Shannon > Recent Status Updates

Hazel looked over at Jack's house. She didn't know what she was expecting to see, maybe a banner hanging from the window reading

I'M SORRY, HAZEL. I DIDN'T MEAN IT.

That would have been the best thing.
But it wasn't there.
She left her room, feeling a little like she was crossing a moat—except the alligators were all inside her, snapping away.

"Oh," said the witch, placing a long finger on her cheek. "This should be interesting."

Oh no! : (

Of course her mother had to stop at the grocery store on the way home, because it was completely grown up to be worried about how much cereal there was in the house instead of a boy with a glass knife in his eye.

"You have to live in reality sometimes. Even when it's not fun. And reality is that you go to Lovelace now. This is a different school, and you have to behave a certain way. The reality is that sometimes people we love get hurt and we can't just turn into the Incredible Hulk."
Hazel looked at the floor. The Incredible Hulk batted .273 with a slugging percentage of .581. He was a disaster in the field, though.

She should have followed Jack. Why did she let Mrs. Jacobs stop her? Maybe it was all a conspiracy, maybe they had done something him, poisoned him somehow, maybe he was being held captive somewhere, maybe he needed her to rescue him—
A folded-up note landed on Hazel's lap. Her name was written on the front in boyish print. She unfolded it and beheld the words It's all your fault.

There are things you do not notice until they are gone. Like the certainty that your body is a single whole, that there's something keeping you from breaking into pieces and scattering with the winds. Now Hazel could feel pieces of her threatening to break off, and she was no longer sure her feet would stay attached to the ground.

"He's just bad for the sake of being bad. That's the scariest kind of villain, you now? And no one can fight against him," Jack continued. "Because what do you do against the guy who takes your soul?"
"But, there's got to be something."
Jack studied his drawing carefully. "But what if there's not? What if no one can fight him?"
Hazel shrugged. There had to be a way. There was always a way.

There were some days, ever since the summer, when the whole feel of Jack seemed to change. Like suddenly, instead of being made of baseball and castles and superheroes and Jack-ness, he was made of something scratchy and thick. Hazel could tell, because he had been her best friend for four years, and you can tell when your best friend is suddenly made of something else.

Hazel's mother sat her down and explained that Jack's mom was sad, that she was sick with sadness.
"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.

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.

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."

Aaahh, snow days! One of the best things in the world.

Today they were playing superhero baseball, which was a variation Jack had invented on the theory that superheroes, too, needed organized sports.
Hazel was pitching snowballs, trying to keep her fastball from breaking a hole in the space-time continuum, while Jack hit the ball and jogged stiffly around the bases, pretending he ran like a man who had not been bitten by a radioactive mosquito.

Jack was the only person she knew with an imagination, at least a real one. The only tea parties he'd have were ones in Wonderland, or the Arctic, or in the darkest reaches of space. He was the only person who saw things for what they could be instead of just what they were. And though they eventually grew out of Wonderland Arctic space-people tea parties, that essential thing remained the same. Hazel fit with Jack.

Jack had moved in next door when she was six. She liked him right away because he replaced the girl who'd lived there before, a four-year-old who was always trying to convince Hazel to come to her tea parties, where no talking was allowed. Plus he was wearing an eye patch.

She felt like she was from a different planet than her schoolmates, and maybe it was true. Hazel had been adopted when she was a baby. Her parents said they flew a long way to take her home with them because they loved her so much they would travel the galaxy to get her. They could have meant that literally.

"Hazel Anderson," said Mrs. Jacobs, "would you sit still?"
Somebody sniggered. From somewhere in the back of the room someone else sneered, "Yeah, Hazel," which was not the greatest insult ever, but one thing Hazel had learned at her new school was when it comes to insults it's the thought that counts.

"I have plans."
"I know, but you can sled with Jack another time. I think you should spend time with ... other people."
Hazel flushed. With girls, her mother meant. She scowled slightly, and her guilt plummeted deep into the snow, burying itself where no one would find it. She mumbled good-bye and hopped out onto the sidewalk before her mom could cancel any more of her pretend plans.

As they moved toward school, the houses became bolder, sprouting second stories that stood uneasily in their rickety wooden frames. Hazel used to want a house like this—something beat-up and possibly haunted, with a dumbwaiter for passing messages, with hidden compartments that contained mysterious old books—but then she would not live next to Jack anymore, and that was not worth all the secret passages in the world.

I apologize for the upcoming spamming of your feed I'll be doing with Breadcrumbs updates, but this book has just too many passages that I want to share!

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.

It was the sort of snowfall that, if there were any magic to be had in the world, would make it come out.
And magic did come out.
But not the kind you were expecting.

It was the sort of snow that transforms the world around it into a different kind of place. You know what it's like—when you wake up to find everything white and soft and quiet, when you run outside and your breath suddenly appears before you in a smokey poof, when you wonder for a moment if the world in which you woke up is not the same one that you went to bed in the night before.

Bah.

I don't have the game yet, but you better believe I wore this shirt to work today after waiting for three years for the chance.

Oh, now this is just silly.

Dude, I'm 27 books behind in my 2012 Reading Challenge. I think I should just accept that it ain't gonna happen.

Duval whips his head around and spears me with his intent gaze. "Have you received no orders from the convent?" he asks.

For fuck's sake, NO, she STILL hasn't received orders from the convent.

"What possible evidence do you have that he is trustworthy?"

None, except my own heart, and that is not nearly enough. "I assure you, my vision is clear, my lord."

Ok, good. Good.

turns the page

My wanting to trust Duval does not make him trustworthy.
And yet I feel in my heart that he is.

*facepalm*

Hmm ... a red herring or an inability to foreshadow properly? We shall see.

So now we've reached the point where the heroine has trouble doing the job she was supposedly made for because she's been lovestruck. Barf.