Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [1]
Ouch.
Hazel yelped and whirled around. There, on the front step of the house next door was a brown-haired, freckled boy packing another snowball and smiling evilly.
A grin broke out on Hazel’s face. “Jack!” she hollered, and bent down to gather some snow.
“No you don’t,” said her mom, shooting a glance at the house next door. She reached over the threshold and placed her hand on Hazel’s back to guide her back into the house.
“I’ll get you later,” Hazel called to Jack as she disappeared inside.
“Just try it!” Jack called back, cackling.
Hazel’s mom closed the front door with a sigh. “Look at you. What were you thinking?”
Hazel looked down. She had clumps of snow hanging off her pajama legs. As she moved her head, snowflakes fell off of her hair. She seemed to be shivering, though she had not noticed the cold until now.
“Come on. You better get dressed. You’ll be late.”
She was late. Hazel walked out the front door, bundled sensibly now in her green jacket and knit gloves and red boots, to see the yellow school bus disappearing into the distance, its wide tracks scarring the snow-covered street, its puffing black smoke trespassing against the white sky. She blinked and looked toward the front window of her house where her mother’s form was already seated at the desk on the other side. Now she felt the snow’s bite against her ankles like a bad memory.
Chewing on her lip, Hazel unlocked the front door and went back into the house. Her mom looked up at her and let out a nearly imperceptible exhale.
“I’m sorry,” Hazel said.
“I’ll get my keys,” her mother said.
In a few moments, their small white car was bursting out of the garage onto the thickly blanketed driveway. And then there was a crunching from the back tires, and they were stopped.
The car groaned. Her mother swore. The wheels spun, one moment, two—the car lurched forward and backward, and her mother swore even more colorfully, and then they were free.
It was a twenty-block drive to school, fourteen of them down a two-lane one-way street. As they moved toward school, the houses became bolder, sprouting second stories that stood uneasily in their rickety wooden frames. Hazel used to want a house like this—something beat-up and possibly haunted, with a dumbwaiter for passing messages, with hidden compartments that contained mysterious old books—but then she would not live next to Jack anymore, and that was not worth all the secret passages in the world.
The snow was coming down harder now, and Hazel’s mother leaned forward in her seat as she drove, as if to will the car through it all. Shiny SUVs charged through the snow, whizzing past Hazel and the other small cars that crept along like scared animals.
Hazel’s mom started pressing down on the brake long before they got to the big intersection where they were to turn left—the one with the gas station that Hazel and Jack biked to in the summers to spend their allowance on Popsicles and push-ups; where the bakery with the birthday cakes used to be before it became another gas station; where the burger place that her dad always took her to after T-ball games had been before it was replaced by the fast- food Mexican place that her mother said made everything taste like plastic and sadness—but that didn’t stop them from skidding when they hit the patch of ice just in front of it. The car began to spin to the right, her mother wrenched the wheel and pumped her foot furiously on the brake, a horn bleated behind them, and from everywhere around them came a polyphony of screeching tires.
Hazel yelped a little, and the car skidded into the busy intersection and stopped. A car swerved around them, and another, before someone finally stopped and waved them ahead.