by Anne Ursu
“Oh,” said Hazel, regarding the drawing carefully. In her head she began to imagine the story that would go with that place. “But who would want that?”
“There’s a boy,” Jack said. “He’s just a normal boy. Until one day he wakes up and no one can see him. He’s turned invisible. And he tries everything, but nothing works. So he goes here.”
“Okay,” said Hazel. She’d read a book once about a girl who turned invisible and a boy who could fly. Hazel knew she would be the invisible one, because she never got to be the one who flew. “Why does he go there?”
“Because it doesn’t matter that he’s invisible, you know? There’s no one to look at him, and no one will ever come.”
“Okay,” Hazel said. “So, show me your bad guy.”
Jack nodded and flipped back a couple of pages. The drawing was of what seemed to be an ordinary man, with a swath of thick black hair. Jack’s heroes were usually muscular, but this one was tall and very thin and wearing an actual suit and tie, like someone you might run into downtown. It was his face where you could see there was something off—the shadows in his cheeks, like he lived on something other than food. And his eyes. Jack had spent a lot of time on his eyes. Hazel could see the life in them, she could see the intelligence behind them, and she knew if you found yourself gazing at these eyes very bad things were going to happen.
“Creepy,” she said.
“I know!” Jack said. “He takes people’s souls. Like a Dementor. But he’s not just a monster, he’s a supervillain. He’s a genius.”
“What does he want?” asked Hazel, thinking of Uncle Martin.
“Nothing.” Jack said. “He’s just bad for the sake of being bad. That’s the scariest kind of villain, you know?”
Hazel nodded.
“And no one can fight against him,” Jack continued. “Because what do you do against the guy who takes your soul? There’s no superpower for that.”
“But,” said Hazel, feeling all of a sudden the dampness around her. “There’s got to be something.”
Jack studied his drawing carefully. “But what if there’s not? What if no one can fight him?”
Hazel shrugged. She didn’t know the answer. But there had to be a way. There was always a way.
Hazel and Jack spent the rest of the day sitting in the second floor of their house talking about supervillains and the secrets in their villain-y hearts. Jack had brought little packages of sandwich crackers and fruit snacks. This was the sort of thing he usually had now that his dad did all the shopping. Then it got to be time to go home, and the two trudged carefully back through the field. They were about to head up the hill that would take them back into the neighborhood, back into the ordinary world, when Hazel stopped.
“What is it?” asked Jack.
“I don’t know,” said Hazel. She turned back and regarded the decaying shell of the house for a moment. “I just wanted to look at it again.” Then she shrugged and turned around to head back home.
When Hazel walked into her house, she found herself feeling scratchy and thick. As she wiped her feet in the vestibule, she heard her mom on the phone. Her voice sounded like it had no air in it, so Hazel knew who she was talking to. Hazel quietly got her boots and jacket off as she heard her mother’s voice say, “. . . she just got in. Do you want to—” and then, a few moments later, her good-bye. Hazel lined up her boots against the wall and tucked her mittens and hat into her jacket.
“Did you have fun sledding?” her mom asked as she came in.
“Yeah,” said Hazel, hanging her jacket in the front closet.
“Hey, listen. Elizabeth Briggs called. Adelaide was hoping you might come over on Saturday morning.”
“I have plans,” Hazel said.
Her mother leaned back in her chair and looked at Hazel. “I already accepted,” she said. “Hazel, honey, it’s not wrong to make other friends. You’d still be a wonderful friend to Jack.”
Hazel rubbed the floor with her stockinged foot. “Whatever,” she muttered, and went into her room and closed the door to go read for the rest of the night. Some things you just couldn’t fight against.
When Hazel woke up the next morning, she found the scratchy feeling had not gone away. It didn’t help when she looked out of her window to find her street had been plowed perfectly. There was no snow day today.
Her mom was cranky at breakfast and gave Hazel a talking-to about snow shoveling and maturity and accepting responsibility. And Hazel could not explain that she had forgotten, that there was Jack and soul-sucking villains, and sometimes you are too scratchy to remember the things you are supposed to do, even if you do feel really bad about it later.
It was snowing when she went to the bus stop, the sort of snow that feels like sharp little ice pellets on your skin. They hurt Hazel’s face. And Jack wasn’t there, and she hated when he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. It was terrible when people weren’t at the places they were supposed to be. Jack didn’t get to the bus stop until just as they were loading, and then he was immediately called over by Tyler and Hazel was left to sit by herself and she’d forgotten her book.
She walked into school behind everyone and stopped in the bathroom, but still when she peered into Mr. Williams’s classroom window Jack wasn’t sitting down yet, and his empty desk nudged at her like something important that’s just out of the reach of memory. She was thinking about something else in the hallway and didn’t see Bobby taking off his boots and accidentally kicked him in the thigh. Bobby yelped and clutched his leg and told her that in addition to being crazy she was a stupid klutz cow.
Mrs. Jacobs read announcements that morning. Remember to bang the snow off your boots when you come into school, field trip to the art museum next week and ask your parents if they’ll chaperone, remember no peanuts for the bake sale, and, oh, Mikaela and her dad are going to start a father-daughter book club if anyone’s interested.
And then, from behind her:
“Wow, Hazy, that sounds like fun. Too bad your dad isn’t around!”
Hazel whirled around. Bobby was snickering. Mikaela sucked in her breath. Even Tyler shook his head. Bobby rolled his eyes in response.
Hazel turned back around and focused on a small spot at the front of her desk and did not lift her eyes.
At recess, Jack was waiting for her again by the big slide, and he looked at Hazel like he had no idea how scratchy she was. She always knew when he was scratchy, always. Bobby called to him, and he lifted his hand to wave.
Hazel’s eyes narrowed. “How can you be friends with them?” she asked.
Jack blinked. “What do you mean?”
She lifted her hand to wipe snow from her forehead. “Bobby and Tyler. They’re jerks. They’re mean to me. I’m your best friend.”
“Whatever! They’re idiots, Hazel. You shouldn’t listen to them.”
“But you’re friends with them.”
Jack just stared at her, like he did not see the contradiction, like he could not even fathom what it was.
“Why don’t you just go hang out with them today then,” Hazel said, crossing her arms.
“What’s with you?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay, fine,” Jack said, looking at her like she had a mental disorder. He stared at her a moment, and then turned to walk toward the boys.
Hazel stood, the pelletlike snow falling around her, and then, so quickly it was like she had superpowers, she bent down and packed a snowball and hurled it at him.
It hit his back. He whirled around. “What the—”
And then it was Hazel’s turn to walk away, leaving Jack standing there in the snow.
It took three steps for the remorse to hit her. One. Two. Three. She stopped. She was about to turn around, to open her mouth and see if any of the right words would come out, when she heard a yelp from Jack. She turned. He was bent over, clutching his left eye. “Ow!” he yelled. “Ow!” His voice cracked into the sky. His other hand flew to his chest,
and he fell to his knees. Mrs. Jacobs and Mr. Williams were there next to him in a flash.
“What is it? What happened?”
But Jack just gargled something into the air and rocked back and forth, clutching his eye.
A crowd gathered around him as the teachers looked at each other, bewildered. Hazel stared, helplessly, as Mr. Williams lifted Jack up onto his feet and began to help him inside while Jack clutched at his face and groaned. Hazel started to follow, but Mrs. Jacobs stopped her. And so she stood and watched as Mr. Williams led Jack away, because there was nothing at all she could do.
Chapter Four
Pieces
In a flash, the fifth graders of Lovelace Elementary were crowded around Hazel.
“What happened?”
“Did his eye fall out?”
“Is he going to be blind?”
It was the first time they’d ever wanted to hear what she had to say. But for once she had no story to tell.
There are things you do not notice until they are gone. Like the certainty that your body is a single whole, that there’s something keeping you from breaking into pieces and scattering with the winds. Now Hazel could feel pieces of her threatening to break off, and she was no longer sure her feet would stay attached to the ground.
Jack was hurt. She felt it as if it had happened to her. She would have preferred that it had happened to her, because then she wouldn’t be standing here, helpless, with the entire fifth grade looking to her. Hazel could fight anything—dragons, wicked witches, evil baseball-playing supervillains, but she needed Jack beside her. He was supposed to be beside her.
She looked around at the other kids. The girls huddled up, whispering and pointing. The boys shuffled around and did not look anyone in the eye.
Except for two of them. Bobby and Tyler were both shooting her nasty looks. Hazel met their eyes and scowled at them. They scowled back.
Mrs. Jacobs put her hand on Hazel’s back and whispered, “He’ll be all right.”
Hazel turned to look up at her teacher, trying to discern whether she meant I have actual knowledge that I am imparting to you about Jack’s condition or I have no idea whether he’ll be okay but since I am a grown-up I think pretending I do is somehow comforting to you.
Then the bell rang, and Mrs. Jacobs motioned everyone into the building. Hazel looked at the spot where Jack had been, but there was nothing there except the impression his legs left in the snow.
Nobody could sit still in Mrs. Jacobs’s class that afternoon, least of all Hazel. Her desk was positioned just so she could almost see out the door. Almost. When Mrs. Jacobs wrote on the blackboard, Hazel would lean forward, trying to catch some glimpse of Jack-like movement in the hallway. This time, it would be him peeking in the doorway, Hazel making some kind of face, and in that face she would say, I’m so glad you are back and I hope you’re okay and I’m so so sorry. And he would be able to read all of it.
It was just something in his eye, she tried to tell herself. Maybe he would need an eye patch. He would like that. Jack knew the value of an eye patch.
But Hazel had had things stuck in her eye before, and it did not make her want to rip her face off. And Jack—Jack never felt a thing. That’s what he said whenever he hurt himself: “I never feel a thing.” It was one of his powers, he said. She had never seen anything hurt anyone the way this hurt Jack.
It was just something in his eye.
She could not get the image out of her head of the impression of his legs in the snow. And anyone else who looked wouldn’t understand; they would just see two leg-size trenches and wonder what had made them. They would just think that this was an empty thing, that that’s what’s supposed to be, that there’s something perfectly normal about a thing that exists entirely because it is lacking something.
“Hazel,” snapped Mrs. Jacobs. “Pay attention!”
Hazel turned back around and slumped in her seat. She should have followed Jack. Why did she let Mrs. Jacobs stop her? They’d traveled through earth’s molten core, the Arctic, through space and beyond together, and she’d let a fifth-grade teacher with no imagination stop her? Maybe it was all a conspiracy, maybe they had done something to him, poisoned him somehow, maybe he was being held captive somewhere, maybe he needed her to rescue him—
A folded-up note landed on Hazel’s lap. Her name was written on the front in boyish print. She unfolded it and beheld the words It’s your fault.
Hazel turned in her seat and glared at the boys in the back. Tyler mouthed your fault. Bobby glared at her. “Crazy Hazy,” he hissed.
In one motion Hazel stood up, grabbed the hard pencil case from her desk, and hurled it at Tyler. There were some yelps, some gasps, and then absolute quiet. Even Mrs. Jacobs had been shocked into stillness.
The pencil case ricocheted off Tyler’s face and clattered on the desk. Pencils rolled everywhere. They were the only movement in the room. Hazel stood there, looking at the frozen tableau of her class, at the shocked faces of the other kids, at Tyler who was clutching his face, at Mrs. Jacobs who seemed to have short-circuited, and decided she was not sorry. Not in the least bit. She gave the room one last look, turned, and stomped out.
She looked into Mr. Williams’s room to see Jack’s desk was still empty. Mr. Williams had returned, though. Hazel could not believe he had not stopped into her classroom to give them an update. Hazel wanted to run in and ask him, but the sound of clanky footsteps from the room behind her indicated Mrs. Jacobs had regained function, so Hazel sprung off on her heel and ran down three flights of stairs into the girls’ locker room, where a bunch of surprised-
looking fourth graders were changing into their gym clothes. Hazel straightened purposefully and gave them the sort of look fifth graders give fourth graders to keep them in line, then walked into one of the bathroom stalls and curled up in a ball on the toilet, where she sat until the end of the school day. And if anyone saw her, they would think that this was the way she was supposed to be, that it was perfectly normal to be a thing created out of the lack of something else.
Finally the school bell rang, and Hazel unballed herself from the toilet and opened the stall. Her legs groaned as if they would have liked nothing more than to be curled up like that forever.
Everyone was streaming out of the school, and there was no going back for her backpack or her jacket, because she did not need to add missing the bus to her list of crimes. And she didn’t particularly want to face anyone in the class—never again, really. But certainly not now.
When you throw something at someone else, it’s usually not a considered action. Hazel, really, had not thought things through. If Hazel had thought things through, she might have realized that elementary schools do not take kindly to students throwing things at other students, or to them stomping out of class, or to completely disappearing in the middle of the day. She might have realized that these activities would result in an inevitable call to her mother, and that her mother, too, would not take kindly to the throwing, stomping, or disappearing, and that when Hazel snuck out of a back door of the building at the end of the day without her backpack, jacket, hat, or mittens and walked around the whole school to head to the buses, her mother would, inevitably, be there waiting for her.
“What were you thinking? Where were you? What happened?” All these words came sputtering out of her mother’s mouth at once, but Hazel got the drift.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry? Do you know how worried I was? You just disappear like that? We looked everywhere for you!”
Hazel’s heart sank. “I’m sorry,” she said again.
Her mother shook her head and grabbed her phone. “I have to call Mr. Yee,” she said. “To let him know you haven’t been kidnapped. Principals don’t really like it when fifth graders disappear in the middle of the day.”
As Hazel’s insides churned, her mom talked on the phone to the principal. She said “uh-huh” a lot and “I see” and “Yes, I’ll
take care of it,” and Hazel got the distinct feeling that that “it” was she. Her mom hung up, and turning to Hazel, started to put it away.
“Wait. Can we call Jack?” The words burst out of Hazel’s mouth.
“What?” This was not one of those whats that was asking What did you say? Or Could you delve deeper so I could better understand your meaning?
“He was hurt. Something hurt him. Something got in his eye. He was hurt really bad and they took him away and I don’t know what happened because I didn’t follow him and I threw a snowball.” Tears pricked in Hazel’s eyes.
Her mother’s expression softened. “Oh. Is that what this is about?”
Hazel nodded.
“Oh, honey.” Her mother sighed. “I’m sorry he got hurt. I really am. That must have been really hard. But . . . he got something in his eye. Is that really worth all this drama?”
Hazel’s cheeks went red. It wasn’t just that. She couldn’t quite say what it was, though.
Her mom sighed and rubbed her forehead. “You’re getting older now, and I think it’s time to control your imagination a little bit. Because it causes you to act in ways that are not always appropriate. Like throwing things at people.”
Hazel blushed. It wasn’t like she would throw things at just anyone.
“You could have hurt Tyler, you know. And no matter how upset you are, that’s just not okay, do you understand?”
Hazel shrugged. She heard Bobby’s voice in her head and wondered why it was she who was not allowed to hurt anyone.
“You have to live in reality sometimes,” her mother continued. “Even when it’s not fun. And reality is that you go to Lovelace now. This is a different school, and you have to behave a certain way. The reality is that sometimes people we love get hurt and we can’t just turn into the Incredible Hulk. “
Hazel looked at the floor. The Incredible Hulk batted .273 with a slugging percentage of .581. He was a disaster in the field, though.
Her mom shook her head and exhaled. The car was quiet, suddenly, and the air was scratchy and thick. “I know it’s hard with your dad gone,” she said finally. “It’s hard for me, too. And I’m trying the best I can. But”—she turned to Hazel—“we need to work together. I can’t do this alone. I can’t come running to school because you’re missing. I can’t be getting emails from your teacher all the time about your behavior. Part of being grown up is acting the way you’re supposed to act, even if you don’t feel like it. Can you be grown up for me?”