Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “See, this is what I don’t get.” She stood on a fallen elm trunk admiring her reflection in the scummy water, took a drag and held the smoke in her mouth (she hadn’t figured out how to inhale yet), then blew it out with a long sigh, peeking to see if I could tell she was faking. “This is what I don’t get,” she said again. “On the one hand, you have this incredible singer with this like incredible voice and this look no one has ever seen before, a junk-store carnival nymph whose first record sells fifteen million copies and produces four number ones. And on the other hand you have this grade-B bimbo with a voice like a parrot dying from throat cancer, who thinks wearing fishnet on your chest instead of your legs is somehow radical fashion, and whose first album, let’s face it, pretty much disappears thanks to the fact that one: it was basically gay disco, which, I mean, nothing against gays or disco but gay plus disco equals, you know, yuck, and two: the videos featured routines that were half spastic imitations of modern dance and half crotch-grabbing. And so whatever, this is what I don’t get: what I don’t get is, why is it that the first girl’s career ends up tanking and the second girl goes on to become the biggest-selling female recording artist in history, picking up a fake English accent, a Kabbalah addiction, and a Malawian orphan along the way? I mean, I don’t get that. Do you?”

  “Your cigarette went out.” (Well, what would you have said?)

  “Madonna,” Ruth Wilcox said. “Duh. And Cyndi Lauper. I thought you were from New York City.”

  “I’m from Long Island, which, culturally speaking, is about as far from New York City as Malawi. And your cigarette really did go out.”

  “Oh crap,” Ruthie said, except she didn’t say “crap” but the more common, albeit unprintable (in this context) synonym that she’d been carving into her desk the day I first saw her. (She’d carved the “crap” into my desk too, the year before. “Crap, darn, fudge. They’re all so sixth-grade. Son of a biscuiteater. What self-respecting preteen can say that with a straight face?”) Now, after a couple of failed attempts to light her cigarette (which is very hard to do if you won’t inhale), she threw it into the pond. I thought she’d finally accepted the fact that cigarette smoking is pretty much the grossest thing ever, but instead she nodded toward something behind me. I turned and saw a twentysomething guy walking down the looping path that bounds Carey Park and staring at us with that proprietary look of accusation that adults love to brandish at anyone under the age of eighteen. As soon as he was gone, Ruthie said,

  “We’d better go. Just in case.”

  “In case what? He throws a phone at us?”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. In case . . . ?”

  “My mom gets back from pilates at four. I better drive you home.”

  And so ended the first of Ruthie’s unfathomable soliloquies, veered into and away from with all the predictability of a rabid skunk trying to cross a highway (I saw it once: trust me, the ending ain’t pretty). Here’s another:

  “I’m named for a character in a book. I tried to read it but it was boring. It was turned into a movie and I tried to watch that, but it was boring too. So I figure maybe I should change my name. What do you think of Desireh?”

  And another:

  “I’m not anorexic. Anorexics have a distorted body image. I know I’m too thin. You have to be too thin if you want to make it in L.A. Besides, I eat eight hundred calories a day, which is considered a lot for people in places like Malawi. What if I called myself something British, like Fenella, or Hermione?”

  And:

  “You know how when some people get a piece of bubble wrap in their hands they have to twist it till it pops? Yeah, I’m not one of those people. I have better things to do with my time. Ruby? But if I called myself Ruby I’d have to dye my hair red, and then, well, Ruby and Sprout, that’d be too much.”

  But my favorite had to be this one:

  “Why is it that the closest word in English that rhymes with anarchy is menarche?”

  “Monarchy—”

  “Menarche.” When I just stared at her blankly, she said, “You walk around clutching a dictionary to your stomach like a cheerleader trying to cover up the gift the captain of the football team gave her, look it up. Oh hell. Why don’t I just give in and call myself Britney?”

  Meanwhile, school:

  On Long Island, I’d been anonymous. Just one of 2,567 students, not at the top of the heap, not at the bottom. Just a brown-haired piece of the middle. Take me out and nothing would collapse. No one would notice.

  But in Kansas, I was marked out. The new kid. The stranger. The boy with the weird accent. The boy with the weird dad, and no mom. From the moment Madison Pagels tripped me as I walked down the aisle of the school bus at 7:07 A.M. to the moment Madison’s best friend Chelsea Monroe tripped me as I walked up the aisle at 3:56 P.M., and all the spitballs, hair-pulling, snickers, catcalls, “Kick me” notes, and fistfights in between, the school day pretty much seemed to revolve around me. After one rock-solid week of this, I decided that if there had to be a target on my head, I’d paint it there myself.

  When Ruthie honked in the driveway (“Daniel, your friend’s mom is here!”) I found my dad planting some vines to fill in a patchy spot in the back of the house, and asked him for some cash.

  “How much do you need?”

  “How about a hundred?”

  “How ’bout twenty?”

  “How ’bout fifty?”

  “How ’bout twenty?”

  “How ’bout twenty-five?”

  “How ’bout twenty?”

  “Really, I just need ten.”

  “Well, here’s twenty. If you go by Wal-Mart, buy a couple of plates. You seem to’ve broken them all.”

  “Gosh, thanks, Dad. That’s more than I asked for. You’re the best.”

  A few days earlier, my dad had shown up on the lawn of some house in Hutch in the middle of the night and interrogated it for six hours—Why did you kill my wife? Why did you destroy my life? Why are you the cause of so much strife?—which made more sense when Ruthie drove me by the house and I saw that it was a one-story ranch made out of pale brown bricks topped by asphalt shingles. Our house on Long Island had been made of pale brown bricks. Its asphalt-shingled single story had barely made an impression against the sky. As I looked at its Kansas doppelganger, I vowed that I would be more than a single story. I would sprout a second story, a third if I wanted, a fourth. I would grow like a beanstalk or a skyscraper. Like the Tower of Babel, I would tell my stories all the way to heaven.

  I looked over at the colored streaks in Ruthie’s hair.

  “Where’d you get your dye?”

  “Duh. This is Hutch. Wal-Mart.”

  “Let’s go there. I need to buy some plates.”

  On Monday, when I walked down the aisle of the bus, I was greeted by silence, followed by titters. Then more silence. Then more titters. And then a shockingly long wave of silence, so complete that only the squeaking springs of the bus could be heard, and then scattered snorts that could’ve been backfires.

  And then silence.

  Blessed, blessed silence.

  Of course, not everything goes according to plan. What I mean is, when I walked into Wal-Mart, I meant to buy red dye. Aggressive, but also clownlike. The color of anger, but also love. But my hand, or my unconscious, betrayed me. Who knows? Maybe it was just my dad’s vines.

  What I mean is, I reached for the red bottle, but I grabbed the green instead.

  I put my pen down. I was pretty sure Mrs. Miller should’ve told me to stop about an hour ago, and I looked up to find her dozing in her chair. I took the margarita glasses and pitcher in the kitchen and washed them, filched a coffee cup from the cabinet and dropped it in the cargo pocket of my shorts, then woke her. I drove her car back to my house while she sat in the passenger seat and read over what I’d written, yawning occasionally, although I hoped this had more to do with the alcohol than my story. When she finished she looked up blearily at my head. N
odded one of those A-ha! nods; then:

  “And ‘Sprout’?”

  From the corner of my eye I saw her curl the index fingers of her hands towards each other, like one earthworm popping up out of the ground and saying “Hi!” to another. “How you doin’? I’m an earthworm! Are you an earthworm too? Great!” If I’d felt confident enough in my driving skills to look away from the road, I probly would’ve realized she was just making quotation marks like she had at the beginning of summer (“Would you like a ‘drink’?”) but what can I tell you? I’m an even worse driver than Mrs. Miller.

  “Sprout?” she said again. “Still there?”

  I shook myself. “Ian.”

  “Abernathy?”

  “‘Der, hey, Sprout!’ ”

  Mrs. M. was silent for a long time. So long that I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again.

  “That’s it?” she said finally. “‘Der, hey, Sprout’?”

  “Like I said, I wanted Lawnboy.” I shrugged. “You were only married to Mr. Miller for a year. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to stick.”

  Mrs. Miller laughed quietly. “You should write that one down.” She tapped the notebook in her lap. “You should write it all down,” as if maybe the words in her hand weren’t writing. “This is good stuff, Daniel. It’s all good. Now all we have to do is whittle it down to six pages.”

  “You said eight—”

  “Eight tops. And we’ll have a winner on our hands.”

  “Yeah, about that.”

  My voice must have sounded tense, because Mrs. Miller turned in her seat. I suppose this is a good time to mention that it was the end of summer, and she’d already voiced worries about what was going to happen when school started the week after next. (“That Mrs. Whittaker. She could undo everything we’ve worked on with a single one of her compare-‘n’-contrast essays.”)

  “Ye-es?” She broke the word in half like a pencil snapping between nervous fingers. Her eyes bored into the side of my head, as if she wanted to read my thoughts before I spoke them. I kept my own eyes on the road, but her stare was so hot it was like sitting too close to an open fire.

  “I’m thinking I don’t want to write about moving from Long Island. My mom, my dad, all that. New school, new friends blah blah blah blah.” I tried to keep my voice light, but it squeaked on the last blah. Note to self: next time stop at three blahs.

  “Look, Daniel—”

  “It’s Sprout, Mrs. Miller. Really. Sprout.”

  “I’m sorry, Spro—”

  “And if I do do this thing,” I said, talking over her, “I want to write about being gay.”

  There was a long silence, and then I giggled.

  “I said do-do.”

  Rural gay boy, party of one

  Betcha didn’t see that coming, did ya? Neither did Mrs. Miller, and she actually knows me. Anyway, you know this much: being gay isn’t my secret.

  Bet you forgot about the secret too, didn’t you?

  Don’t worry. I won’t.

  “You’re . . . ?” Mrs. Miller didn’t seem to know any hand gestures that would indicate homosexuality. I could’ve shown her a few, but I didn’t think it would help the situation, and besides, I had my hands glued to the wheel in the approved 10-2 position.

  “Gay.”

  “Gay?” She repeated the word as if she’d never said it before, and who knows, maybe she hadn’t. She rubbed her head as if maybe the word had given her a headache, rather than the mojitoritas (she’d kind of combined two different recipes that day).

  “Yup,” I said. “Gay. Gay gay gay.”

  My voice squeaked on the fourth gay.

  A year earlier, when my dad found a couple of gay sites in the cache of Internet Explorer, he threw my dictionary into our PC. I think he thought I’d learned how to be gay from the web, although the truth is I’d only looked at those kinds of sites after I was pretty sure about myself, and then only once or twice, or maybe three or four times (hey, I had to be sure). The fact is, they kind of weirded me out. The old guys were so muscly they looked more like statues than people, whereas the kids around my age were showing off their bodies with leering expressions that made me want to put on padded coveralls and zip myself into a sleeping bag. The only problem was, once I was in the sleeping bag, all I could think about was their bodies.

  After my dad broke the computer—and knocked back a couple of shots—he went for a walk in the woods, leaving me to pry the dictionary out of the broken monitor and vacuum up the glass. The cover had half ripped away from the pages but it was otherwise okay. Score one for paper in the ongoing battle between books and computers.

  Computer. One who computes.

  What can I say, it was an old dictionary.

  By the time he came back I was learning the definition of a nice set of p-words. Produce, profane, profess. It wasn’t as exciting as the web, but you make do with what you have.

  My dad wavered in the doorway like a tree in a heavy wind, an image reinforced by a couple of vines he’d dug up and curled around his upper body like a beauty queen’s sash. Unfortunately for him, the vines were itch ivy—he never could remember what they looked like—which meant he was going to suffer more than I was.

  “I should have seen it coming. Absent mother, poor role model for a father. I apologize, son. I should have found another maternal figure for you.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be too much mothering that made you gay.”

  My dad’s eyes crossed as he tried to figure this out, and I thought he was going to fall down. The leaves shimmered as he shook, and he scratched at his neck. Finally he blinked hard, twice, and said,

  “Whatever. Toss me a beer, would you?”

  I looked at the dictionary, the TV, back at him. “That’s it? A beer?”

  “Oh, okay, two.”

  “Dad.”

  He didn’t meet my eyes. “Hey. You’re a fag. I’m a drunk. Nobody’s perfect.” The leaves shook as he scratched the first red speck of an itch-ivy rash. “That was mean. You’re gay. I’m an alcoholic. Now toss me a beer so I can go get these in the ground.”

  I aimed for my dad’s head, but you know drunks: they can’t jerk the wheel of their car to avoid hitting a four-year-old running into the street, but they never drop a cold one.

  Just before he went outside, my dad said, “Just promise me you won’t tell anyone. I don’t want to have to identify my son at the morgue.”

  “Does anyone else know . . . ?” Again Mrs. Miller’s voice trailed off.

  “That I’m gay?”

  “That you’re gay,” she repeated, or, I dunno, echoed, since she didn’t really repeat what I said. Paraphrased.

  I wasn’t forcing Mrs. Miller to say it just to be mean, by the way. The more you say something, the less strange it seems. The first time Mrs. Miller said the word “gay,” it sounded like she was describing, I dunno, a new species of elephant, with six legs and pink and green polka dots, which for some reason was window shopping on Main Street. By the second or third time she could’ve been describing something much less weird, a deer with only one antler growing out the side of its head, say, or a high school writing coach who likes to get a little toasted while conducting time trials with her best-and-brightest.

  “Sprout? You’re kind of drifting over the center line.”

  I nudged the wheel to the right.

  “Ruthie knows. And my dad.”

  “Ruthie.” Mrs. Miller nodded. “Your dad. Mr. Sprout.” She forced a laugh. “And, um . . . ?” There was that ellipsis again, the vague hand gesture.

  “Ye-es?”

  “Well, uh. I mean, have you, you know? Acted on your, um, feelings?”

  Think about that for a minute. Do you honestly believe Mrs. M. would ever ask, oh, let’s say Ian Abernathy, if he was having sex? So, Ian, I hear you’ve joined the ranks of card-carrying heterosexuals. Gotten any action yet? Yeah, me neither. So, in keeping with my “Ask a stupid question” philosophy, all I did was lo
ok over and run a hand through my dark green hair.

  “Ruthie’s the actress, Mrs. M.”

  “Eyes front, Sprout.” Mrs. Miller summoned the kind of instant authority that only someone who’s been administering pop quizzes for the past fifteen years can muster. “Both hands on the wheel.” I turned back to the road and waited for her to say something else, but all she did was repeat my name. “Sprout,” she said. Only this time it came out the way she’d said gay. Like the word had lost all meaning. “Sprout Sprout Sprout.” She looked down at the pages in her hand, then pushed them away as if they, too, had lost meaning. Lost worth. After a moment, though, she took one of those deep calming breaths and twisted in her seat to face me.

  “Look, Sprout, I know where you’re coming from. You see your friends dating and engaging in extracurricular activities my colleagues and I pretend we don’t know about, and you want some of that for yourself.”

  My mind flashed on Stacy McTaverty and Troy Bellows. Troy’s locker was close to mine, so I was treated several times a day to the sight of his tongue probing Stacy’s mouth, apparently in search of a lost piece of gum or, I dunno, her tonsils, while his hands squeezed her breasts so tightly you’d’ve thought it was a football he was about to throw down a field. I didn’t want anything like that.

  “Love is a special experience,” Mrs. Miller continued, “and everyone deserves their shot at it.”

  I knew Mrs. Miller didn’t think that what was going on between Troy and Stacy had anything to do with love, but all I said was, “Are we talking about coming out at school, or writing about it?”

  Long, frustrated sigh; vague hand gesture. Then: “I just don’t want you to get sidetracked, Sprout. Kids who come out in school have a hard time. They get singled out. Their whole life becomes about being gay. By keeping your private life to yourself you can focus on your future. Your grades, getting into a good college, building a career. And this contest is part of that. I would hate to see you overlooked because some of the more conservative judges were incapable of seeing past your choice of subject matter to your talent.” And then, as if I’d protested, she threw in, “This is Kansas, Sprout. Kansas.”