Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [15]
“Is he going to be blind?”
It was the first time they’d ever wanted to hear what she had to say. But for once she had no story to tell.
There are things you do not notice until they are gone. Like the certainty that your body is a single whole, that there’s something keeping you from breaking into pieces and scattering with the winds. Now Hazel could feel pieces of her threatening to break off, and she was no longer sure her feet would stay attached to the ground.
Jack was hurt. She felt it as if it had happened to her. She would have preferred that it had happened to her, because then she wouldn’t be standing here, helpless, with the entire fifth grade looking to her. Hazel could fight anything—dragons, wicked witches, evil baseball-playing supervillains, but she needed Jack beside her. He was supposed to be beside her.
She looked around at the other kids. The girls huddled up, whispering and pointing. The boys shuffled around and did not look anyone in the eye.
Except for two of them. Bobby and Tyler were both shooting her nasty looks. Hazel met their eyes and scowled at them. They scowled back.
Mrs. Jacobs put her hand on Hazel’s back and whispered, “He’ll be all right.”
Hazel turned to look up at her teacher, trying to discern whether she meant I have actual knowledge that I am imparting to you about Jack’s condition or I have no idea whether he’ll be okay but since I am a grown-up I think pretending I do is somehow comforting to you.
Then the bell rang, and Mrs. Jacobs motioned everyone into the building. Hazel looked at the spot where Jack had been, but there was nothing there except the impression his legs left in the snow.
Nobody could sit still in Mrs. Jacobs’s class that afternoon, least of all Hazel. Her desk was positioned just so she could almost see out the door. Almost. When Mrs. Jacobs wrote on the blackboard, Hazel would lean forward, trying to catch some glimpse of Jack-like movement in the hallway. This time, it would be him peeking in the doorway, Hazel making some kind of face, and in that face she would say, I’m so glad you are back and I hope you’re okay and I’m so so sorry. And he would be able to read all of it.
It was just something in his eye, she tried to tell herself. Maybe he would need an eye patch. He would like that. Jack knew the value of an eye patch.
But Hazel had had things stuck in her eye before, and it did not make her want to rip her face off. And Jack—Jack never felt a thing. That’s what he said whenever he hurt himself: “I never feel a thing.” It was one of his powers, he said. She had never seen anything hurt anyone the way this hurt Jack.
It was just something in his eye.
She could not get the image out of her head of the impression of his legs in the snow. And anyone else who looked wouldn’t understand; they would just see two leg-size trenches and wonder what had made them. They would just think that this was an empty thing, that that’s what’s supposed to be, that there’s something perfectly normal about a thing that exists entirely because it is lacking something.
“Hazel,” snapped Mrs. Jacobs. “Pay attention!”
Hazel turned back around and slumped in her seat. She should have followed Jack. Why did she let Mrs. Jacobs stop her? They’d traveled through earth’s molten core, the Arctic, through space and beyond together, and she’d let a fifth-grade teacher with no imagination stop her? Maybe it was all a conspiracy, maybe they had done something to him, poisoned him somehow, maybe he was being held captive somewhere, maybe he needed her to rescue him—
A folded-up note landed on Hazel’s lap. Her name was written on the front in boyish print. She unfolded it and beheld the words It’s your fault.
Hazel turned in her seat and glared at the boys in the back. Tyler mouthed your fault. Bobby glared at her. “Crazy Hazy,” he hissed.
In one motion Hazel stood up, grabbed the hard pencil case from her desk, and hurled it at Tyler. There were some yelps, some gasps, and then absolute quiet. Even Mrs. Jacobs had been shocked into stillness.
The pencil