Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [33]
Hazel frowned along with the rest of the class.
One of the girls raised her hand. “Like . . . pretend?”
“Yes,” said Ms. Blum. “This is what artists do all the time. They, like, pretend. They don’t have to just show the world as it is. You can use art to express something. . . . Think of an emotion or an idea and make a place that evokes that idea.”
Hazel stared at the paint-splotted table in front of her. There was a time when she would have loved this assignment, when she had a thousand made-up places at her fingertips just waiting for someone to ask to see them. But now she could think of nothing. There were so many real places in the world, and they had so much weight to them. There were front hallways and bus stops and the space on the other side of classroom doors. There were lonely big slides and microscopically out of line desks and lunch tables that survived gravity shifts. How could anyone ever make something up?
She moved to the supply table with the rest of the class, able to see nothing but the world as it was.
She took a piece of plain white paper and stared at it. It was an empty, inhospitable thing. Hazel exhaled. And then she remembered Jack’s sketch.
Hazel drew a tiny fort in the middle of the page—an austere palace framed by four tall turrets. In Hazel’s hands they looked a little like deformed lollipops. Then she drew a long line coming out from either side of the palace, stretching out across the landscape of the paper.
Hazel felt the presence of the teacher behind her.
“That’s your sketch?” Ms. Blum asked.
Hazel nodded. The thing with not being able to draw very well is you didn’t have to spend any time at it.
“What colors are you going to use?” Ms. Blum motioned to the paint wall.
“Just white,” said Hazel.
The teacher stared at the drawing, and then gave Hazel a searching look.
“This is different for you,” she said.
“It’s a fort,” Hazel explained. “No one can ever find you there.”
“That’s very interesting, Hazel,” the teacher finally said.
“Thank you, Ms. Blum,” said Hazel.
A second-grade girl sat next to Hazel on the bus and started showing her her sticker collection. The boys were already in the back, but there was no Jack there, either. Hazel wondered what had happened to him. Maybe Jack was pretending to be sick. But that wasn’t logical—it wasn’t like Jack was upset. He was completely happy to be a total jerk.
Maybe his father had kept him home for the day, just to be safe. His father worried a lot more, now.
It was possible that he was actually sick. Maybe he got hurt worse than anyone knew. And no one was telling her. She had no information at all. He could be in the hospital hooked up to tubes and beeping things with people in scrubs standing over him whispering dramatically and scribbling on clipboards, and she would have no idea, no one would tell her. Maybe she should go visit him, maybe he needed her, maybe when he saw her the beeping would get stronger and Jack would sit up in bed and the doctors would gasp and scribble about the miracle before their eyes.
The poison lifted. Her heart breathed free. And—
“Are you okay?” the second grader asked, closing her sticker album.
Hazel swallowed and turned to stare out the window at the slushy gray real world.
On the way from the bus stop, Hazel walked by Jack’s house slowly. She tried to sneak glances at the front windows while at the same time making a show of looking straight ahead. It was not easy.
And then, from behind her, the sound of a car. Hazel turned. The red station wagon was pulling up in the driveway. Hazel felt a wave rise up inside of her and crash. Jack’s parents got out of the car and began to walk toward the house. No Jack.
Hazel took a deep breath and called out, “Mr. and Mrs. Campbell?”
They turned around. Mr. Campbell had his hand lightly on his wife’s back. Hazel didn’t even know she ever left the house.
“Um, is Jack okay? He wasn’t in school. And—”
And what? And he was mean.
And, that.
Jack’s