No one under thirteen can pass through an interdimensional portal pond. If they even try to dip a limb in, their body freezes and chaps and bleeds until their toes fall off, one by one. 

​

Marra hears this for the millionth time when she asks her parents if she can sit by the pond today. She prefers sitting by the pond on hot days. Just her luck that the pond in her backyard is a portal pond. Marra looks out the back window. She sees her next-door neighbor—a solitary old woman—walking out onto her porch. Does the old woman wear sandals when it’s hot? No: the same clogs always. Does she stroll around town on sunny days? No: she needs Marra to run her most basic errands. Does she have a partner? No: one cannot be loved if one does not have toes. No one asks her about it. They all know the story; what point is there in making her repeat it?

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Besides, no one should want to go through the portal. Humans diverged about three-hundred years ago; the better ones ended up here. The humans in the other world are greedy and destructive: Marra has a five-paragraph essay due next Friday where she has to explain one bad thing the worse humans did, and how the better humans avoided the problem altogether. She needs to write it to graduate primary school. Her sister, Isadora, sits at the desk by the back door, editing her university admissions essay. A stack of lined paper sits at the edge of the desk. Marra walks past it. She’ll work on her five-paragraph essay after it gets dark.

​

She looks at the pond, again. The sun—which hid itself behind rain clouds for the past week—bounces on the water’s ripples. There’s no way she can enjoy the pond from afar. She slips on her sandals and dashes through the door.

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Once outside, Marra feels the spring breeze bend through grass and flowers and pollen, through her tangled hair and ticklish nose. She perches in front of the pond. Pale, half-petaled flowers encircle the water, reminding her what would happen if she entered. Still, she sees a frog contentedly sitting on a lily pad. Marra likes that frogs are blue and hop from lily pad to lily pad. Maybe the frog is from the other world. What are frogs like there? She could find out eventually. But if those frogs can’t even be blue and hop from lily pad to lily pad without fear of a worse human squishing them, she doesn’t want to know. 

​

Marra wants to call out, to share this frog with her parents and sister. It sticks its tongue out to catch a winged worm. The frog isn’t especially blue and its tongue doesn’t move with precision. She can’t hang it up on the wall like Isadora hangs each prize-winning essay. But Marra isn’t Isadora, and the frog isn’t an essay. She keeps her mouth shut and smiles at the frog. They’re friends now.

​

The breeze intensifies. Marra blows air from her mouth in the same direction to see if the breeze will get even stronger. Marra wants to think that she has wind magic, but the only humans who have magic live in the southern kingdoms. Her teachers always say that the kingdoms are backwards because they trade with the worse humans. The breeze transforms into a gust of wind. She hears something plop into the water. Her sandals!

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Marra searches for them. Isadora is still inside. She couldn’t have pushed her shoes into the water. Isadora always wants to make her look bad. Her parents don’t even know that she went outside. Oh, she’s going to be in so much trouble. Isadora would never let her sandals sink in a portal pond. If she comes back inside with no shoes, she won’t be able to sit out by the pond for a month. If she saves her sandals, she’ll have no toes. Wait. If her hands were the only part of her body to touch the water, would her toes still fall off? And if her toes fell off, would she have to stop wearing sandals forever? It would be better if her fingers fell off. That way, she wouldn’t have to write that essay. Do the worse humans have to write the same essays? Do they call themselves better or worse humans? Maybe the worse humans don’t go to school at all. The schools in the worse humans’ world don’t have any money. The worse human children have to repeat a lot of grades. Marra could be happier in the worse humans’ world. 

​

Marra sees a fallen branch at the base of a tree. She could use it to fish out her sandals. She almost gets up to retrieve it, but it couldn’t hurt to stick her hand in the water for a second. Her sandals float atop the pond. She could save her sandals without getting her hands wet.

​

The first sandal comes out without complaint. The second one sinks as she reaches for it. Now, she has to touch the water. She dips a fingernail in. It almost tickles. It’s warm; it bubbles like a jacuzzi. She places the wet sandal at the edge, but she dips her finger back into the pond. The water’s so nice. Marra wants to wade in it, swim in it, bathe in it. If she were a fish, she would live here forever. But she’s not a fish. She’s becoming an anchor.

​

She feels herself slip into the pond. Marra tries to tread water, but her body stiffens, as if a magnetic force hid itself within the pond’s bubbles and turned her into a piece of metal. She wants to shriek for help, but her mouth shuts itself. Her eyes follow suit. Her toes are the only part of her body that can still move. Maybe that means they’re about to fall off. Her body starts whirling in a circle. She’s spinning, she’s sinking—she’s rising?

​

***

​

It takes a moment for motion to return to Marra’s prone body, so she looks up at the clouds. Her waterlogged vision is blurry, which must explain why these clouds look so different. All clouds are identical ovals, but some of these clouds are wispy like dandelions or fluffy like pillows. One even looks like a frog! This is too good to be true, so Marra shuts her eyes and finds the articulation in her limbs and the strength in her spine to sit up in the tall grass.

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She sees the frog and the pond a few feet away from her. The blue frog in the bubbly water. The frog, who now looks green. What? There’s no such thing as green frogs. There’s also no such thing as plants growing off the branches of trees, but she sees green trees and purple bushes all around her. Where is she?

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Marra can’t find her sandals, but she sees her house in the distance. Except now, it’s taller and thinner and surrounded by other houses. She hears people talking, but none of them sound like her neighbors. Could she have passed through the portal? Did that metallic feeling mean her body was being transported across dimensions? No way that could be true. She’s only eleven. Eleven-year-olds who pass through the portal pond get their toes frozen off. Still, she’s never heard of a green frog in her life.

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She stumbles as she stands, falling back onto the grass. A woman in the distance takes notice and walks over. She carries a metallic rectangle inside her front pocket. The woman asks where her family or babysitter is. Marra asks what a babysitter is. The woman starts to explain, but decides Marra must’ve fallen into the pond and hurt her head. She removes a piece of kelp from atop Marra’s head. She says she’ll call a doctor for Marra, but she doesn’t yell “Medic!” like her teachers do when someone trips over a rock on a field trip. She takes out her rectangle and starts talking to it. Marra remembers the word for this: a phone! Worse-human technology was the only quiz in worse human history class she did well in. So, yes, the woman uses her phone to call a doctor. And, yes, she is in the worse human’s world. 

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She asks the woman what her phone does. The woman shows her the screen to make calls and the tracking screen for the ambulance that’s on its way. She asks if she can try and call her parents. Can worse human phones make interdimensional calls? Can better human phones even do that? Marra types in her family’s alphanumeric code; as she waits for her parents to pick up, she hears an operator start talking.

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“What is this guy saying?” Marra asks the woman as she hands the phone back to her.

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“He’s speaking in German.” She asks.

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“What’s German?” 

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“I thought you were calling your parents.” The woman sighs and leads her to sit on a nearby bench. Marra’s head must hurt.

​

“I was trying, but I don’t know how worse human technology works. Where I’m from, our phones don’t have screens.”

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“I don’t know what a worse human is.” 

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“You know, the two dimensions. Better and worse humans.”

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“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

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Marra’s head really does hurt. She lays down on the bench. The woman mumbles something about Marra using the rest of her international call minutes, but Marra can only focus on the plants and people around her. This is a nice park. It must be a park. The surrounding conversations become more intelligible: she hears teenagers gossiping about their crushes, parents calming their babies, and elderly women talking about the swimming class they’re on the way to at something called a “rec center.” Couples hold hands and toddlers ride their fathers’ shoulders. People of all ages line up in front of an ice cream truck. Dogs play inside a fenced enclosure in the distance, their owners simultaneously conversing and keeping their eyes out to make sure playtime doesn’t go too far. The sun shines on the portal pond. Marra could just go back home right now. She could jump in and feel the warm, bubbly water on her skin. She would invent a reason why her body was soaked and she was gone for an hour. She looks back down at her bare toes. They’re still there. Her parents will never notice she even left.

​

Have her parents ever come to this dimension? Has Isadora? All of them are old enough; all of them keep secrets from her. Marra’s grandpa used to tell her stories about places she could never find on a map. Could she spot those places on the worse humans’ map? 

​

She sits back up on the bench and the woman explains to her that the doctors are still a while away. It’s hard to get the ambulances into the center of the park, since there are no paved roads. Just then, a spotted dog starts sniffing her knees. Marra reaches out to pet it. A girl around her age holds the dog on a leash, and the girl’s parents stand right behind her.

​

“Wait, what happened to your shoes?” The girl her age asks.

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“I dunno. They fell in that pond over there.” Marra points to the pond.

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“I have an extra pair in my bag!”

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The girl pulls out a pair of sandals from her backpack; they fit Marra just fine. Her parents ask the woman what happened to Marra. Of course, the woman doesn’t really know what’s going on, but the family sits down next to Marra anyway. Marra says they don’t need to.

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“Of course we’ll wait. We want to make sure you’re okay!” One of the parents says.

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“I can handle myself.”

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“I’m sure you can, but we want to help you. It’s basic human decency.”

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“You call yourselves basic humans?”

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When Marra tripped over a branch on her school’s overnight camping trip two years ago, the rest of the class kept hiking without her. When she finally caught up, none of them asked if she was okay. 

​

***

​

The family starts asking her questions about herself as they wait for the doctor. She talks about the town where she’s from, her family, and the woman next door. The girl—Marra learns her name is Izzie—asks her about school. Izzie is also in her last year of primary school. She likes learning about flowers and clouds and frogs too. She says she’s going to a special middle school in the fall, where they take extra science classes. She’ll get to look through microscopes and dissect worms. Izzie shows her some bugs climbing on the trees.

​

“Wait, Izzie,” Marra asks as she examines a beetle. “Do you have a worse human history class?”

​

“Worse human history class?” Izzie raises her eyebrow.

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“Yeah, the history of humans in my dimension.”

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“I mean, we learned in our Revolutionary War unit that a few people started finding portal ponds in America and moving to the other dimension, but that’s it.”

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“You don’t have to write five-paragraph essays about how much better you guys are?”

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“I don’t think so. Maybe I’ll have to do that in high school.”

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“Do you guys get told that your toes will freeze off if you go through the portal before you turn thirteen?”

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“Some of my friends went on vacation to your world, and they still have all their toes.”

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Marra looks down at her toes sheepishly. The woman announces that the doctor is coming over right now, so Izzie and Marra hug goodbye. Izzie’s parents tell Marra that they want to visit her dimension someday. Marra writes down her address on a piece of paper for when they can make it. The doctor beckons her over towards the large, white vehicle that they call an ambulance. Red markings line the ambulance with red, flashing lights dotting the top to match. The back door opens and the doctor asks her to lay down on the bed.

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The movement of the ambulance atop bumpy city streets makes Marra’s stomach flip as she lays down, so the doctor lets her stand up and look at all the different medical instruments. The wipes kill all the germs if you scrape your knee or cut yourself with scissors. That instrument is for checking a heartbeat, and the other is for looking at ears, eyes, and mouths. That wrap with the pump is for checking blood pressure. Marra touches a few of the machines. They’re smooth and light in her hands.

​

“Hmm,” Marra thinks aloud. “The worse humans really aren’t so bad.”

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“Worse?” The doctor asks.

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“Yeah, that’s what you guys are called in our world.”

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“What makes us worse?”

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Marra can’t remember. She knows she studied this for her worse human history class. Isadora has to memorize the 91 most important reasons for her university admissions test. Isadora recites the list every morning as she brushes her teeth, every afternoon as she walks Marra home from school, every night before and after dinner. Marra’s parents met at a reason-memorization contest. Her dad broke a local record with 503. Her mom got second place with 490. There are exactly 568 reasons. Why can’t Marra remember?

​

“If you came here without hearing that we were called the worse humans, what would you call us?” The doctor asks.

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“I dunno. Maybe the humans who make big buildings and fancy technology?” 

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“That works.”

​

The ambulance pulls into the hospital. The doctor leads her inside and down a hallway until they reach an elevator. She asks them if she has to get any blood drawn as the elevator travels up six floors. The doctor says no; they’re at the hospital because the portal pond that leads to her capital city back home is in the courtyard. She can choose to go back immediately or wait a night. They just need to record that she passed through. 

​

The interdimensional portal wing looks a lot like the doctor’s office where Marra has to get her shots every year. Marra squeezes her mom’s hand and shuts her eyes as soon as she sees the needle. There aren’t any needles in this waiting room full of colorful cushions, but her hand involuntarily squeezes the edge of the turquoise bean bag on which she finds herself sitting. Can her parents guess where she is? It’s almost dinner time now. Isadora must be reciting her reasons as her dad reheats last night’s soup and her mom takes her cinnamon rolls out of the oven. She can almost taste the cinnamon roll in her mouth when the doctor brings her a large screen with something called a cartoon playing on it. Fast-moving drawings made on a computer. The drawings are cute; the doctor says she can keep watching until her paperwork gets finalized. Then, Marra can decide when she wants to go home. The doctor turns to leave—they have a patient in the other wing, and interdimensional portal travel isn’t their specialty—but Marra taps their back before they start walking. 

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“Do you know the last person who came through the portal in my backyard?” She asks.

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“There’s only been one other person in the past hundred years, and she seems to be your sister. She came when she was twelve,” the doctor says.

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“Isadora?” Marra’s eyes widen. The doctor nods. “What about the old woman without toes? She had to have gone through. Her toes froze off!” 

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“Her toes froze off?” The doctor laughs and makes their way out of the interdimensional portal wing.

​

Isadora? The old woman next door? Everyone knows that your toes freeze off if you try to pass through the portal. Isadora has all her toes. The old woman doesn’t. That’s why she only wears clogs. Everyone knows it. Her teachers told her stories about their friends whose toes fell off. Marra’s parents and their parents before them were also taught by their teachers about frozen toes and portal ponds. But what if the old woman has all her toes? Marra will ask the next time she gets groceries for her.

 

***

​

The doctor comes back after an hour to tell Marra that her forms are all filled out. She can go home whenever she wants. She could also stay overnight. The hospital sent a message to her parents to tell them where she is, and they could send another message that Marra wouldn’t be able to go home until tomorrow morning. Marra wants to keep watching the janitors and patients and doctors pass through the waiting room; she wants to keep sipping the bright-colored, metal-canned drink the receptionist with neon pink hair gave her. She also wants to taste her mom’s cinnamon rolls. She wants to ask Isadora why she never told her about her portal pond experience, and instead kept warning and teasing Marra about frozen toes. She wants to find the hidden worse human books inside her town’s discount bookstore. She wants to explain the truth about it all to her parents.

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Either way, Marra decides not to write that essay.