Free Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu, Erin Mcguire

sat down next to her. “What do you mean? Did you guys have a fight?”
    “No!” Hazel exclaimed, wiping her eyes. “He just stopped talking to me! He was mean .”
    “Oh, baby,” her mom said, her voice cracking a little. “I’m so sorry.”
    “Something’s wrong.” Hazel said. “He wouldn’t just do that. He’s my best friend.”
    “Oh, Hazel.” Her mother shook her head. “You know, this is so hard. It’s one of the really hard things about growing up. Sometimes your friends change.”
    “What?”
    “Well, sometimes when you get older you grow apart.”
    Hazel straightened and stared at her mother. “Overnight?”
    Mrs. Anderson shrugged. “Maybe. You guys have been two peas in a pod for so long. Maybe Jack decided he needs to have some friends who are boys. It’s natural for someone Jack’s age.”
    “But . . . ” Hazel said, “he has friends who are boys. He just likes me better.”
    Her mom gazed at her, lips pressed together, and Hazel could hear all the things she was not letting herself say. “Haze, dear,” she said finally, “Jack’s going through a lot, you know. It’s got to be so hard for him.”
    “Yeah, but . . .” But that’s why he needed her.
    “You just wait and see what happens. If he’s a true friend, he’ll come back.”
    “He is a true friend!” Hazel mentally stomped her foot.
    “Well, good.” She stroked Hazel’s shoulder. “And in the meantime you can make other friends. We’re going to the Briggses’ tomorrow, remember? You had fun with Adelaide, didn’t you?”
    Hazel felt the tears come again, and she put her head in her hands.
    “Oh, sweetie,” her mom said, hugging her. “This happens. I’m so sorry it happened to you.”
    And Hazel could see that she was sorry. She meant everything she said. But her mom didn’t know. She didn’t really know Jack. Jack was her best friend. He wasn’t going to leave her because he was going through a lot. And he was not going to grow out of her overnight like she was an old puffy purple jacket.
    It didn’t make any sense at all.

Chapter Seven
The Witch
    O nce upon a time, there was a boy named Jack who lived in a small house on a place mat of a yard. He lived with his father, who held the whole house on his back, and his mother, whose eyes registered nothing when they looked at him. He was made of superheroes and castles and baseball, but sometimes he had trouble remembering that. One day the snow transformed the world around him into a different kind of place, and two days after that he got a piece of an enchanted mirror in his eye. The mirror went right to his heart. And then he changed.
    But Jack didn’t know anything was wrong. He felt suddenly wonderful, as if all the energies of the world were surging through him, as if he knew precisely what he was made of. He could barely get through the school day with his body crackling like it did. At the end of the day he bounded on the bus with his friends, brain and body abuzz with something like he had never felt before. And as he headed down the aisle, he felt the bus would not be able to go fast enough for him, no matter how hard it tried, and what he should have been doing was flying through the winter sky.
    Instead, he tripped on a third grader’s backpack.
    “Smooth!” yelled Tyler as Jack stumbled.
    “I meant to do that!” Jack yelled back. “And it was awesome !”
    The third grader eyed Jack warily and inched his backpack out of the path. Jack grinned at him and winked. No one had anything to fear from him.
    “What are we doing today?” Rico asked as the bus pulled out of the lot.
    “We gotta go sledding!” Jack said.
    Jack wasn’t going to be inside, not today. All he wanted to do was be in the snow. At recess they’d made snow forts and had snowball fights and Jack was a master—his fort was bigger and thicker than everyone else’s, and his snowballs seemed to have targeting computers on them. He got hit a lot, too, but he was a