Sprout

by Dale Peck

  Mrs. Miller did something with the gear shift, and the car made a sound like a cow being stuck with an electric prod. I’m not sure if it had something to do with driving, or if she was just using the car to communicate her impatience.

  “Most kids your age either write earnest essays about how they’re trying to understand ‘this crazy world’ ”—she said this like, Al-Qaeda Al-Schmaeda, what’s the big deal—“or else about how they want to ‘fulfill themselves.’ No offense, but no one really cares what a teenager thinks about Islamic extremism. I mean, we want you to devote a due measure of consideration to these kinds of blah blah blah [yes, she actually said the blah blah blahs] but we don’t exactly want you writing policy papers for the State Department. A solid, concrete essay about a personal experience will stick in the judges’ minds far better than some earnest tract that begins ‘The problem of terrorism is a complex one.’ Getting out of your clearing is complex, tell me something I don’t know.”

  “Um, Lawnboy.”

  “Do what?”

  “Lawnboy. Like the lawnmowers. That’s what I wanted my nickname to be. After I started dying my hair.”

  Mrs. Miller’s eyebrows knitted in confusion. “Lawnboy.”

  “You said to tell you something you didn’t know. I figured you probly didn’t know that.”

  Mrs. Miller opened her mouth. Closed it. Didn’t say anything until we were safely on the highway. Then:

  “Is that a dictionary?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t exactly have a computer anymore.”

  Mrs. Miller turned and looked at me for so long that the car began to edge off the asphalt. She sighed, and jerked the wheel to the left.

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

  Now I gotta cut loose . . .

  So about seven pages ago, when I was talking about how I had no one to invite me to pool parties and ultimate frisbee, I think I might’ve given the impression that I’m an outcast or a geek or something (too geeky for ultimate frisbee even, which is like super geek).1 Anyway, I hope you don’t think I’m one of those troubled teens with a subscription to Guns & Ammo who walks around in a black trenchcoat with death metal blasting out of his headphones, just waiting to go all Columbine and stuff. I don’t even have a walkman,2 let alone an ipod,3 let alone any death metal. No trenchcoat, no Guns & Ammo, and (more to the point) no guns. No BB gun or air rifle or bow and arrow (although we do have this old set of lawn darts, which why my father didn’t pack the shovel but did pack lawn darts—and Christmas lights, and something that I’m pretty sure is the top half of one of those screw-together pool cues—is beyond me).

  Anyway.

  While I freely cop to being something of a loner, I’m not a dropout or a hater or anything. I mean, I’m junior captain of the cross-country team (although I suppose that’s the ultimate loner extracurricular activity, unless maybe it’s essay writing) and I do have a few friends, and one good friend, Ruthie Wilcox, who’s probly p.o.’d it took me twenty-eight pages to namecheck her (sorry, Ruthie). When you add that to the fact that the nearest kid my age lives 5.8 miles from my house (why yes, I did measure it) and I only get the car one day a week, I think I have a pretty good excuse for spending a lot of time by myself.

  The truth is, Buhler’s both hermetic (he said, stuffing his dictionary behind his back) and (glancing over his shoulder) pretty monolithic too. In Long Island, groups tended to form along the Old Big Lines—girls and guys, whites and blacks, Jews and gentiles, south shore and north shore. Buhler, by contrast, is completely white, completely Mennonite, and (to keep with the rhyme scheme) completely uptight. Of course there are the usual cliques—jocks, cheerleaders, geeks—plus a couple of local staples, my favorite being the Fuffas (from FFA, or Future Farmers of America), who all chew tobacco and wear belt buckles bearing the logo of their favorite make of truck. But all of these are pretty relaxed. I mean, nobody’s ever shot someone over whether the Chevy Silverado is a better ve-hicle than the Ford F-150. The one hard and fast division, though, is between locals and outsiders. People We Know and People We Don’t. Although in the second case “people” should really be “person.”

  I.e., Daniel Bradford.

  I.e., me.

  I mean, look. Everyone knows it’s rough being the new kid. But I was the new kid in a school where all the other students had known each other since, like, birth. In a crate of bright red apples, I was a hairy kiwi of indeterminate but slightly blech color. To make matters worse, I had a funny accent. I freely admit this. When, every year on Christmas, I call my Aunt Sophie (dad’s side, in case you’re wondering) and she gives me one of her “Was Santer Claws nice to youse guys this ye-ah?” I think, Man, you talk funny.

  But Buhler. New kid. Me. The age-old immigrant saga, from Vito Corleone in The Godfather to Kevin Bacon in Footloose. Only this time it’s twelve-year-old Daniel “Not-Yet-Known-as-Sprout” Bradford in:

  “LOVE AMONG THE WHEAT SHEARS”

  (A little heads up: there’s no love in the next couple of pages, or wheat shears for that matter, but Mrs. Miller says “a good title is half the battle.”)

  Curtain rises on a typical elementary school classroom in a typically Bauhaus-inspired elementary school. Along one wall, a line of shallow awning windows is cranked open as far as they’ll go, which is to say about six inches, as if to remind students There Is No Escape. To make the setting more realistic, I suggest the theater pipe goodly amounts of wheat chaff through the windows, just to the brink of Man-I’ve-really-GOT-to-sneeze level. The theater should also be heated to approximately one thousand degrees, filled liberally with flies (and a couple of yellowjackets), and twenty-seven students wearing identical Children of the Corn overalls and straw hats. A bell rings, announcing the start of class.

  SEVENTH-GRADE TEACHER: Class, we have a new student joining us this year.

  CLASS giggles.

  SEVENTH-GRADE TEACHER: (squinting around the room in mock-confusion, as though she might not realize who the new kid is, or maybe just needs glasses) Daniel Bradford, are you here?

  DANIEL BRADFORD, a.k.a. THE ONE KID NOT WEARING OVERALLS AND A STRAW HAT, a.k.a. ME: Um, yeah?

  CLASS giggles louder.

  SEVENTH-GRADE TEACHER: (whose name was MISS TUNIE, by the way, and who would later turn out to be okay, but who was pretty much THE ENEMY at that particular moment) Do you prefer Dan, or Danny?

  ME: Daniel.

  SEVENTH-GRADE TEACHER, a.k.a. MISS TUNIE, a.k.a. THE ENEMY WHO NEEDS TO GET A HEARING AID AS WELL AS GLASSES: Okay. Well, welcome to our school, Danny, and to Kansas. I understand you traveled quite a distance to get here.

  ME: I’m from Long Island.

  IAN ABERNATHY: (spitting out the stalk of wheat he’s been chewing on) Long Guyland? Is that right next to Short Gayland?

  CLASS giggles become CLASS guffaws.

  ME: (intellectually distancing my fragile psyche from Ian’s lameoid joke by reminding myself that hazing is an unavoidable but finite adolescent ritual, and also staring at my desk, where the word “crap” had been carved about an inch deep into the wood, and seemed to sum up how I felt) It’s in New York.

  IAN: (slapping his forehead so hard his straw hat is knocked to the floor) Noo Yauk? Noooooo Yaaaaaaaauuuuuuuk?

  MISS TUNIE: Thank you for your generous offer, Ian. Yes, you can prepare an essay on the State of New York for next Monday. I’m sure we would all appreciate learning about where our new classmate comes from.

  CLASS, fickle in its loyalty, redirects its guffaws at IAN ABERNATHY.

  IAN: (blushing so hard the smattering of freckles on his cheeks disappears like lily pads subsumed by algae in a dead pond) Miss Tunie!

  MISS TUNIE, a.k.a. THE TEACHER WHO MEANS WELL BUT DOESN’T REALIZE HOW MUCH TROUBLE SHE’S CAUSING: You’d rather have it ready tomorrow? Why, thank you, Ian. I’m impressed with your zeal. (continuing in a louder voice when IAN, who will later demonstrate his love of lost causes by playing for Buhler High’s football and
basketball teams, opens his mouth to protest) Why, yes, I do think an hour after school in the library would help you finish your paper. Is there anything else you’d like to volunteer for, Ian? Or anyone else for that matter?

  IAN is silent. As is CLASS, save for one snort from a tall, angular GIRL sitting in the desk one row over from mine, and scratching a word into her desk with a pencil. A hint: it’s a synonym for the word that had been carved into mine.

  MISS TUNIE: Well, Dan, I believe you were telling us why you moved here?

  ME: (wishing MISS TUNIE, who got props for taking down Ian, had forgotten about me in the excitement) My dad said he heard about a job.

  MISS TUNIE: (smiling naively, like well-meaning elementary school teachers everywhere) And what does he do?

  ME: Nothing. He didn’t get the job.

  CLASS is silent. Dead silent. The sound of the tall GIRL’s pencil scratching into the wood is the only thing that can be heard.

  MISS TUNIE: (oh so naive) A-ha. (which, to be fair, might’ve been uh-huh, although that’s not much better) And what does your mother do?

  ME: (mumbling) Mpmf-mpmf-mpmf.

  GIRL scratching well-known but unprintable four-letter word into her desk suddenly lifts her pencil—No. 1, I later learned, which has a harder lead than No. 2, and cuts into laminated wood better. From the corner of my eye, I notice that one of the straps of her overalls is undone, exposing a faded T-shirt from Hole’s 1994 Live Through This tour, which occurred when the GIRL was approximately one

  MISS TUNIE: (really, really unwilling to let well enough alone) Pardon me, Dan? I didn’t catch that.

  ME: (e-nun-ci-a-ting) She. Is. Dead.

  MISS TUNIE: (smile hardening like Play-Doh left out of the can) Oh. Well. Welcome to our school, Dan. Daniel. (fiddling with papers) I see that your English and composition skills are exceptionally high. Perhaps you can, um, write about . . . Well. Would everyone please open their copy of The Outsiders to the last page? What do we make of Ponyboy’s assertion that quote It-was-too-vast-a-problem-to-be-just-a-personal-thing unquote? What do we think Hinton is trying to communicate . . .

  Lights dim until the entire class is shrouded in darkness, save for a lone spot on the new kid. Another bell rings. Class exits, their shadowy forms more heard than seen as they squeeze through the closely packed desks. But the boy known for one more week as Daniel Bradford remains in his seat as the last spotlight fades, until eventually he too disappears in a darkness punctuated not by noises from the stage, but from the audience. Seatsprings creak beneath squirming bottoms as they wait for the house lights to come up; the electric hum of the EXIT sign at the back of the theater calls them back to the real world. At long last, rubber-soled chair legs squeak over freshly waxed linoleum. There’s a crash, hollow metal being tripped over by not-so-hollow flesh as, invisibly but not inaudibly, the new kid heads for his next class.

  One down. Five more to go.

  And nine more months of the school year.

  And six more years of school.

  ME: Shoot me now.

  CURTAIN

  So.

  That was the first time I’d ever mentioned my mom’s death out loud, and afterwards everything was pretty much a blur. I drifted through my classes, did the whole sitting-by-myself thing at lunchtime, which took all of about five minutes to (not) eat, then wandered outside. The playground was a big dusty square of asphalt next to an even bigger dustier field of, well, dust. Something had been planted on the field that I think was supposed to be grass, but it was so brown and dry it looked more like stale chocolate frosting. I wandered the perimeter like a prisoner checking for holes in the fence, but in fact there was no fence. Buhler Elementary was located more or less in the middle of nowhere, which meant there was nowhere for potential threats to hide, and nowhere for fleeing students to run. On the eastern edge of the playground I found a couple of stumps from trees that had been cut down, or maybe just died. This was before my dad started his collection (and besides, their roots were still in the ground where they belonged), so I didn’t think too much about them. Just sat down and prepared to wait out the twenty-three minutes until my next class.

  The sky was big and empty and not quite blue because of all the dust in the air, and after a while a combination of gravity and boredom caused my eyes to fall to the horizon, which looked like it was about a hundred miles away, and then to the two-lane highway that ran past the school, on which a rattle-trap truck or car passed every four or five years or so, and then finally to my shoes. My dad had taken me to the mall to shop for school clothes the day before. Unlike my mom, he hadn’t vetoed any of my choices. The coolest thing I’d bought by far was a pair of Vans. The classic red checkerboard print reminded me of a brick wall, which had inspired me to bomb it with a purple sharpie I’d picked up at the Hobby Hut. I was trying to come up with a good answer for what other word might begin with F-U-C, but, since I didn’t have my dictionary handy, it was harder than it might seem. Suddenly I heard a throat clear.

  “Well well well. If it isn’t Long Gayland.”

  I looked up to see—duh—Ian Abernathy. You’d think the whole dead mother thing would’ve given me the pity vote, but Ian Abernathy was not exactly what you would call sensitive. Since an essay to him was what a hike up Mt. Everest would be to a blindfolded paraplegic with acrophobia and asthma, he wanted revenge. His eyes glowered out from beneath his straw hat, and his football-throwing arms were bursting from his overalls. Okay, so maybe his overalls were actually a pair of Diesel jeans and an A&F T-shirt, and his straw hat was a baseball cap (Yankees, in fact, which isn’t ironic as much as it’s a coincidence, although I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help me).

  I must’ve made some kind of funny expression because Ian’s eyes blinked rapidly, and in a slightly unsteady voice he said, “Um, nice kicks.”

  I looked at my shoes, then back up at Ian. Before I could decide what to say to this true but, let’s face it, pretty unexpected statement, I saw a second figure in the field behind him. Because of the height I thought it was a teacher at first, or maybe one of Ian’s friends come to join in the fun. Then I realized it was the girl who’d sat next to me in first period. She strode rapidly across the dust, as tall and thin as a periscope poking from the waves. She was even more angular standing than sitting, the cardboard flatness of her body heightened by the super-severe eighties wedge that cut across one of her eyes like a slice of pizza taped to her face. This isn’t to say she was awkward or anything. On the contrary. Her body seemed as taut and strong as the wires that hold up a suspension bridge. And her face . . . man, how do I describe her face? Her face seemed to rise above the usual set of seventh-grade adjectives: PrettyUglyCoolWeirdEtc. Instead you thought of grownup words like “haughty” or “composed” or “striking.” It was a face that seemed to come with its own frame; no matter what angle you looked at it from, it seemed more like a picture than flesh and blood. In tenth grade I saw a painting called Liberty Leading the People and I thought, That’s it, but that day I just thought the girl approaching me looked like a pop star in front of an invisible troupe of backup dancers. You could almost hear the internal soundtrack—my guess, based on the T-shirt, was Hole’s “Rock Star”:

  Well I went to school in Olympia, and everyone’s the same . . .

  “Ahem. I said, ‘Nice kicks,’ newbie.”

  I looked back at Ian. He had an interesting face too. Well, maybe not interesting as much as handsome—a little bit like Josh Hartnett in The Virgin Suicides (hey, just because I’m a teenager doesn’t mean I can’t like old movies), although he was thicker than JH, more muscly.

  I lifted both feet up (I wasn’t levitating, I was sitting on a stump, remember?) and stared at the graffiti on my shoes. “Fucate,” I said. “Painted, or disguised with paint.”

  “Hey, Ian.”

  Liberty Leading the People had arrived.

  Ian jumped, turned.

  “Ruth Wilcox,” he said, the way some people sa
y “George Bush” and other people say “Osama bin Laden” and Matt Groening says “Walt Disney.” He pretended to look for something in his pockets. “Too bad I don’t have a letter that needs opening. I could use your nose.”

  I kind of doubt Ian Abernathy had or has any idea what a letter opener is, unless maybe he thinks it’s an email application or something. Ruthie’s nose, however, was most people’s go-to place for an insult. It was just so, well, in your face. Or, in this case, in Ian’s: Ruthie stood so close to him that the tip of her very long, very sharp-looking proboscis practically touched his forehead.

  “Fuchsia,” I said. “A purplish-red color.” Neither of them noticed.

  “Beat it, Abernathy.”

  “You beat it, Wilcox.”

  “Fucoid. A seaweed.”

  I could’ve been talking to the wind for all the attention either of them paid to me. Not that I was surprised. This wasn’t about me. It was a turf war. Crips versus Bloods, schoolyard-style.

  Ruth Wilcox walked around Ian Abernathy like a drill sergeant checking out a sorry-looking recruit.

  “Let’s face it, Ian. We’re not kids anymore. Now that I’ve got these”—she grabbed her chest, which, if anything, was flatter than mine—“it’s no longer okay for you to throw down with me. Which means I can beat the tar out of you, but if you lay a finger on me the whole school will come down on you like a ton of bricks for hitting a girl. So either I kick your butt until you crawl off in shame, or you just crawl off in shame. What’s it gonna be?”

  I’m not sure if it was the basic truth of what Ruth Wilcox said that drove Ian Abernathy away, or just the sheer number of words. His mouth opened and closed several times, and so did his fists, and then he turned to me. “This ain’t over, newbie,” he said, and marched across the playground.

  Neither of us said anything while Ian walked away, the sound of dead grass crunching beneath his sneaks gradually drowned out by the distant screams of first- and second-graders playing tetherball and four-square and game boy. Why do little kids scream like they’re dying when they’re supposedly having fun?