"Um . . . Hazel."
"What a lovely name," he said, nodding appreciatively. "Very heroic."
"Really?" Hazel said.
He turned to Adelaide. "Isn"t that Lee Scoresby"s daemon"s name?"
"No, that"s Hester!" Adelaide looked at Hazel. "Have you read The Golden Compa.s.s?"
Like a thousand times. "Yeah," said Hazel.
"What do you think your daemon would be?"
Hazel paused a moment, as if she hadn"t already thought about this very carefully. "A cat," she said, because that was a normal thing to say.
"Really? I think it would be, like, an owl."
"Really?" Hazel asked.
"Mine is a slug," said Uncle Martin. "Now, Hazel, tell me your life story, from the beginning until you met me."
"Hazel"s adopted," offered Adelaide. "From India."
Hazel blinked again, and looked from Adelaide to her wizard-school slug-daemon uncle. It wasn"t the sort of thing people usually came out and said.
"Really!" Martin said. "I want to go there someday off my screenwriting riches. Do you remember it at all?"
Hazel bit her lip. She supposed this was the sort of thing people with decorative furniture did. They just said things, because their houses had enough room for all kinds of things, no matter how odd and funny-shaped they were.
"No," she said. "I was just a baby."
"You should go back when you"re older. It could be a quest, heroic Hazel." He nodded at her. "Now, Adie, tell Hazel the story I"m going to steal."
Adelaide nodded, her curls springing a little. "Okay," she said, leaning against the table toward Hazel. "There"s a witch who lives wherever it"s winter."
"We"re starting with the villain," Martin interjected. "Because they are the most fun. Do you want to help, Hazel?"
She did. Adelaide looked at her expectantly. "The witch travels on a sleigh pulled by huge white wolves," Hazel began. This was not original. She tried again. "The wolves have mouths as red as blood. The snowflakes follow her like bees." She glanced at Adelaide, who nodded earnestly.
Uncle Martin smiled. "Like bees. Very evocative. Now, Adelaide, what does she wear?"
"A white dress and white furs," Adelaide said. "And she has a crown. Made of the thinnest of ice."
"Because she"s a queen," Hazel said. "She"s the Snow Queen."
"Yes, nice. Where does she live?"
"In a palace of ice," said Hazel. "And she has a heart to match."
"Very good." He looked at the two of them seriously. "And what does she want?"
Hazel and Adelaide exchanged a confused look. "What do you mean?" Adelaide asked.
"Everyone in a story wants something," he said. "Especially the villains. And the hero"s job is to stop them from getting it. So, what does she want?"
"Eternal winter?" said Adelaide.
"Kids," said Hazel. "She wants kids. She wants to collect them. She puts them in snow globes. She traps them with promises, and if she can get them to agree to stay there forever, they"re hers."
The words came tumbling out of her mouth, and once they were out there she could only look from Martin to Adelaide in horror. This was the sort of thing she was not supposed to say out loud.
But Martin just turned to Hazel and nodded slowly. "Very good," he said. "You get a tube cookie. You, too, Adie."
"But . . . why?" Adelaide asked, looking from her uncle to Hazel. "The kids. Why would they agree to stay? Why would anyone stay with her?"
Martin stopped and regarded Hazel and Adelaide. "Yes," he said slowly. "Why. That"s the question."
Hazel heard the sound of throat clearing. She had not noticed the two mothers step into the room. Her mom was looking at Adelaide"s meaningfully, and Hazel knew that they had spent the last ten minutes talking about her. See how she is?
"Marty," Adelaide"s mother warned, "you"ll give them nightmares."
"Come on, Lizzie." He shook his head dismissively. "Kids can handle a lot more than you think they can. It"s when they get to be grown up that you have to start worrying."
Adelaide smiled smugly at Hazel, and it was the sort of smile that invited her to smile smugly back. Which she did.
"So, did you have fun?" her mom asked as they drove off.
She did. "It was okay," Hazel said.
"We can go over to Adelaide"s any time you want. I don"t get to see Elizabeth much. It"s nice for me. Maybe on the weekends?"
"Maybe," Hazel said. Weekends were for her and Jack. She needed to be there if he needed her.
They drove home on newly plowed streets, which their little car tackled eagerly. Hazel stared out of the window and watched the houses shrink and thought of villains and snow globes and what it would be like to be trapped inside.
When they pulled into the driveway, Hazel cast a glance over to Jack"s house. It was dark. She wondered if he"d been able to make plans, if he was still out, or if he was home in his room, drawing or reading comic books or making up superhero baseball stats, with the shades drawn and the door closed. She wished he had a place to put all his funny-looking things.
Her heart panged. She was supposed to be with him, not eating tube cookies and speaking in fairy tales. She was his best friend. She would do better. Tomorrow.
Chapter Three.
s.p.a.ces
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 no way to tell that over the course of the night the sky would try to bury the city.
Hazel woke up to her mother"s knock on the door and a gentle whisper, "You don"t have to get up. School"s canceled."
The sky did not bury the city, but it came close enough. The street outside Hazel"s house looked like it might only be traversable by tauntaun. "Eighteen inches overnight," her mom told her when she came down for breakfast. "I"ve never seen it come down like that. I hope there was nothing you were dying to do at school today."
Hazel knew her mother really meant I hope there is something you were dying to do at school today, that you are learning to love it there, and if you are not learning to love it there, can you please try harder? Because her mom seemed to think it was the sort of thing Hazel could choose to do, like she could choose to understand the rules when they weren"t even written in her language, like she could choose to make herself fit when she was so clearly shaped all wrong. She shrugged.
"Are you going to be okay by yourself?" her mom added, nodding toward her desk. "I"ve got-"
"Sure," Hazel said. "I"ll go over to Jack"s."
Her mother tilted her head. "Haze," she said slowly, "maybe it"s better if Jack comes over here? Maybe you guys shouldn"t-"
"Oh." Hazel shifted. "I think we"re going sledding."
"Okay, good. And can you shovel the driveway for me today?"
"Sure."
"Thanks. Hey, um"-she leaned in to Hazel-"how"s Jack doing these days? With everything."
"Okay, I think."
"Okay."
After breakfast, Hazel got on her boots and stepped outside. The snow was almost up to her knees, and she had to lift her legs up to move through it, first one then the other-like she was trying to walk through b.u.t.ter.
There were no footprints outside of Jack"s house. No one had tried to venture out yet. Hazel picked her way to the Campbells" front doorstep and rang their bell twice, their special ring. And waited. And waited. Just when she decided everyone must have slept in, the door opened. "Jack!" Hazel said, or was about to say when the word evaporated from her mouth. Standing in the doorway was someone she was not expecting to see at all: Jack"s mom.
"h.e.l.lo, Hazel," Mrs. Campbell said.
"Oh," said Hazel, shifting. "Hi."
It had been several weeks since Hazel had even laid eyes on Mrs. Campbell. She was wearing the same light-blue tee shirt and black yoga pants that she"d been in the last time Hazel saw her, but they were now faded and frayed. She was much thinner now, and surrounded by shadows. Her eyes were all wrong. They were like the eyes of the animals at the natural history museum, who were hollowed out and stuffed and posed and placed in some habitat and made to look like they were still alive. "You want Jack."
"Yes. Please," said Hazel.
"He was getting dressed. My husband"s in the shower."
"Okay," said Hazel.
Mrs. Campbell blinked down at her. "It"s nice to see you, Hazel," she said, and she stretched her face into a smile that held nothing. She looked like someone had severed her daemon.
And then Jack appeared in the doorway next to her. "Mom, what are you doing?" He looked from her to Hazel. Hazel looked at the ground.
"The doorbell rang."
"I know, but . . . you should go sit down."
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.
"Okay." She nodded at Jack and faded off.
"Let me get my stuff," Jack muttered. "Wait there."
There had been a time, not so long ago, when Jack had had a mom and Hazel had had a dad-that is, a real mom, the sort who did things besides sit in a beat-up easy chair and watch twenty-four-hour news networks and stare blankly at the world, and a real dad, the sort who lived with you or at least came to see you once in a while. Then one day Hazel did not have a dad anymore, because hers had left. And a couple days after that Jack had showed up on her doorstep and handed her his most prized possession, a baseball signed by Joe Mauer. Hazel had stared at it as if he"d just handed her his still-beating heart. "You should keep it," he had said.
"But . . . why?"
And he"d looked at her, almost bewildered, then said, "It"s a Joe Mauer signed baseball," as if that was all that needed to be said. So Hazel took it, and she kept it on her bookshelf, and sometimes she looked at it and said to herself, That is a Joe Mauer signed baseball, and she understood.
Then one day Hazel went over to Jack"s house to find his mom in the easy chair, except she wasn"t there at all. It was like someone had snuck into their house in the middle of the night and stolen his mother. Except they"d forgotten to take her body.
And it wasn"t too long after that that Hazel"s mother sat her down and explained that Jack"s mom was sad, that 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 b.u.t.ts 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.