Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [18]
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