Free Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu, Erin Mcguire Page A

superhero and the snow just fueled his powers. He was the Snow Man, and he could be either hero or villain, Indomitable or Abominable. Both sides wanted him for his amazing powers—and neither wanted the other to have him. What would Jack choose?
    “Yeah,” said Tyler. “Bobby and Kai want to come. Kai’s got a new sled, supposed to be super fast.”
    “Not as fast as me!” Rico said.
    “Whatever,” said Jack. “I’ll beat any of you.”
    The boys agreed to meet at the sledding hill in an hour. Jack had to go home first because his father had made him promise he’d call right after school. Jack thought he was making a big deal about nothing. He barely remembered the accident. He had been at recess, he knew that much, and then something got in his eye. And then there was pain shooting from his eye to his chest. He remembered that part like you’d remember a story someone told to you once, like you might nod in sympathy but it wasn’t like it happened to you.
    He got to ride in an ambulance, though they didn’t turn the sirens on. And then he was in the emergency room and there were doctors and at some point the pain just stopped, though he didn’t remember if that was because they gave him something or not. And then he was home and the boys came over and it was like nothing had ever hurt him in his entire life or ever would.
    It had taken him about fifteen minutes to do his homework that night. He only did the math and ignored everything else. Because the math he suddenly understood instinctively, like a truth. Fractions were like baseball statistics, three hits out of ten is .300 or 3/10. It was perfect.
    Jack had trouble sitting still in school the next morning. He wanted to shout all the answers out, to explain to everyone what he now understood. But he didn’t even have the words for it; he could just see it: 1/4 is .25 is 25 out of 100.
    So Jack did problems in his head all day. A player who had 516 at-bats in a year would need 206 hits to bat .400. A catcher might have 100 fewer at bats, and would need 166 hits.
    After the school bus dropped him off, he ran home and fixed himself a peanut-butter sandwich. And then another one. As he was eating the second, his mom wandered in the kitchen.
    “You’re home.”
    He put his sandwich down. “Yeah.”
    “How’s your eye?”
    “Fine.”
    “Good.”
    Silence. Then: “Are you going out?”
    “Yeah. I’m going sledding.”
    “All right.”
    Jack looked sideways at his mother. Her pants were gross. Her hair was like a homeless person’s. Her eyes were dead. Something flared up inside him, and he exhaled and shook his head. He saw something pass over her face.
    “I gotta go,” he muttered. And ran out the door.
    He felt suddenly like he could not breathe, like the air no longer wanted anything to do with him. He went to the garage to get his sled. It looked beat up and flimsy. It was not good enough.
    Jack dragged his sled around the corner and down the ten long blocks to the good park. The sky was touched with purple now, and the snow shone brightly against the dark background. The air smelled of cold. Everything was quiet, the only sound the crunching of Jack’s boots and the soft drag of the sled. The noise he made assaulted his ears.
    There was no one at the hill when he got there. The park was silent. Jack dragged his sled up to the top of the steep hill. He wasn’t supposed to sled by himself, but no one was there to notice. And the trees in the wood behind the hill loomed so watchfully that it seemed he was not alone.
    He placed his sled on the top of the hill, sat down on it, and pushed himself off. Down, down the hill he went, buffered by the cool breeze. He leaned back and went faster and faster. The sled reached the bottom of the hill and flew several more feet before skidding out. It was not fast enough. Jack carried the sled back up the hill.
    This time he lay on his stomach, head first. He was absolutely not supposed to do it this way.