Breadcrumbs Read Online Free PDF Page B

she was sick with sadness. And she asked if Hazel understood and Hazel said yes, though she didn’t really.
    “Why?” Hazel had asked.
    “I don’t know,” her mother answered. “Sometimes there’s no why.”
    Like an enchantment, Hazel thought. But at that moment she knew that it was not the thing to say out loud, and besides she could tell from her mother’s voice that it was nothing like an enchantment, not at all.
    And Jack’s mother stayed sick with sadness, and her eyes were so dead, and it was like she didn’t see Jack, even when he was in front of her. And Hazel did not have anything for him, anything that was like her beating heart. And Jack never said a word about it, but sometimes he banged around and slammed doors, like he wanted to make sure he could still make noise, and sometimes he just kind of stopped, and it was like he had been frozen.
    Now he stepped out of the house in his jacket and mittens, carrying his messenger bag, and closed the door firmly behind him.
    “Sorry ’bout that,” he said with a shrug.
    Hazel got the urge to apologize back, but she did not know what for. “Are we gonna go sledding?”
    Jack shrugged. “Let’s go to the shrieking shack,” he said. “I’ll show you my new stuff.”
    The shrieking shack was an old skeleton of a house tucked away in a field near the railroad tracks. Jack had found it last summer, and he’d presented it to her like it was a palace. And it might as well have been, because it was all theirs.
    Well, not all theirs. People came and they left trash behind and cigarette butts and beer bottles. They wrote things on the walls—tiny secret things in ballpoint pen and sprawling screaming things in spray paint. Hazel didn’t mind. Because the people who left their secrets on the walls thought that this was some ordinary place, something for garbage and graffiti. Which meant that no one else had discovered that it was a palace in disguise.
    It was winter and the sky had just tried to bury the city and this was not the time to go hang out in crumbling deserted houses, but—
    “Okay,” Hazel said.
    It was a long journey through the snow today, down a couple of neighborhood blocks, then around the funny lime-green house with the tiny white fence, down the hill to the railroad tracks. The field was an ocean of snow that needed to be crossed—but there were no other footprints in it. It was all theirs.
    The shack seemed to be waiting for them. The snow had ingratiated itself with the ruins of walls and memory of a roof, and it made it seem like the small dark-brown house had sprung out of the snow itself.
    There would be a time when it wouldn’t be safe for them to sit up in the small attic of the house anymore. The roof above them was falling in, the floor below them had places where it had rotted completely away. The house was decaying around them. But, for now, it was safe.
    Hazel and Jack crossed through the empty doorway into the rotting shell of the first floor and trod gently up the stairs, stepping over the ones that had already given themselves to the rot.
    There was a big enough hole in the roof for the winter sky to shine though, showing a dappling of snow on the wooden floor. It didn’t matter—Hazel’s jeans could not be wetter than they already were. She sat at their usual spot by the hole, which was just low enough in the slanted roof that you could sit on the floor and see the world outside. Jack settled in next to her.
    There were some days, ever since the summer, when the whole feel of Jack seemed to change. Like suddenly, instead of being made of baseball and castles and superheroes and Jack-ness, he was made of something scratchy and thick. Hazel could tell, because he had been her best friend for four years, and you can tell when your best friend is suddenly made of something else. And all she could do was try to remind him what he was really made of.
    “So,” she said. “Let me see what you got.”
    “Cool,” Jack said.