If Avery had been able to ask an adult what he was feeling, they would have given him a word: offense. The wall was an offense. It was an impossible thing in a possible place, and it should never have been allowed, not for a moment, not ever. It hurt him to look at it, like it was there only to mock him.
Zib grinned at the wall. Her feelings were no less complicated than Avery’s, but they were more familiar to her, because she had been feeling them almost every day she could remember. She felt delight, yes, and excitement, and a small measure of what she would have refused to identify as relief if anyone had asked her. Not being willing to name a thing doesn’t change what it is, however, and Zib was relieved.
This was something new. This was something different. This might mean missing math class, and she would be sad about that later, but right here, right now, this was an adventure.
Adventures do not come along every day, or every week, or even every year. Adventures are shy, unpredictable things, and they swoop in when least expected, carrying their victims away from their average, everyday worlds and into something marvelous. Zib had been waiting so long for something marvelous to come for her. She was the first of them to approach the wall, touching the rough stones with one shaking hand, grin growing even wider when she confirmed that yes, yes, it was real; this was happening.
Dropping her half-eaten apple to the ground, she grasped the highest brick she could reach and began pulling herself up, scrabbling until she was sure she had her balance. Once she was high enough, she slung one leg over the top of the wall, pausing to catch her breath and look back.
We will return to her in a moment. Let us look, briefly, to Avery, who stood looking at the wall with wide, offended eyes, waiting for it to go away. It did not go away. He reached out and touched it, snatching his fingers away as if they had been burned by the brief contact, and still it did not go away, and still it was between him and the school.
If a wall where a wall was not meant to be was an offense, that same wall keeping him from making it to class on time was unthinkable. Avery looked in one direction and then the other, trying to find a way around the wall. There was none. It extended the width of the street, and across the yards of the houses to either side, stopping only when it reached their windows and could go no further. The only way forward was over.
Slower than Zib, more hesitantly, Avery began to climb.
When he reached the top, he looked back, not realizing that a girl he had never met before was doing the same thing in the very same instant. Together, they gazed down what should have been a street they both knew well, toward the place where their homes should have been.
There was nothing there but forest.
The houses were gone. The telephone posts and streetlights and lawns were gone. Even the street, where they had been standing only moments before, was gone, replaced by tree roots and broken ground and trailing ferns. Zib made a strangled squawking noise and fell, landing on the far side of the wall. Avery continued to stare, his shoulders shaking as he tried to deny the change. Then, with the calm precision of a boy who didn’t know what else to do, he swung his legs over the wall’s edge. Once he was on the other side, everything would return to normal. It would have to.
The wind blew down an empty street, where there were no children with hair to be ruffled or jackets to be flapped, and where there was no wall to stop or slow it, and everything was ordinary, and nothing was ordinary at all.
TWO
OVER THE WOODWARD WALL
Zib stared up at the sky, her head still spinning with the impossibility of what she had just seen. Her house, gone. Her mother, gone. All her toys and clothes and books and games, gone. She knew, in a distant way, that not all those things were equal—that some of them should have been more upsetting than others—but they were all so big and so impossible that she couldn’t start untangling them from one another.
She would have to figure things out as she went along. She sat up, and discovered that her fall had been broken by a cluster of ferns the likes of which she had never seen before. Their fronds were proper fern-fronds, long and curling and almost mathematical in their perfection, but each one of them was a different shade of blue, from the color of the sky at midnight to the color of a robin’s egg in the morning. She had never seen blue ferns before, and she unsnarled herself from them carefully, afraid of hurting them.
Avery, who had climbed down more cautiously, turned in a slow circle as he tried to decide what was happening. There was no street on this side of the wall. There were no houses. There was only forest, vast and wild and tangled in a way that the woods behind his house had never been. The woods weren’t his playground the way they were Zib’s, but they weren’t like this. This was … old, somehow, old and strange and not unwelcoming, exactly, but not happy to see him, either.
Zib, shaking the last bit of fern off her shoe, cleared her throat. “Um,” she said. “Hello.”
It was not the most remarkable introduction as such things go. It would, however, have to do. Avery turned, and the two of them saw each other for the first time. Avery looked at Zib, and Zib looked at Avery, and neither of them knew quite what to do with what they saw.
Avery saw a girl his age, in a sweater that was too big for her and a skirt with mended tears all the way around the hem. Some of them were sewn better than others. Some of them were on the verge of ripping open again. Her socks were mismatched and her sweater was patched, and her hair was so wild that if she had reached into it and produced a full set of silverware, a cheese sandwich, and a live frog, he would not have been surprised. She had mud under her nails and scabs on her knees, and was not at all the sort of person his parents liked him to associate with.
Zib saw a boy her age, in a shirt that was too white and pants that were too pressed. Her reflection stared back at her from the surface of his polished shoes, wide-eyed and goggling. His cuffs were buttoned and his jacket was pristine, making him look like a very small mortician who had somehow wandered into the wrong sort of neighborhood, one where there were too many living people and not nearly enough dead ones. He had carefully clipped nails and looked like he had never ridden a bike in his life, and was not at all the sort of person her parents liked her to associate with.
“What are you doing here?” they asked in unison, and stopped, and stared at each other, and said nothing further. They were standing in the middle of a mystery. Mysteries needed to be explored.
Zib turned to look at the wall. It was still there, which was almost surprising, given how many other things had disappeared. She reached out and tapped it. It felt solid, like stone was supposed to feel. The moss felt cool and fuzzy, like velvet. Every sense she had told her that the wall was real, real, real. But when she started to reach for a handhold, she stopped, suddenly overcome with the absolute conviction that climbing back was not the answer.
Avery was not so calm. He gaped at the blue ferns, and then at the trees, which had leaves as clear as glass, as thin as the pages of a book. “Trees can’t photosynthesize without chlorophyll,” he said. “They’d starve and die if they tried. These trees aren’t real. These trees can’t be real.”
“The wall’s real,” said Zib.
“I said the trees weren’t real.”
“The trees look pretty real to me.” Zib tapped the wall again before turning abruptly to Avery. “I have a dime and three acorns and a seashell my uncle gave me for luck, and you can have them all if you’ll climb back over the wall.”