Something kept telling Ava that she must get to that book.

Something drove her to push over the tall wooden ladder, even though it said Off Limits: Library Staff Only, and Ava never broke rules. (Well…except when she got caught reading The Odyssey underneath her desk while her social studies teacher, Mr. Grayson, was lecturing about the Aztecs. But really, she had told her parents that night in a calm and rational voice, you can’t be punished for reading.) She took a hesitant step onto the first rung of the ladder, glancing from side to side. As always, her corner of the library was deserted. She heard the faint murmur of voices at the reference desk, the hum of a copier, Mrs. McNally’s melodic voice as she read The Very Hungry Caterpillar to a group of toddlers on the story rug. No one could see her. She felt invisible and powerful.

As Ava climbed higher and higher, she imagined that she was an archaeologist unearthing ancient artifacts. The books were older, the shelves were covered in a thin film of dust, and there were rusted bronze plates screwed into the dark wood labeling the subjects. When she reached the very top step, the book was just within her reach. She stretched her hand out and grasped it, cradling it underneath her arm as she climbed back down the ladder. Her heart thudded against her chest, and it wasn’t the thrill of climbing so high or scampering up the forbidden ladder. She was filled with an overwhelming feeling — no, a knowing — that this book was Very Important.

She sat cross-legged on the deep red carpet and ran her thumb along the binding. The book was so old that the title had been scuffed out, so she turned to the first page. The lettering was faded, but she could make out the words “Philosophy of the Self.”

She skimmed through the book, letting her fingers dance across the pages, scared she might tear the fragile, delicate paper that was almost translucent. It was a strange little book, with lots of collected myths, stories, poems, folktales, and even a few drawings, from different places and cultures. As far as she could gather, they had one thing in common: they were all different explorations of how people came to figure out who they were, and what their place was in the world: different “philosophies of the self.” It was fascinating, and she wanted to read all the little fragments and figure out how they fit together, and what wisdom she could find inside the stories – but something told her that there was more to find in this book, beyond the words on the page.

As she thumbed through to the back cover, she saw another glimmer of silver in the warm golden sunlight, and she realized that what she had thought was just a ribbon (old, fancy books sometimes had them as bookmarks, she had noticed) was something else. Something more. It was — she drew in a breath as she pulled the silver thread, and a small note emerged, looped through the ribbon. The note was written in elegant silver script:

 “Dear Ava—

This marks the beginning of your quest,

a spiraling journey of language.

The first clue is 031.3.

And of course, your greatest clue

Is always you, Ava. Good luck.

                                                —The Story Weaver

 Ava’s mind started racing. The note was for her…it said “Ava,” didn’t it? And it was spelled just like her name, A-V-A. She had never met anyone else who spelled it like that, the mirror-image way. (She had especially never met anyone else whose first and last names were both mirror images: A-V-A O-T-T-O. These kinds of words were called palindromes, she learned one day, when she was flipping through the dictionary during math class. She loved the way the word palindrome rolled off her tongue, and ever since that day, she had collected words that were the same forwards and backwards. She wrote them in pen around the edges of her purple three-ring binder: Civic. Dad. Eve. Kayak. Level. Mom. Noon. Racecar. Radar. Solos. Stats. Tenet.) She read the mysterious note over again. Who was “The Story Weaver”? And most important: what was this Quest?

Ava loved puzzles. In school, whenever she was working through a complicated problem, she could feel her mind looping around in figure eights and spirals, slipping through trap doors and hidden passageways with an eager curiosity. Now, she focused on the number printed at the bottom of the page: “031.3.” Was it a date? She cocked her head to the side and narrowed her eyes, deep in thought. 03 could be March, couldn’t it? And, well — if she ignored the decimal (because who understood decimals, anyway), the 13 could stand for 2013. What had happened three years ago in March? She had gotten 2nd place in the geography bee (and only because she mixed up Spain and Portugal.) Her family had gone to the shore for spring break and she had stood up for four full seconds on her second-oldest brother Mick’s surfboard. She had played the role of Tinkerbell in the Freeman Park Elementary School performance of Peter Pan, and even though she didn’t technically have any lines, everyone agreed that she had flitted around the stage quite magnificently. Lots of things had happened in the spring of that year, she concluded, but nothing Quest-worthy.

Her mind looped back around to the beginning. Maybe “031.3” was a math problem. She did some quick calculations. 0 + 3 + 1 + 3 = 7. Well…she liked the number 7. It was her first-oldest brother Charlie’s baseball number, and she was the youngest of seven cousins. 3 x 1 x 3 = 9. She liked that when you flipped the number 9 around, it became a 6. It reminded her of the tessellation she had made in art class, with purple and green shapes that were reflected and folded over and over each other. But that didn’t seem too significant. (3 + 1)  x 3 = 12, and (3-1) x 3 = 6, which was half of 12. The numbers fit together, that was obvious, but what did they mean?

Could it be a code? Ava and her best friend Lucas both loved codes. After his dad was relocated to Fort Meade and his family had to move away at the end of fifth grade, they had written each other letters every week. Once, they invented a code using a shape for every letter, but it was so exhausting to decode that they abandoned it after two weeks. Most often, they would use a simple letter to number code: A = 1, B = 2, C = 3, and so on. They had gotten so good at it that now Ava could scrawl out a letter to Lucas just as quickly as she could write out her spelling words for homework. For a fleeting moment, she thought that maybe this note was from Lucas. But that didn’t make sense. Lucas was 872 miles away, and besides, why would he call himself “The Story Weaver”? And either way, Lucas hated poetry and anything that rhymed. There was no way he could have written the note. Ava decoded the number anyway, but it spelled “CAC,” or “CM,” depending on whether she used “1” and “3” or “13,” and she couldn’t think of anyone with those initials.

Her mind was nearing a wall. She could feel its shadow looming over her. She leaned her head back against the smooth white pillar and looked up into the beam of sunlight, trying to summon inspiration. She squinted as she peered up at the empty space on the very top shelf; her eyes traced back over the rows of books, the worn wooden shelves, the bronze plaques that marked each section, the —

Something sparked in her mind. The bronze plaques. The one just above the empty space said, “Philosophy of the Self: 126.8.”

Ava jumped to her feet, clutching the book and the clue.

She knew exactly what the numbers meant.

Next Chapter: Book 0.00 - The Girl with the Mirror-Image Name - Chapter 2