Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [39]
He gritted his teeth. “Hazel, stop being a psycho and listen, okay? I’m sorry I was mean. I’m sorry we didn’t let you hang out with us. But you have to believe me.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the only one who’ll believe me. I mean”—he shrugged—“you know how you are. . . .”
He looked at her and she saw tears in his eyes, she saw that he was wrapped in heaviness, a blanket of snow. Like her.
“Somebody took Jack,” she said. “Into the woods.”
“Yes. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“A woman in white on a sleigh. Like Narnia.”
“What’s Narnia?”
Hazel rolled her eyes. “Okay, then,” she said, crossing her arms, “what happened before?”
“Before?” Tyler shook his head. “He was sledding.”
“No,” she said, talking over the thing that had wedged in her throat. “Before that. He changed. He was mean. He stopped being my friend. What happened?”
Tyler blinked at her. “I don’t know, Hazel. I thought he’d finally figured out we were more fun.”
Hazel closed her eyes and saw herself bashing Tyler on the head with all the pencil cases of the world.
She got off the bus and walked slowly home, Tyler’s words buzzing in her head. It was absolutely crazy, what he had said. He was teasing her. He knew about the Snow Queen somehow. He was trying to get her to make a fool of herself. Because he knew what she was like. And then he would tell the whole school that Crazy Hazy believed Jack was kidnapped by a witch.
But then there was the way he looked, so serious, so shaken, like someone who had recently learned that the world was not at all what he thought it was.
Hazel walked into her house, nodded at her mother who was on the phone, and went straight to her room, where she set her backpack on the floor and lay down on the bed.
It was absolutely crazy, what he had said.
She looked at her shelves, filled with books in which the bad stuff that happened to people was caused by things like witches who lured people into the woods. In a weird way, the world seemed to make more sense that way. At least it always had to Hazel.
It was what she wanted to hear, what he had said. That it had nothing to do with her. That it was magic. That a witch had enchanted him and swept him off into the night. That she could still get him back.
Her eyes fell on the Joe Mauer baseball that was propped up on the shelf. He had given her something like his beating heart once, because she needed it, and because he knew she would keep it well.
And then something happened, something changed, and he was gone. And it might be true that he had just changed, that he didn’t want to be her friend anymore, that he had grown out of her like a puffy purple jacket, that he had gone to stay with his elderly aunt Bernice. It was most likely true.
But what if it wasn’t?
It might be true that something else had happened, something bad, something that flickered outside the boundaries of the things you could see. It might be true. Because who was Hazel to say what the world is really made of?
It might be true.
And if it was true, Hazel was the only one who could save him. Because, like Tyler said, she knew how she was. And because she was Jack’s best friend. And that meant she would not give up on him, could not give up on him, without doing everything possible to save him.
It might be true.
It would not hurt, after all, to walk into the woods.
Hazel looked at the baseball and then exhaled. Tyler’s face flashed in her mind. The pieces clicked together.
I believe there is magic in the woods, Uncle Martin had said.
What if there was?
Hazel’s heart sped up. She sat up and looked around her room, then got down from the bed and opened her backpack and unloaded everything—all of the books and folders and notebooks—and hid them under the bed. She had to be prepared. She must carry things with her.
She got out a change of clothes and stuffed it into the backpack. She was tempted to bring another. It could be days. But she should travel light, she knew that much. And she could always wash her clothes in a stream. People