Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [35]
Her mother exhaled, and moved to put her hand on Hazel’s. Hazel did not let herself blink. “About your dad . . . you know . . .” Her voice was fraying from the strain of picking words so carefully. “I know he’s not being that . . . communicative now, but that’s his way. If he’s not calling you, it’s not because he doesn’t want to . . . but because he feels . . . bad. I wish it were different. Believe me. But it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you to the stars, do you understand?”
Hazel near-nodded again. The scar on the table blurred.
“We’ll get you lessons someday, hon. I promise.”
“I better go,” Hazel said, standing up from the chair. “I’ll be late.”
At the bus stop, Hazel took her spot at the edge of the sidewalk, a few feet away from the twins. When the bus came, she boarded it with her eyes down. This is how she was going to get through the seven-hour leper-o-rama of school—with her eyes always on the ground.
Of course, she’d just bump into people.
Immediately when she walked down the aisle of the bus she felt eyes boring into her. She looked up and saw Tyler staring at her.
Hazel wished she had something in her hands to throw. She looked away and sat down.
She opened up the new library book she’d brought for the bus ride and willed her thoughts to disappear in the pages. The girl in it was reading A Wrinkle in Time. She was best friends with a boy who lived in the apartment below. And then one day the boy stopped talking to her. Hazel closed the book.
When the bus arrived at school, Hazel gathered her things slowly, waiting for everyone else to get off. But when she got off she found Tyler waiting for her.
“What?” she snapped.
“Um, Jack’s not here today either?”
“Doesn’t look like it, no.”
“Do you know where he is?”
So that’s what this is about. He couldn’t call over there himself? Couldn’t boys do anything by themselves?
“He went to stay with his elderly aunt Bernice,” Hazel responded primly. “She’s sickly and she needs his help.” Hazel smiled in the way people who have superior information do, and walked away.
When she passed Mr. Williams’s classroom, she did not stop to look in.
As she walked into her class, she wondered if people noticed the change in her, if you could extract such a big part of yourself but still look the same on the outside, or if people would notice that she was part girl, part hollowed-out space.
Hazel sat down, ignoring the presence of the boys behind her. Mikaela smiled a greeting at her, and the girl part of Hazel smiled a little back, because that’s what you do. And then the hollowed-out part took over, and Hazel settled in for a Jack-less day.
As Mrs. Jacobs yammered on that morning, Hazel found her eyes drawn to the busy street out the window. This is what there was in the world, busy streets thick with the smell of car exhaust and fast-food hamburgers. Maybe everyone was right, maybe she did let her imagination run away with her, and maybe she could be a baby sometimes.
Then it was time for recess, and Hazel girded herself. She got up and was heading outside with everyone else when Mrs. Jacobs stopped her.
“Hazel?”
She looked.
“Don’t forget you have your appointment today.”
Mrs. Jacobs put a slight emphasis on the word appointment, so Hazel would understand that this was not an appointment with a hair stylist or a dentist or a vet, but the sort of appointment that causes you to articulate the word a little more carefully.
“Crazy Hazy,” someone muttered.
So, while her classmates filed outside, Hazel slung her backpack over her shoulder and trudged down the hall to the counselor’s office.
To get to Mr. Lewis’s office, you had to walk across the third floor and up the stairs into a corridor Hazel had never been in. It seemed like the sort of place that should be guarded by a three-headed dog. It didn’t seem like part of school anymore—the corridor was thickly carpeted, and the walls were painted a chipper light blue and tastefully decorated with black-and-white photos of flowers. There was a small waiting area—just two chairs and a table with a big flower arrangement.