Read Online Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu, Erin Mcguire - Free Book Online

hat with purple stars embroidered on it and sparkly silver strands in the puff on top, and hot pink mittens to match. Hazel could only dress herself slowly in her own brightly hued humiliation. She tried to put on the glittery boots her mother gave her but couldn’t get her feet into them.
    She looked up at her mom. Her mom closed her eyes. “All right,” she said. “I’ll drive you.”
    Even the half of her that was desperate to see Jack at the bus stop, to hear his explanation, to get as quickly as possible to the moment when everything was all right again, did not want to do so dressed like a spastic eight-year-old’s birthday hat.
    “Thanks, Mom,” she muttered.
    Hazel had always felt invisible when she walked into school alone, and she thought that that was the worst way you could possibly feel. That was before she’d turned into a walking purple and pink glitter marshmallow. All she could do was keep her head down and count the steps to the school, while her mother watched out the car window, not understanding that freezing to death would be better than this.
    Just in front of the entrance to the school, her sneakered foot landed on a patch of ice. Her back slammed against the ground. Hazel lay there as elementary school students gathered around her, and it seemed that not even the third graders were dressed as ridiculously as she was.
    Hazel slowly picked herself up and headed into the school, her body now feeling as beat up as her heart. As soon as she crossed through the front door, she shed herself of the accoutrements of her absurdity, and had to fight the urge to dump them behind a wastebasket. Her sneakers were soaked from the snow. Her jeans were wet from the encounter with the ice. She felt like slush.
    She walked through the hallways alone. She had done this before, but there was always the idea of Jack, a ghost of him that grinned as it accompanied her.
    She wondered if people could hear the pounding of her heart, if the monstrous thrumming caused the kindergartners in their classroom to look around wide-eyed with fear as she passed, if the before-school-care kids in the music room unwittingly began to shake their maracas in time with it, if soon the very walls of the building would shake with it.
    She went up to Jack’s classroom and peered through the window. He was there, just as he was supposed to be. She thought at him, as hard as she could. One moment. Two. Three.
    Four. Five.
    He did not turn around.
    Hazel shrank backward.

    She walked into her classroom, breathing ice. Someone mumbled, “Tyler, she’s got a pencil case, duck!” and someone else cackled.
    Hazel flinched. She’d forgotten that part. She crawled into her desk and began to fiddle with the backpack she’d left there the day before, while people whispered around her.
    And then Mrs. Jacobs was standing over her. “Good morning, Hazel,” she said, carefully articulating each word. And then she stopped and stood in silence. She said nothing else, nothing about the day before. An artificial smile spread across her face, and Hazel got the feeling she was supposed to congratulate the teacher on her generosity.
    Hazel looked down and got out her notebook, and Mrs. Jacobs turned away. The bell rang and the teacher began to talk, and Hazel’s brain identified her voice as background noise and moved it to the rear of her consciousness.
    Hazel looked out the window, wondering how many cars she would watch pass by until recess when she saw Jack again.
    What would he say to her? Would he try to explain? Or would he pretend it had never happened? Maybe he didn’t even remember, maybe he’d been in so much shock that he had amnesia. That would explain a lot. Hazel would understand. She’d never even tell him how he’d acted, she’d keep it secret for the rest of her days.
    Her eyes fell on the trees that lined the sidewalk. Ice had colonized them like alien goo. She wondered what they felt. Were they cold underneath all of that,