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By Root 437 0

’t bobble it or anything. It fell into your hands like a gift. The people around you clapped. It was on the Jumbotron and everything! Some guy next to you said they could use you at shortstop. . . . And it was so late, but you and your dad waited outside after the game, and finally all the players came out, and you waited some more, and you practiced what you were going to say. And then Joe Mauer came out, and you just held out the ball to him, because you forgot how to speak English. And he smiled at you and asked you if he could sign your ball. And you just nodded like a big dork. And he did sign it and he told you to get some sleep, and you didn’t let anyone else touch the ball and you looked up on the Internet how to preserve it best, and you didn’t even let me touch it. And then . . . and then . . .” Hazel shook her head. She was crying now, and the tears burned her scar and bit at her face. “My dad left. . . . And I didn’t know what to do. And you came over, and . . .”

Hazel dissolved. The words flew away. There was nothing. Jack looked down at the ball and squeezed it. He turned it around in his hands again.

And then he looked up and blinked.

“Hazel?”

Chapter Twenty-five

Hazel and the Woods

“Jack?”

He was squeezing the ball in one hand and staring at her. He was shuddering harder, now, and his skin shone as if he were sweating.

She could not move, she could not do anything but let the tears run down her cheeks and stare back at him, willing him back to her.

“Hazel,” he repeated, like her name was a revelation. He blinked at her. “I gave you this.”

“Yes.”

He looked at the ball again, and then at her. “I’m really cold.”

“I know,” she said. She inhaled and her stomach contracted. “Jack,” she said, “we can go somewhere warmer. Would you like that?”

He blinked at her. “Yeah,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, and it was the only word she could say.

She crouched down next to Jack and put her arm around him. He was wet and so cold he felt wrong to her, and she had to work to suppress a shudder. Hazel wrapped both arms around him and pulled him into her. She’d never realized how skinny he was—but that was Jack, he burned off energy just by being alive. He shivered and shuddered and she tucked him into herself, though she was a very small girl. I am warm, she thought. I am warm and I am getting warmer. I am gathering all the warmth of my body, of all the Hazels past and future, and I am giving it to you.

She held him like that, willing him to leach warmth from her, willing his body to learn from the rhythm of her heartbeat, the steadiness of her breath.

Then the ground beneath them cracked. The sound hit the air like a slap. Freezing water crept onto Hazel’s legs.

Hazel looked up. The ice floe they were on had split. Water as dark and sickly as the storm-tossed sky seeped onto their perch.

“Jack,” she whispered. “We have to go. Come on.” She was trying her best to sound brave and in control, because she was the one whose heart knew how to beat and lungs knew how to breathe and legs knew how to walk, and that passed for heroism now.

Hazel wiped her face and stood up, pulling Jack up with her. His legs sank, and she gasped and pulled him back up. “Can you walk?” she whispered, her heart squeezing.

He inhaled. “I think so,” he said.

He drew himself up, clutching the baseball in his hand, with Hazel supporting him. The shift in weight caused the ice floe to dip into the black water, and Jack fell back down. Water splashed on him, and he flinched.

The floe was melting. Hazel’s eyes snapped to the lake. Around them, the black water was stealthily infiltrating the ice.

“Come on,” she said, tugging him up again.

With one arm on Jack’s back and another supporting his chest, Hazel pushed him forward. The palace loomed east of them, but to the west was a line of trees. The woods, calling her back.

“This way,” she said. They stepped from Jack’s floe to the next one. Jack inhaled and looked behind him.

“What?” she said, turning to look. Jack’s floe had cracked into four pieces now.

“Nothing,” he said, his eyes