I put my feet in the water. The tadpoles edged closer, but when I wiggled my toes they scattered. I wondered where their mother was. She probably abandoned them after they hatched from their eggs. Maybe even before. Some mothers were like that.

As I rested by the creek, Carl inspected every corner under the bridge. Tapping stones and pulling out pale weeds. He bent and organized the mound of garbage so that it was neat and contained. As he moved from one side of the space to the other, he reached up and ran his palm over the Almost.

“Did you paint that?”

“Did you paint that?” he repeated. He stared at me as though my question didn’t make sense. Maybe he was insulted. Carl would never destroy property. Do something illegal. I just had that sense.

“Sorry,” I said. “Dumb question.”

“Urh.”

The afternoon passed in a hazy way. I collected twigs and fallen branches for later. I waded in the cool water, washing the dirt off my feet and arms and neck. I discovered a trail of ants and followed them until I located their volcano-shaped nest.

“Don’t touch that,” Carl said.

“I won’t.”

Often, I noticed Carl gaping at me. Not in a menacing way exactly, but in an intense way. As though he were studying me. When I stepped from one place to the next, he followed my feet. When I cleaned the grime from my skin, I could tell he was watching my hands. When I spoke, he stared straight at my mouth. A couple of times I heard him talking to Stan. His voice got way louder. “I am being logical. I don’t believe it.” “Not a single live wire on his person.” “Always twos. That’s the rule. Magnetic force too strong to break.”

He paced back and forth and lit one of his brown cigarettes. “You know any other languages, Magic Boy? Foreign languages?”

I stopped blowing on the blade of grass nipped between my thumbs. “No. They try to teach me Spanish in school and stuff, but I’m no good at it.”

He mumbled, then his eyes narrowed. “Nothing else? Conspiratorial languages?”

The grass-blade whistle fell onto the surface of the water. It floated away. “I don’t get what you mean.”

“I don’t get what you mean,” he said.

I wondered why he repeated my words so often. Maybe he was trying to hear parts of our conversation a second time to understand better. It didn’t bother me. He wasn’t being mean.

He didn’t ask me anything else about foreign languages. Instead he stepped on his cigarette, then brought the squished butt to the trash pile. Girl bounced over and dropped her stuffed squirrel beside him. Carl plucked it up, and while inspecting it, he must have noticed a hole. He retrieved a small tin from his backpack, and with needle, thread, and squinting eyes, he repaired a tear.