by Anne Ursu
“Um . . . “ Her mom wouldn’t respond well to the soul-switching theory. “Kind of . . . weird.”
Hazel’s mother sighed. “I suppose it’s none of our business. Maybe it was better to have him away right now. It has to be so hard on him. But at least this will make it easier for you, right? Not to have to see him all the time?”
Hazel looked at her feet.
“Come on, hon. I’ll make some pasta.” She let out a small laugh. “I know, I know. For a change.”
“Mom?” Hazel pointed her toe. “What if he doesn’t come back?”
Her mother put her hand on Hazel’s shoulder and looked into her eyes. “Then you’ll be okay. You will. Now, come with me.” She straightened and motioned to the kitchen. “I’ll teach you how to boil noodles.”
Hazel smiled a little. “And microwave some sauce?”
“Don’t get carried away,” said her mom. “I can’t give you all my cooking secrets in one day.”
Hazel looked down at her feet, poised in perfect third position, and then undid them and followed her mom into the kitchen.
When Hazel woke up on Tuesday morning, the truth of things finally hit her. Jack was gone. Just gone. He didn’t call her, or come over, or leave a note, or anything. He didn’t say good-bye, because he didn’t care to. He didn’t try to explain the things he said, or the way he acted. He was perfectly happy to leave her feeling like this. And there was no witch, no wraith blade, no evil corporate brain-thingy that had caused the change in him. He had just changed. He just didn’t like her anymore.
And that meant, even if Jack came back from his elderly aunt—or wherever he was—he was still gone.
She dragged herself down to the kitchen for breakfast to find her mother sitting at the small breakfast table waiting for her, with a face that made Hazel think she should turn right around and crawl back into bed until summer.
“Sit down, hon. I need to talk to you.”
Hazel slid into the hard chair.
“I talked to your father,” her mom continued, and Hazel’s eyes snapped to the long gouge she’d made in the table when she was seven and wanted to play Excalibur. “I’m so sorry. About the ballet lessons. Your dad says he can’t do it right now. With the wedding, you know . . .”
Hazel moved her head in an approximation of a nod.
Her mother exhaled, and moved to put her hand on Hazel’s. Hazel did not let herself blink. “About your dad . . . you know . . .” Her voice was fraying from the strain of picking words so carefully. “I know he’s not being that . . . communicative now, but that’s his way. If he’s not calling you, it’s not because he doesn’t want to . . . but because he feels . . . bad. I wish it were different. Believe me. But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you to the stars, do you understand?”
Hazel near-nodded again. The scar on the table blurred.
“We’ll get you lessons someday, hon. I promise.”
“I better go,” Hazel said, standing up from the chair. “I’ll be late.”
At the bus stop, Hazel took her spot at the edge of the sidewalk, a few feet away from the twins. When the bus came, she boarded it with her eyes down. This is how she was going to get through the seven-hour leper-o-rama of school—with her eyes always on the ground.
Of course, she’d just bump into people.
Immediately when she walked down the aisle of the bus she felt eyes boring into her. She looked up and saw Tyler staring at her.
Hazel wished she had something in her hands to throw. She looked away and sat down.
She opened up the new library book she’d brought for the bus ride and willed her thoughts to disappear in the pages. The girl in it was reading A Wrinkle in Time. She was best friends with a boy who lived in the apartment below. And then one day the boy stopped talking to her. Hazel closed the book.
When the bus arrived at school, Hazel gathered her things slowly, waiting for everyone else to get off. But when she got off she found Tyler waiting for her.
“What?” she snapped.
“Um, Jack’s not here today either?”
“Doesn’t look like it, no.”
“Do you know where he is?”
So that’s what this is about. He couldn’t call over there himself? Couldn’t boys do anything by themselves?
“He went to stay with his elderly aunt Bernice,” Hazel responded primly. “She’s sickly and she needs his help.” Hazel smiled in the way people who have superior information do, and walked away.
When she passed Mr. Williams’s classroom, she did not stop to look in.
As she walked into her class, she wondered if people noticed the change in her, if you could extract such a big part of yourself but still look the same on the outside, or if people would notice that she was part girl, part hollowed-out space.
Hazel sat down, ignoring the presence of the boys behind her. Mikaela smiled a greeting at her, and the girl part of Hazel smiled a little back, because that’s what you do. And then the hollowed-out part took over, and Hazel settled in for a Jack-less day.
As Mrs. Jacobs yammered on that morning, Hazel found her eyes drawn to the busy street out the window. This is what there was in the world, busy streets thick with the smell of car exhaust and fast-food hamburgers. Maybe everyone was right, maybe she did let her imagination run away with her, and maybe she could be a baby sometimes.
Then it was time for recess, and Hazel girded herself. She got up and was heading outside with everyone else when Mrs. Jacobs stopped her.
“Hazel?”
She looked.
“Don’t forget you have your appointment today.”
Mrs. Jacobs put a slight emphasis on the word appointment, so Hazel would understand that this was not an appointment with a hair stylist or a dentist or a vet, but the sort of appointment that causes you to articulate the word a little more carefully.
“Crazy Hazy,” someone muttered.
So, while her classmates filed outside, Hazel slung her backpack over her shoulder and trudged down the hall to the counselor’s office.
To get to Mr. Lewis’s office, you had to walk across the third floor and up the stairs into a corridor Hazel had never been in. It seemed like the sort of place that should be guarded by a three-headed dog. It didn’t seem like part of school anymore—the corridor was thickly carpeted, and the walls were painted a chipper light blue and tastefully decorated with black-and-white photos of flowers. There was a small waiting area—just two chairs and a table with a big flower arrangement. Hazel leaned in to smell the flowers. They were fake. She put her hand out and rubbed a white petal between her hands. It was rough and plastic-y. What was the point?
“Hazel Anderson?”
Hazel pulled her hand back. A small man with round glasses, big cheeks, and a ring of thin brown-gray hair was looking at her as if she were doing something very peculiar. He looked like a chipmunk.
If Jack were here, Hazel would tell him about the chipmunk counselor, and he would draw a cartoon of a chipmunk with big glasses behind a desk and the chipmunk would say, “I’m so sorry, Hazel, but you’re nuts.”
Mr. Lewis welcomed her into his office and sat down behind a big desk. He motioned Hazel into one of the yellow armchairs in front of the desk. She sat down, clutching her backpack to herself.
The window on the other side of his desk looked out on the playground. Hazel had to will herself to look at the chipmunk man and not the thick, winter-white sky.
Mr. Lewis had a file on his desk, and Hazel knew that that file represented her, that when she became a hollowed-out thing this file would seem to be the sum total of her existence on the planet. And there would be no one around to tell anyone any different.
“So, do you know why you’re here?” Mr. Lewis asked, eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses.
She didn’t, particularly, but she knew that some questions were best answered untruthfully.
“I threw a pencil case,” she said.
“At one of your cla
ssmates.”
“Yes.”
“Do you often find yourself feeling angry?”
Hazel crossed her arms. She felt like she was being poked. “Everyone does,” she said quietly.
“Everyone gets angry, Hazel. Not everyone throws things at people.”
It was the whole point, wasn’t it? Hazel was not like everyone else. She was surprised that that wasn’t in the file.
“Do you want to tell me what happened?”
Hazel shifted. “I was upset. My friend had gotten hurt.”
“You’ve been here a few months now. Do you feel like you’re fitting in here, Hazel?”
Hazel squirmed. She did not know how she was supposed to survive things like this anymore.
Mr. Lewis flipped through her file and kept asking her questions, and she knew what the notes in the file said just as surely as if she was reading them herself. This is what would be left of Hazel Anderson once her whole body hollowed out, the empty shell of her cracked, and the pieces flew to the winds: Hazel has anger issues. She has trouble following rules. She does not pay attention. She has an overactive imagination. She has trouble making friends. She does not fit, not anywhere.
She felt like a bird that someone was preparing to stuff and put on the mantel. He would have small dinner parties and show off his new wonder, and the guests would marvel that her dull eyes once contained life, and he would carefully describe to them the process of taking out her insides, piece by piece, and the very odd quality her heart had when you held it up to the light.
And then the questions were done, and Mr. Lewis closed the file and leaned into her, rodent-y eyes squinting. “Hazel. You’re a smart girl. May I speak frankly?”
He looked at her like he genuinely expected an answer.
“Okay.”
“A lot has happened to you this year. The change in schools. The upheaval in your family. But you’re eleven now. I think you can take control.”
“Okay.”
“And maybe there are things you need help with. We want to look at the attention issues, certainly. And the mood issues. We’re going to figure out what you need. And you can take ownership. For instance, we could draw up a plan, and if you needed to put yourself in time-out, you could.”
“Time-out?”
“Yes. You know. If you find yourself feeling angry in class. You could just leave the classroom. A time-out.”
“Oh.” Everyone else wanted Hazel to be more grown up, now the counselor was giving her a time out.
“So here’s what’s going to happen now. I’m going to make some referrals. There are a couple of different avenues I want to pursue. We should have a meeting with your mother. We’re all going to be partners here.”
He said this like it was a good thing, like Hazel would really want to be partners with this chipmunk man. He made some notes and added them to her file, making it bigger while she got smaller.
He dismissed her, and Hazel poured concrete into the hollow parts. Now she would be part girl, part hardening gray sludge. And no one would notice the difference.
After the bus let her off, Hazel found herself heading in the opposite direction from her house—down a couple of neighborhood blocks, around the funny lime-green house with the tiny white fence, down the hill to the railroad tracks. She kicked up slush as she walked, and her jeans were wet and spattered by the time she arrived at the field where the shrieking shack was.
The once-white field was now made of wet, slurpy snow. Their footprints had disappeared, but there were new ones in their place—three sets of heavy-booted adult-size prints. Hazel chewed on her lip and took a few steps closer to the shack, which was now dark and wet with melting snow. She didn’t know what she was doing there, but she didn’t have anywhere else to go, and sometimes you need to hole up in the decaying floor of a ruined old shack and pour concrete into your hollow places.
But as Hazel walked toward the house she realized the air was vibrating with noise. She was not alone. There were people in her house, and they were laughing and yelling and their voices were rough and loud and had the sharp edges of crushed-up beer cans.
Hazel stopped and took a step back from the house. She stood there for a moment, looking at the lonely, broken-down thing. It was a palace once.
And then she turned around and began to trudge home.
Chapter Twelve
Passages
When 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 di
d 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.
