Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “I said, is that a dictionary?”

  I glanced up at Ruth Wilcox, who was staring at me as impatiently as Ian Abernathy had a moment before. I found myself wondering if she’d chased him off so she could beat me up herself.

  I glanced at the ground on either side of the stump. “Huh?”

  “Home room, duh. Did you actually bring your own dictionary to class?”

  I shrugged. “You know, budget cuts and all. I wasn’t sure what sort of resources a rural school would have.”

  She rolled her one visible eye. I’m guessing the eye under the wedge of hair rolled as well, but I couldn’t say for sure. Ruth Wilcox struck you as the kind of girl who could learn to roll one eye at a time.

  “Miss Tunie said you were good at English and composition.”

  “Yeah, I don’t really know what she meant by—”

  She held up her hand, not so much “stop” as “Stop! In the Name of Love” (although, given Ruth Wilcox’s love of all things eighties, it would’ve been more like Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads). She reached into her purse, pulled out a sparkly silver notebook and something that was, depending on your point of view, a long pink pencil with a troll doll on the eraser end, or a troll doll that just happened to have a pencil hanging from its butt. She held them out until, not knowing what else to do, I took them. Then:

  “Describe me,” Ruth Wilcox said.

  “Um—”

  “Don’t think. Do.”

  I stared at her for a long time, but she showed no sign of going away. I looked at my watch. Nineteen minutes till recess ended. I looked at the troll doll, its googly eyes and tangled polyester thatch of green hair, then back up at the strange girl standing in front of me. Her skin-tight acid-washed jeans were tucked into a pair of beige Uggs, her oldies concert tee worn underneath an outer garment that was less a tanktop than a couple of strips of fabric holding up a little square of cloth. Her face could’ve been a clear glass pitcher filled with milk, with that impossibly long sharp nose sticking out of it like a spout. A striped bluejay’s feather dangled from her left ear, and her right eyelid was painted some kind of bronzy red. The words “etaoin shrdlu” (which aren’t Gaelic as I thought at first, but rather the twelve most frequently used letters of the English language) were painted across her fingernails. Since she only had five fingers on each hand, this was perhaps the most impressive part of the whole ensemble.

  After a long time I sighed and wrote three words. I wrote in all caps, put periods between them, underlined the last one, and then I handed the notebook back.

  Ruth Wilcox stared at what I’d written. In profile her face was so thin it seemed two-dimensional, as if it’d come out of a photocopier. I couldn’t stop looking at it.

  She nodded and closed the book.

  “What’s that all over your fingers?”

  “Huh?”

  “Fin-gers.” She waggled the etaoin digits at me. “Yours are fil-thy.”

  I looked down at my fingertips, saw that they were covered with black and purple stains.

  “Um, rubber cement and pokeberry juice.”

  She nodded like this was a satisfactory explanation, then tapped the closed notebook.

  “I like it. It’s like the opening monologue before the curtain goes up, when the audience is still leafing through their programs and trying to decide whether they’ll wear their coats or stuff them under their seats or maybe just sneak out at intermission. It’s tantalizing. It could go in any direction.” She looked down that incredibly long, sharp nose at me. “I believe we were destined to meet, Daniel Bradford. Together you and I are going to ditch this loser town and rule the world.” And, turning on her heel, she walked away.

  I stared after her in disbelief, the troll doll pencil still dangling from my hand. All I’d written was:

  YOU. ARE. WEIRD.

  “Sucks about your mom,” Ruth Wilcox tossed over her shoulder, and I looked down at my dirty fingers and burst into tears.

  1 For the record, I am aware “frisbee” should be capitalized—and ultimate frisbee, for that matter. Ditto cup-a-noodles, peppermint pattie, tabasco, internet, sharpie, vaseline, magic marker, post-it, etc., etc. In fact, most of them should be written with a ® too. What can I say? Sometimes that shift key just seems so far away . . .

  2 See note above.

  3 Ditto; if there’s anything worse than a word with a totally useless capital letter at the beginning of it, it’s a word with a totally useless capital letter somewhere in the middle. And now, having pretty much run this whole footnote gimmick into the ground, I’ll stop. Your eyes can return to the top of the page with my promise that they won’t have to wander back down here again, except to look for page numbers.

  The margarita was the only virgin in the house

  “Call me Janet.”

  Mrs. Miller opened an amber door and beckoned me into a tawny living room. Beige dining room to the left; ochre hallway to the right; dun-colored patio through a pair of sliding-glass panels. Beyond that, a yard full of dry grass yellowing beneath the merciless Kansas sun.

  On the wall next to the door, where some people hang framed squares of needlepoint that say “God Bless This Home” and other people hang pictures of their children or parents or dead wives, Mrs. Miller had hung a brass plate reading:

  GOD BLESS SYNONYMS, META PHORS, AND EUPHEMISMS TOO!

  “God Bless Synonyms, Metaphors, and Euphemisms too!” is a pretty weird sentence all by itself, but it’s even weirder when it’s stamped into solid brass and fastened to one of those heraldic wooden plaques that usually have a moose’s head or a stuffed pheasant mounted on them, and is the first thing you see when you walk in someone’s front door to boot. Now Mrs. Miller ran a hand through her blonde hair and said:

  “Would you like a ‘drink’?”

  She used her fingers to make the quotation marks, which kind of threw me. No teacher had ever offered me a “drink” before, or even a drink for that matter. I wondered if “drink” was a synonym for something—or, God forbid, a euphemism.

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “Okay what?”

  “Okay . . . Janet?”

  “‘At’s my boy.”

  “I got married when I was twenty-one,” she called through the kitchen window, her voice barely audible over a roaring blender. “Divorced at twenty-three, but that’s a whole ’nother story. Somehow during the past decade and a half I never got around to taking my name back. I tried doing the whole ‘Ms.’ thing, but I couldn’t even get my head-in-a-bucket colleagues to say it, let alone the students. Kansas,” she added, as if that explained everything.

  I glanced up from my dictionary (thermotype: a picture obtained by wetting an object with hydrochloric acid, then taking an impression, then heating it) when the sliding-glass door slid open. Mrs. Miller was hunched over a tray containing a couple of glasses with cactus-shaped stems and a pitcher filled with icy yellow liquid sloshing over the top.

  Oh, and a bottle of tequila.

  “Anyhoo,” she set the tray on a table, and a little more liquid sloshed out of the pitcher, making me wonder if she wasn’t a bit sloshed herself. “Since, technically speaking, I’m not your teacher during the summer, I thought we’d stick with first names. Okay, Daniel?”

  I put the dictionary on the floor. Sometimes definitions don’t help much. (For example: do you have any idea what a thermotype is based on what I just told you? I don’t, and I’m sure not about to splash acid on my face to see if it takes a picture.) Mrs. Miller’s “I’m not your teacher” left me similarly unenlightened, and all I could do was stare at the bottle of tequila. I mean, even my dad doesn’t drink tequila at 11:30 on a Monday morning. He drinks whiskey, but that, to borrow a phrase from Mrs. M., is a whole ’nother story.

  “Uh, it’s Sprout.”

  “Sprout.” Mrs. Miller glanced at my hair, then followed my eyes to the bottle. “Yes, Sprout, it’s true. Teachers are human too, surprise, surprise. Relax, the pitcher’s
virgin.” She poured some in a glass and pushed it towards me. “I’ll doctor mine separately.”

  If you’re a virgin-margarita virgin, it tastes a little like a lime rickey. If you’re a lime-rickey virgin, it tastes a little like a limeade with something dissolved in it—a peppermint pattie, maybe, or a Ricola, or several bags of mint tea. Since margaritas aren’t supposed to have any mint in them, this was especially weird, or maybe just gross. Luckily I wasn’t thirsty.

  “Wojadubikowski.”

  I looked at Mrs. Miller, again wondering if she’d had a nip in the kitchen, or maybe an epileptic fit. Her hand was steady enough as she dosed her drink.

  I held up my glass. “Delicious!” When in doubt, hide behind a compliment.

  Mrs. Miller laughed. “My maiden name. Woy-a-du-bi-kuv-skee.”

  “Oh! Woya, Woya—wha?”

  “Don’t bother. I couldn’t say it myself till I was six. There are some benefits to Miller.” She poked a bendy straw into her drink and took a sip, made a face, half grimace, half smile, and again I wondered if she were having a fit. But:

  “Ooh!” was all she said. “Ow. Brain-freeze.”

  “So,” her wet voice going all teacherly: “The essay contest is timed. One hour, which means you can write six, maybe eight good pages. The topic is selected randomly, but always falls within certain parameters. ‘If you were president, what would you do?’ ‘If you had a million dollars, how would you spend it?’ ‘If you could invent one thing, what would it be?’ ”

  Oh.

  Right.

  Essay contest.

  I’d almost forgotten about it, what with the novelty of a teacher picking me up at my house and serving me frozen margaritas, virgin or otherwise.

  I have to admit, though, in the two weeks since Mrs. Miller had put the idea in my head, it had grown on me. The truth is, I do enjoy playing around with words (if you’re still reading, you might’ve noticed that). And I was also beginning to think maybe I had something to say. Like, you know: I’m a creep, I’m a loser, I smell like Teen Spirit but I’m beautiful, no matter what they say, and I’m bringing sexy back, yeah! Does that make me crazy? Probably. But now it seemed Mrs. M. was telling me I couldn’t write what I wanted. That I had to discuss a topic someone else picked out. This was starting to sound less like an extracurricular activity, more like, well, school.

  I glanced down at the dictionary, resisted the urge to start leafing through in search of words to hide behind.

  “So, uh, if the topic’s chosen at random, how can I practice for it?”

  Mrs. Miller did a combination sip-and-nod, which almost sent her straw up her nose.

  “A couple things. The first is: ignore the topic. Anything they’ll ask is basically a version of ‘So what do you want to be when you grow up?’ or ‘What formative experience made you realize that the U.S. of A. is the best country on earth?’ You prepare a stock answer to that question and then adapt it to whatever they actually put in front of you.”

  I nodded, being careful of my straw. “Kind of like when a reporter asks the president about the state of health care in America, and he says, ‘Health care is goin’ great—and so is the war on terror!’ and then rambles on about that for five minutes.”

  “Please, Daniel—”

  “Sprout.”

  “Sprout. Please. This is a red state. No politics. Although it never hurts to throw in a little God.”

  “A little God?”

  Mrs. Miller held up an imaginary Grammy (’though how I knew it was a Grammy is anyone’s guess). “First of all I’d like to thank Almighty God for this award,” she said in the worst fake black accent I’ve ever heard, then laughed way too long at her own joke. When she’d regained her composure, she said, “God always goes over well, but any strong conviction will do in a pinch.” Another sip. “We can also do time trials.”

  “Time trials? Like wind sprints? Or board races?”

  Mrs. Miller ignored me. Glanced at her watch. Then:

  “You have five minutes to describe the sunset from the point of view of a man who’s just lost his wife to cancer. Don’t mention cancer, the wife, or death. Ready . . . set . . . go!”

  I stared at Mrs. Miller, trying to figure out what she did or didn’t know about me. I mean, really.

  “Four minutes and fifty seconds. Forty-nine. Forty-eight. Forty-ni—I mean, forty-seven.”

  She couldn’t have looked less like Ruthie, with her pleated navy blue pants pulled up to her bellybutton, her long-sleeved buttondown shirt tucked into the tightly belted waistband. Yet something about her reminded me of my best friend when we first met. Giving me orders. Telling me what to write. (Ruthie was spending the summer in England with her dad, by the way, which is another reason why I’d consented to meet with Mrs. Miller.)

  “Thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty . . .”

  Well, what can I say? I like it when women tell me what to do. I reached for my dictionary.

  “Daniel Bradford, if you dare start an essay with ‘Webster’s Dictionary defines . . . ’ ”

  “Relax,” I set my notebook on the dictionary’s front cover. “I just need something to write on.” I grabbed my pencil. As with Ruthie, I wrote three words, then handed the page to Mrs. Miller.

  “You’ve got four minutes left.”

  “I’m done.”

  Mrs. Miller pursed her lips—not a flattering expression when you’ve left half your frosty lipstick on a bendy straw. In a slow voice she read:

  “‘It is dark.’”

  She looked up at me. Opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened her mouth again, but this time to take a drink. Then:

  “It is dark.”

  She didn’t look at the page, but at the horizon, where the sun wasn’t even close to setting. “It . . . is . . . dark.” She shook her head and handed the notebook back to me. “You know what? You’re too damn clever for your own good.”

  I bent forwards, shook my green locks in her face.

  “I’m too damn clever for my own good what?”

  Mrs. Miller tried and failed to keep from smirking.

  “You’re too damn clever for your own good, Sprout.”

  “ ’At’s my girl.”

  “Tragedy, adversity, triumph, and a little humor.”

  During the next three months, these were Mrs. Miller’s buzzwords (although sometimes they were “keywords,” and other times they were “talking points,” and occasionally they were just slurred, but I didn’t quiz her about the distinction).

  I.e.:

  Tragedy: dead mom. Duh.

  Adversity: drunk dad; poverty. Again: duh.

  Triumph: in Mrs. Miller’s terms, “articulation, education, and matriculation,” to which I was like “Huh?” But then, when I figured out she meant winning the contest, graduating high school, and going to college, I was like, Oh. Duh.

  A little humor: lest we forget, I have green hair, and everyone calls me Sprout.

  “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way,” Mrs. Miller told me sometime in early July. “These are serious issues, I don’t want you to exploit them or anything. But, you know, everything happens for a reason.”

  “I don’t think my mom died so I could write about it.”

  Mrs. Miller looked at me for a long time, then picked up my glass and headed inside.

  “This is why teenagers should be kept away from alcolol,” she said, and hiccupped.

  For the record: I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t even tipsy. In fact, I hadn’t had anything to “drink” at all. A few weeks into our lessons, Mrs. Miller developed the habit of “remembering” she’d left something in the kitchen after she came out to the patio with the pitcher of virgin margaritas (or virgin daiquiris, or virgin mojitos, which, if you’ve never had one, DON’T!). I guess she liked to think of herself as a cool teacher or a with-it kind of grownup or whatever; the trip back to the kitchen was to allow me to doctor my own drink while allowing her to maintain plausible deniability. But I liked tequila (or rum if
it was mojitos, or vodka if it was bloody marys, or cachaça if it was caipirinhas, or Pisco if it was Pisco sours) even less than the various virgin versions, so all I did was pour a jigger of whatever kind of alcohol was on offer onto the grass beside the patio. Over the course of the summer a dead spot spread there, which provided as good an illustration of the deleterious effects of drinking as anything else (this is your brain; this is your brain on cocktails). At any rate, when she came back outside with the straws or napkins or tabasco (for bloody marys) or whatever she’d pretended to forget, she would always wink at me, and I would always wink back, trying to make it look as intoxicated as possible. It didn’t cost me anything, and it made her feel like she was down with the kids.

  “And ready . . . set . . . go!”

  The school banned my graffiti’d Vans on Tuesday; on Wednesday, Ruthie drove me to the mall to buy a new pair of shoes; on Thursday she wrote “FU” in tiny letters on the heel of my right shoe, and “CK” on the heel of her left, so that when we stood next to each other it read “FU

  “And . . . stop. Stop stop stop stop stop stop stop.”

  “Huh? It can’t’ve been five minutes.”

  “It’s been fifteen seconds.”

  “Then—”

  “C’mon, Sprout.” Mrs. Miller tapped the last word on the page. The last partial word. “You know you can’t write that.”

  “Can’t write . . . ?”

  “Profanity, Sprout.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Could you tell me more about this ‘profanity’?”

  Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. “I assume you don’t need a definition. Perhaps you’d prefer an example?”

  “That would be so helpful, thank you very much.”

  Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, and their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to’ve been born out of wedlock. As for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of nicknames so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would’ve wished he’d been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a variety of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would’ve given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to the single-cell stage, forever free of the taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.