Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [12]
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 matter—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.”
“Oh,” said Hazel, regarding the drawing carefully. In her head she began to imagine the story that would go with that place. “But who would want that?”
“There’s a boy,” Jack said. “He’s just a normal boy. Until one day he wakes up and no one can see him. He’s turned invisible. And he tries everything, but nothing works. So he goes here.”
“Okay,” said Hazel. She’d read