And I was thinking about all of that when I rounded the curb back to my house and saw Mr. Khouri at my front door, speaking with Luca.

I ran up to greet him. I wanted to throw my arms around his middle and hug him—but that would have been weird, and impossible anyway, since he was holding something large and square and wrapped in brown paper in front of his chest.

“You want to come in, Ferman?” Anika shouted from somewhere inside the house, but Mr. Khouri looked between Luca and me and shook his head.

“You mind if we just chat here for a bit, Winifred?” and he pointed down at our front steps.

“Take your time,” Luca said, and he let the screen door close, but not before I saw him hustling Sam back inside.

“Ah, your pop and I have had cause to spend a bit of time together lately, and he mentioned once or twice that it was today . . .” Mr. Khouri said, and he handed me the brown parcel. “Happy birthday.”

I knew from the weight what it was, and from the shape too—I’d spent one whole term balancing Mr. Khouri’s personal copy of the ninth edition of The Times Atlas of the World on my lap, so of course I knew exactly how it felt, and I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I opened it up to find exactly that.

“I can’t take this,” I said, and tried to hand it back to him.

“Nonsense, I insist,” he said, holding his hands up, “and besides—I’m not your teacher anymore, so it’s perfectly appropriate. A proper present for a gifted former student.”

I snorted at that. And then I ran my hands over the image of the Earth on the front cover, the continent of Africa in partial view.

“You told us once that maps lie,” I said, still tracing the continent that I remembered Mr. Khouri said was three times the size it’s often drawn on maps.

“You know why they have to, though, don’t you?” Mr. Khouri said, and I turned to him.

“Maps are designed to appeal to our human nature. The Earth is imperfect. It’s not even a perfect sphere, it’s all lumpy landmasses and constantly moving oceans and atmosphere. It’s impossible to capture all of that on a map, so we lie and simplify, and have been for hundreds of years.”

“So . . . none of it’s real? There’s really nothing solid that we’re standing on? The whole world is a lie?”

Mr. Khouri leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees. He looked out past our front yard to the end of our street, over the rooftops and past the trees and somewhere down there was the ocean stretching out.