William and Misty go fishing instead. They sit side by side on the muddy ground, trading worms. They catch nothing but faded Pepsi cans and mosquito bites and when they retreat across their shared yard at dusk, the crowd is still there, still watching the fallow field.
Sometimes, late at night, William’s mother crawls into bed with him. Her breath is hot against his neck. It feels like a fever does, only it’s on the outside of his body instead of the inside. She makes their shapes fit—her knees behind his knees, his back against her front. No spaces. No gaps. Even her words gum together when she speaks. They stick in places that they shouldn’t, the places where they are meant to come apart. She says things like:
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t never trust a man.”
“He pushed me down. We was thirty miles from anywhere, what was I supposed to do?”
“It’s like glass. Like your whole body’s made of glass.”
“I never wanted to marry him. I never even wanted to kiss him, but when has that ever stopped a man? They take things. That’s all they know how to do. Take and take and take.”
“Don’t ever be like that, William. You promise me?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“I’ll be your father, all right? I’ll be the man.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know he hit me? Your daddy? That’s why he never comes around no more, because I told him I would kill him if he ever did, and I meant it.”
“Promise me, William. Promise.”
“I’m sorry.”
They play spin-the-bottle again. This time, it’s only Misty and William. They sit in the barn where it’s growing dark. They spin the bottle and it lands on William every time, even when he is the one spinning it. To play fair, he kisses the back of his hand, the curve of his knee, the space between his fingers. Misty kisses him, too, and each time, William presses harder into the kiss, and holds it for longer. He thinks of his mother and wonders if he is doing it right.
Outside, it begins to rain, and the thin crowd grows thinner. Fat drops of water slick down the sides of the green statue, which still stands alone. Umbrellas pop open, making a roof over the crowd, and the ground dries under them in pale brown circles that overlap and crisscross and disappear when the people shift from one side of the field to the other. After a while, Penny comes walking through the crowd looking for Misty, but Misty isn’t anywhere that Penny is looking, and the bottle spins and spins.
Certain things don’t grow. This, William knows for sure.
Every night for a week he goes out to field after his mother is asleep. He waits until the house is quiet and he can hear the cricket song through the thin walls and the thinner glass of his window. It is less quiet outside, where he isn’t the only one awake. There are bullfrogs and whippoorwills under the deep white moon.
There, alone in the field, William buries his new shoes and a plate from the kitchen and a pair of mismatched earrings that he took from his mother’s dresser. Nothing comes of these. When William tries to dig them back up, they are gone. He is more careful now, about what he offers to the field. He only wants to give something that will give him something in return.
The crowd that has been visiting the field every morning is growing restless. They’ve stopped taking pictures. They’ve stopped bringing their friends. Maybe they’re wondering if the field was special after all, or if it was all a mistake. Misty’s mother says the crowd will find something new to be excited about soon, and that scares William, the thought of things going back to the way they were. So maybe, if William buries the right object, then the right statue would grow, and Misty would love it, and his mother would love it, too. They would have dinner on the back porch, the three of them, together, and they would listen to the crickets trembling in the grass and they would say how beautiful the statues were. Their delicate bodies and glowing edges. Like angels, winged and glorious. Like God. And then William could tell them about burying the bottle, how it had been him all along.
William wants to show Misty something. He has been thinking about the right way to do it for a while now. It can’t be raining outside and Penny can’t be there and neither can their mothers, and it has to be before dinner, too. All these things are important. He thinks for days and every time he thinks about it, it makes the palms of his hands itch like they can already feel it, like the William from four days from now is telling him it is all right to do this.
William takes Misty to the barn again. He swept the floor the day before and the barn smells like damp hay and leaves. It isn’t a bad smell.
“I want to show you something,” he says. William lies down on the ground and tells Misty to lie down beside him.
“Why?”
“Because,” he says. “That’s how it works.”
Misty pushes her hand into her back pocket and pulls out a handful of firecrackers. “Why can’t we just light these?”
“This is better.”
“You want me to go get a bottle?”
“No. Lay down.” And, when she still doesn’t listen, William says, “If you don’t want to play, then go on home.”
Then he closes his eyes and lets the sun turn his eyelids bright red. When Misty lays down, he tells her to close her eyes, too. He tells her about the tattoos on his mother’s boyfriend’s back. How the boyfriend plays with the hem of her shorts. How he comes up behind her and puts his mouth on her neck. William rolls onto his side and leans over Misty. He talks the whole time that he is pushing at the button on her shorts. He talks about black ink bleeding into blue ink, about wings on things that shouldn’t have wings, about green light and bodies made of glass. William only stops talking once he rests his hand between Misty’s legs. He moves his fingers back and forth to feel the skin beneath her underwear shift and give. They lie there, side by side on the dirt, waiting for something to happen.
William tears a soft piece of wood from the barn’s door. He plants that, too.
In the morning, there is a new statue. This one is shorter than the glass man, though much wider. This statue is a handmade of gold—five fingers and an unlined palm. The fingers curl gently toward each other. The index and thumb almost meet, like there is something the hand means to take hold of, something that William can’t see, or can’t see yet.
“It kinda looks like me,” William says.
They are on the porch together, William and his mother. There is a small mirror balanced on the rail and Shannon is bent double in front of it. She has one eye closed as she puts on mascara. She is wearing a dress that ties around her neck. William can see the skin between her shoulders, the way it moves, bunching and releasing. She makes a low sound in her throat, a skeptical sound, like when William wakes up late for school and tells her that his stomach hurts, he has a fever, his tongue is a boulder that could weigh the world down, and he can’t imagine going to school today. Not like this.
He says, “It does. Just look at the nose.” He touches his own nose, flattens it into his cheeks. “And my head. The little lump on the side of it.” He touches this, too.
“Which one are you talking about?” Shannon asks.