Breadcrumbs

  “Tyler,” Hazel said. “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, okay? But I’m not crazy. I’m not.”

  “Okay. I get it,” she said, voice tight. “You’re not crazy. Now, tell me!”

  “He wasn’t alone. There was a woman there. She was . . . she wasn’t right. She was tall and weirdly thin. She wasn’t real. She was all white and silver and made of snow . . . like an elf or a witch . . . like a movie.”

  She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s true, okay? She had a sled. It was huge and white and there were all these huge dogs, except I’m not sure they were dogs and—” He caught his breath and looked around the bus. “And he got in the sled and drove into the woods. And I called after him, but . . .” He shook his head and looked away.

  Hazel gaped. Did he know Adelaide somehow? Had she told him about the Snow Queen?

  “This isn’t funny,” she said.

  “I’m serious!”

  “You’re trying to trick me.”

  “I am not.”

  “You’re lying. You’re lying and I’m going to throw something at you every day for the rest of your life.”

  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 did that kind of thing in books.

  The two teddy bears, the orange kitten, the beat-up Grover she’d had since she was two, and the large purple hippopotamus on her bed eyed her as she moved. She remembered the compass her father had gotten her last Christmas as part of a junior adventurer’s kit and she grabbed it, and then dug out the flashlight, the canteen, and the whistle from her bottom drawer. The kit had had a Swiss Army knife, but Jack broke it performing an emergency tracheotomy on the dinosaur rock at the park.

  And then she found herself looking at the baseball again. It would be lucky, Jack had promised, for it was a baseball signed by Joe Mauer. She grabbed it and put it in the backpack.

  She crept into the kitchen and pulled out some of the energy bars her mother alleged were food and filled up the canteen with water, then took a deep breath and went into the living room, where her mother was still on the phone.

  Heart in throat, Hazel gave her a “do you have a minute” look.

  “I’m sorry,” her mother said into the phone, “could you hold on a second? . . . What is it, Hazel?”

  “Um, I’m going to go to Mikaela’s. We have a group project.”

  “Oh!” She cast a glance at the clock. “Look, if you wait a half hour, I can drive you.”

  “Oh, no. That’s okay. It’s not that cold.”

  Her mother nodded. “Remember, I have class tonight. I won’t be home when you get home.”

  Hazel gulped. “Okay, Mom.” And her mother nodded and turned back to the phone.

  Hazel stood for a moment, looking at their living room. It held a yellow couch that some long-dead cat had scratched up, a TV perched on a small cart, her mom’s desk with a computer and all kinds of papers, and a row of shelves teeming with books. The walls were light blue, Hazel’s favorite color. She’d helped her parents pick the paint four years ago, and her dad spilled a whole bucket of it on his shirt. You could trace his path through the house by the little drips that still lingered everywhere like breadcrumbs.

  It was one of the few records of his ever living there. There used to be pictures of the family scattered around the living room, but her mom had packed them all away, and now the only record of Hazels-past was last year’s school photo, preserving Hazel forever in long braids and a puffy green T-shirt that Jack thought made her look like a vegetable.

  She stood so long that her mother gave her a questioning look, and she smiled as if everything was okay and put on her jacket.

  “’Bye, Mom,” Hazel whispered. She stood there for one beat. Two. And she went out the front door.

  Hazel was trying so hard no
t to think, because if she thought about what she was doing she could never possibly do it. Instead she put one foot in front of the other, her sneakers crunching the snow, her socks absorbing the wet and cold and transmitting it up her legs. Already she’d made a mistake, but she could not risk going back for boots.

  Anyway, how cold could it be in the woods at night, right?

  Hazel trudged forward, down the long blocks to the park with the good sledding hill. She noticed among the footprints in the hard snow some tracks, like from a dragging sled, and she wondered if she was seeing the last record of Jack and when that record would melt away into nothing.

  There were kids at the park, building snowmen, having snowball fights, barreling down Suicide Hill. Hazel walked as far around them as she could. She had a reason to be apart from them now. She climbed up the hill at the other side of the park, feeling the effort in her legs. The trees stood in front of her like sentries, and she could not tell whether they intended to welcome her or keep her out.

  She stood looking at the line of trees that demarcated the woods as clearly as any doorway. Uncle Martin was right. She knew it at that moment. There were secrets, and there were witches in white, and somewhere there was Jack.

  She wished he were with her now.

  Hazel had read enough books to know that a line like this one is the line down which your life breaks in two. And you have to think very carefully about whether you want to cross it, because once you do it’s very hard to get back to the world you left behind. And sometimes you break a barrier that no one knew existed, and then everything you knew before crossing the line is gone.

  But sometimes you have a friend to rescue. And so you take a deep breath and then step over the line and into the darkness ahead.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Splinters

  Once upon a time, a demonlike creature with a forty-seven-syllable name made an enchanted mirror. The mirror shattered in the sky. The splinters took to the wind and scattered for hundreds of miles. When they fell to the earth, things began to change.

  You might be swimming in a lake and come upon a spot that is cold and murky, and it feels like you have swum through a ghost. You might be walking in a grassy field and find a hard bit of dirt where nothing grows. You might be in a forest and find yourself in a patch of silence, as if no birds dare sing there. This is where the splinters fell.

  Some went into the sand, and that sand became glass again, and that glass became all kinds of things, creating mischief beyond what even Mal could have imagined.

  A woman got a new pair of eyeglasses. She left her husband the next day. She told him that she just needed to find herself, but it was a lie. “It was like I was seeing him through new eyes,” she told a friend.

  The president of a small corporation had a bathroom with a mirror installed just off his office. Within a week, he confessed to dumping chemicals in a nearby river. Within two weeks, he’d resigned and spent the rest of his days in a small cabin writing confessional poetry.

  An astronomer looked through his new telescope into the stars one morning and then refused to ever look to the heavens again. When questioned, he said, “Some things we are better off not knowing.”

  No one who tried on clothes in the third dressing room to the right of a certain department store ever bought anything. One observant employee suggested the room might be haunted. She was fired.

  Every person who bought a particular model of television came to believe that TV shows had become particularly mean-spirited of late, and they all canceled their cable and took to other hobbies.

  A certain shiny new subdivision featured windows made of the most state-of-the-art material. The neighbors peek out the window through closed curtains and keep to themselves.

  Most of the splinters that fell were as tiny as dust. But there were a few larger pieces as well. The biggest one was about the size of your hand. It fell near the woods and a woman picked it up and carried it in with her. She dropped it when the wolves scared her, and it was picked up several days later by a girl who lived nearby. This girl did not need an enchanted mirror to show her that the world could be an ugly place, so to her it spoke the truth. She kept the mirror in her apron pocket, where it could be secret and safe.

  A boy got a splinter in his eye, and his heart turned cold. Only two people noticed. One was a witch, and she took him for her own. The other was his best friend. And she went after him in ill-considered shoes, brave and completely unprepared.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Into the Woods

  Hazel stepped into the woods gingerly, expecting to land in a thick cushion of snow. So she stumbled when her foot went all the way to solid ground. It was not winter in the woods—at least in these woods.

  She stood, rooted to the spot like the mammoth trees that surrounded her. Dark trunks traveled up into the distant sky, connecting this world to the one above. The distant roof was a tangle of budding branches. Decaying leaves clung fiercely to the floor among tiny green sprouts that aspired toward the world above. A cloud of mist hung in the sky like the aftereffects of a spell. The air was a tangible thing, rushing into Hazel’s lungs as she breathed, touching her skin like a curious ghost. It carried with it the smell of old leaves and wide open sky. She was in the wood at the end of the world, or perhaps at the beginning.

  She looked behind her, to remind herself of the place she came from, but it was gone. The wood stretched out in every direction. It was as if she had sprouted there.

  She had stepped into the woods in the park and landed in an entirely different place. She knew this might happen. She’d been to Narnia, Wonderland, Hogwarts, Diction-

  opolis. She had tessered, fallen through the rabbit hole, crossed the ice bridge into the unknown world beyond. Hazel knew this world. And it should have made this easier.

  But it did not.

  Hazel shuddered. She couldn’t get out even if she wanted to. But it didn’t matter. She didn’t want to get out, not now anyway. She had a job to do.

  Hazel took a deep breath and was about step forward when some primal instinct made her turn her head to the left. And when she did she desperately wished she had a place to run to. For about ten yards away, next to one of the trees, was a large gray wolf.

  Hazel froze. The wolf sat, erect and still, like a statue. His copper eyes gazed at her. She instinctively took a step backward and still he stared. Panic fused the circuits of her brain. Her breath stopped. She’d read once that if you ran into a bear in the woods you should avoid eye contact and you shouldn’t run away, but all she knew about wolves was that you should never tell them how to find your grandmother’s house.

  So Hazel lowered her eyes and took another step back, her skin crawling and her heart buzzing with fright. The wolf blinked, and in all the stillness it was as if he had leapt toward her. But he hadn’t—he just stayed, regarding her, and his gaze was the world.

  “Hi,” she croaked.

  Nothing.

  “I’m just looking for my friend. I don’t mean any harm.”

  Stare.

  “Um, maybe you’ve seen him. His name’s Jack. He’s got freckles and a blue coat. He was with a woman on a sleigh, a witch or an elf? Dressed all in white . . .”

  Blink.

  “Well . . . I should be going, then.” Hazel took one step back, then another, then, moving as slowly as possible, she turned around and began to walk away from the wolf.

  It was all she could do not to take off and run as fast as she could. Her every muscle begged to be sprung. She wondered whether she would hear him as he approached, or if the next thing she knew would be his jaws on her neck, and then searing pain, and then nothing. But neither thing happened, and she carefully stole a look behind her to see the wolf still at his post, and still watching her.

  She crept on for an eternity, one foot in front of the other, grateful for each and every breath. Finally, when she was well out of his sight, she leaned up against one of the trees and let out a great, s
haking exhale.

  The feeling of his eyes on her had not left her. It seemed like it would never go away, that she would spend the rest of her life feeling that predatory gaze.

  She closed her eyes and gathered herself. Find Jack. That was all.

  She looked around for some direction, some guidance, some place. There was a clearing up ahead, and it was, at least, a destination. Hazel moved softly toward it, conscious of advertising her presence with every step to all the watchful wolves of the woods. Not that everything was silent—the wind carried whisperings with it, a current of noise just underneath the airy quiet.

  She listened, her ears learning how to work in this new world, and she could hear the sounds of birds chirping and trilling, and this was somehow comforting. Normal. There were birds in the woods, and they had things to sing of.

  There was another noise in the wind, too, something that did not seem normal—at least not here. As Hazel continued to walk forward the sound clarified and she had to stop to take in what she was hearing.

  Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

  Hazel shook her head slightly at the strangeness of it, this once-ordinary sound that in the mist-filled forest felt like a mechanical menace. She moved toward the sound, the ticks marking out her steps, and she realized it was coming from the clearing. And then she saw why.

  The clearing was about the size of the first floor of Hazel’s house, and at the very center of it was a clock. It was a tall standing clock with a gold-trimmed face at the top like a head, supported by two steel beams. Three cylindrical weights hung down from behind the face, and a long pendulum swung back and forth over the ground. Behind the face you could see gears and cranks. It looked like a grandfather clock that had been skinned.

  The clock was only about a foot taller than she was, and she stared up into its face as if to have a conversation. In the woods the sun was rising in the sky, but the iron hands pronounced the time as 5:43—probably about the time it was back in the real world. And that seemed the weirdest thing of all.