Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [3]
“Miss the bus, Hazy?” he said, his voice taunting.
“Um, so did you,” Hazel said, turning up her nose elegantly as if it were not filled with stale fast-food sausage.
“Whatever,” said Tyler.
Hazel grumbled inwardly. Now she was either going to have to pretend there was something really urgent she had to do right there on the snowy sidewalk, or walk in with Tyler, who hated her because Jack hung out with her during recess now instead of him. She couldn’t help it if she was more interesting. Tyler and his friend Bobby made it very clear that they blamed her for Jack’s abdication of duty. They were sure she must have done something to Jack, because he never would have picked a girl over them if he had his wits about him.
Hazel was about to bend down and wrestle with a particularly intricate problem with her right boot when Tyler burst ahead of her and ran through the gate, his messenger bag trailing behind him.
Hazel watched him go. Everyone in the fifth grade had messenger bags, everyone but Hazel, who had not been cc’ed on that particular school-wide email. And by the time she figured it out on her own, it wasn’t like she could have asked her mom for one.
She’d asked Jack, a week into school, why he hadn’t told her. He frowned, looked at his own messenger bag, which he’d had for a year, and shrugged. “Who cares about stuff like that?” he asked.
Now, slinging her perpetually uncool backpack on her shoulders, Hazel headed through the tall fence, up to the side entrance that they were supposed to use if they were late, and buzzed to be let in. She held the door for a group of fourth-grade fellow stragglers, because she was a nice person, unlike some people.
Hazel was decidedly late, and she had endured enough days with Mrs. Jacobs to know how this was going to go. But that didn’t stop her from pausing outside the classroom opposite the hall from her own and peering in the window.
There Jack was, as he always was, sitting in the third row at the end, close enough to the door that Hazel could grin at him and he could make a face back at her. She stood a step back from the window and thought in his direction as hard as she could, as she always did on days they could not walk from the bus to class together. One moment. Two. He would know she was there. He always knew she was there. And then his head turned and he saw her, and a slow grin spread across his face. He waggled his eyebrows at her like a giant goofball—and though she had never before known what it meant to waggle, she did now—it meant I got you pretty good this morning and I bet you want to get me back and Just try it, Anderson and We’re going sledding later, right? And all the weight of Hazel’s snow-dampened morning was gone.
She grinned back at him and raised her eyebrows—Try it, I will, Campbell!—and then turned to her own classroom, forgetting the dread she should feel entering it.
But as soon as she walked in, Mrs. Jacobs eyed her and shook her head in the way that we do with people who are terrible disappointments and made a big show of marking something in her book, and there was the snow again, dumped right on her shoulders.
The desks were in five perfect lines of six. If ever these lines strayed from perfect, if someone should move his by scooting backward too vigorously, or trying to get just the right angle to pass a note, Mrs. Jacobs got very cranky. The average Lovelace fifth grader could not differentiate this from her normal state, but Hazel was attuned to these kinds of subtleties. In Jack’s classroom sometimes they moved their desks into one big circle or into small groups. This was not the sort of nonsense Mrs. Jacobs would brook. Hazel sometimes wondered if her teacher came from that planet at the end of Wrinkle in Time where everyone has to be exactly the same, except Mrs. Jacobs would have been