All four sides of the rectangular house were pure glass. It was edged on one side by beautiful tall trees and the grass surrounding it was pristine and green. There was a circular column of bricks on the inside, a small room, whereas everything else was open and bright.
“I’ve just always liked it here,” Sam said as we followed the tour inside. “It’s so peaceful. So open.”
“It’s really beautiful.”
The house was small and felt cramped with everyone inside, but it was easy to imagine what it would be like without them, what it would be like by yourself or with a few friends. I imagined it in winter, surrounded by snow, and in fall—all the colors of the leaves. I imagined what it would look like in different places—on the top of a mountain or in the desert or on the bottom of the ocean. I couldn’t stop spinning in circles. I wondered how often they had to clean all the glass, whether they used newspapers like my mom, and a blue-and-white can of glass cleaner.
There were other buildings on the property, another brick house, and an art gallery built right into the side of a small, grassy hill. The entrance, the tour guide said, was built to resemble Agamemnon’s Tomb. There was a Warhol there, a portrait of Philip Johnson, who had designed and built everything and lived here before he died.
The tour was an hour and a half long, and afterward the van was quiet as the tour guide drove us back to the visitors’ center. Sam and I wandered idly through the museum store, touching everything, buying only a single postcard each. In the parking lot, Sam searched for a park on his phone, and we found one called Waveny. We left my car at the visitors’ center (I guess that could technically be considered something I wasn’t supposed to do, but it didn’t feel like a big enough deviance) and went and got sandwiches at a deli close by.
We ate them in the park, under the shadow of a giant tree, on a blanket Sam removed from the trunk of his car. Not far from us a group of kids played a very unregulated game of soccer, using jackets to mark goalposts and a half-deflated ball that whistled and flopped when it was kicked.
“How did you find out about this place?” I asked.
“Whenever I meet someone new, I ask them where they live, and then I ask them—what’s your favorite place there? And then I go and see for myself.”
“You didn’t ask me that.”
“I usually ask them. Sometimes I’m too busy dancing.”
“So you go to all these places, you audit all these classes . . . I still have no idea how you do it all.”
“I guess I just have a lot of time on my hands,” he said.
“I feel like I never have time for anything except school.”
“You’re here now.”
“Well, school is basically over.”
“You’ll have plenty of time this summer.”
“I guess. Three months, at least.”
“That’s enough time to see some cool things. Especially here. You can get anywhere in Connecticut within two hours.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Usually,” he said, smiling.
“Remember when we were younger and there were all those field trips with school? Sturbridge Village, the Dr. Seuss Sculpture Garden in Springfield, the Basketball Hall of Fame. We even went to a waterpark once. Why did those stop? We finally got old enough to appreciate them, and all of a sudden they were taken away from us. And recess. We should still have recess.”
Sam laughed. “You want recess?”
“Just a break, you know? We’re on the same freaking campus as the middle school. We can see the swings from the English hallway.”
“Just out of reach,” he said dramatically. “So close, and yet . . .”
“Laugh all you want. Why didn’t we come and see things like this? History, you know? Our state. Our world. You have to be in chorus or band to go anywhere in my high school, and when people started figuring that out, everyone signed up because they wanted to go to Disney World. So they stopped sending them to Disney World. Now they just go to New York to see a musical. Chorus attendance has dropped dramatically. It’s a catch twenty-two. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t actually care about Disney and just want to sing. Just to clarify though, I do care about Disney.”
“Do you sing, then? Or play anything?”
“I was terrible at the recorder,” I said seriously, remembering our very first music classes as elementary-aged kids. The people who could afford new recorders got smooth, cream-colored ones. The people who bought secondhand got a sickly tan. They taught us how to put them together, take them apart. I slept with mine for two weeks, convinced that proximity would lead to a state of musical affluence. I had seen the posters of Garfield lying on a stack of books, bright text above him that said I’m Learning Through Osmosis.
“Then Abe snuck into my room once, found the recorder under my pillow, learned to play ‘Hot Cross Buns’ in ten minutes, and I was over it. That was the first time I realized (but admitted to no one) that I didn’t like things I wasn’t immediately good at. Which is why I never play my father at Monopoly.”
“Can you sing?” he asked.
“I am potentially better at the recorder than I am at singing.”
“In the car? In the shower?”
“The shower has excellent acoustics, but no. What about you?”
“I play some guitar. And sing a little. Not well! And I think you’re right, you know. About the field trips. Except we’re jerks. We can’t even shut up during school assemblies. I don’t think they trust us not to act like idiots if they brought us somewhere that actually mattered.”
“I couldn’t imagine you acting like an idiot,” I said. Which reminded me. “I read another letter from my aunt.”
“Really? What did it say?”
And there it was suddenly, the answer. I didn’t need Sam to tell me what to do, and I didn’t need to murder anyone. I just needed the sun to go down.
“What can we do in this town to kill a few hours?” I asked him.
Which is how we ended up playing soccer with a bunch of fourth graders.
At seven o’clock—early enough that the sun hadn’t set yet, late enough to be sure the last tour had ended—we found ourselves back at the Glass House. We snuck up, Sam carrying the blanket and me carrying a flashlight he’d had in his backseat (“Be prepared,” he said, handing it to me). Everything was quiet at the house. The lights were off, and we were completely alone. Sam laid the blanket out near the pond, and I skipped rocks and then taught him how to skip rocks. The hardest part is finding the right kind of stone: flat, round, smooth. The next hardest part is wrapping your fingers around it. The next hardest part is how you let go.
The second Alvin Hatter book, Alvin Hatter and the Overcoat Man, opens with Margo trying to teach Alvin how to skip rocks. She is a natural at it, getting six or seven or eight skips a rock. Alvin is hopeless, eventually giving up and trying for the biggest splash. That was kind of like Sam.