“Let’s play Science,” Jennifer said. “You can be my assistant.”

In the kitchen, they mixed baking soda with mustard and red food coloring, and spooned the result into a glass filled with pickle juice. “It might be poisonous,” Jennifer said. “But it might be a cure for the most deadly disease in the world. Test it.” She pushed the glass toward him.

“You test it,” he said, nudging it back toward her.

“If it’s poison, I’m the only one who can make the antidote. It has to be you.”

Frankie took the smallest sip he could from the glass. It tasted awful, and he swallowed it with his head shuddering.

“Your vital signs are good,” Jennifer said, resting her tiny, shriveled fingers on his wrist. “Let’s play Wild Kingdom.”

Their neighborhood sat alongside a patch of swamp, and armadillos and possums sometimes crept out of it and waddled down the sidewalk. Glass snakes and black snakes wound across the road and curled up against doorsteps. There were palmetto bugs, slugs, roly-polies, and dragonflies. A turtle as big as a suitcase lived in a cavern beneath the house at the end of Jennifer’s street. But when they played Wild Kingdom, it was about the lizards, which were everywhere. Jennifer had developed a tracking system for the ones they caught in her backyard. They would name them, tag them by tying bits of colored string to their legs, and use index cards to keep track of the information: Zeus, five inches long, lime green, white belly, found near back fence next to magnolia bush. Red string on right foreleg. They had never caught the same lizard twice, but if it ever happened, they were prepared to record its new location and note any changes in its appearance.

“Herman,” Frankie said, holding up a lizard he’d caught on the warm metal side of the swimming pool. Its stomach felt spongy between his fingers.

Jennifer peered at it and shook her head. “Artemis,” she said, and wrote the name down on an index card. She pulled a couple of inches of blue thread from the spool her mother had given her, and bit it off. Frankie cupped his hands around Artemis and felt the lizard charging against his palms, ricocheting back and forth like a miniature Superball. Lizards were so fast, they sometimes seemed to vanish before his eyes: one moment they’d be clinging to the side of the house, or to the edge of the patio, or to a slat in the fence—and the next moment, they’d be gone. “We should do a magic show,” he said. “We could be a husband-and-wife magic team, and we could have the Amazing Vanishing Lizard, and put Artemis in a box, and when we opened the box, he’d run away so fast, it would look like he disappeared.”

“Red ants,” Jennifer said.

“What would they do?”

“You’re standing in red ants,” she explained, pointing down.