Avery walked with quick, precise steps, content with his place in the world, secure in the knowledge that he knew exactly where he was going and exactly what he was going to find when he got there; he knew the route between home and school better than almost anything, and it held no surprises for him. So it was that when he turned off his street to find his way blocked by construction equipment, he stopped, confused and blinking.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t in the plan. But the street was broken, cracked like an eggshell, and water gushed up from a hidden, splintered pipe, flooding everything. Men in hard hats swarmed around the break, dropping sandbags and tubes, trying to minimize the damage.
One of them saw Avery and waved. “Sorry, kid,” he called. “Water main burst due to an electrical fire. You’re going to have to go around.”
Avery’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Go around? Go around? He had walked the same path to school every day since he’d been old enough to start going to school at all. His parents trusted him to walk this way, to follow the clear and sensible rules that were there to keep him safe. He had never considered going a different way. He didn’t know how.
The man in the hard hat, for all that he is a minor character in this story, as so many people must be—for a story is, by its very nature, a narrow thing, focused on this hero and this villain, on making them the most important people in the world, and hence excluding anyone who might be a threat to their positions—offered the boy a sympathetic smile. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “All you need to do is go up the block to the next street and you can get around the damage.”
Avery disagreed. Everything was not fine. But he had been raised to listen when adults spoke, and so he merely nodded, tightened his hand on the strap holding his books in place, and turned to go back the way he’d come.
As for Zib, she walked along the perfectly straight sidewalk in a wavy, erratic line, sometimes slowing to a crawl to watch a snail working its way down the pavement, sometimes running to make up the time she’d spent malingering. “Malingering” was one of her favorite words. Her teachers liked to use it about her when they thought she wasn’t listening—which, to be fair, was always. Zib had a way of making people think she was paying attention to anything but them, when in fact, she was taking careful note of everything that happened around her.
When she reached the end of the block, she turned and stopped, cocking her head to the side as she solemnly, silently considered the scene in front of her. She had walked this way just the day before, twice, once coming and once going, and she was quite sure that there had been a street there. A whole street, not just two pieces framing a pit that went down, down, down into the depths of the town’s foundations. Workers in hard hats swarmed around the hole, putting up barriers and taking measurements, too distracted to have noticed her yet.
It must have only just happened, she thought; there would have been sirens otherwise, big and loud and clanging. Her mother would have come out to see what all the fuss was about, and then she would have called the school to say that Zib wasn’t coming in, and it would have been pancakes and finger paints and a day spent happily at home.
But it would also have been missing math class, and Zib thought that math might be the best thing that anyone had ever invented; the rest of school was worth suffering through if at the end of it she got to see the way the numbers danced. She took a cautious step forward.
A woman in an orange safety vest paused in the process of setting another caution sign near the edge of the hole and called, “Hey! You can’t be here!”
Zib, who was very much present, stopped and blinked at her. Adults were always saying things like that. “You can’t be here” didn’t change the fact that “here” was a place, and Zib was already in the place, making the statement nonsensical at best, and false at worst.
“Look, kiddo, a gas line blew, and the whole street’s closed. Are you trying to get to school?”
Zib nodded.
“You’re going to have to go around.”
Zib frowned and pointed to the intact sidewalk.
The woman shook her head. “It’s not safe. I’m sorry. If you back up and try the next street, you should be fine. You won’t even be late for school.”
Adults were always so sure of things like that, and there was no sense in arguing with them: once they decided that something was so, they would argue and yell and send children to their rooms to get their way. Zib wasn’t entirely sure why being old made you right, but it definitely made you bigger, and she didn’t want to fight with someone who was bigger than she was. So she shrugged, and turned, and went back the way she had come.
Because their houses, Avery’s and Zib’s both, were on the side of the street where the forest loomed, there were no corners: they lived, unwittingly, only three doors down from one another. But across the street from them was another road, right between the one where Avery walked to school and the one where Zib walked to school. They approached it, Avery walking with quick, precise steps, Zib skipping and strolling and sometimes outright running, and they reached their respective corners at the same time.
It would seem reasonable for them to have seen each other, for them to have noticed each other, for something to have begun with two children on two corners on an ordinary day that was quickly going wrong. But Avery was thinking about the water and the way it had filled the street, and Zib was thinking about the hole and the way it had seemed to go on forever, and so they both turned without looking to see who might be watching, and they walked down the road, one on either side, both of them thinking they were entirely alone.
Everything that had happened so far, from alarm clocks ringing or not ringing to breakfasts being eaten or not eaten to holes opening in streets where holes had never been before … everything that had happened had been something entirely possible, if not entirely probable. The world is divided, after all, into possible and impossible, and something which is possible can happen whenever it sees fit, even if it is inconvenient or unwanted. Something which is impossible, however, is never supposed to happen at all, and when it does—for it would be impossible for the impossible to go away entirely—it tends to disrupt things rather conclusively.
So it was, perhaps, more reasonable than it seemed for Avery and Zib, upon reaching the end of the block, to find themselves looking, not at another block like the last, but at a wall only slightly higher than Zib was tall, made of large, rough-hewn bricks. Avery, who was a few inches shorter than she, but who knew something about rocks, thought they might be granite. Zib, who had never been very interested in rocks when not skipping them across the surface of a pond, thought the flowering moss growing between the bricks might be the sort of thing lizards liked to use for a mattress. Both of them thought the wall had no business being there.
The wall, which did not care what anyone thought of it, continued to exist.
It was a very pretty wall, well crafted and sturdy. Avery’s parents would have approved of the craftsmanship. Zib’s parents would have approved of the wildflowers that grew along its base and the lichen that grew along its top. It looked weathered and wise and oddly permanent, like it would still be there long after the rest of the town had been forgotten.
Avery gaped at the wall. He didn’t have the words for what he felt as he looked at it. There wasn’t a wall here. He had been down this street a hundred times, walking with his parents or sitting in the backseat of their car, and there had never been a wall here, certainly not one that looked older than any of the houses around it.