Breadcrumbs: Chapters 1–4

She leapt over the threshold of the house onto the front stoop where she stood, ignoring the snow biting at her ankles, to take in the white street. Everything was pristine.

No cars had yet left their tracks to sully the road.

Nobody could accept that she did not want to hear about gaseous balls and layers of atmosphere and refracted light and tiny building blocks of life.

The truth of things was always much more mundane than what she could imagine, and she did not understand why people always wanted to replace the marvelous things in her head with this miserable heap of you’re-a-fifth-grader-now facts.

The car began to spin to the right, her mother wrenched the wheel and pumped her foot furiously on the brake, a horn bleated behind them, and from everywhere around them came a polyphony of screeching tires.

As they pulled into the side street next to the school, Hazel’s mom let out a long breath and squeezed the steering wheel—though whether out of the camaraderie bent of surviving hardship or out of some desire to strangle the car, Hazel was not sure.

Tyler and his friend Bobby made it very clear that they blamed her for Jack’s abdication of duty.

The average Lovelace fifth grader could not differentiate this from her normal state, but Hazel was attuned to these kinds of subtleties.

This was not the sort of nonsense Mrs. Jacobs would brook.

But the ground was thick with it, and half the fifth graders of Lovelace Elementary hurled themselves into it while the other half lifted their feet in and out of it warily, like they were treading on some hostile alien moon.

“Hey,” he said, grinning as she ran to him. “Have you recovered from my devious snowball attack?”

“Are you guys going out?” Molly repeated, her voice low and conspiratorial.

The girls’ faces were identical masks of affront—because it was certainly bad enough to be called names when you were just innocently trying to be obnoxious, but far worse to be called something that, just an hour earlier, you had specifically established as dorky.

She looked ahead impassively.

No one had to dream up shutters and window boxes and trim, or porches and turrets and wide curving staircases.

She had magenta horn-rimmed glasses that were probably very cool, though Hazel was no arbiter of such things.

Uncle Martin smiled. “Like bees. Very evocative. Now, Adelaide, what does she wear?”

Adelaide smiled smugly at Hazel, and it was the sort of smile that invited her to smile smugly back.

The snow started up again just as Hazel was going to sleep that night. It seemed innocuous, a soft coda to the storm of the morning.

The snow started up again just as Hazel was going to sleep that night. It seemed innocuous, a soft coda to the storm of the morning.

There was something about Jack, something subdued about his very appearance, as if he had dampened his own hue so as not to contrast with his mother’s too brightly.

They wrote things on the walls—tiny secret things in ballpoint pen and sprawling screaming things in spray paint.

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 was a big enough hole in the roof for the winter sky to shine though, showing a dappling of snow on the wooden floor.

The drawing was of what seemed to be an ordinary man, with a swath of thick black hair.

As she wiped her feet in the vestibule, she heard her mom on the phone.

Jack just stared at her, like he did not see the contradiction, like he could not even fathom what it was.

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.

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.

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.