I stood there, trying to think about whether it was true, what I was saying. Deep inside, I thought it was. It was like there was a sharp clear bell ringing, like I’d stumbled onto the truth, even if I didn’t quite understand it.

Then I thought about Dad’s secret. About the cornfield in the garage. The one weird thing he had left. Except that he wasn’t sharing it. He was keeping it to himself. What did that mean?

And standing there, with Jasper and the art supplies, I suddenly had an idea. “Hey!” I said so sharply that Jasper jumped. “I know something neat we could do!”

“I’m in!” said Jasper right away, even though she had no idea what I was thinking about. “I’m a fan of neat somethings.”

That afternoon, we packed up all the paints and brushes we could find in the house and took them to Jasper’s place. Up the creek, through the kudzu, and around the back of the house, into the kitchen. Then we stood together, staring at the one big blank wall in the room, the one over Jasper’s bed, and trying to think of what kind of mural we wanted to paint.

“We need a theme,” said Jasper. “What’s a good theme for a mural?”

Friendship, I thought. Magic. Summertime. But I didn’t say them out loud. They sounded cheesy and babyish, even inside my head. “I don’t know,” I said. “What do you mean by a theme?”

“Or maybe not a theme,” said Jasper. “That makes it sound like school. I just mean that the house needs an identity, a name, an idea, something special. Like Cair Paravel or the Burrow. What’s a good name for a house? What’s this house all about?”

“It’s a secret portal,” I said. “This house is, like, a doorway to another world, our little world. It’s a mystery to the outside world, you know? Just ours.”

“Yessssss,” said Jasper. “You’re right. It’s a secret door. This whole house is. You crawl through the kudzu vines and you’re in a different dimension, another realm. A vine realm!”

“The Vine Realm,” I repeated. “That’s it. We’re the Keepers of the Vine Realm! It almost sounds like it came from a book, doesn’t it?”

“Totally,” said Jasper. “Maybe we should write it someday. But for now . . .” She stepped back, and with a pencil, in four confident strokes, she drew a rectangle in the middle of the wall over her bed. It was a door-sized rectangle, but a small one. If it suddenly turned into a real door, and we wanted to step through, we’d have to duck our heads.

“Nice,” I said.

Jasper looked back at me over her shoulder. “Right?” Her face was shiny with sweat, and she looked extra alive as she turned back around and quickly added a circle for a doorknob.