Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “What strange creature lumbers forth from the infernal blackness, its external appearance human, but unspeakable desires lurking deep within its breast?”

  “Cut it out, Daniel.” Ty stepped back as I stepped towards him. “You get that crap on me and I’ll kick your ass.”

  I dropped my hands.

  “Sorry to spoil the tea party, Mary Jane. Just give me a moment to spread my tablecloth and then we’ll have some poppy seed muffins with black currant jam.”

  Ty cursed. It wasn’t the word, wasn’t even the accompanying finger gesture, which was reflexive more than angry. It was the look on his face. As if I was a ghost and he wished I was the real thing, or that I’d stayed dead.

  “Dude. What’s up?”

  Ty turned, started walking away. “Nothin’.”

  By now I knew that when Ty started dropping his g’s some-thin’ was up. Ty hated rednecks, and hated sounding like one even more.

  “Ty!” My voice was sharper than I’d intended. I reached out for him, saw my mud-encrusted hand and pulled back just in time. “Hey. It’s me. It’s Daniel.”

  Ty took three more steps, then dropped to his knees as though the great puppeteer in the sky had released his strings. He cursed again, his voice wet with that clot of mucus that collects at the back of your throat when you’re swallowing back tears.

  I wanted to touch him on the shoulder, or maybe trace the line of his ear or the hairline at the nape of his neck, but my hands were covered with mud, and anyway boys don’t touch each other like that. But I told myself it was just the mud.

  “My brother,” Ty said.

  I started slightly. For a moment I’d thought he meant me. I thought he was calling me his brother.

  “L.D.?” I said, even though I knew he didn’t mean L.D.

  “No.” Ty made a blustery, whinnying sound, and I knew he was fighting with all his might not to cry. “No. Not L.D.”

  “Holly.”

  He nodded. “Holly.”

  Suddenly I had one of those 1 + 1 = 2 flashes. I remembered what had set Ty off in the first place, which was my comment about our hole being like an open grave, and I remembered his didn’t not doesn’t of our first day in the forest, and then I turned and looked back at the muddy bog. I stared at it for a long time, then looked down at my hands, my feet, my knees.

  “Aw, crap,” I said, and began flinging and scraping the mud off my skin as well as I could. “Crap crap crap. Here,” I said to Ty. “Really? Here?”

  Ty nodded miserably. When it seemed like I’d gotten all the mud off that I could without a fire hose, I walked in front of him and sat down.

  “Here.”

  Ty’s cheeks were red and puffy. “I dunno why I’m getting so worked up. It was a long time ago.”

  “He was your brother.” I turned to the mud again. “Quicksand?”

  Ty let out a little blubbery laugh. “Nah, no quicksand.” He pointed to a line on the surrounding hills. Tufts of grass fell over an eroded patch of bare dry soil like bangs combed forwards to cover a receding hairline. Ty’s arm traced a wide circle around us, and as it traveled I could see the area fill up with water, making a small pond.

  “In wet years that’s how high the water gets. It was our swimming hole.”

  The line Ty pointed out was three, maybe four feet above the valley floor. The pond would’ve been smaller than our clearing, as shallow as a hot tub. Shallow enough that I felt compelled to ask:

  “He . . . drowned?”

  Ty nodded his head, then shook it. Then nodded again. “Oh, man. I’ve never said this out loud before. Man oh man.”

  It took all my strength not to put my dirty hand on his knee.

  “It’s okay. If you tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “It didn’t make any sense.” Ty pointed at the waterline again. “It wasn’t but three, four feet deep.”

  “How—”

  “Tall was he? ’Bout, four, five feet.”

  “—old was he?”

  Ty turned from the mud and looked at me for a moment. He shook his head, let his eyes fall.

  “Ty?”

  Before I knew what was happening Ty had thrown his face in my muddy lap and his sobs echoed eerily in the wet valley.

  “He was my twin, Daniel! He was my twin brother, and he drowned himself and left me all alone!”

  He was younger by eighty-two minutes. That’s a long time between twins. He didn’t want to come out, Ty said. The doctor had to go in and get him.

  Technically they were identical but you’d’ve never known it. Holly was always smaller than Ty, shyer. Hid behind his bigger brother, did whatever he said. He took it hardest of all four children when their mom disappeared—they were only seven, but Holly always acted as though Ty knew something he didn’t. Knew where their mom had gone, when she was coming back, or when they’d escape their dad’s house to join her. As the years passed and she didn’t come back or send for them he stopped talking about her, but Ty knew he thought about her all the time. He liked to draw, but their dad thought drawing was sinful, so he drew in the dirt. He drew stick figures, with a stick, a woman with a boy on either hand, and afterwards he’d rub them out with his bare feet. When he forgot to wash his feet before he went in the house his dad would whip the blackened soles with an electrical cord.

  Ty said Holly always forgot to wash his feet.

  By the time he was eleven, he’d become a recluse. Ty had to get him out of bed in the morning, make him shower, dress, eat. Nothing caught his brother’s attention, roused him from his stupor, not even the threat of a whipping. He just stood there and stared at Mr. Petit as if willing him to do the thing they both really wanted him to do. But it’s no fun hitting someone if it doesn’t make him suffer, so their dad took to ignoring Holly instead. He’d pass plates of food over Holly’s head at the table, hand out playing card–sized Bible verses to L.D., June, Ty, but leave a blank card in front of Holly. Holly didn’t protest, didn’t even seem to notice. He used his thumbnail to etch stick figures of a woman and two boys into the blank laminated cards and stare at his empty plate in silence unless Ty put some food on it, put a fork in his hand, said, “Eat.” Which is why, Ty said, he didn’t notice Holly wasn’t in bed that night.

  “He put clothes under the sheets. You know, like a person. He even—” Ty moved his hands through the air, traced a shape. When I didn’t understand he showed me with his body. Curled up on the ground in a fetal position with his knees only inches from his snuffling nose, caked with dirty mucus. “Like a baby,” Ty said, “cuz that was how he slept.”

  Ty said: “No one realized he was gone till the next morning.”

  “We didn’t find him till the day after that,” Ty said.

  “He was on his back,” Ty told me. “On the water, on his back. Everyone said it was like he’d gone to sleep on the bottom of the pond and floated to the surface. But I told them he didn’t sleep on his back. He slept on his side, like a baby.”

  Ty drew a stick figure in the ground beside him, arms and legs akimbo.

  “He was like that,” he said, and then he rubbed out the drawing with his feet.

  He showed me the gravestone. The Petits had a scraggly cedar break planted west of the house to check snow drifts in the winter, and Holly’s ashes were buried beneath them and marked by a single brown brick. Vitrified, ferrous, crenellated: not even the fanciest adjectives in the world could disguise the fact that Mr. Petit had marked the final resting place of his youngest son with a leftover brick from the construction of his dingy subterranean house. Two brass letters had been set in the top.

  H.P.

  Ty brushed dirt and needles off the brick.

  “The crows had eaten his eyes by the time we found him.”

  His voice was nearly inaudible, as if the crows that had eaten his twin’s eyes had taken his tongue as well. With the light coating of dust covering his body, he could’ve been Adam standing up for the first time, his earthen heart pumping a r
iver of mud through his veins, but his eyes remained as lifeless and empty as still water, reflecting only what passes in front of it.

  Well, what would you have done? I put my hand—still dirty, but dry now—on his shoulder. But before I could pull him close he threw me off.

  “I’m not gay, Daniel. Dammit, I’m not! I’m not!”

  He ran for the house then. It was a good hundred yards away, and I could’ve caught him easily, but the field was open to the house’s windows. I didn’t know if his dad was home, but I knew that if his dad saw me everything would be that much worse. Not for me. For Ty.

  I waited though, in case he turned around. He didn’t turn around.

  The door slammed.

  I continued to wait, in case the door opened. It didn’t open.

  A light came on in a back window.

  I kept waiting.

  “Oh hell, Sprout,” Mrs. Miller said when she got to the end of what I’d written. “Is this where everything was going? I could’ve told you all this on the first day of school, if you’d’ve just come to me.”

  Everyone’s a clitic

  Oh.

  Yeah.

  Mrs. Miller.

  You might remember her as the inventor of such cocktails as the mojitorita and the margarinha, as well as the hanger of the front-door plaque “God Bless Synonyms, Metaphors, and Euphemisms too!” Oh, and the seducer of my dad. Let’s not forget that.

  You didn’t think she’d let me off the hook just because I was being “sullen and uncooperative,” did you? (That was me by the way: “I’m being sullen and uncooperative,” I told her when she walked in on me trying to raise my left eyebrow without moving my right, which is harder than it looks. “Really?” Her own eyebrows had gone up in unison. “I thought you looked perplexed myself.”)

  As the weeks ticked by, she reminded me with ever-increasing frequency that she’d “staked her reputation on a junior,” and even though she now came to school in untucked, unbuttoned blouses, she was as uptight as ever where the State Essay Contest was concerned. Since time trials weren’t working (I could fill more than a dozen sheets of paper with the word “No” in five minutes) she assigned me weekly papers instead. At first I thought I’d blow those off too. But, well, things with Ty were just so strange. He’d moved into my life and pushed everything else aside, yet hadn’t given me anything concrete to take the place of what was gone. Not that there’d been a lot for him to replace. Ruthie. Shove. Ian. Flick. My dad. Ping. All gone. That left just me.

  Me and Ty.

  I dunno. Maybe Mrs. Miller’d had more of an effect on me than I realized, or maybe I’d just become infatuated with my own linguistic prowess. But every Sunday night a blank page sat in front of me on the table, and, well, something had to go on it (besides my name, I mean, and a few green smudges, Sunday being the night I usually touched up my hair). I wrote hesitantly at first, afraid of revealing too much, but before I knew it I’d produced as many pages about the month and a half I’d spent with Ty as I had about the first sixteen years of my life. But this time I wrote not to reveal something about myself, but to discover something about Ty. Some crucial fact I’d missed during our F2F encounters. And when I say “with Ty,” I mean just that: I didn’t write a word about the strained fifteen-second chats I had with Ruthie when she caught me in the lunch line, the post-its on my locker I didn’t answer or the bazillion and one phone calls I dodged. Nor have I mentioned the various and pretty much transparent attempts Ian made to lure me into the janitors’ closet, or get us both detention, up to and including pretending to share his answers on a history quiz, which made Mrs. Coulter laugh so hard I thought she was going to pee herself (the funny thing is, I had been copying his answers, because I’d hung out with Ty the night before and hadn’t read the assignment). And, when you find out that I’ve left out the academic warning I got in civics (you’d think after twenty-four or twenty-five constitutional amendments they’d just start over, but no, they keep adding more), it probly won’t come as a surprise that I also skipped over the fact that I got booted from the cross-country team (you’re not allowed to suit up for sports when you’re on academic probation at Buhler, and since I’d already missed like 90% of the practices Coach Greene went ahead and gave me the ax). And so anyway, after all that I doubt it’ll come as a big shocker that I haven’t bothered to allude to the truly magical hour I spent with Mrs. Miller every day in fourth period, let alone the “bonus session” on Fridays when she pulled me out of independent study to go over my writing assignment for the week. This was sixth—i.e., last—period, and Mrs. Miller generally ignored the 3:30 bell, my peers screaming their weekend plans up and down the hallway outside her door, the throaty rumble of buses as they lumbered south on Main Street with their sardine-loads of high schoolers. “I’ll just drive you home,” she always said, a big smile on her face, like she was taking me to the mall or a water park or, I don’t know, a strip club. But of course it wasn’t just me she was taking to my house: it was herself, and by the time we turned on 82nd Street I’d become little more than a passenger. I ground the back of my head into the already-green-stained headrest of her Civic while she touched up her lipstick and eye shadow and foundation or blush or whatever it is you call the makeup women put on their cheeks. She drove with one hand, the rearview and vanity mirrors angled so she could see both sides of her face at once, and every once in a while I’d scream “Cow!” or “Deer!” or “Ostrich!” just to make her jump. When we reached my house I climbed out and my dad climbed in, his hair as neatly combed as mine was messy, his shirt tucked into his belt in a way that somehow complimented Mrs. Miller’s untucked blouses. “S’a jar-a cream corn on the counter,” he’d joke as we passed each other. “Make it last till Monday.” In fact there was usually a twenty-dollar bill on the counter, and the car keys, and of course my notebook—which pretty much brings us back to where this paragraph started about two pages ago. I.e., Mrs. M., reading slowly, occasionally commenting on my “esoterical grammatical constructions” or “nonlinear narrative progression” or “over-reliance on irony as a distancing technique,” and even though she often looked at me over the tops of her glasses with that skeptical expression she’d thrown my way when she first recruited me at the end of sophomore year, she never did ask the one question that, you know, I also wanted the answer to, even more than she did. Namely:

  Was Ty gay?

  On the one hand, there was our need to be with each other as much as possible, and the more or less constant excuses we found to touch each other. On the other was the fact that Ty pretty much talked about girls nonstop (which comments I haven’t reproduced here because, first of all, the world really doesn’t need one more catalog of teenage boys talking about girls’ bodies, and, secondly, it’s the kind of stuff that would 100% definitely get this book banned from the BHS library).

  And then too there was that last thing he said. I.e.:

  “I’m not gay.”

  That seemed pretty, you know, assertive. Definitive even.

  And yet.

  And yet, he’d said it without me asking him. Said it when he was showing me his twin brother’s grave of all things, and I’d put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him, which suggested Ty was thinking about the subject as much as I was—more even, since, although I admit I’m a little socially awkward, not even I am uncouth enough to make a play for someone at a moment like that. And let’s face it: Ty wouldn’t be the first gay person to deny his homosexuality: Ricky Martin, meet Doogie Howser. And so yeah but anyway (by which I mean whatever, mary): after a month and half of hanging out with him, not to mention fifty-some pages of well-observed scene-setting and exposition (that’s Mrs. Miller’s evaluation, by the way, not mine, although of course I’m forced to agree with her), I felt like I knew even less about Ty than when I’d first seen him standing red-skinned against the back wall of the gym. Felt like I had even less of an idea what he wanted from me than when he’d sneered, “At least my hair ain’t green.
” It’s kind of funny when you think about it. When I started writing about myself, I waited as long as I could before I told you I was gay, because once you reveal that, it seems like it’s all anyone can think about. Look at the way my dad trashed our computer when he found out I’d been looking at gay sites (as opposed to just forbidding me from looking at certain stuff like the parent of any heterosexual kid would do) or how Mrs. Miller had to grill me on what I had or hadn’t done sexually, as opposed to just giving me “the talk” that every other teenager gets. But with Ty, everything I knew about him seemed to float in the air, and the only thing that would keep it from blowing away like a Kansas tumbleweed was knowing whether or not he was gay. Knowing whether the amorphous feelings that hovered between us were going to solidify into a bridge that would bring us together, or a wall that would keep us apart. And like I said, I’d’ve thought Mrs. Miller would’ve asked me about this, but all she said was:

  “The teachers call it day-tention.”

  I took my essay from her outstretched hand.

  “Huh?”

  We sat in the office behind her classroom. The walls were lined with melamine shelves that sagged beneath the weight of graffiti’d textbooks and dusty stacks of once and future tests, and below the counter-slash-desk thingy that ran around all four walls sat bags and plastic boxes and two-drawer filing cabinets whose drawers looked rusted shut.

  “Day-tention. Detention during the day. Oh, and ‘first recruited’? Redundant.”

  “One thing at a time, please.”

  “Haven’t you noticed Ty doesn’t have to stay after school, even though he gets in a fight just about every other day and pretty much never does his homework and has a mouth like a truck driver crossed with a marine sergeant?”