Chapter 5: The Hot Shop

The annex door was heavy steel, and it was open an inch.

Heat rolled out of the gap.

I pushed it with two fingers and stepped into a room that smelled of hot metal and ash.

A furnace the size of a car squatted against the far wall, its mouth glowing orange.

Gavin stood in front of it in a grey T-shirt gone dark with sweat, a long steel pipe in his hands.

He turned it slowly, and a blob of molten glass on the end turned with it, bright as a sun.

I should have gone back to bed.

"You're not supposed to be up," he said, without turning around.

"Neither are you."

"I don't sleep much on the days that matter."

"Is that what today was?"

"I don't know yet."

He lifted the pipe out of the fire, and the glass swung out.

I had never seen anything so beautiful or so dangerous.

"What is this place?" I asked.

"The hot shop. I built it in the old annex when I was twenty. My father's company made plates. I wanted to make something that wasn't a plate."

"Does Harold know?"

"Everyone knows. Nobody comes in."

"I came in."

"I noticed."

He set the pipe on a steel rest and rolled it with his palm.

The glass began to take a shape, a body and a tilted head.

It was a bird.

"Come here," he said.

I should have said no.

I walked across the concrete in bare feet with my hormone-heavy body, and I stood close enough to feel the furnace on my face.

He took my hands, one at a time, and put them on the pipe.

"Roll it," he said. "Keep it moving. If you stop, it droops."

"I'll ruin it."

"You can't ruin it. It's a bird. It only has to be something."

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