Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [27]
“So, what did you think of Adelaide’s uncle?” her mother asked.
Hazel shrugged. “He’s funny.”
“He’s a character, all right. He was just like that in college, too. He just never grew up. Some people don’t have to. They’re lucky.” She cast a glance at Hazel. “Most people do, though.”
“I like him,” Hazel said. They were driving by the lake now, and a group of brightly plumaged girls were emerging from the warming house carrying skates and chirping to each other. Saturday was also a good day for skating, apparently.
“Well, good. You think you can have fun today?”
“Sure,” Hazel said.
“Try for me, okay?”
“Okay.” Soon they arrived at the Briggses’. Today the house shone so brightly it hurt Hazel’s eyes, and she wondered if it would even allow her in. If Jack thought she was a baby, what was Adelaide going to think?
Adelaide opened the door, smiling. Hazel hesitated. She wanted to keep this moment when Adelaide thought she was someone she would like to welcome in.
But there was nothing to do but enter the house, and Hazel found herself in the vast living room with Adelaide and her little brother, Jeremy, who was sitting at a desk poking around at a computer with a screen bigger than Hazel’s TV.
“Mom wants us to watch him,” Adelaide explained. “Sometimes he breaks things.”
Hazel did not know how to respond to that. She didn’t know anything about little brothers, except from books. She would have liked a brother or a little sister, but her parents had already traveled to another planet to get her. It’s hard to do that twice.
“I break things, too,” she said finally. And then flushed. This was the part where you were supposed to say something fascinating, if you were the sort of person that had fascinating things to say. This was not the part where you say I break things, too. “Um,” she said, shifting. “I liked the story you were working on. With your uncle.”
There. That was something. People liked compliments.
“Yeah!” Adelaide’s eyes sparkled underneath her glasses. “That was cool. I want to be a writer, too. And a ballet dancer. I’m going to write stories and make ballets about them.”
“Really?” Hazel didn’t know that that was something you could do.
“Wanna do one now?”
“A . . . ballet?”
“Yeah! We could make one about the Snow Queen!”
“Um.” Hazel bit her lip. “I . . . don’t know how to dance.”
“I’ll teach you! Come on!”
In a few minutes Hazel was wearing one of Adelaide’s leotards and ballet slippers, and was holding onto the back of a chair while Adelaide moved her feet around in various positions—first, second, third, fourth, fifth. Hazel’s feet responded slowly, warily, unused to the attention. Then Adelaide stood in front of Hazel, positioned her own feet, stuck her arm in the air in an arc like a swan’s neck, and bent her legs so she slowly dropped toward the ground.
“Wow,” said Hazel.
“It’s a plié. You do it on all the positions. It’s very good for dramatic moments. Do you want to learn leaps?”
She did. They pushed all the furniture out of the way, and soon the girls were leaping around the room. Hazel’s feet in the soft pink ballet slippers felt borrowed, like she would have to give them back. But she leapt anyway, and while the lamps shook and the decorative furniture quavered, she did not break a thing.
Hazel had feathers, she had wings, she had beautiful borrowed feet. If she could steal beauty from swans, even for a moment, maybe there was some kind of hope.
And then there was a mournful noise, and a clunking sound, and Adelaide’s little brother’s head was buried in his arms on the desk. He lifted it up, sighed dramatically, then clunked it down again.
Adelaide stopped. “Jer, what is it?”
He lifted his head enough to say, “Adie, you were gonna help me with my homework!”
The girls came to earth. “All right,” Adelaide said. “What’s your homework?”
“I’m supposed to write a bi-o-graph-y. It has to be a scientist, I can’t make anything up, and I can’t do Spider-man.” He threw up his hands in despair.
“A scientist?” Adelaide screwed her face up in thought. “Um . . . Albert Einstein?”
“Everyone