Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu, Erin Mcguire

seem to indicate,” Hazel said.
    Mikaela blinked at her, and then looked back at the other table. “It’s hard to keep track sometimes.”
    Hazel nodded, as if she knew what the girl meant.
    Mikaela asked a few more questions about Jack and Hazel responded, as people do. There was a boyish yelping from a few tables away, and Mikaela’s eyes darted over there and then back. Hazel’s eyes followed. Mikaela saw and leaned into Hazel.
    “You know Bobby’s a jerk, right?”
    She looked like she wanted an answer, and so Hazel nodded. She did know. The facts indicated that, too.
    “You shouldn’t listen to him. I mean, what he said yesterday. You know.”
    Hazel knew.
    “It’s funny. We used to play all the time together, like in kindergarten and stuff.”
    “Oh,” said Hazel. “What happened?”
    Mikaela tilted her head for a moment and then shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
    Just then Susan’s voice called Mikaela’s name from the next table. Hazel watched as Mikaela looked up.
    Susan beckoned. “Come eat with us!”
    Mikaela blinked at her and looked at Hazel.
    “It’s okay,” said Hazel. “I was just about finished.”
    “Okay. ’Bye, Hazel.”
    “Good-bye.”
    Mikaela got up and moved over to join Susan and Molly. The two became three, and Hazel carefully studied the shift in gravity.

    When she got back to her classroom, Mrs. Jacobs stopped her. “The counselor’s office sent up a note,” she said. “You have an appointment tomorrow morning, during recess.”
    “Thank you very much,” said Hazel.
    Mrs. Jacobs regarded her. “You’re very welcome, Hazel.”

    They had art class that afternoon. The walls of the room were lined with galleries from each grade, and on the fifth-grade wall two of Jack’s pieces were at the very top. At one time, this had made Hazel very proud.
    Their art teacher was named Ms. Blum, though in her head Hazel had always called her Mrs. Which, because she wore weird baggy clothes and seemed like the sort of person who might tesser in some dark and stormy night. It seemed now an odd thing to think.
    Ms. Blum was introducing their new project, speaking, as she always did, with grand hand gestures that Hazel used to find dramatic but now made her fear for the jars of paint.
    “I’ve noticed,” said Ms. Blum, her hands in the air, “that we’ve all been spending time making art about things we know. But you don’t have to just make a picture of something you know, something real. So for our next project I want you to show me a place that isn’t real, something you make up.”
    Hazel frowned along with the rest of the class.
    One of the girls raised her hand. “Like . . . pretend?”
    “Yes,” said Ms. Blum. “This is what artists do all the time. They, like, pretend. They don’t have to just show the world as it is. You can use art to express something. . . . Think of an emotion or an idea and make a place that evokes that idea.”
    Hazel stared at the paint-splotted table in front of her. There was a time when she would have loved this assignment, when she had a thousand made-up places at her fingertips just waiting for someone to ask to see them. But now she could think of nothing. There were so many real places in the world, and they had so much weight to them. There were front hallways and bus stops and the space on the other side of classroom doors. There were lonely big slides and microscopically out of line desks and lunch tables that survived gravity shifts. How could anyone ever make something up?
    She moved to the supply table with the rest of the class, able to see nothing but the world as it was.
    She took a piece of plain white paper and stared at it. It was an empty, inhospitable thing. Hazel exhaled. And then she remembered Jack’s sketch.
    Hazel drew a tiny fort in the middle of the page—an austere palace framed by four tall turrets. In Hazel’s hands they looked a little like deformed lollipops. Then she drew a long line coming out from