Sprout

by Dale Peck

  “Hey, Daughtry is—”

  “Crap taste in music,” Ruthie emphasized, “and that whole Abercrombie look is—how can I put this delicately?—a bit homosexual mall. But his little brother has autism—”

  “Asperger’s—”

  “—and Ian is like totally sweet to him. Like he helps him with his homework and plays catch with him and lets him sit on his lap to watch TV for hours at a time. I mean, it almost makes you wish every little kid had autism—”

  “Asperger’s—”

  “—just so Ian could be as nice to them as he is to his little brother, and so—”

  BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP.

  Ruthie stopped.

  Turned.

  Glared at me.

  “Okay, I give up. What is the deal with the bleeping?”

  Let’s pause to catch our breath, okay?

  In case you haven’t figured it out, we’re in the back of Ruthie’s mom’s hand-me-down BMW convertible. I mean, I’m in the back of Ruthie’s mom’s hand-me-down BMW convertible. Ruthie and Ian are in the front, and you’re just along for the ride. And so whatever: I apologize if you’re a little confused as to how we ended up here. I mean, I ended up here. But trust me, you’re not half as confused as I am.

  The simple explanation is that Mrs. Miller said, “You still drive your mom’s hand-me-down car, don’t you, Ruthie? That BMW? A dark blue convertible?” and then she said she was running late for the hairdresser and asked Ruthie if she would take me home. That part was probly pretty obvious, right? And I mean it probly makes sense too that Ruthie was macking on Ian, since she’d told me at the beginning of the year she was going to get him. Let’s not forget this is the same girl who told her parents she was going to grow a foot and managed to eke out thirteen inches: we should never be surprised when Ruthie Wilcox gets what she wants. The part I didn’t understand—the part Ruthie somehow managed to leave out in her half-hour monologue—was what Ian was doing with Ruthie, since he had this look on his face like a cow standing in line at the slaughterhouse. And then there was my growing suspicion that Ruthie and Ian had been together for longer than the two months school had been in session, which suspicion was based primarily on the heart-shaped card that dangled from the rearview mirror, which bore the inscription “To us, on our quarter-year anniversary.”

  BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP.

  Oh, and the bleeping (by which I mean the plethora of customized ring tones available to the modern aficionado of mobile communications technology): it came from Mrs. Miller’s bag of phones, which I stole. Duh. It was less than an hour since school’d let out, and a Friday to boot, so they were at their peak of busyness, as high schoolers all over northern Reno County called or texted each other to find out, as one of the phones on top of the pile read, “yo where da party at???”

  “The phones are Mrs. Miller’s,” I said to Ruthie. “Long story.” And, to Ian: “I didn’t know your little brother has autism.”

  Ian was still twisted around in his seat, his shirt still pulled up, as though showing off his abs was all he could think to do in this situation.

  “Asperger’s Syndrome. It’s related, but, like, totally different.”

  “That’s illuminating,” Ruthie said to Ian. Then, to me: “Are you going to invite us in to watch youtube or something?”

  Let me conclude the scene-setting by mentioning that we were in my driveway. In fact, we’d been there for about twenty minutes (it’s only a ten-minute drive between my house and Buhler) but neither Ian nor I had made a move to get out of the car, since it seemed like Ruthie would do something drastic if we did. And, you know, the view from there was pretty interesting. The backseat, I mean, with Ian and Ruthie’s heads framing the view. It’s funny how the tiniest shift in perspective can make you see things differently. For the first time in years I noticed how small our trailer was. I mean, I make fun of how small our trailer is all the time, but the very fact that I can make fun of it makes the smallness interesting. But now it didn’t seem interesting. Just small. And the net of vines covering it didn’t seem interesting either. Just weird. And the stumps were weirder still. But not weird in an interesting kind of way. Who knows, maybe I was only seeing things this way because of what Mrs. Miller’d said about my college fund. I.e., that it didn’t exist. Before, my house had seemed like one of those things you have to endure in order to move on to bigger and better rewards, like the bleaching process you have to go through before you can actually dye your hair. But now that it looked like I might be stuck in our little house forever, it wasn’t so funny anymore.

  “We don’t have a computer,” I said to Ruthie. “Which you know.” And, to Ian: “How long have you two been dating?”

  “Whatever,” Ruthie said before Ian could answer. “We can watch TV or something. We haven’t hung out in forever.”

  have

  “We don’t a TV,” I said, “and how long have you and Ian been dating?”

  For the first time Ruthie’s composure cracked. She turned around to face forwards, looked at me in the rearview mirror instead of head on.

  “Since the summer,” she said, sighing heavily. “Since you and Mrs. Miller became, like, best friends.”

  “You spent the summer in England.”

  “I spent July and August in England. I spent June with Ian, while you were in Mrs. Miller’s backyard, and Ian’s parents let him come visit me in August.”

  “London’s cool, btw,” Ian said. “What happened to your TV?” He was still holding his shirt up, by the way, which had gone from being funny to scary to slightly neurotic.

  “Long story. Oh wait, no it’s not. My dad threw my dictionary through the screen during Hurricane Irene. And why,” I said to Ruthie, “didn’t you tell me you were dating?”

  “We wanted to tell you,” Ian said. “I mean, I wanted to tell you, but Ruthie—” He smiled nervously, and pulled up his shirt another inch or two to make up for ratting her out. “Why Hurricane Irene?”

  “Duh. His mom’s name was Irene.” Ruthie glared at Ian for a moment, then adjusted the rearview mirror. It’s anyone’s guess whether she did this so she could see me better or so I could see her better, but before she spoke she used a black fingernail to move a magenta bang that apparently wasn’t exactly where she wanted it. Then:

  “I told him about you.”

  “You—”

  “Told him.”

  “Yes, you said that. What did you tell him?”

  “C’mon, Sprout . . .”

  “No, you come on. I mean, if you could say it to Ian, surely you can say it to me. Or perhaps Ian would like to tell me?”

  Ian’s fingernails dug at his stomach so fiercely they left red scratch marks. “She told me you were gay,” he said finally, then suddenly pulled his shirt down and tucked it deep deep deep into his pants. He tried to turn away, but I locked eyes with him.

  “I—don’t—understand,” I said slowly. “What does me being gay have to do with you dating Ruthie?”

  Ian stared at me, a deer in headlights, a rabbit transfixed by a rattlesnake. His mouth opened and closed convulsively, but nothing came out. Ruthie’s stare fell on us like a wave of hot air from a suddenly opened oven, but I didn’t look in her direction. I could see the desire to just come out with it in Ian’s eyes, and for a moment I actually thought he was going to. In some ways, this didn’t really surprise me. Ian was one of the most straight-up guys you’ll ever meet. Keeping secrets just didn’t suit him. What surprised me more, though, was how much I wanted him to confess.

  Suddenly Ruthie’s arm appeared in my peripheral vision. She reached over and took Ian’s hand, pulled it possessively into her lap. He jumped like she’d shocked him, then tried to laugh it off, but his knuckles were white where his hand wrapped around hers, and I thought I could actually hear bones cracking.

  “It was like what we talked about the other day,” Ruthie said. There was a question in her voice that she didn’t quite know how to ask, and, after a confused
pause, she went ahead with her own explanation. “The day before school started, I mean. When you were saying how hard it was for you to find someone to date.”

  Ian nodded his head so rapidly I thought it was going to fall off. “I—I mean we—we didn’t want to rub what we had in your face.”

  Okay. Here was my best friend, telling me that she’d hidden her relationship from me because she didn’t want me to feel bad about the fact that there was no one for me to date at Buhler, when in fact she was dating the very boy I’d been hooking up with for the past four years. And, to make the situation even juicier, the boy I’d been hooking up with for the past four years was present at this scene, and telling me that he didn’t want to rub his relationship with my best friend in my face because he had to pretend to his girlfriend that he thought I was leading a sexually frustrated existence. I mean, I was sexually frustrated, but I wasn’t celibate, which is really what he was pretending. It was all too rich. Or at least it was until that proverbial lightbulb went off again. Not flickering like it had in Mrs. Miller’s office, but bright white light.

  “Oh. My. God. You two are having sex, aren’t you?”

  Ian’s mouth opened, but before he could answer Ruthie spoke over him.

  “Well, what about you?”

  “Um-huh-what?” I said, by which I meant: “What do you mean, what about me?” even though I knew exactly what she meant.

  “I mean,” Ruthie said, “what’s up with you and that Petit dork? You’ve been joined at the hip ever since the beginning of school.”

  All of a sudden—by which I mean, as soon as I tore my eyes from Ruthie’s and looked anywhere but at her face—I noticed that one of my dad’s stumps had fallen over. Sixteen, I think it was, although I can never remember how he numbers them. The grass had grown up around it where the mower couldn’t reach, which meant that it had been on its side for a long time—like, way longer than my dad had been seeing Mrs. Miller, or I’d been hanging out with Ty. While Ruthie stared at me and Ian stared into space, I stared at the fallen stump, trying to figure out why it bugged me so much. At first I thought it was because I’d always considered myself the kind of person who picked up on things like that. I mean, I’d been writing about things like that. Writing about my house, and my life, and the people in my life, which meant I was supposed to notice things like that. But if I wasn’t paying attention—if I wasn’t writing about how my dad had lost interest in his stumps and how our house wasn’t interesting or weird but just small or how Ian and Ruthie, far from feeling abandoned by me, had actually taken up with each other—then, well, what was I paying attention to? What was I writing about?

  “Sprout?” Ruthie prompted me. “Are you two—I mean, is he, well, you know? Is he?”

  And even as she spoke, I realized it wasn’t the stump that was holding my attention. Wasn’t just the stump anyway. It was actually a pale stillness in the trees, just visible over the stump’s fallen length. In a forest, nothing is ever still, not even tree trunks, which sway in the slightest breeze. Leaves flutter, branches rock up and down, birds and squirrels and termites flit from one place to another. But right in the middle of all this movement one thing was frozen in place, staring at us. An angular white face from which shone two dark hot—furious—eyes.

  “Ty!”

  As soon as I called his name, he turned and melted into the shadows. I stood on the backseat and hopped over the side of Ruthie’s mom’s hand-me-down BMW convertible. Ian’s eyes followed me with that same pleading look leaking out of them like X-rays, but Ruthie’s mouth just dropped open.

  “Sprout! What the fu—”

  “Ty!” I yelled over her. “Wait!”

  I didn’t know how long he’d been watching, how much he’d heard. I mean, there’d been nothing to hear, really, nothing to see, yet somehow my presence in Ruthie’s car seemed like a betrayal. Like I was reverting to my old way of life. My life before him. Maybe I only felt like that because Mrs. Miller’d told me that’s what I needed to do if I wanted to get that scholarship, or maybe it was because Ruthie had called Ty a dork and I hadn’t slugged her. Or maybe it was because of the way Ian Abernathy was looking at me with those pleading eyes. Eyes that wanted not just to reveal his own secret, but our secret, as if maybe something more had gone on between us than an activity we carefully shielded from ourselves with the brim of his hat. I mean, for all I knew Ian fooled around with other guys, but I didn’t think so. Buhler wasn’t that big for one thing. And then, well, four years is a long time to pretend sex is just sex. At a certain point you realize that it might not be just the act that you enjoy, but the person you’re enjoying it with.

  But all that was behind me, at least for now, and up ahead was Ty. He’d disappeared into the undergrowth, but the sound of snapping branches and crunching leaves let me track him pretty easily. He avoided the paths, made a beeline for the Andersens’ pasture, and I found myself hoping he was wearing socks or else he was going to end up with a terrible case of itch ivy. I’m a faster runner than he is, but he had a good head start and plus running through tangles of itch ivy and marijuana—er, hemp—is a lot different from running on an open road, and of course there was that stupid bag of cell phones I was carrying, which why I didn’t leave them in the backyard is beyond me. And so anyway, the long and the short of it is that he made it to the Andersens’ pasture and was streaking across it by the time I pulled up short at the fence. I grabbed the upper strand as though I was trying to snap the wire from its posts. You might think I’d given up or something—the fence symbolizing the barrier that had suddenly grown up between us and all that—but the simpler truth is:

  “Ty! The dog!”

  Ty’s head jerked to the right. The Andersens’ St. Bernard was barreling towards him, a yellowish-brown blur like a backhoe careening out of control. Ty almost tripped over his too-big shoes when he whirled and started running back towards me. The dog was slow and clumsy as dogs go, but it was still closing on him fast, ears flapping like bits of cloth pinned to his head, clods of dirt and cow patties spitting from beneath his paws. Like most scared people, Ty ran like an idiot, arms flailing, torso straight up and creating as much wind resistance as possible, and of course turning around every other step to see how close his pursuer was, which nearly made him trip twice. But I didn’t think offering him this kind of rational analysis would help, so all I screamed was:

  “JFC, Ty, RUN!”

  I stepped on the second strand of the fence, held up the third, but he didn’t bother climbing through, just vaulted it. The cottonwood with the long sloping branch was about fifteen feet behind us, and we’d’ve never made it if the dog hadn’t got held up by the fence. He yelped when he shoved his scarred, slobbery muzzle through it, jumped back, but then he shoved forwards again, leaving fat, blood-stained clumps of fur on the barbs, which might’ve made me feel sorry for him if he hadn’t been trying to kill us. By then Ty and I had scrambled as far up the branch as we could go. Leaves shivered and fell off with each footfall, and the branch itself swayed like the arm of an oil derrick, but seemed to be holding our weight just fine. The St. Bernard actually jumped on the branch (it was about three feet in diameter at its base, in case you’re having a hard time picturing this) but when he tried to clamber after us he fell to the ground. A little bark burped out of him when he smashed into the forest floor. Twice more he tried, twice more he fell, and after that he just stood on the base of the branch, his beady, bloodshot eyes glaring up at us, ropes of saliva hanging from his flappy jowls.

  For a long time Ty and I just looked down at the dog. We’d glance at each other every once in a while, then turn back to the dog. Glance at each other, turn to the dog. Each other; the dog. Then one of the phones let out a BLEEP, and it was only after we jumped and let go of each other that we realized we’d been holding hands.

  Our eyes flitted to our fingers in the same way they’d flitted to the dog. As though the thing we stared at was capable of ripping our bodies limb from lim
b. We scooted as far from each other on the branch as we could get, which is to say, about one and a half inches.

  “Um,” I said.

  “Yeah, Ty said.

  BLEEP, one of the phones said (which bleep was actually the sample from Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”).

  Twenty feet below us, the Andersens’ St. Bernard barked.

  A distraction! I leaned over, looked down. “We should give it a name!” I said, pointing. Then I realized I was pointing with the hand that’d been holding Ty’s and I shoved it in my pocket.

  Ty blushed a deep, deep red. “Why? A name’ll just help us remember this embarrassing moment,” he said, and his hand, the one that’d been holding mine, curled into a fist.

  “Well, at least we outsmarted him. We should feel proud.”

  “He’s the one walking around. We’re stuck up a tree.”

  I looked down at the dog, who had lifted one leg to mark our trunk. I made a mental note to climb down on the lee side, then, more because I didn’t know what to say to Ty than anything else, I took one of Mrs. Miller’s confiscated phones out of the bag and tossed it at the dog. I don’t have a good aim even when I’m concentrating, and the phone missed the dog and hit the tree trunk instead, snapped into two or three pieces and fell to the forest floor.

  When I looked up, Ty was staring at me.

  “Did you just throw your—no, wait. First of all, you throw like a girl. Now: dude, did you just throw your cell phone at that dog?”

  I nudged the bag in his direction, opened it. Ty stared at it for like five minutes with an unreadable expression on his face. He could’ve been looking at gold coins, or dead snakes, or a TJ Maxx bag full of cell phones.

  “You know what? I’m not gonna ask.” And he took one of the phones and chucked it at the dog. The dog was at that particular moment licking himself in the place only dogs can lick, and the phone bounced off his thick fur. If he even felt it, he didn’t react. There being nothing else to do, we threw three or four or five or six more phones at the dog in the same halfhearted sort of way. I think the word for how we threw them is “desultorily,” or maybe “perfunctory,” but I didn’t have my dictionary with me to check. I was about to throw the precious BlackBerry when I noticed Ty looking at me funny.