by Anne Ursu
“Oh,” said Hazel. She looked down at Adelaide’s textbook. She didn’t recognize it. It struck her that she didn’t know where Adelaide went to school, and if it was the sort of place that told you you had a good imagination or the sort of place that told you you needed to work on following the rules. “I probably can’t help you.”
“That’s okay,” Adelaide said, leaning in like she was telling a secret. “I can’t help me either.”
“I don’t want to keep you,” Hazel said, shifting.
“Oh, don’t be a goof.” Adelaide shut the book. “Come on, sit down.”
Goof. Hazel blinked. “Okay.” She crossed the kitchen and sat down on the cushioned oak chair next to Adelaide.
“What, I’m not here?” a male voice said.
Hazel turned. Adelaide’s kitchen was big enough that if there was a man taking cookies out of the oven you might not immediately notice. Which in this case there was.
The man smiled at Hazel. He was roughly parent age and tall, with a poof of brown hair and sparkly gray eyes. He looked like the sort of person who might hand you an invitation to wizard school. “I’m Adelaide’s uncle. You can call me Martin.”
Hazel could not take it all in, the kitchen, the gleaming, the uncle in the apron. This was the universe that everyone else lived in. She wanted to ask Adelaide to explain this place to her, to explain the rules, to show her the potion you had to drink to fit in here, but all she could say was “Your uncle makes cookies.”
He shrugged. “They’re from a tube.”
“Uncle Martin’s a screenwriter,” Adelaide said. “That means he writes movies. But he can’t sell them, so he’s freeloading on my parents.”
“That’s right,” her uncle said cheerfully. “But I make excellent tube cookies. I think it more than makes up for any freeloading.”
“We’re writing a story together,” Adelaide told Hazel, eyes serious.
“Yes,” said Uncle Martin. “Adie is going to make it up and then I am going to steal it and sell it for a jillion dollars and then who will be freeloading upon whom? But I will certainly put her name in the end credits. And yours, Ms. . . . ?
“Um . . . Hazel.”
“What a lovely name,” he said, nodding appreciatively. “Very heroic.”
“Really?” Hazel said.
He turned to Adelaide. “Isn’t that Lee Scoresby’s dæmon’s name?”
“No, that’s Hester!” Adelaide looked at Hazel. “Have you read The Golden Compass?”
Like a thousand times. “Yeah,” said Hazel.
“What do you think your dæmon would be?”
Hazel paused a moment, as if she hadn’t already thought about this very carefully. “A cat,” she said, because that was a normal thing to say.
“Really? I think it would be, like, an owl.”
“Really?” Hazel asked.
“Mine is a slug,” said Uncle Martin. “Now, Hazel, tell me your life story, from the beginning until you met me.”
“Hazel’s adopted,” offered Adelaide. “From India.”
Hazel blinked again, and looked from Adelaide to her wizard-school slug-dæmon uncle. It wasn’t the sort of thing people usually came out and said.
“Really!” Martin said. “I want to go there someday off my screenwriting riches. Do you remember it at all?”
Hazel bit her lip. She supposed this was the sort of thing people with decorative furniture did. They just said things, because their houses had enough room for all kinds of things, no matter how odd and funny-shaped they were.
“No,” she said. “I was just a baby.”
“You should go back when you’re older. It could be a quest, heroic Hazel.” He nodded at her. “Now, Adie, tell Hazel the story I’m going to steal.”
Adelaide nodded, her curls springing a little. “Okay,” she said, leaning against the table toward Hazel. “There’s a witch who lives wherever it’s winter.”
“We’re starting with the villain,” Martin interjected. “Because they are the most fun. Do you want to help, Hazel?”
She did. Adelaide looked at her expectantly. “The witch travels on a sleigh pulled by huge white wolves,” Hazel began. This was not original. She tried again. “The wolves have mouths as red as blood. The snowflakes follow her like bees.” She glanced at Adelaide, who nodded earnestly.
Uncle Martin smiled. “Like bees. Very evocative. Now, Adelaide, what does she wear?”
“A white dress and white furs,” Adelaide said. “And she has a crown. Made of the thinnest of ice.”
“Because she’s a queen,” Hazel said. “She’s the Snow Queen.”
“Yes, nice. Where does she live?”
“In a palace of ice,” said Hazel. “And she has a heart to match.”
“Very good.” He looked at the two of them seriously. “And what does she want?”
Hazel and Adelaide exchanged a confused look. “What do you mean?” Adelaide asked.
“Everyone in a story wants something,” he said. “Especially the villains. And the hero’s job is to stop them from getting it. So, what does she want?”
“Eternal winter?” said Adelaide.
“Kids,” said Hazel. “She wants kids. She wants to collect them. She puts them in snow globes. She traps them with promises, and if she can get them to agree to stay there forever, they’re hers.”
The words came tumbling out of her mouth, and once they were out there she could only look from Martin to Adelaide in horror. This was the sort of thing she was not supposed to say out loud.
But Martin just turned to Hazel and nodded slowly. “Very good,” he said. “You get a tube cookie. You, too, Adie.”
“But . . . why?” Adelaide asked, looking from her uncle to Hazel. “The kids. Why would they agree to stay? Why would anyone stay with her?”
Martin stopped and regarded Hazel and Adelaide. “Yes,” he said slowly. “Why. That’s the question.”
Hazel heard the sound of throat clearing. She had not noticed the two mothers step into the room. Her mom was looking at Adelaide’s meaningfully, and Hazel knew that they had spent the last ten minutes talking about her. See how she is?
“Marty,” Adelaide’s mother warned, “you’ll give them nightmares.”
“Come on, Lizzie.” He shook his head dismissively. “Kids can handle a lot more than you think they can. It’s when they get to be grown up that you have to start worrying.”
Adelaide smiled smugly at Hazel, and it was the sort of smile that invited her to smile smugly back. Which she did.
“So, did you have fun?” her mom asked as they drove off.
She did. “It was okay,” Hazel said.
“We can go over to Adelaide’s any time you want. I don’t get to see Elizabeth much. It’s nice for me. Maybe on the weekends?”
“Maybe,” Hazel said. Weekends were for her and Jack. She needed to be there if he needed her.
They drove home on newly plowed streets, which their little car tackled eagerly. Hazel stared out of the window and watched the houses shrink and thought of villains and snow globes and what it would be like to be trapped inside.
When they pulled into the driveway, Hazel cast a glance over to Jack’s house. It was dark. She wondered if he’d been able to make plans, if he was still out, or if he was home in his room, drawing or reading comic books or making up superhero baseball stats, with the shades drawn and the door closed. She wished he had a place to put all his funny-looking things.
Her heart panged. She was supposed to be with him, not eating tube cookies and speaking in fairy tales. She was his best friend. She would do better. Tomorrow.
Chapter Three
Spaces
The snow started up again just as Hazel was going to sleep that night. It seemed innocuous, a soft coda to the storm of the morning. There was no way to tell that over the course of the night the sky would try to bury the city.
Hazel woke up to her mother’s knock on the door and a gentle whisper, “You don�
��t have to get up. School’s canceled.”
The sky did not bury the city, but it came close enough. The street outside Hazel’s house looked like it might only be traversable by tauntaun. “Eighteen inches overnight,” her mom told her when she came down for breakfast. “I’ve never seen it come down like that. I hope there was nothing you were dying to do at school today.”
Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren’t even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong. She shrugged.
“Are you going to be okay by yourself?” her mom added, nodding toward her desk. “I’ve got—”
“Sure,” Hazel said. “I’ll go over to Jack’s.”
Her mother tilted her head. “Haze,” she said slowly, “maybe it’s better if Jack comes over here? Maybe you guys shouldn’t—”
“Oh.” Hazel shifted. “I think we’re going sledding.”
“Okay, good. And can you shovel the driveway for me today?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks. Hey, um”—she leaned in to Hazel—”how’s Jack doing these days? With everything.”
“Okay, I think.”
“Okay.”
After breakfast, Hazel got on her boots and stepped outside. The snow was almost up to her knees, and she had to lift her legs up to move through it, first one then the other—like she was trying to walk through butter.
There were no footprints outside of Jack’s house. No one had tried to venture out yet. Hazel picked her way to the Campbells’ front doorstep and rang their bell twice, their special ring. And waited. And waited. Just when she decided everyone must have slept in, the door opened. “Jack!” Hazel said, or was about to say when the word evaporated from her mouth. Standing in the doorway was someone she was not expecting to see at all: Jack’s mom.
“Hello, Hazel,” Mrs. Campbell said.
“Oh,” said Hazel, shifting. “Hi.”
It had been several weeks since Hazel had even laid eyes on Mrs. Campbell. She was wearing the same light-blue tee shirt and black yoga pants that she’d been in the last time Hazel saw her, but they were now faded and frayed. She was much thinner now, and surrounded by shadows. Her eyes were all wrong. They were like the eyes of the animals at the natural history museum, who were hollowed out and stuffed and posed and placed in some habitat and made to look like they were still alive. “You want Jack.”
“Yes. Please,” said Hazel.
“He was getting dressed. My husband’s in the shower.”
“Okay,” said Hazel.
Mrs. Campbell blinked down at her. “It’s nice to see you, Hazel,” she said, and she stretched her face into a smile that held nothing. She looked like someone had severed her dæmon.
And then Jack appeared in the doorway next to her. “Mom, what are you doing?” He looked from her to Hazel. Hazel looked at the ground.
“The doorbell rang.”
“I know, but . . . you should go sit down.”
There was something about Jack, something subdued about his very appearance, as if he had dampened his own hue so as not to contrast with his mother’s too brightly.
“Okay.” She nodded at Jack and faded off.
“Let me get my stuff,” Jack muttered. “Wait there.”
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Jack had had a mom and Hazel had had a dad—that is, a real mom, the sort who did things besides sit in a beat-up easy chair and watch twenty-four-hour news networks and stare blankly at the world, and a real dad, the sort who lived with you or at least came to see you once in a while. Then one day Hazel did not have a dad anymore, because hers had left. And a couple days after that Jack had showed up on her doorstep and handed her his most prized possession, a baseball signed by Joe Mauer. Hazel had stared at it as if he’d just handed her his still-beating heart. “You should keep it,” he had said.
“But . . . why?”
And he’d looked at her, almost bewildered, then said, “It’s a Joe Mauer signed baseball,” as if that was all that needed to be said. So Hazel took it, and she kept it on her bookshelf, and sometimes she looked at it and said to herself, That is a Joe Mauer signed baseball, and she understood.
Then one day Hazel went over to Jack’s house to find his mom in the easy chair, except she wasn’t there at all. It was like someone had snuck into their house in the middle of the night and stolen his mother. Except they’d forgotten to take her body.
And it wasn’t too long after that that Hazel’s mother sat her down and explained that Jack’s mom was sad, that she was sick with sadness. And she asked if Hazel understood and Hazel said yes, though she didn’t really.
“Why?” Hazel had asked.
“I don’t know,” her mother answered. “Sometimes there’s no why.”
Like an enchantment, Hazel thought. But at that moment she knew that it was not the thing to say out loud, and besides she could tell from her mother’s voice that it was nothing like an enchantment, not at all.
And Jack’s mother stayed sick with sadness, and her eyes were so dead, and it was like she didn’t see Jack, even when he was in front of her. And Hazel did not have anything for him, anything that was like her beating heart. And Jack never said a word about it, but sometimes he banged around and slammed doors, like he wanted to make sure he could still make noise, and sometimes he just kind of stopped, and it was like he had been frozen.
Now he stepped out of the house in his jacket and mittens, carrying his messenger bag, and closed the door firmly behind him.
“Sorry ’bout that,” he said with a shrug.
Hazel got the urge to apologize back, but she did not know what for. “Are we gonna go sledding?”
Jack shrugged. “Let’s go to the shrieking shack,” he said. “I’ll show you my new stuff.”
The shrieking shack was an old skeleton of a house tucked away in a field near the railroad tracks. Jack had found it last summer, and he’d presented it to her like it was a palace. And it might as well have been, because it was all theirs.
Well, not all theirs. People came and they left trash behind and cigarette butts and beer bottles. They wrote things on the walls—tiny secret things in ballpoint pen and sprawling screaming things in spray paint. Hazel didn’t mind. Because the people who left their secrets on the walls thought that this was some ordinary place, something for garbage and graffiti. Which meant that no one else had discovered that it was a palace in disguise.
It was winter and the sky had just tried to bury the city and this was not the time to go hang out in crumbling deserted houses, but—
“Okay,” Hazel said.
It was a long journey through the snow today, down a couple of neighborhood blocks, then around the funny lime-green house with the tiny white fence, down the hill to the railroad tracks. The field was an ocean of snow that needed to be crossed—but there were no other footprints in it. It was all theirs.
The shack seemed to be waiting for them. The snow had ingratiated itself with the ruins of walls and memory of a roof, and it made it seem like the small dark-brown house had sprung out of the snow itself.
There would be a time when it wouldn’t be safe for them to sit up in the small attic of the house anymore. The roof above them was falling in, the floor below them had places where it had rotted completely away. The house was decaying around them. But, for now, it was safe.
Hazel and Jack crossed through the empty doorway into the rotting shell of the first floor and trod gently up the stairs, stepping over the ones that had already given themselves to the rot.
There was a big enough hole in the roof for the winter sky to shine though, showing a dappling of snow on the wooden floor. It didn’t matte
r—Hazel’s jeans could not be wetter than they already were. She sat at their usual spot by the hole, which was just low enough in the slanted roof that you could sit on the floor and see the world outside. Jack settled in next to her.
There were some days, ever since the summer, when the whole feel of Jack seemed to change. Like suddenly, instead of being made of baseball and castles and superheroes and Jack-ness, he was made of something scratchy and thick. Hazel could tell, because he had been her best friend for four years, and you can tell when your best friend is suddenly made of something else. And all she could do was try to remind him what he was really made of.
“So,” she said. “Let me see what you got.”
“Cool,” Jack said. He opened up his bag and took out the sketchbook and began to flip through it. She watched the pages go by, thinking what a thing it must be to be good at something. There were figures and faces, some human, some monstrous, and they had some kind of life and lightness to them, like the person who had drawn them could give them breath if he chose.
“What’s that?” Hazel said. The last drawing was something she hadn’t seen before, something very different from everything else in the book.
“Oh. Nothing. I just drew it last night.”
“Can I see?”
“Sure.” Jack handed her the sketchbook. “It’s not really anything.”
Hazel looked at the page. This was a small sketch of a very simple palace—just a square, really, with four thin turrets coming up from each corner. Its edges were rounded a little bit, like it was made of clay or something. But it wasn’t just the palace—he’d drawn a line under it across the paper to signify some kind of landscape. And the drawing of the palace was so small against the landscape, just a gesture in the middle of the page—like he had wanted to make it seem like it existed in the middle of infinite emptiness.
“You just don’t usually do places.”
“It’s like a fort. It just kind of appeared there one day in the middle of the snow. And no one knows what it’s for or how it got there. But if you’re inside, no one can ever find you there.”
