“I forgot about the wall,” he says. He sits down, lost in thought.
“The wall?” I ask.
“It’s what keeps us safe, I suppose, if a Reader handlesthe pages without much care, or folds one down right in the center of an illustration. It’s like a bubble. Soft, but you can’t push through it no matter how hard you try.” He glances up. “Believe me, I have.”
“So you need something that can poke a hole in it….”
Oliver reaches for the dagger in his belt and takes a running leap directly toward me, so forceful that I find myself covering my face with my hands, as if he might burst through the pages and land right in front of me. But when I peek between my fingers, I find him flat on his back, staring up at the sky.
“Ouch,” he murmurs.
“Scientific discovery number one,” I say. “You can’t break the barrier between us.”
He sits up, rubbing his forehead. “No,” he replies, “but maybeyoucan.”
“You want me to poke the book with a knife?”
“No,” Oliver says. “You have to rip the book.”
I gasp. “No way! This is alibrarybook!”
“You havegotto be kidding me,” Oliver mutters. “Come on, Delilah. Just a little tear, so that I can sneak the spider out to you.”
When he offers up that smile again—the one that makes me feel like I’m the only person in his universe (although in this case that’s probably true)—I am utterly lost. “Okay,” I say with a sigh.
Gingerly, I take the page between my fingers andmake the tiniest, most minute, infinitesimal tear.
“Delilah,” Oliver says, “I couldn’t squeeze protozoa through that, much less a spider. Could you try again? A little less imaginary this time?”
“Fine.” I pinch the top of the page between my fingers and give a good, solid tug. The paper tears.
“Ithadto be up at the top of the page, didn’t it….” Oliver rolls his eyes and wearily looks at the sheer cliff of rock before him.
“You do it for Seraphima,” I point out.
“Very funny.” Clenching the spider in his fist, he looks up. “How am I supposed to hold on to this thingandclimb?” With a grimace, Oliver opens his mouth and pops the spider onto his tongue.
“That is so gross!” I cry out.
“Mmffphm,”Oliver says, but his eyes speak volumes. He starts to climb up the rock wall, getting quicker and quicker as he comes closer to the top. He inches to the right, to the part of the page that I’ve torn.
Holding his hand in front of his mouth, he spits. “That,” he says, “wasrevolting.” He glances at me over his shoulder. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I say. Feeling foolish, I hold my finger up to the rip in the paper.
Oliver extends his hand. The spider begins to crawl across his knuckles, his ring finger, his pinkie. When itreaches the edge of his skin, its legs grasp for purchase and find the seam of the paper.
And suddenly, there is the tiniest of black dots in my palm.
It’s nearly invisible, and it’s uncomfortably warm and wet. Before my eyes, it begins to grow, expanding into a familiar formation of eight creepy, crawly legs.
“Oliver!” I say, stunned. “I think it worked!”
“Really?” He has jumped down to the ground again and stares up at me eagerly. “You’ve got the spider, then?”
I glance down at the tiny arachnid. But now that I am looking more carefully, I see something’s not quite right. What I thought were legs are letters, raveling and unraveling. I think I can make out ad.And ap.
It’s not a spider, really. It’s theword“spider,” taking the shape of the bug and crawling across my hand.
Before I can tell Oliver, however, a knock at the bathroom door startles me. I shake the word-insect off my palm, beneath the inside cover of the book, and shut the book tightly. “I’ll just be another minute,” I call out.
Gingerly, I open the book again. There is no insect. Instead, written neatly on the inside cover, at a bizarre diagonal angle, I read:spider.
“Oliver,” I murmur, although the pages are still closed, although he probably cannot hear me. “I think we need to go back to square one.”
