made of snow . . . like an elf or a witch . . . like a movie.”

She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s true, okay? She had a sled. It was huge and white and there were all these huge dogs, except I’m not sure they were dogs and—” He caught his breath and looked around the bus. “And he got in the sled and drove into the woods. And I called after him, but . . .” He shook his head and looked away.

Hazel gaped. Did he know Adelaide somehow? Had she told him about the Snow Queen?

“This isn’t funny,” she said.

“I’m serious!”

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“I am
not
.”

“You’re lying. You’re lying and I’m going to throw something at you every day for the rest of your life.”

He gritted his teeth. “Hazel, stop being a psycho and listen, okay? I’m sorry I was mean. I’m sorry we didn’t let you hang out with us. But you have to believe me.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the only one who’ll believe me. I mean”—he shrugged—“you know how you are. . . .”

He looked at her and she saw tears in his eyes, she saw that he was wrapped in heaviness, a blanket of snow. Like her.

“Somebody took Jack,” she said. “Into the woods.”

“Yes. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“A woman in white on a sleigh. Like Narnia.”

“What’s Narnia?”

Hazel rolled her eyes. “Okay, then,” she said, crossing her arms, “what happened before?”

“Before?” Tyler shook his head. “He was sledding.”

“No,” she said, talking over the thing that had wedged in her throat. “Before that. He changed. He was mean. He stopped being my friend. What happened?”

Tyler blinked at her. “I don’t know, Hazel. I thought he’d finally figured out we were more fun.”

Hazel closed her eyes and saw herself bashing Tyler on the head with all the pencil cases of the world.

She got off the bus and walked slowly home, Tyler’s words buzzing in her head. It was absolutely crazy, what he had said. He was teasing her. He knew about the Snow Queen somehow. He was trying to get her to make a fool of herself. Because he knew what she was like. And then he would tell the whole school that Crazy Hazy believed Jack was kidnapped by a witch.

But then there was the way he looked, so serious, so shaken, like someone who had recently learned that the world was not at all what he thought it was.

Hazel walked into her house, nodded at her mother who was on the phone, and went straight to her room, where she set her backpack on the floor and lay down on the bed.

It was absolutely crazy, what he had said.

She looked at her shelves, filled with books in which the bad stuff that happened to people was caused by things like witches who lured people into the woods. In a weird way, the world seemed to make more sense that way. At least it always had to Hazel.

It was what she wanted to hear, what he had said. That it had nothing to do with her. That it was magic. That a witch had enchanted him and swept him off into the night. That she could still get him back.

Her eyes fell on the Joe Mauer baseball that was propped up on the shelf. He had given her something like his beating heart once, because she needed it, and because he knew she would keep it well.

And then something happened, something changed, and he was gone. And it might be true that he had just changed, that he didn’t want to be her friend anymore, that he had grown out of her like a puffy purple jacket, that he had gone to stay with his elderly aunt Bernice. It was most likely true.

But what if it wasn’t?

It might be true that something else had happened, something bad, something that flickered outside the boundaries of the things you could see. It might be true. Because who was Hazel to say what the world is really made of?

It might be true.

And if it was true, Hazel was the only one who could save him. Because, like Tyler said, she knew how she was. And because she was Jack’s best friend. And that meant she would not give up on him, could not give up on him, without doing everything possible to save him.

It might be true.

It would not hurt, after all, to walk into the woods.

Hazel looked at the baseball and then exhaled. Tyler’s face flashed in her mind. The pieces clicked together.

I believe there is magic in the woods,
Uncle Martin had said.

What if there was?

Hazel’s heart sped up. She sat up and looked around her room, then got down from the bed and opened her backpack and unloaded everything—all of the books and folders and notebooks—and hid them under the bed. She had to be prepared. She must carry things with her.

She got out a change of clothes and stuffed it into the backpack. She was tempted to bring another. It could be days. But she should travel light, she knew that much. And she could always wash her clothes in a stream. People did that kind of thing in books.

The two teddy bears, the orange kitten, the beat-up Grover she’d had since she was two, and the large purple hippopotamus on her bed eyed her as she moved. She remembered the compass her father had gotten her last Christmas as part of a junior adventurer’s kit and she grabbed it, and then dug out the flashlight, the canteen, and the whistle from her bottom drawer. The kit had had a Swiss Army knife, but Jack broke it performing an emergency tracheotomy on the dinosaur rock at the park.

And then she found herself looking at the baseball again. It would be lucky, Jack had promised, for it was a baseball signed by Joe Mauer. She grabbed it and put it in the backpack.

She crept into the kitchen and pulled out some of the energy bars her mother alleged were food and filled up the canteen with water, then took a deep breath and went into the living room, where her mother was still on the phone.

Heart in throat, Hazel gave her a “do you have a minute” look.

“I’m sorry,” her mother said into the phone, “could you hold on a second? . . . What is it, Hazel?”

“Um, I’m going to go to Mikaela’s. We have a group project.”

“Oh!” She cast a glance at the clock. “Look, if you wait a half hour, I can drive you.”

“Oh, no. That’s okay. It’s not that cold.”

Her mother nodded. “Remember, I have class tonight. I won’t be home when you get home.”

Hazel gulped. “Okay, Mom.” And her mother nodded and turned back to the phone.

Hazel stood for a moment, looking at their living room. It held a yellow couch that some long-dead cat had scratched up, a TV perched on a small cart, her mom’s desk with a computer and all kinds of papers, and a row of shelves teeming with books. The walls were light blue, Hazel’s favorite color. She’d helped her parents pick the paint four years ago, and her dad spilled a whole bucket of it on his shirt. You could trace his path through the house by the little drips that still lingered everywhere like breadcrumbs.

It was one of the few records of his ever living there. There used to be pictures of the family scattered around the living room, but her mom had packed them all away, and now the only record of Hazels-past was last year’s school photo, preserving Hazel forever in long braids and a puffy green T-shirt that Jack thought made her look like a vegetable.

She stood so long that her mother gave her a questioning look, and she smiled as if everything was okay and put on her jacket.

“’Bye, Mom,” Hazel whispered. She stood there for one beat. Two. And she went out the front door.

Hazel was trying so hard not to think, because if she thought about what she was doing she could never possibly do it. Instead she put one foot in front of the other, her sneakers crunching the snow, her socks absorbing the wet and cold and transmitting it up her legs. Already she’d made a mistake, but she could not risk going back for boots.

Anyway, how cold could it be in the woods at night, right?

Hazel trudged forward, down the long blocks to the park with the good sledding hill. She noticed among the footprints in the hard snow some tracks, like from a dragging sled, and she wondered if she was seeing the last record of Jack and when that record would melt away into nothing.