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.”
Avery paused. “What?”
“They’re all in my pocket. See?” She stuck her hand into the rough pocket sewn to the front of her skirt and pulled out her treasures, holding them out toward him. “You can have them. But you have to climb the wall.”
“Why … wait.” Avery’s eyes narrowed in sudden suspicion. “Why don’t you climb the wall?”
Zib hesitated before putting her hand back in her pocket, tucking her treasures away. “I don’t think it’s real. I think the trees are real and the wall isn’t.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense at all! We just came from the other side of the wall. If it wasn’t real, we couldn’t have climbed over it.”
“So climb it,” said Zib stubbornly. “Climb it and prove me wrong, why don’t you?”
“Maybe I will!” Avery turned to face the wall. His anger collapsed in his chest, replaced by a hollow place that felt a little bit like fear and a little bit like wariness and a lot like wishing his alarm clock hadn’t rung at all but had left him to sleep in and need his father to give him a ride to school. He usually hated those days. Right now, he would have welcomed it.
The wall didn’t look exactly like it had looked before he had climbed over it: no two sides of the same thing ever look exactly alike. But the stones looked like they could be the same stones, viewed from behind, and the moss and lichen looked like they could be the same kind of moss and lichen, and who was this girl, anyway, to tell him what to do, to bribe him with trash and pretend that it was treasure? All he had to do was climb and she would know that he was brave, and clever, and right.
All he had to do was climb and they would both know that walls didn’t disappear just because someone crossed them. Maybe the forest would feel ashamed of being here when it wasn’t supposed to, and fade away, letting the streets and houses and ordinary things come back. He tried to hold that thought in the front of his mind. If he went back over the wall, everything would be normal again.
He reached out. He touched the stone. For a moment—just a moment—it was cool and solid and faintly rough, the way real bricks always were.
Then, without warning, it was gone. Avery stumbled forward, into the cloud shaped like a wall, and watched in horror as it broke apart and drifted away, popping like a soap bubble in the morning air. There wasn’t even a line of empty earth to show where it had been, no, there were ferns and flowers and rocks and bushes and if someone had told him that there had never been a wall at all, he would have had trouble arguing, because the evidence of his eyes was so very, very clear.
Avery put his hands against the sides of his face and stared at the place where the wall belonged. The wall did not return.
“Guess you don’t get my seashell,” said Zib thoughtfully. She wiped her hand against her skirt and stuck it out toward him. “I’m Zib.”
“That’s not a name,” Avery mumbled.
“It is so,” she protested. “It’s my name, and it’s what my parents call me, and that means it’s as good and real as any other name. It’s short for ‘Hepzibah.’”
Avery turned to look at her, hands still pressed against his face. “So your name is Hepzibah.”
“No. That’s my name for when I’m older.” Zib had a vague sense that Hepzibah would always
