“What’re you doing here?” Misty asked.
The crawdad shared an image from earlier that day—Misty lying on the bank of the creek—and then other images—acorns scattered across the ground, flies buzzing above something long dead, the heaving thrum of their wings like drums inside her head. The crawdads still believed that Misty was sick or that something was wrong with her.
“So you came to check on me?”
An image of a crawdad with eggs attached to the underside of its long tail. The water pulsed past them, warm and steady, but it never separated them. The feeling of something so close that it was almost herself, a second self, twinned. The crawdads hatched into babies with shells so thin that they were nearly transparent. The hatchlings stayed near their mother’s side.
When something was small, it needed to be protected.
Misty was small, so she needed them.
Tears welled in her eyes. She ran her finger gently along the length of the crawdad’s back. “Won’t you get all dried out under there?”
The crawdad showed Misty the water inside its burrow. Deep down beneath the earth, cold water, pure and sweet smelling. Water buried in pockets if one knew where to look. Water coursing beneath them and around them all the time. The crawdad would make a home there for a while so it could be near Misty. So she wouldn’t be alone.
A door creaked and Misty jolted, thinking it must be her mother looking for her, but the porch remained empty. Across the yard, William walked through the high grass and stood in front of Earl’s garden. He wore a white T-shirt that glowed under the moonlight and a pair of ratty shorts. His feet were bare and his hair was flattened in the back from the time he’d spent in bed trying to sleep. His shoulders bowed slightly like he might have been searching for something on the dark ground or he might have been praying.
He looked different at night. Different alone when no one else was looking. Smaller, somehow. More like her. Misty hesitated. It felt wrong to speak to William without anyone else around in the middle of the night. Like something that her mother wouldn’t approve of.
But he looked so small. So familiar.
Misty crawled from beneath the porch, sharing one last thing with the crawdad—the feeling of her aunt Dolly’s hugs, the warm, tight embrace of someone who loved you through and through, the kind of feeling that made it okay to be smaller than something else, to fit inside something else.
Then Misty crept across the yard toward William. She paused before she reached him and said, “Are you okay?” in her smallest voice.
William whipped around, startled. He dropped the bottle that was in his hand, and it clanked against the ground.
“Shit,” he said, and then grinned. “What’re you doing out here?”
“I come out here sometimes,” Misty said. “Is that the spin-the-bottle?”
William picked the green bottle off the ground and twisted it slowly between his fingers, letting the moonlight glint off its dark surface. “Yeah. I was gonna take it back to the barn. I didn’t think Mom’d like it if she found it in my room. I think she’s afraid I’m going to grow up and be a drunk just like Earl.”
“I saw her outside a few minutes ago…” Misty bit back the words, but William already knew what she meant. He sat down on the grass beside the garden and twisted the bottle in his hands.
“She was saying good night to her boyfriend.” He said the last word like it tasted bitter in his mouth.
“With the big beard?”
“That’s him. Harold. He’s training to be a boss in the mines.”
Misty sat down in the grass, careful not to let her bare feet touch the garden. She didn’t think anything bad would happen if she did, but it still felt wrong somehow. Sadness crept into her throat just looking at it.
“He’s hung around longer than most of the men has,” William said. “But they all leave eventually. And then it’s just me and Mom again. She says I’m the only one who’ll never leave her, and she’s right. I just wish he’d get to the leaving already. Mom works all the time, but now she spends half her time with Harold. I don’t see her near as much as I used to.”
Misty nodded. “My dad ain’t home much, neither. And when he is…”
“What?”
Misty shrugged. “I don’t know. Him and my mom fight sometimes.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. They just seem mad all the time. About everything.”
“He don’t hit her, does he?”
“No.”
“That’s something, at least,” William said.
“I guess.”
William turned the bottle upside down and tried to balance it on the dirt, but the ground was uneven and the bottle kept tipping to the side. They each tapped the bottle with their fingers, bouncing it between them, trying to help it catch someplace in the middle, someplace it wouldn’t fall. The bottle finally fell onto the garden and rolled across the torn-up ground. Earl had tilled it that very morning, so the dirt was still loose and dark. William stretched across it, careful not to touch the ground, and he dragged the bottle back into the yard.
“I don’t know why Earl keeps trying to make this into a garden,” he said.
“I wish he’d leave it alone. It feels mean to keep trying to make it grow when it don’t never grow. Maybe it don’t want to be a garden.”
“Yeah. He’s done everything he can to it already.” William twisted the bottle in his hands. “You know what I was thinking before you came over?”
“What?”
“That it kinda looks like me. The garden.”
Misty looked at the side of William’s face. There was a scratch on his cheek, its edges ragged and red even in the dark, and his nose was freckled from all the time he spent in the sun. His hair had grown out more over the summer, and it curled behind his ears and fell into his eyes no matter how many times he brushed it away. She looked between him and the garden, and she could almost see the sameness in them. The sadness.
“That’s stupid, ain’t it?” he said.
“No, it ain’t stupid.”
William lifted his chin and smiled at Misty. She smiled back at him.
She said, “What if we left it something?”
“What do you mean?”
“The garden,” Misty said. “What if we gave it something. Like the bottle.”
Misty pressed her finger against the long, green neck of the bottle, spinning it around until it faced her.