Breadcrumbs

by Anne Ursu

  Hazel understood. Being grown up meant doing what grown-ups wanted you to do. It meant sacrificing your imagination for rules. It meant sitting quietly in your desk chair while your best friend is helicoptered off for emergency eye surgery. It meant letting people say whatever they wanted to you.

  But her mother seemed so tired, and so sad, and it wasn’t like Hazel tried to make trouble. She wanted to do well in school and make friends and have her teachers like her and have her mom be happy and proud of her. She just didn’t seem to know how.

  “I’ll try,” she said quietly.

  “Good,” said her mom. “Now, Mr. Yee told me that some things are going to happen at school. You’re going to meet with the counselor. We’re going to go for evaluations.”

  “Mrs. Jacobs hates me.”

  “She doesn’t hate you, Hazel. You have to see things from her perspective. She’s got a big class to manage. She’s just trying to do her job, honey. You never know what someone else is going through, right?”

  Hazel shrugged.

  “Everyone just wants to help you,” her mother said.

  Hazel stared at the dashboard. Up until this year, nobody thought she needed help.

  “It will be okay. You’ve been through a lot, and everyone needs help sometimes. That’s all.” She touched Hazel gently on the shoulder. “Now. Let’s call over to Jack’s and see what’s going on.”

  So Hazel’s mother called up Jack’s home, while Hazel leaned in to listen. It is not an easy thing, to keep yourself from exploding. She could hear the drone of Jack’s dad’s voice from the receiver but couldn’t make out any words. She tugged at her mom’s coat and whispered, “Let me talk to Jack,” once, and then again. Her mom nodded, and an eternity later she said, “Oh, all right then,” and “I’ll let her know,” and “Thank you very much, Kevin,” and then, “Is Jack available to talk?” and finally she stopped talking, and as Hazel reached for the phone, she hung up.

  Hazel gaped at her mother.

  “He couldn’t talk,” she said, starting the car. “He was busy.”

  “Busy? Busy doing what?”

  “I don’t know. But he’s okay. He got glass in his eye.”

  “Glass?” Hazel imagined a shard of glass the size of a small knife sticking out of Jack’s eye.

  “Yeah. They can’t imagine how it happened. There must have been some in the snow, and . . .” Her eyes traveled to Hazel and then snapped back. “But it wasn’t very much, and they got it out.”

  “But . . . it really hurt him!”

  “He’s okay now, honey. That’s what matters. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  Hazel flushed. “It looked like a big deal!”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Can we go over there?”

  Her mother frowned. “I don’t know. Mr. Campbell said he was busy.”

  “He’s not too busy to see me.” Hazel folded her arms and slumped in her seat. Jack was never “busy.” He would never not want to talk to her. They were keeping something from her. Something was wrong.

  Of course her mother had to stop at the grocery store on the way home, because it was completely grown up to be worried about how much cereal there was in the house instead of a boy with a glass knife in his eye. Hazel sat in the front seat while her mom spent a lifetime in the grocery store, barely resisting the urge to punch through the window. It would accomplish nothing but maybe get glass in her eye, but then at least she might know what Jack was going through.

  Hazel burst out of the car when they got home and ran to Jack’s front door before her mother could stop her. She still didn’t have her jacket. She stood on the doorstep, afraid for a moment to knock, because something was up, something was wrong, because they wouldn’t let her talk to him, because she’d let Jack be led off.

  But whatever it was, Jack needed her. Now was not the time to stand on doorsteps, heart pounding; it was time to stride through the door and see what awaited on the other side.

  So she rang the doorbell. Twice, because that was their signal.

  Jack’s mom opened the door.

  “Oh,” said Hazel, again. “Hi.”

  “Hello,” said Mrs. Campbell, who seemed like she might fall over with the effort of it. “Where’s your jacket?”

  Hazel blinked. “I’m . . . fine, Mrs. Campbell.” She peered into the house. “Is Jack here?”

  “Oh, sure,” Mrs. Campbell said, smiling that half-smile she had now, a smile that existed because it was lacking something.

  Footsteps, then—a herd of them, as if Jack’s accident had caused him to duplicate. And at first Hazel thought he had, because three boys appeared in front of her where she had been expecting one. Hazel stared. Jack was fine, no eye patch, no shard of glass sticking out of his eye, no permanent disfigurement. Bobby and Tyler surrounded him like guards.

  “Oh,” Hazel said.

  “Oh, hi, Hazel,” said Bobby.

  Tyler glared and made a show of rubbing the spot on his head where the pencil case had hit him.

  Hazel ignored them. “I called you,” she said to Jack. “To see how you were. Your dad said you were busy.”

  “Bobby and Tyler were coming over,” Jack said, shrugging.

  “I wanted to see how you were,” she repeated. So the boys had come over after school to see how he was, and she, his best friend, had sat in the car at the grocery-store parking lot and did not punch through the window. “I’m sorry. But I tried calling and your dad said—”

  “Yeah. I was busy.”

  “Are we going outside, or what?” Bobby asked the other boys. Jack started bouncing up and down on his feet.

  Hazel blinked. “Um,” she said, looking at Jack. “I think I figured out about the soul-sucker. Someone has to have a power, just like a blocking power. And at first that seems really useless, really small when you consider all the powers in the world. But then it turns out they’re the only one who can stop this guy . . .”

  Bobby snickered. Tyler snorted. And Jack ran a hand through his brown hair and shook his head.

  “Oh, Hazel,” he said, “stop being such a baby.”

  “Come on,” said Bobby. “We gotta go!”

  “Yeah, let’s go,” Jack said. “We’ll go out the back.” And with that they disappeared into the house, leaving Hazel standing in the front hall, alone.

  Chapter Five

  The Mirror

  Now, the world is more than it seems to be. You know this, of course, because you read stories. You understand that there is the surface and then there are all the things that glimmer and shift underneath it. And you know that not everyone believes in those things, that there are people—a great many people—who believe the world cannot be any more than what they can see with their eyes.

  But we know better.

  So we are going to leave Hazel for a moment and step into the glimmering, shifting world. Because there is something there you need to see.

  Or rather, someone.

  We’ll call him Mal, though that is not his real name. His real name has forty-seven syllables, and we have things to do.

  Mal looks like nothing you know or can imagine, neither goblin nor troll nor imp nor demon. But neither the goblins nor the trolls nor the imps nor even the demons know what Mal is either. For Mal is not any one of those things, but all of them.

  Mal is a goblin. He has green-brown skin, a froglike mouth, and sharp little teeth. Mal is a troll. He is seven feet tall and warty, has terrible breath, and a penchant for hanging out under bridges. Mal is an imp. He has small bat wings, a high-pitched screech of a laugh, and pointy little ears. Mal is a demon. And that means he is up to no good.

  But we are not interested in Mal for who he is—and we’ll be leaving him soon enough. We are interested in him for what he has done.

  If you had encountered Mal just a few days before this story began, you would have found him in very good spirits. For Mal had just invented something delightful—or at least something that he found delightful
, which is altogether a different prospect.

  On the surface, it looked like an ordinary mirror. It was about the size of a tall man. It was oval shaped, like something you would find covered by a white sheet in an old haunted house. It had a thick frame carved with winged beings crawling and clamoring all over each other. The beings looked like angels at first. It was only when you got close enough that you could see that their faces were like skulls and their eyes were filled with menace.

  There was nothing ordinary about that mirror. And if you were the perceptive sort—which of course you are—you would have known it immediately. But if you weren’t, you might look in the mirror and think, I did not know that mole was so enormous or Why is my face festering? Or My goodness, I had no idea I was so evil looking. For the mirror took beautiful things and made them ugly, and it took ugly things and made them hideous.

  It was most marvelous mischief indeed.

  Mal took the mirror around, reflecting everything he could in it, delighting in the transformations he saw. A rose garden looked like piles of boiled spinach. A grove of trees became a charred wasteland. A sparkling lake turned into burbling oil.

  And then he decided he would fly it up into the sky, right up to the heavens, to see the sparkling blue earth look like a mean shriveled-up thing.

  So Mal took the mirror and flew into the sky. He flew up, up, up.

  And something happened.

  Something unexpected.

  Something fateful.

  Mal flew too high, and the mirror began to protest. The mirror creaked, then the mirror cracked.

  It shattered into a hundred million pieces in Mal’s hands. The pieces caught in the wind and landed all across the earth below. The beings of the hidden earth came out to watch.

  And so did the witch.

  She had come because of the snow. She could travel from one snowy world to another—to her it was all the same place. She liked heavy snowfalls the best, the kind that blankets the world in white quiet, the kind where the snowflakes are big enough to show their architecture, the kind that, if there is any magic to be had in the world, would make it come out.

  She stayed in the woods where all the hidden creatures were, and the trees feared her. She moved through the shadows and kept her eye on the glimmering world outside. She felt the mirror shatter in the sky, she closed her eyes and saw its story spread back into the past, she fell with the tiny shards as they spread over the earth. Some fell to the ground. Some landed in trees, turning the bark black. And one, one landed in the eye of a boy, and she saw it as if she were right there.

  “Oh,” said the witch, placing a long finger on her cheek. “This should be interesting.”

  Chapter Six

  Castoffs

  Hazel walked in the front door of her house, trailing snow behind her. Her feet were soaked in their sneakers, and she was shivering underneath her thin shirt. She didn’t really care.

  Her mom was already at her desk in the living room doing work. She looked up as her daughter walked in.

  “You don’t have a jacket!” she exclaimed.

  “I left it at school, remember?”

  “Oh, Hazel.” She shook her head. “You’re shivering. Come in and get warm. Wasn’t Jack home?”

  Hazel looked at the ground. “He . . . he had Bobby and Tyler over.” There. That was true.

  “Oh,” her mom said. It was an Oh with a question attached.

  “Yeah,” Hazel added quickly. “They were gonna go sledding and, you know”—she gestured to her jacketless body—“I don’t have my stuff.”

  Her mother perked up. “Well, that was sensible of you, Haze. You’re making good choices.”

  Hazel grimaced. In books a good choice is choosing to go fight the dragon. In Hazel’s life, it’s not going sledding because you left your boots at school.

  And, of course, she hadn’t made that choice at all. In real life you don’t get to make choices. You’re just not invited.

  “Do you need the desk to do your homework?” her mother said, motioning in front of her.

  “Um . . . ” Even if she wanted to, Hazel could not do her homework because it was all still in her backpack in Mrs. Jacobs’s room. It didn’t matter. They were already going to send her to the school counselor. She was already a problem, she might as well start acting like it.

  “No. I don’t.”

  “Honey”—her mother tilted her head—“are you all right?”

  Hazel shrugged. “Sure.” She looked away so her mom wouldn’t see the lie on her face, then excused herself and went into her room, closing the door behind her.

  She lay down on the bed, moving her pile of stuffed animals aside. She reached over to grab one of them, but Jack’s words rang in her head. Stop being such a baby. Her hand retracted, and she wrapped her arms around her chest and hugged herself.

  There was a Nithling in her stomach, chomping away at everything around it. Tears filled her eyes, and she squeezed them away. She was not a baby. She was Hazel, and Jack was her best friend. Why would he act like that?

  In the back of her mind she heard Adelaide’s uncle’s voice: Why? That’s the question.

  There was a reason. People don’t just change like that. Jack wouldn’t be mean to her. He just wasn’t himself. He could have been in shock, still. She would be in shock, too, if she’d gotten glass in her eye. Maybe they’d given him some medication that made him weird. That happened all the time. Or maybe he was trying to keep her out of his house, like there was some kind of secret there, something bad, and he was trying to keep her safe, and he was sorry he had to do it like that but he had to keep her out for her own protection and that was the only way to do it. He’d explain tomorrow. He’d explain and apologize. She just had to wait.

  Hazel woke up the next morning and the monster in her stomach immediately chomped down. Everything clenched up, and two moments later she remembered why.

  She went to her window to find that ice had covered the world. The street in front of her glimmered menacingly. Huge icicles hung down from the rows of houses like spikes. The trees looked as if they had been mummified. Ice coated Hazel’s window, and she wondered if the whole house was encased in it. They would open the front door only to find a foot-thick wall blocking them from everything beyond it. They’d peer at the world beyond but would only be able to see blurs and splotches, and soon they would forget what it was like to see things for what they were.

  Hazel looked over at Jack’s house. She didn’t know what she was expecting to see, maybe a banner hanging from the window reading

  I’M SORRY, HAZEL. I DIDN’T MEAN IT.

  That would have been the best thing.

  But it wasn’t there.

  She left her room, feeling a little like she was crossing a moat—except the alligators were all inside her, snapping away.

  She had breakfast, then her mom emerged from the basement holding something puffy and purple. “I found your old jacket. Good thing I didn’t give it away yet.”

  Hazel stared. The jacket shone. “I can’t wear that.”

  “Why not? I know it’s small. It was small last year.”

  “It’s too . . . ” Hazel shook her head. Babyish, she thought.

  “You loved this two years ago,” her mom said with a little smile. “I can’t let you freeze to death, honey. It’s just for the morning.”

  Soon Hazel was dressed in her third-grade jacket. It went down to her mid-waist, and her wrists stuck out. She looked like a puffy purple pauper. Her mom then produced a hot pink hat with purple stars embroidered on it and sparkly silver strands in the puff on top, and hot pink mittens to match. Hazel could only dress herself slowly in her own brightly hued humiliation. She tried to put on the glittery boots her mother gave her but couldn’t get her feet into them.

  She looked up at her mom. Her mom closed her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll drive you.”

  Even the half of her that was desperate to see Jack at the bus stop, to hear h
is explanation, to get as quickly as possible to the moment when everything was all right again, did not want to do so dressed like a spastic eight-year-old’s birthday hat.

  “Thanks, Mom,” she muttered.

  Hazel had always felt invisible when she walked into school alone, and she thought that that was the worst way you could possibly feel. That was before she’d turned into a walking purple and pink glitter marshmallow. All she could do was keep her head down and count the steps to the school, while her mother watched out the car window, not understanding that freezing to death would be better than this.

  Just in front of the entrance to the school, her sneakered foot landed on a patch of ice. Her back slammed against the ground. Hazel lay there as elementary school students gathered around her, and it seemed that not even the third graders were dressed as ridiculously as she was.

  Hazel slowly picked herself up and headed into the school, her body now feeling as beat up as her heart. As soon as she crossed through the front door, she shed herself of the accoutrements of her absurdity, and had to fight the urge to dump them behind a wastebasket. Her sneakers were soaked from the snow. Her jeans were wet from the encounter with the ice. She felt like slush.

  She walked through the hallways alone. She had done this before, but there was always the idea of Jack, a ghost of him that grinned as it accompanied her.

  She wondered if people could hear the pounding of her heart, if the monstrous thrumming caused the kindergartners in their classroom to look around wide-eyed with fear as she passed, if the before-school-care kids in the music room unwittingly began to shake their maracas in time with it, if soon the very walls of the building would shake with it.