Sprout

by Dale Peck

  Did I mention that I was shirtless? I was shirtless, so the dye wouldn’t get on my shirt. Duh.

  “It’s the water. Brrr.”

  Ruthie pinched the left one, and I yelped and did my best not to jerk out of the sink. By now she was slathering green dye on my head, and it would’ve gone everywhere. Somehow I had the feeling she’d planned it that way. I crossed an arm over my chest like a virgin guarding her modesty.

  “So, uh, why the sudden interest in Ian Abernathy?”

  “Oh nothing. It’s just that I think I need to sleep with him.”

  The dye in my hair felt like a thousand-pound weight when all I wanted to do was look up. I turned my head, squinted one eye open. “You think you need to . . . ?”

  Ruthie nodded. “Sleep with Ian Abernathy.” Like all she was telling me was who she would vote for, if she was old enough to vote.

  She finally slipped the showercap over my gloopy hair and I was able to stand. A line of cold water ran down my spine, but that wasn’t why I shivered.

  “Ian Abernathy?”

  “I’m sixteen, Sprout. It’s time I joined the club.”

  “Um, what club would that be?”

  “Um, the I’m-not-a-virgin-anymore-and-thank-the-god -damned-Lord club?”

  I shrugged. “What about France? Last year?”

  Ruthie smiled, one-quarter guilty, three-quarters pleased. “I kind of exaggerated that whole thing a little bit. Right before Jean-Claude and I could’ve, you know, done it, it occurred to me that he was probably uncircumcised, and I was afraid I might laugh or, I don’t know, puke.”

  (In fact, I’d pretty much figured out Ruthie was lying about losing her virginity one day when we were fooling around with a box of condoms we’d found in her mom’s bedside table. Ruthie tried to put one on a banana—hey, it seemed funny at the time—but she put it on inside out, and then couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t unroll.)

  “Okay, fine,” I said now. “But: why Ian?”

  “Look, I know he’s got this thing with always picking on you and getting you detention and stuff, but come on. You must’ve clocked by now that he’s smokin’ hot.”

  Thank God my head was covered in green dye. Ruthie probly couldn’t see my blush, although my cheeks felt so hot I was surprised the water didn’t steam off them.

  “But you just said he’s gross.”

  “I meant his personality, what he stands for, all that Nazi jock stuff. I mean whatever. I don’t want to have his babies. I just want to . . .” It was Ruthie’s turn to shrug.

  “Join the club.”

  “Look, when I crack my first VH1 hot list—you know, the top twenty-five under twenty-five, the twenty-five thinnest celebs, whatever—I want them to flash a grainy image of Ian’s yearbook photo across the screen so that everyone at home says, ‘Damn, he was hot, I wonder what he’s doing now?’ when they all know he’s probly pumping gas or flipping burgers or sitting on a tractor with his love handles spilling over his Wrangler’s. My fans—”

  Ruthie broke off when she saw the dubious look on my face. Since I didn’t study my expressions in a mirror the way she did, I achieved this effect by pointing both index fingers at my face and saying, “This is me, looking dubious.”

  “Whatever, Sprout. This is Buhler. Choices are limited.”

  “You’re telling me? At least you have a choice. Ever since my dad broke my computer, I don’t even have the internet at home, let alone a real live—”

  I stopped. A real live what? Gay friend? Boyfriend? What was I looking for?

  Ruthie’s eyes went wide with sympathy. “Oh, I know, baby, you’re horny too. Hell, I’ve got more than a decade before I reach my sexual peak but you’re practically at the summit right now.” She touched my knee sympathetically. “I told you, you need to try that bar down on east Sherman. My mom’s hairdresser said it’s totally gay on Wednesday nights. Mostly gay. Well, he’s there anyway.”

  “Your mom’s hairdresser is like forty!”

  “He keeps himself in good shape though.”

  “Ugh! I’m going to puke!”

  “Whatever,” Ruthie said, “I don’t get why you don’t just come out at school. It’s not like everyone doesn’t know already.”

  “Why? Did you write it on the bathroom wall or something?”

  Ruthie rolled her eyes. “Total guy thing. Girls just smoke in the bathroom. But I don’t need to tell anyone. People, you know, know.”

  “Then why do I, you know, need to tell them?”

  “I don’t know. Cuz maybe you’ll inspire someone who’s not quite as clued into himself as you are. Maybe Jack Wallace—”

  “Ew!”

  “—or Campbell Dillon—”

  “Double-ew!”

  “Or, whatever, someone. You can’t be the only gay at Buhler. I mean, doesn’t the captain of one of the sports teams always turn out to be a big ’mo? Hell, look how much time Ian spends on his hair. I would totally not be shocked if he turned up at our five-year reunion with a cute Puerto Rican boyfriend named Diego or Amir or something.”

  “Okay, one: gay is an adjective, not a noun. Two, I thought we agreed to send a video of ourselves to every high school reunion until we could afford to charter a helicopter like Sandy Frink in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion. And three, Amir is an Arabic name, not Spanish. Oh, and four—”

  “And four, don’t change the subject. You need to come out at school, Sprout. You’re not gonna get laid, let alone find a boyfriend, until you do.”

  Suddenly all those things Mrs. Miller said to me last summer when I told her I wanted to write about being gay came back to me. I’d pretty much rolled over on the whole subject, and I realized now that I hadn’t put up too much of a fight because on some level I must’ve agreed with her. I mean, when you thought about it, I was already doing what she advised, wasn’t I? Taking the easy road? The high road even? By which I mean: keeping the focus on my green hair (and the brain underneath it) rather than on areas a bit lower down my body, if you know what I mean.

  “Look,” I told Ruthie now, “I don’t want to be that guy, okay? The gay guy. The token homosexual. The school fag. I don’t want to have to try out for every stupid school musical, wear pink triangle pins, and start a letter-writing campaign to bring my boyfriend to the prom. I just want to be me.”

  “Okay, my turn to count. One: you can’t sing. Two: pink triangle pins are so over. And three: you’ve gotta have a boyfriend before you start worrying about bringing him to the prom.”

  “Ruthie!”

  “Fine, fine. We should rinse anyway.” She shooed me towards the sink. There was a long pause and somehow I knew what she was going to say before she said it. “What about—”

  “Don’t even.”

  A jet of water blasted against my head.

  “Yeah no, I guess that’s crazy.” She adjusted the temperature, cooling it slightly, as if she knew my scalp was still tingling from the extra-long bleach treatment. “Still, I’d be, you know, curious. To see how it all works.”

  “Yeah? Then why don’t you go down there?”

  What Ruthie was talking about (in case you’re curious) was Carey Park. (See also pages 63 and 64, and Ruthie’s soliloquy on Madonna v. Cyndi Lauper.) You might remember that a man had walked by towards the end of Ruthie’s monologue, and she’d chucked her cigarette in the pond and driven us home. At first I thought it was because she was afraid of getting busted for smoking, but in fact it was less paranoid than that. Well, maybe not less paranoid, but at least more serious: about six months before I moved to Hutch, the dad of one of the kids in eighth grade had been picked up in Carey Park for “loitering with intent.” Apparently Carey Park was where Hutchinson homosexuals went to meet each other and, well, do the things homosexuals do when they meet each other. In parks. Apparently the dad of the kid in eighth grade had approached some guy who was only nineteen (the dad was forty-seven) and, while this is not illegal, it’s still pretty ick, and gave rise t
o a bunch of rumors about predators and that sort of stuff. Even though none of those rumors were ever proven, twelve-year-old Ruthie was still creeped out enough to want to jet. But after I told her I was gay she did a complete about-face, and started pestering me to hang out in the park and find out if there was any truth to all the stories. I was like, no thanks. I’d just as soon remain sexless as get it on with someone old enough to be my dad. Ruthie had argued that if there were old guys looking for young guys then that meant that there had to be young guys, right? I could just hook up with one of them? The scary thing about this was that her argument made some kind of sense—make no mistake, Ruthie Wilcox could be diabolically clever when she wanted to be. But still. Trolling a park in search of a kid who was so desperate to get his rocks off that he’d risk being picked up by a middle-aged pedophile (or, for that matter, a cop) was not how I wanted to take the next step on my sexual adventure. Not that Ruthie knew anything about the first step, of course. But I was pretty sure that even if I hadn’t fooled around with Ian I still wouldn’t be horny enough to work Carey Park.

  While all this was going through my head, Ruthie was rinsing my hair. She pressed the strands between her index and middle finger, expertly squeegeeing out the excess dye without tugging at the roots. I closed my eyes, let out a long, tired sigh. Talking to Ruthie could be so exhausting. If only she could just rinse my hair forever, we’d get along great.

  In fact, she continued to run her fingers through my hair for so long that I risked opening one eye. The water running into the sink was clear, which meant that she’d drifted off, and I knew she was imagining what it would be like to have sex with Ian. Which is kind of ironic when you think about it, since I was doing the same thing.

  I closed my eye again and smiled to myself, wondering what Ruthie would think if she knew I’d beaten her to Ian Abernathy. It was nice to have one thing to myself. Not just something she didn’t have, but something she didn’t even know about.

  Turns out I was wrong about that.

  On both points.

  Like that girl in the pink coat in Schindler’s List

  At BHS the lunch period is spread out over the course of seventy-five minutes. Classes come in at ten-minute intervals and get thirty-five minutes to eat, nap, study, make out, play video games or band together in marauding packs to pick off the glasses-wearing outcasts and top-button-buttoned pariahs and overly-afflicted-by-acne future internet millionaires. In addition to not having a single class together, it turned out that by some cruel twist of fate Ruthie went in on the very first shift of this byzantine schedule and I went in on the last. Normally we spent the first week of school lunches deciding which of the new freshmen were going to lose their virginity to upperclassmen and which of the seniors were going to be pregnant by graduation. On the first Monday of our junior year, however, our entire lunchtime interaction consisted of her warning me to avoid the “hamburger”; on Tuesday, she advised me not to sit anywhere near the northwest corner of the cafeteria, where one of the Special Ed kids had puked up the twenty-three Jell-o cups that the football team had been “kind” enough to give him; and on Wednesday all we had time to do was link pinks as we passed each other in the lunch line.

  “I’ll never let go, Jack,” she solemnly intoned, “I promise!”

  “A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets,” I responded, and then, Titanic style, we sank into the stygian depths of the rest of the school day.

  And now, how can I say this so I don’t come off sounding totally disloyal? The plain truth was, I was kind of glad. Well, not glad, but relieved. I’d enjoyed spending July and August with my notebook and pen, being my own muse instead of hers, which is pretty much impossible anyway. After four years of churning out monologues, performance pieces, and soliloquies for Ruthie to perform for youtube videos or school talent shows or regional beauty pageants (Ruthie had been last year’s runner-up in the Miss Reno County pageant, which was pretty amazing given that she wore an evening gown for the swimsuit competition, and a swimsuit for the evening gown competition) the only thing I’d ever written that met with her approval were those first three words. “Oh my God,” she said whenever I showed her anything else, “you make me sound so self-involved!” Ruthie’d been right when she told me all the way back in seventh grade that she’d inspire me: there were a lot of things I wanted to write about her. Just not a lot I wanted to write for her. And, once that was stripped away, our relationship mostly consisted of her doing my hair, or me following her around the mall while she shopped with her mother’s credit card.

  Not that eating lunch alone was so much fun either. For three days I put up with people beaning me with peas, carrots, cauliflower and the occasional soggy, ketchup-dipped French fry (a true mark of disdain, since French fries are to high school what cigarettes are to prison). On Thursday, I decided that if my peers were going to throw things at me, I might as well get to throw back, by which I mean that the guys usually got a game of touch football going in the gym during lunch, and I decided—what the hey—to join in. I got in line to be picked, purely as a formality, of course, since on the rare occasions I did something like this (usually against my will) I was always picked last. Still, it was kind of fun, in an anthropological way if nothing else, to see Ian Abernathy and Troy Bellows try to balance the fact that they didn’t want me on their respective teams with the fact that they didn’t want me on the other team because I was the fastest kid in school. And of course it was a completely different kind of fun to watch Ian not watch me, which I have to admit he was a master at. Just lifted his Yankees cap and pushed his unruly mop of dark brown hair off his forehead and wedged it back on (in the process giving anyone who wanted to look a glimpse of the green stains that ringed the inside of the cap), then pulled a coin from his pocket and flicked it a good twenty feet in the air.

  “You call it, Troy-boy. You’re gonna need all the help you can get.”

  Troy’s voice cracked when he called tails, which elicited a snicker from Paul “Beanpole” Overholser. Troy blushed, but before he could say something another voice cut him off.

  “Language, Mr. Bellows.”

  I whipped around. Mrs. Miller was just taking a seat on the bleachers. I didn’t know if she was gym monitor that afternoon, or if she just—

  “Hello, Sprout. May I speak to you a moment?”

  Well, that answered that one.

  There was a faint thwick and then a louder sptt as Ian caught the coin and slapped it on the back of his hand.

  “Heads.”

  “Sprout?”

  “Yeah, um, I don’t want to lose my place. I might end up—” I did a quick count to see if there was an odd or even number of players “—on Ian’s, um, team.”

  At the mention of Ian’s name, Mrs. Miller’s eyebrows raised dramatically, and she blinked rapidly. My blush was the red-rose version of Troy’s carnation pink, and I glanced in Ian’s direction to see if he’d noticed. An expression flickered over his face so quickly that I couldn’t tell what it was. Fear? Hatred? A muscle spasm? But all he said was:

  “Don’t worry, Brussels. I’ll save a spot for you. Railsback, get your ass over here.”

  “Detention, Mr. Abernathy,” Mrs. Miller said, all traces of summer-friendliness squashed beneath her formidable teacherly authority. “Sprout? You don’t want me to give you detention with Ian, do you?”

  After a brief moment in which the world stopped turning on its axis, the gym floor split open and a demon from the underworld reached one long tentacle out and pulled me down into the depths of hell, I realized Ian hadn’t heard what she’d said.

  Sighing half in relief, half in consternation, I shuffled over to her.

  “Mpmf?”

  Mrs. Miller’s eyelids were still twitching. I wasn’t sure if this was because of what I’d said, or because of the cinnamony eye shadow she’d applied so heavily that it dusted the inside of her glasses with an iridescent powder. It was the first time I’d seen her since she start
ed dating my dad, and I noticed that, in addition to the new eye shadow, her bangs hadn’t been tortured quite so much with the curling iron either. Most frightening of all, her blouse, usually strapped in by a belt that made her stomach pooch out on either side, was casually—insouciantly even, positively brazenly—untucked.

  Ah, synonyms.

  “I just spoke to Principal Stickley. In light of your excellent grades, not to mention your role as the school’s representative in the State Essay Contest, he’s agreed to allow you to take senior English with me, instead of Mrs. Whittaker’s more, shall we say, remedial class.”

  Like most English teachers, Mrs. Miller has a kind of, you know, English teacher way of talking. However, the strategic deployment of not one, not two, but three dependent clauses told me she’d rehearsed this sentence before she said it, right down to that seemingly spontaneous “shall we say, remedial” at Mrs. Whittaker’s expense.

  “But what’m I gonna do next year? Take your class all over again?”

  A grin curled up one side of Mrs. Miller’s lips, whose usual layer of cracked pink lipstick had been replaced with a subtler yet—God, it kills me even to write this—more sensual sheen of gloss. “Do you really think you can learn everything I have to teach in one year? Oh, don’t worry,” she said before I could answer, “we’ll arrange an independent study for your senior year, possibly even let you take a class at JuCo for college credit.”

  I closed my mouth. That would be cool. But the past Saturday—the day before Ruthie got back from England—I’d spent my allotted day with the car driving all around town, until eventually, totally by accident, completely by chance, I ended up driving by Mrs. Miller’s house, where I’d seen my writing coach and my dad dancing arm in arm in her too-many-shades-of-yellow living room, which might as well have been the interior of the sun, given the strangeness of what was happening inside it. The idea of spending an hour a day with the woman who waltzed to Patsy Cline with my dad was just too much.