Sprout

by Dale Peck

  Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed that I’d snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.

  “Guhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh,” I said, by which I meant: “You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain.” Nervously, I climbed back into my chair, the two halves of my pencil sticking out of my ears like an arrow that had shot clean through my head.

  Mrs. Miller allowed herself a small, self-congratulatory smile. “So look. I could tell you that profanity’s just not going to fly at the contest, but you already know that. You broke the rules on purpose, to see what I would do.”

  I sort of grin-grimaced, which had the unintended effect of causing my ears to rise, which in turn had the unintended effect of driving the two halves of my broken pencil a little deeper into my auditory canals, which in turn, well, hurt. I took them out gingerly, inspected them for wax, or blood.

  “It’s easy to shock people, Sprout, as I just demonstrated.

  But you have to realize that it doesn’t always stop with the initial jolt. Sometimes the tiniest stunt can alienate people forever, which in turn causes them to lose sympathy for you, and what you’re trying to say.”

  “You’re saying keep it clean.”

  “I’m saying remember lesson one. Know your audience.”

  I thought back to the B+ Mrs. Lentman had given me on my Catcher in the Rye paper. I’d raised my grade to an A+ by writing my final paper on To Kill a Mockingbird, which, I piously informed Mrs. Lentman, had taught me, “along with countless generations of readers,” that racism is, you know, wrong. Really, really wrong.

  “You’re saying dumb it down.”

  “I’m saying know your audience. Remember that when you sit down to write your essay in that gymnasium-turned-testing hall on Jan. 4, you’re writing about yourself. Not to yourself, or to your peers, but to an audience that will be composed almost exclusively of white, middle-aged, middle-class educators with an equally conservative educational profile. The three R’s. Family values. Intelligent design. You have to find a way to make this audience understand who you are, not some imaginary group of people you might wish was reading your words. Save that for the locker room, or your Facebook page.”

  “I don’t have a computer,” I said. “And teenagers curse. It’s just something we do.”

  “You think we don’t know that, Sprout? We all know the words. And we all know everyone says them. The people we tell not to say them, and the people who tell the people not to say them. But if using them is going to cause you to lose the contest, you have to think of a creative way to let people know what’s being said without actually writing them down.”

  “What, like when a spammer puts a space in the middle of a word so the spam filter doesn’t recognize it, or an asterisk or something? F-star-C-K?”

  “I said creative. And I thought you didn’t have a computer.”

  “Duh. I use the ones at school. And how do I know where to draw the line? Like, is ‘butt’ cool?”

  Mrs. Miller rolled her eyes. “‘Butt’ is cool.”

  “Ha ha, you said butt is cool. What about ‘ass’? Is ‘ass’ cool?”

  Mrs. Miller glared at me through her glasses. “Think about it this way: if you’ve ever seen the word in a book you checked out from the Buhler High School library, it’s okay. And if you haven’t, then, well, there’s a reason why.”

  “Buhler bans books?”

  “All high schools ban books. Buhler just happens not to be ashamed of it. And Buhler’s pretty much a bellwether for the state Board of Ed.”

  “Bellwether?”

  “Look it up.”

  (I did. You should too.)

  “What about sh—”

  “Sprout!” Mrs. Miller’s voice squeaked. She tapped her watch. “We’ll set the clock at four minutes. Now go.”

  I held up my broken pencil. “I was going to say, what about showing me where you keep the pencils.”

  Mrs. Miller pulled a pen from her cleavage and handed it to me. It was shockingly warm.

  “Here,” she said, “use my ballpoint.” She put the slightest extra emphasis on the first syllable, and whatever mental circuits hadn’t been fried by her stream of profanity fizzled out for good.

  When she was seven years old, Ruth Wilcox saw Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth. Even before her parents shut the TV off she’d decided she was going to be a queen or a movie star. Regardless of which role she eventually chose, she realized she needed to be at least a foot taller than her mom—and four inches taller than her dad—so she immediately set her mind to growing. The photographic evidence was on display the first time I went to her house. At eight, Ruthie could rest her chin on top of a yardstick; at ten, she already came up to her mom’s eyebrows; at twelve, her mom stood eye to eye (well, eye to nipple I guess) with the very visible ribs of her daughter’s chest—which, despite her height, remained as flat as the Kansas

  “No no no,” Mrs. Miller cut in again. “Exposition. Background. Don’t start with a character sketch. And for God’s sake, please. No nipples. I’ll give you three minutes. Now go!”

  “Maybe if you’d stop inter—”

  “Two minutes fifty-five seconds. Go, Sprout. Go!”

  My pen quivered above the page, just as it had when Ruthie first commanded me to write. How were you supposed to compose something meaningful when someone was standing over you, stopping you every time you got started? Telling you what to write about, but not what to actually write. But that reminded me:

  “I will be your muse,” Ruthie said to me, standing on one of the stumps at the edge of the playground with her arms in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Nancy Spungeon to your Sid Vicious, Patti Smith to your Robert Mapplethorpe, Courtney Love to your Kurt Cobain.”

  At first I was like, my muse? And then, after she explained to me who everyone was, I was like, my muse?

  “I’m a little worried here. All those guys are dead.”

  “Death,” Ruthie didn’t bat an eye, “is a crucial component of fame. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Eva Peron, River Phoenix, Tupac and Biggie. Heath Ledger. Anybody worth their salt is planning for death from the moment they’re born. Otherwise what’s the point?”

  “How much is salt worth?”

  “I mean, everyone knows Princess Di, but who was that guy in the car with her? No one remembers.”

  “Dodi Al Fayed. And isn’t salt, like, cheap?”

  “I’m thinking pills,” Ruthie pirouetted on the stump. “On the eve of my fortieth birthday. Or maybe I’ll become a terrorist. Patty Hearst was so glam in the SLA. She wasn’t smart enough to get shot though, and what is she now? Just another heiress with bad plastic surgery and a tall gate around her house, dreaming of the days when life used to be fun. Like, yuck.”

  “Di’s boyfriend was named Dodi Al Fayed.”

  “Yeah? And who read his biography?”

  “And . . . time. Pen down, Sprout.”

  Mrs. Miller looked over what I’d written.

  “Getting there, getting there. You’ve certainly got good material in your friend. Although I wonder if I need to report her to Mr. Philpot.”

  The Phil-bot was the school counselor.

  “Mrs. M.!”

  “Just kidding, S.,” she said, her laugh fluttering behind her own joke like a Confederate flag on the antenna of a muddy pickup truck. “But seriously. I’m wondering where you are in all this. You kind of disappear, you know.”

  I nodded. I did know.

  “Ruthie’s like that.”

  Mrs. Miller’s nod echoed mine, although, like her laugh, it went on too long. Then, out of left field:

  “Have you ever talked to Mr. Philpot?”

  Cue smile going hard and sharp as a pizza cutter, eyes blinking faster than a gat, fingers clutching at my dictionary cover. (That’d be me, by the way, not Mrs. M.) I had the sudden urge to drop my glass on t
he patio, but I fought it off.

  “Have you ever talked to the Phil-bot?” That was me, too.

  Duh.

  “The—? Oh.” Mrs. Miller couldn’t quite suppress her smile. “I know he can be a bit stiff.”

  “He wears bowties.”

  “Effective counseling doesn’t require that he be ‘down with the kids,’ as you say.”

  “If I ever employed such a doof-butt phrase, I was doing so ironically. And the Phil-bot’s bowties have smiley faces on them.”

  “In fact”—apparently Mrs. Miller was feeling persistent today—“it’s often better when you don’t think of your counselor as a peer, so you don’t feel he’s judging you in the same way kids your age might.”

  “He has a poster in his office that says ‘Mental Health Is Mental Wealth.’ ”

  Mrs. Miller closed her mouth. Then: “He does?” (She opened it again to say that. Duh.)

  “Where the E’s should be there are old-timey gold pieces instead.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Miller grabbed the empty pitcher and stood up, wobbling slightly. “I didn’t realize it was as bad as all that.”

  As she walked away, it occurred to me that mentioning the poster was a mistake, since it gave away the fact that I’d actually been to see the Phil-bot. I guess now’s as good a time as any to tell that particular story. So:

  In ninth grade my dad got picked up for drunk-driving. (Wait, don’t act so shocked, you’re making me self-conscious.) It being his first offense, the only thing that happened was his license was suspended for three months, which lead to the hilarious spectacle of him buying a dilapidated 10-speed and riding it fifteen miles to and from the liquor store (the hilarious part was more the riding than the buying). “Son,” he said at the end of the first month, “I am the healthiest goddamn drunk in Reno County.” The day he got his license back he drove the car over the bicycle, but that’s another story. No, wait. That is the story.

  So. Kansas being Kansas, the school found out about his arrest the day after it happened (it might’ve had something to do with the announcement that ran in the “Crime Blotter” section of the newspaper). In the middle of last period there was the familiar squeak of intercom feedback followed by a distracted-sounding man’s voice, as if the speaker weren’t facing the microphone but talking to someone in the administrative office.

  “Is it on? It is? Oh.” Suddenly shouting: “ATTENTION, STUDENTS AND TEACH—what?” The voice turning away again. “I don’t have to shout? Sorry.” In an almost whispery voice: “Attention, students and teachers. Would David, pardon me, Daniel—what?” Turning away once more. “He goes by Sprout? Oh, is he the boy with the green—oh, right. Sorry.” Back to the microphone. “Would Daniel”—dramatic pause—“‘Sprout’”—audible quotation marks—“Bradford”—confused pause, as the speaker tried to remember what he’d been going to say after all those pauses—“would, um, Mr. Bradford please report to my office? Thank you.” There was a click and then, a moment later, another feedbacky squeal as the intercom came back on. “Oh, sorry, this is Mr. Philpot. The counselor.” Click.

  There were oohs and aahs as I made my way out of Señor Gutierrez’s class, and just before I reached the door Ian Abernathy said, “Well, either he’s pregnant, or this is about his dad’s glug glug glug glug glug.”

  “¡Señor Abernathy! ¡Preséntese a la oficina del director para la detención! ¡Immediatamente!”

  “¡Mi placer!” Ian said, following hard on my heels. “¿Esta cerca de la oficina del consejero, si?”

  Did I mention that Ian’s mom was from Chile? Ian’s mom

  Did I mention that Ian’s mom was from Chile? Ian’s mom was from Chile.

  “¡Muy bueno, Señor Abernathy!” Señor Gutierrez’s voice followed us into the hall, “¡Muy bueno!”

  The Phil-bot didn’t ask why it took me twenty minutes to get to his office, or why my hair was sticking out in seventy-nine different directions like maybe someone had been giving me an Indian burn, or why my T-shirt had long stretchy marks on it like maybe I’d tried to run away from someone who’d been holding on to it with one clenched fist. All he did was sit down beneath a poster that showed a big sunny glass of OJ with the caption “Orange juice glad you came to see me!” (the “Mental Health Is Mental Wealth” poster was on the wall behind me).

  “May I call you Sprout?”

  I blinked. Let me rephrase that. I felt myself blink. Have you ever noticed how once you feel yourself blink you can’t stop feeling yourself blink and everything gets all strobed out like a light is going on and off in front of your face? I think I counted about a hundred blinks before the Phil-bot finally said:

  “Ahem, Sprout?”

  I shook my head, smiled brightly.

  “That’s me!”

  This made him gasp, which I thought was a bit of an extreme reaction. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, but instead of walking away like you usually do when you say “Excuse me,” all he did was open a drawer, pull out a pad with the word FLOMAX® written on it, and pick up a VAGISIL® ballpoint pen. He clicked the pen, which was already open (thus closing it), started to write something on the pad, stopped to actually click the VAGISIL® pen open, then wrote “Daniel Bradford (Sprout)” on the top of the pad and clicked the pen closed. When he looked up at me, he seemed surprised I was still in the room. Tell you the truth, so was I.

  “I’m sorry, where were we?”

  I blinked.

  The Phil-bot spent about forty-five minutes asking me if my dad’s “recent apprehension” (which made it sound as if he’d been frightened, not arrested) made me feel

  confused?

  scared?

  sad?

  ashamed?

  angry?

  suicidal?

  homicidal?

  like having a drink?

  isolated and alone? (about which: redundant)

  exposed and vulnerable? (about which: ditto)

  etc., etc. These questions had to be answered on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is “reaction not present” and 10 is “reaction felt most intensely,” which scale I asked the Phil-bot to repeat at the end of every single question, only to respond 5.5 each time, because there is no middle number on a 1-to-10 scale, which is just, you know, stupid.

  “Okay then,” the Phil-bot said when he’d completed his suicidality checklist. He tore the top sheet off the pad, which had nothing written on it besides my name, and put it in an empty manila folder, which also had my name on it, although in this case it had been typed onto a label and stuck to the folder’s tab, which made it seem more official. He handed me a bumper sticker that said “MY SON IS ON THE HONOR ROLL,” which is kind of ironic if you think about it, since the whole reason I’d been called into his office was because my dad had gotten a DUI and lost his license.

  “If you ever need to talk . . .”

  “I need to talk every day,” I said, which put a bright, eager smile in the middle of the Phil-bot’s pudgy face. “Just like anyone else who wants to, you know, say something.”

  The Phil-bot’s jowls fell so far he looked like a basset hound in a bowtie. I almost felt sorry for him, but I told myself that’s how they get you. As he pulled open his door, he glanced at his watch and said, “I’m afraid I’ve kept you past your bus. Do you have a way to get home?”

  And there was Ian Abernathy, flirting with Mrs. Helicopter, the 125-year-old front secretary whose real name was Heliocopulate or something like that, but who had long since given up on getting anyone to say it right.

  “Don’t worry,” Ian flashed Mrs. Helicopter his best James Dean, then turned to the Phil-bot. “My mom’s coming to pick me up. We’d be honored to drive Sprout

  “Sprout? What are you writing?”

  I looked up to see Mrs. M. in the doorway with a fresh pitcher of margaritas, and I flipped the page quickly. I pantomimed jogging in place, like a runner stopped at a red light.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just keeping my muscles warm.”
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br />   Mrs. Miller’s time trials often involved leaving something out, like that exercise with the sunset she’d had me do the first day, where I couldn’t mention why the husband was sad. “Less is more,” she said. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” One week I wasn’t allowed to use any form of the verb to be, which was bad enough, but the next week I wasn’t allowed to use the letter e. Let me tell you, I came pretty close to having a drink that day. Then sometimes I had to focus on some specific thing or another. Mrs. Miller was big on all five senses, but especially smells. I knew something was up that day, because she was wearing an especially strong perfume. My dad only wears cologne when he’s trying to cover up the fact that he’s drunk, so I assumed that was the case here, until she said, “Describe everything you smell in this car.” Just to make her blush, all I wrote was: “Did you eat onions for lunch?”

  And then other times she just let me freestyle. She’d press the button on her stopwatch (did I mention she had a stopwatch? she had a stopwatch) and off I’d go:

  At twelve, Ruthie was too young for a license, but that didn’t stop her from driving wherever she wanted to go. With a little lipstick, she looked at least sixteen. With a lot of lipstick—which is what she usually wore, along with a lot of eyeliner and enough eye shadow to keep Revlon’s quarterly profits in the black—she looked like my mother, or maybe just the Demoiselles d’Avignon.

  She drove her mom’s hand-me-down BMW. The silver convertible emerged from the leafy tunnel of our driveway like a minnow jumping from a pond—Carey Pond, let’s say, in Carey Park, on the southern edge of Hutchinson, which is where she took me to smoke cigarettes (“nature’s natural appetite suppressant,” she told me, which, as far as redundancies go, verges on brilliant).