It’s hard when you live in a paper town. You see the other kids, the real ones, playing at the linen edges, the cloth borders, and you want to interact with them but you can’t cross over. There is no existing bridge, no gateway or portal, which would allow you to cross from where you are to where they are. It’s agonizing, because you can see and hear them, but it as if there is impassable glass, thick as impossible, between your world and theirs. I can only get so close to where they are before a surge of blurring overtakes me and I wind up back where I was, staring at them. It’s like being at the mercy of a magnetic rewind.

   The kids show no signs of seeing me, or knowing that I exist. They play their games—hopscotch, ring-o-levio, double dutch, freeze tag—without every looking in my direction, without ever showing the least sign that they are aware of a world right next to theirs.

   My father explained to me, more than once, that’s just how it goes when you live in a paper town. He is very cut-and-dry about the whole thing. You exist only for and in relation to other people who live in the same paper town as you. You can see the others, in the place that we called Overside, but connections and mergers were impossible. When I asked my father how we came to be in our town, which was called Avnoste, he shrugged—Beats me. My father was here before me, and his father was here before him, and so on. How our ancestors first came to be here, I have no idea.

   My father’s lack of curiosity regarding our origins irritated me. It wasn’t just my wanting to play with the kids from Overside (I had friends of my own, but they were paper town friends, that somehow felt less substantial, less vital, than the Oversiders), it was also the fact that everyone accepted, as wholesale gospel, that we couldn’t cross from Avnoste to Overside. I wanted to show everyone that these laws weren’t unbreakable, that there was a way to bypass this seemingly impenetrable barrier. But how? Too much of my time had been spent staring at the kids from Overside, and longing and wishing and hoping to be able to join in their games, and I had not given enough time to making my dreams a reality. Not anymore. I would do everything in my power to cross over. Every vanishing harbors a rogue pioneer.