She came back down, felt a shock of impact jolt up through her heels and into her knees. The squodgy ground under her left foot melted away. She dropped and sat down in the rich black muck with another jolt of impact, a literal whack in the ass.

Becky thought she had walked twenty steps into the grass. Maybe thirty at most. The road should’ve been close enough to hit with a Frisbee. It was instead as if she had walked the length of a football field and then some. A battered red Datsun, zipping along the highway, looked no bigger than a Matchbox car. A hundred and forty yards of grass—a softly flowing ocean of watered green silk—stood between her and that slender blacktop thread.

Her first thought, sitting in the mud, was, No. Impossible. You didn’t see what you think you saw.

Her second thought was of a weak swimmer, caught in a retreating tide, pulled farther and farther from shore, not understanding how much trouble she was in until she began to scream and discovered that no one on the beach could hear her.

As shaken as she was by the sight of the improbably distant highway, her brief glimpse of Cal was just as disorienting. Not because he was far away but because he was really close. She had seen him spring up above the grass less than ten feet from her, but the two of them had been screaming for all they were worth just to make themselves heard.

The muck was warm, sticky, placental.

The grass hummed furiously with insects.

“Be careful!” the boy shouted. “Don’t you get lost, too!”

This was followed by another brief burst of laughter—a giddy, nervous sob of hilarity. It wasn’t Cal, and it wasn’t the kid, not this time. It wasn’t the woman either. This laughter came from somewhere to her left, then died out, swallowed by bug song. It was male and had a quality of drunkenness to it.

Becky suddenly remembered one of the things Weirdo Mom had shouted: Stop calling, honey! He’ll hear you!

What the fuck?

“What the fuck?” shouted Cal, as if he were echoing her. She wasn’t surprised. Ike and Mike, they think alike, Mrs. DeMuth liked to say. Frick and Frack, got two heads but just one back, Mr. Demuth liked to say.

A pause in which there was only the sound of the wind and the reeeee of the bugs. Then, bellowing at the top of his lungs: “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS?”

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Cal had a brief period, about five minutes later, when he lost it a little. It happened after he tried an experiment. He jumped and looked at the road and landed and waited, and then, after he had counted to thirty, he jumped and looked again.