“We have to hurry though,” Misty said. “Mom’ll be home soon.”
Penny crossed her arms over her chest. “She’s right. Mom’ll skin us alive if she finds us in here. Or Earl will. We must be a bunch of idiots.”
“That’s what makes it fun,” William said.
Penny took the bottle from William and held it upside down, letting a few drops of brown water drip out. “Yeah, but your mom won’t take a switch to your bare legs if she catches you. She’d have to be home first to even notice you was gone. She’s probably out with that new feller of hers. The one that drives that blue truck.”
Something dark flashed across William’s face as he jerked the bottle from Penny’s hand. “That ain’t her feller. And if you’d quit talking for half a second, we could get started and then nobody has to get in trouble, how about that?”
They sat so their bodies formed a triangle, there in the corner of the barn among puddles of rainwater grown scummy in the June heat, where the air smelled of stale hay and staler beer. That way, William said, no one could see them from the road if they drove by.
“Ain’t we supposed to have more people?” Penny asked.
“What, you want me to go find Earl?” William said.
Penny frowned. “I’m just saying. There ain’t that many of us playing, so what happens if my bottle lands on Misty, huh? What then?”
“You ain’t never kissed your sister on the cheek before? We’ll figure it out, all right. The game ain’t even started and you’re picking it apart. Here.” William held the neck of the bottle between two fingers. “You just spin it like this. Not no little spin, neither. It’s got to go all the way around at least twice.”
“What if it don’t?” Penny said.
“Then you lose your spin.”
“You’re making this up,” Penny said. “Spin the bottle ain’t got that many rules.”
“Have you ever played this game before?” William asked.
Penny lifted her chin. “I’ve seen—”
“Seeing ain’t the same,” William said. “My cousin taught me how to play with her and her friend, and they’re both sixteen. And I reckon they know a lot more than you do about kissing games. They showed me—well, they showed me how to do this, for one. So until you know more than me, I reckon I’m the one to listen to.”
William took the first spin without hesitating, and they kissed what the bottle gave them. Wooden beams. Metal pipes. Once, for William, a grasshopper. The bottle seemed to find only the gaps between them, the space that separated their knees from other knees. It didn’t land on a body, not even after William moved them three times, convinced that it was the ground or the moisture from the puddles that was warping the bottle’s path. Nothing changed when they moved, except for the light falling through the spaces between the barn’s wooden sides. The light soured, turned to a kind of dirty yellow that no flower had ever grown.
Misty’s lips grew chapped from kissing so little skin and so much else. Her tongue tasted first of dirt and then of iron and then of nothing at all, but they kept spinning, because even one kiss would change something between them. Misty could feel it in the way that they all leaned forward as the bottle spun, that something was about to happen. She opened her chest for the bottle, let it fill her with its memories, with the feeling of its glass against the cold earth, the tremor of every spin jarring through her spine, like they were spinning together, and she could have asked the bottle to land on William if she wanted. She could kiss him there, in the dank barn while her sister watched, but she didn’t want to. Her nerves coiled around the bottle’s name until they both pulsed together under her skin and she hoped it might never land, that it would spin and spin until someone’s mother came home and called them from the barn.
It was Misty’s turn, and she told the bottle to land where it would, to choose for itself where it wanted to be, and the words coursed through her like a lightning strike, all spark and light, all warmth. She pressed her fingertips along the crack in the bottle’s glass and felt the bottle call back, a distant, glimmering sound, but then William grabbed the bottle’s neck and twisted. The bottle seesawed back and forth against the damp ground, the glass clinking louder every time it touched the earth. Misty leaned back in case the glass shattered. She pulled away from the bottle until she heard nothing but her own thoughts, felt nothing but her own skin, solid and sheened with sweat.
A car drove past the barn, a cloud of dust yawning in its wake. A door slammed and Misty’s mother called their names. Penny jumped to her feet and ran outside before their mother could notice what direction she was coming from. Misty leaned back, about to follow, but William darted forward at the last second. His lips were warm and dry against Misty’s cheek as he kissed her. He didn’t look at her as she stood to leave, but his own cheeks were stained a deep, deep pink. Misty’s skin tingled in the breeze as she walked out of the barn, leaving William behind with the green bottle, still spinning.
Five
That night, Misty and Penny and their mother watched their mother’s favorite show, the one about the missing people, who almost always turned out to be missing women. Missing women usually turned out to be dead women, murdered by their husbands or boyfriends or coworkers. Dead women whose bodies were often found in parts, scattered along empty highways, shoved into boxes or freezers, or left in shallow pits in unfamiliar woods. The lives of women seemed to be thin strings held taut in someone else’s hands, and at any moment someone, some man, might come along and cut that string in half.
Misty sat beside their mother on the couch while Penny lay on her belly on the living room floor. Penny scribbled furiously in her notebook, though she refused to share what she was writing. Their mother had a plastic tray of cookies in her lap. Misty had eaten the entire middle row that week, the one where the cookies were half vanilla and half chocolate, leaving only the vanilla and chocolate cookies on either side. So their mother took one of each kind, wiggled them apart and then stuck the odd pieces back together. She handed one of these cookies to Misty and kept one for herself. Every now and then Penny looked up at the television to mutter “What an idiot” or “What a jerk,” and their mother just shook her head.
It was Misty’s favorite night of the week. Her mother had just gone grocery shopping so there was plenty of food in the cabinets—more, it seemed, than their family might ever eat. Misty had already showered, and her long, damp hair dripped cool water onto her neck, which made her shiver and scoot closer to her mother, and her mother smelled just the same as always, like dried flowers and sweat.
Misty had tried to talk to her mother the way she talked to the rest of the world, but it had never worked. When she tried, her chest felt tight with a mixture of loneliness and tenderness that she associated with her mother, but she heard no other sound, no grumblings or roarings or quickenings, no memories, no stories. It was that way for everyone she knew. She had never learned her family’s other names and she wasn’t sure where to find them, or if she could. She wasn’t sure why it was that way, either, though she wondered if maybe it was because people lied so much and so often. Names were honest. They had to be in order to work, and sometimes it felt like there wasn’t a day that passed that her family didn’t hold something back. But if she could find her own name, then maybe she could help her mother find her name. And things would be different between them. They could talk to each other all the time and share everything that they had to share, and Misty would never have to wonder if her mother was lonely or sad or scared, because she would know. And she could help. She might even be able to help her mom and dad stop fighting so much. She could become the bridge between them.