Breadcrumbs - Anne Ursu [77]
His eyes went to the flame. And then something passed over his face, and he peered at the flame like it had a secret to tell him.
“What is it?” Hazel asked, trying to control her voice. “Do you see something?”
He shook his head, but kept staring.
Hazel looked into the light, searching desperately for magic, because she needed it now. It was nothing but flame.
Hazel closed her eyes for a moment, and then opened them again.
“I see something,” she said, her words a whisper.
He looked up at her.
“I do,” she said, trying to sound more sure. “I see you at your house. Do you remember your house? You live next door to me. Your kitchen is bigger than mine, and yellow-er, and it’s got these big blotchy flowers that you think look like soup stains, and you’ve got a plastic table in it.” Hazel took a breath. He was still staring into the flame. “You’re in the kitchen, and I’m with you. We’re . . . we’re sitting there in your sparkly plastic chairs making little clay guys. First you did a knight and I did a robot. I thought the robot would win. But you said that that was the obvious choice, people always pick the robots, and the knight’s ability to think freely would eventually win out. Now . . . now, you’re making a dragon, and I’m making a velociraptor. I’m having trouble with the neck. It’s too wobbly. You tell me a T. rex would be better, and I say you always think a T. rex would be better, and then you remind me what your knight did to my robot.”
The flame was dying now. But Jack still stared.
“I say,” she said, her voice firm and clear, “that if you’re fighting a fire-breathing dragon—and when you meet a dragon, it’s best to assume it’s fire breathing—what you want is speed. And the element of surprise. The dragon’s going to fight hard against the T. rex, but the velociraptor won’t seem like much of a threat. It’s small. The dragon doesn’t know it’s got a sickle claw. He just sees the feathers and thinks it’s a goofy dino-bird . . .”
And the flame was gone. All there was was smoke, dissolving into the lightening sky. Hazel lost her words. Her eyes went to Jack. Something had changed. He was shuddering violently now, and he dropped the shard he was holding.
“I’m cold,” he said.
“Oh,” she choked. “Okay. Okay. Jack . . .” She felt like someone was scooping out her chest. “Jack, I’m so sorry, I gave everything away. I don’t have anything else. I—” His teeth were chattering loudly. Hazel thought she might freeze just looking at him.
“Okay, listen,” she said. “I—” The backpack. Hazel took the last thing out—the baseball—and set it on the ice, and then struck another match and put it to the backpack.
The flame took hold of the backpack for a moment, then smoked and smoldered and died out.
Hazel whimpered.
“You lit your backpack on fire,” Jack said.
Hazel let out a small gasp and shook her head. She was going to fail. All this way only to learn that there was nothing she could do.
Jack looked at her, shuddering and clattering and wide-eyed. His eyes fell on the baseball next to her. “What is that?” he asked.
She picked up the baseball. It was firm and real in her hands. “This?”
“Can I see that?” he asked through clattering teeth.
“Of course,” she said, handing it to him.
He turned it over in his hands, considering it. His eyes fell on the big black scuff, then the signature. He studied it a moment. He moved his fingers around the soft leather, then ran his thumb slowly across the bumpy stitches.
“You gave that to me,” Hazel said in a whisper. “It’s a baseball, signed by Joe Mauer. He’s your favorite baseball player,” she added. He looked up at her, his hand firm around the baseball.
“You’re going to be a catcher, someday, like him,” she said. “You’re going to hit nine hundred home runs, which is better than Wolverine, I think. You got the ball yourself. You went to a game with your dad last summer. The Twins won in the eleventh inning. It was late, but your dad said you could stay until the end, because Campbells don’t leave baseball games early. And Mauer hit a pop foul right to you. You didn