Sprout Read online

  “Look, I—”

  Mrs. Miller waved a hand. “Let me save you the trouble of thinking up one of your bons ripostes” (which she pronounced clever retort). “This isn’t a request. My class. Tomorrow. Fourth period. And, since you’re coming in late, you’ll need to read the first twenty pages of In Our Time tonight.”

  “Janet—”

  “School’s in session, Sprout. It’s Mrs. M.”

  She grinned, and it was hard to tell if she was trying to soften the blow or rub it in, but as she walked off I could swear she somehow managed to make the click of her low heels sound victorious, if not simply smug. Sanctimonious. Pusillanimous even, but still triumphant.

  Damn those synonyms. Or, I dunno, adjectives. Words.

  “Yo, Alfalfa.”

  My head jerked back to the court. Apparently Ian was working a vegetable conceit today.

  “You playing or what?”

  I took one last look at Mrs. Miller, then sighed dramatically.

  “Last again,” I said, and trotted towards Ian’s team. But then:

  “What am I, invisible?”

  Sometimes things happen in your life and you just know everthing’s going to be different afterwards. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, like the day when I was ten years old and I came home from school to find my mom smoking her first cigarette in more than two years, and she asked me if I knew what the word “metastasize” meant. Sometimes it’s a little more obscure, like the day my dad came home with that first stump rattling on the back of his trailer, and I sensed that he’d found the person he was going to be now. And sometimes it’s just a feeling, a premonition I guess, that only the passing weeks and months will confirm. And for whatever reason, when I heard that strange voice say, “What am I, invisible?” I knew even before I turned and looked at the speaker that something important had just happened.

  So. My head jerked to the right. A kid I’d never seen before was standing on the sideline. Crewcut, dark eyes, prominent zit in the crease between lower lip and chin. He was short enough that I wondered if maybe he was a freshman, but something in his stare—aggressive, but also amused—seemed a lot older than fourteen.

  “I mean, I know my hair ain’t green. But on the other hand, hey, my hair ain’t green.”

  White buttondown shirt, gray polyester pants, a cracked patent leather belt that was at least twice as big as his waist. And the shoes. The shoes were . . . dude, I don’t even know what they were. They were from Sears. Sears brand. Ultrasuede uppers the color of dirt, with big bulbous rubber soles that looked like they’d hold you up if you tried to walk on water. The killer detail though—the detail that let me know that after two years of High School Hell I’d finally climbed from the bottom of the social ladder to an eminently respectable one rung up: a pocket protector. From the local Stuckey’s. The t had been worn off by the repeated passage of a pen handle or, I don’t know, an air-pressure gauge, which was why Troy Bellows sighed like a punctured tire and said:

  “I guess I’ll take Suckey’s.”

  Beanpole Overholser snickered, and for the first time in my life I was tempted to join him.

  It turned out Mrs. Miller really was the gym monitor that afternoon, and her victorious—cum-smug—cum-sanctimonious walkoff meant that twenty-two teenaged boys playing flag football had been left unsupervised before an audience of about fifty teenaged girls, which is the long way of saying we played shirts versus skins, so at least half of us could show off for what Troy Bellows called, in a completely unconvincing appropriation of hiphop slang, “the shorties.” He whipped off his shirt with a flourish, exposing a surprisingly thick growth of hair curling over his chest in the shape of Croatia. One by one the members of his team did their version of the half Monty, equal parts blush and braggadocio, futzing and flexing—and one seriously shocked ouch! when Carl Peterson’s navel ring caught on his shirt—until it was the new kid’s turn. The whole gym was staring at him. No, scratch that. The whole gym was staring at him, and doing that bump-and-grind music that strippers, you know, strip too. But all the new kid did was roll his eyes, undo the top two buttons of his clerk-in-a-video-store shirt, and pull it over his head. Dropping it on the floor, he looked Troy Bellows in the face.

  “Yo, Sasquatch. Let’s play already.”

  Giggles erupted from the girls on the bleachers. Not because the new kid had a bad body or anything—his skin was stretched tightly across the wiry muscles of his chest and abs—but because he had the absolute worst farmer’s tan I’d ever seen. His neck and his arms up to the middle of his biceps were light brown, but his shoulders and the front and back of his torso were so white they were almost blue. The line between the white and the brown was so neatly drawn you could almost believe he was wearing a T-shirt, if it weren’t for the freckles spread over his torso, and two nipples the size of pink Skittles, and a nervous little outie that poked from his stomach like a piece of chewing gum stuck on a radiator.

  After that I lost sight of him. Indoor flag football is fast and rough. The end zones are a hundred feet rather than a hundred yards apart, and, with no monitor on duty, blocking involved a lot of stiff-arming, tripping, and headlocks. One time Troy Bellows even tried to pants me, but I’d cinched my belt in for precisely that contingency, and all he exposed was a little cheek. He kept shaking though, till finally Ian Abernathy called,

  “Hey-yo, Troy. I don’t wanna put words in my wide receiver’s mouth, but I don’t think you’re his type.”

  “I heard you put something else in your wide receiver’s mouth,” Troy muttered.

  I couldn’t help looking at Ian to see if he reacted.

  “Yo, Green Day,” was all Ian said, “heads up.” A brown speck left his hands and grew rapidly larger. I’m not sure if he was throwing the ball to me or at me, but a second later it bounced into my chest and I took off, not so much towards the end zone as away from the dozen hostile boys who converged on me like a horde of zombies going after that girl in the Resident Evil movies (or the Dawn of the Dead movies, or Shaun of the Dead, or 28 Days Later, or any other film franchise where hordes of bumbling zombies chase the fleet-footed good guy). For about four and a half seconds there was nothing but my breath and my legs and the sound of forty rubber-soled shoes squeaking over freshly waxed wood, and then Ian’s voice cut through it all like a siren:

  “Touchdown!”

  I know you’re supposed to feel some kind of rush when you score in football, but the truth is I always feel let down. For me, it’s all about running—the chase, the dodge, the feint, the leap—and I would’ve kept going if there’d been room. But we were inside the gym, and there was the wall, its white-painted cinderblocks covered by a big paper banner that said

  We’re ALL Crew-saders!

  The words stretched over a We Are the World/Hands Across America—type sea of smiling faces, each crowned by red or yellow or black or good old mouse-brown hair. There was a bald one, and a pink one (I’m pretty sure that was supposed to be Ruthie, since she was taller than everyone else in the poster) and even a black one, by which I mean a black person, despite the fact that there were no black students at Buhler, but not a green one in sight.

  “Dude. Good one.”

  Ian was jogging up to me. For some reason it was hard for me to look at his face, and I looked down at the ball instead, saw a drop of green-tinged sweat already beginning to disappear into the panoply of grass stains dotting the nubbly Naugahyde. I looked up again. Saw Ian’s cap. Saw an identical smudge of green under the brim.

  I jerked my thumb at Troy. “Hey, uh, thanks for the save back there.”

  Ian looked over at Troy, who was assembling his team in an all-butts-out huddle. Shrugged, then turned back to me.

  “Go wide,” was all he said. “I’ll hit you again.”

  I tried to play it down, but during the usual round of hut-ones and hut-twos I was practically bouncing on my toes. I nearly jumped the line of scrimmage before Fred Lynch finally snapped the ball and the gym
erupted in squeaks as Troy’s team launched themselves forwards. I ducked right, leapfrogged (leapedfrog? leaptfrog?) over a sweaty back, headed for the sideline. Go wide, Ian’d said, I’ll hit you again. So okay. I was going wide. I was going to get hit—

  Something smacked me in the side of the head, almost knocked me over, which task was accomplished by a half dozen defenders jumping on me like a horde of toddlers fighting over one lone lollipop. They pulled at my shirt, belt, pants, hair, crushed me to the wooden floor. And then, when everyone cleared, there was Ian, his glowering eyes shadowed by the stained rim of his cap.

  “You might as well take a seat, Vomithead, cuz there ain’t no way you’re seeing this ball again.”

  For the last ten minutes of the game I could have been running drills for all the action I saw. In fact, I zoned out and did start running drills, and I would’ve gone at it till the bell rang if Beanpole Overholser hadn’t run past me at one point on his crazy giraffe legs, the breath whistling in and out of his freakishly elongated body like an out-of-tune saxophone.

  “Hey, Mouse,” he panted. “Nice shoes.”

  “My name’s—” I started, but then the new kid ran past me—the kid with the farmer’s tan and the zit in the middle of his chin, not to mention the ridiculous shoes, which is when I realized Beanpole Overholser must’ve been talking to him.

  Mouse? I thought. He’s here four hours and he already has a nickname? It took me a full week to get mine.

  “Hey, Beanpole,” the new kid shot back. “You know what’s worse than these shoes?”

  I wondered how he knew Paul’s nickname, even as Beanpole did his best to hunker down and make himself, I dunno, thicker.

  “Huh?”

  “Having the kid who’s wearing ’em steal—your—ball.” And, diving in front of Beanpole, he intercepted Ian’s pass and ran it all the way to the other end of the court, his funny, fat-soled shoes squeaking like a worn fan belt with each and every footfall. He reached the endzone and spiked the ball, which bounced up just in time to catch Beanpole Overholser in the face. The spokes of Beanpole’s arms and legs jangled around like wonky TV antennas, and the gym echoed with the sound of laughter. When he finally got a hold of the ball he heaved it at the new kid. The shot went wide, but before I knew it a rain of footballs and basketballs, soccer balls and kickballs was flying through the air. The new kid stood pressed up against the “Crew-saders” banner at the back of the gym and didn’t even bother to cover his face, as if he knew it was his lot in life to suffer through the time-honored hazing rituals of the American secondary school system.

  At some point a ball bounced wonkily in my direction, and I lunged for it and caught it because, well, that’s what you do when a ball bounces in your direction. It was a tetherball of all things, a U of hard, solid rubber poking from its surface where the rope normally went. I wondered how much it would hurt if that U was the part of the ball that made contact with your thigh or your gut or your cheek. If it would leave a welt instead of just a red burning patch like Ian’s football had left on my head. But the new kid was hidden behind a wall of bodies, and every time it seemed like I had a shot someone would get in the way. Before I could do anything the bell rang, and sixty or seventy screaming kids disappeared the way only high school kids can, scattering like leaves shunted by a leafblower.

  Brown, orange, white, striped, and pentagonally patterned balls came to rest like a field of psychedelic mushrooms around the new kid, but all by himself he was a surreal sight. His farmer’s tan had disappeared: the bare skin of his upper body, from the off-white stretched-out waistband of his granddad underwear to the golden peach fuzz covering his head, was a swirling splotchy field of angry pink and bitter red and birthmark purple, with here and there the blue-veined spiderweb of a bruise just beginning to swell up. His torso was like a human-shaped flame spouting from the nerdy base of his polyester pants and his wrinkled tube socks and his stupid, stupid, stupid shoes. The only part of him that was still white was his teeth, which were bared in a wide, taunting smile—and aimed, out of everyone else in the gym, at me.

  “Yup,” he said. “My hair still ain’t green.”

  All at once the tetherball in my hand felt as heavy as a cannon shot. I bent down, set it on the floor so it wouldn’t bounce or crash through the freshly waxed boards to the locker rooms below. It seemed to me that the dozens of balls between me and the new kid were evidence that everyone had taken a shot at him except me, but when I let go of the ball I saw that it was covered in green—fingerprints and handprints and a million sweaty-palmed smears, a clear indictment of the eager, almost desperate way I’d waited for my own chance to throw. To make sure it really hurt. To make sure it left its mark.

  By the time I stood up the new kid was gone, and instead it was Ian Abernathy again. He nudged the stained tetherball with his toe. The expression that had flickered over his face at the beginning of the game was back again, and this time I saw it was fear and hatred. But it wasn’t me he was afraid of, me he hated.

  “You wanted to,” he said, “didn’t you, Sprout?”

  For a long time I just stared at him. And then, surprising even myself, I reached out and flicked his green-stained baseball cap to the floor.

  “Yeah?” I said. “Well, so did you.”

  Welcome to the jungle

  Time passed.

  Specifically, eight days passed, but it could’ve been five years. It was what Mr. Schaefer, the world—i.e., advanced—history teacher would’ve called an “epochal shift.” One age was ending, another was beginning. We just didn’t know it yet.

  The first sign of the change was that afternoon in the gym. Well, in fact the first sign of the change was actually that afternoon before school started, when Ruthie told me she was interested in Ian. The second sign was that day in the gym. I thought the change had something to do with Ian—like maybe Ian was going to turn out to be straight after all—but it turned out Ian was just a distraction. This was made clear by the third and final sign, namely, a pickup truck rattling down 82nd Street’s washboard ridges. It was a Tuesday, around four; I was getting in my after-school run, and I hung back a little from the intersection so I wouldn’t have to wade through the truck’s cape of dust. I had my pretend ipod on, a pair of old earbuds plugged into the waistband of my underwear, and I did jumping jacks while singing along with the song in my head.

  “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine . . .”

  (I’d try to make an excuse here, but really, there isn’t one.)

  The truck was dark and funny-shaped. Everything rounded, bulbous, protruding, concave. Running boards, flared wheel wells in front and back, a windshield curved like a bow. The hood stuck out like the snout of a bloodhound and the engine made a sound like a dog stuck midbark. A shadow filled the window on the driver’s side. On the passenger’s side, a head and arm hung out like a balloon on a stick.

  “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey!”

  (Like everyone else, I only knew that one line of the song. Oh, and also? I have a terrible singing voice.)

  As the truck grew closer, I could see that the arm hanging out the passenger window was thin but wiry. Corded muscle lay over bone, under skin. What little fuzz remained on the shaved head had gone white-blond under the sun. The cheekbones were sharp, the jaw pointed, but I didn’t recognize him till I saw the zit on his chin. Sometimes I wonder if I really saw that pink pinprick—he was in a moving truck, after all, enveloped in a cloud of dust. I found myself wondering if he recognized me too. I imagine my green hair was pretty much a giveaway.

  His eyes were already looking at mine when I met his. I felt my mouth move, saw his lips pucker and curve. If it hadn’t been for the name each of us voiced, you could’ve thought we were blowing kisses at each other.

  “Mouse . . .”

  “. . . Sprout.”

  And then the truck was gone.

  It seemed like I didn’t stop running till I fo
und him the next day in school.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  Later, we argued over who said “hey” first. Never did agree.

  “Was that you yesterday?”

  “Yeah. That was you?”

  “That was me.”

  The words could’ve come from either of us. Our first conversation: we both had the same questions, the same answers.

  “You live around there?”

  “Yeah. With my dad.”

  “Me too.”

  “I didn’t know there was anyone my age in the hood.”

  “Me neither. I never saw you before.”

  “I never saw you either.”

  My heart thrilled. Never had a lack of connection made me feel so connected.

  “It sucks living out there. No one around.”

  “Yeah. But school sucks worse, right?”

  “Right. Damned if you do—”

  “—damned if you don’t.”

  We had cursed together. We were friends for life.

  “Ty,” he said, and stuck out his fist.

  “Daniel,” I said, and touched his, knuckle to knuckle.

  We argue over who said whose name first too. But I know: it was him. It was him, because I’d’ve never said what I said if he hadn’t said what he said first. Never would’ve said Daniel, I mean, if he hadn’t said Ty.

  I noticed his zit had popped, faded.

  One of us said, “I gotta get to class.”

  “Yeah, me too,” the other said.

  We walked down the hall then, side by side, and didn’t say anything.

  Over the course of three lunch periods, eleven breaks between classes, two chats before school and a couple more on the way to our respective buses (and one time when I ran into him outside Stickler’s office, during which all we said was “Hey”), I learned that he lived on the other side of Tobacco Road, which is the next road over from the one I live on. I’d probly gone past his place a hundred times but never once noticed the house. Like all the land on the west side of Tobacco, Ty’s dad’s property was pretty much tree-free, but it was hilly (or what passes for hills in Kansas), the house set back from the road a good quarter mile, and built into a south-facing slope to boot. The asphalt shingles had worn to the color of the dusty fields surrounding it and sported a few wisps of grasslike hairs on an old lady’s chin. When you got close enough to see it (by which I mean when you crawled under the padlocked gate that barred the entrance to the driveway and made your way past a half a dozen signs informing you “Trespassers WILL Be Shot”) you didn’t think house as much as storm cellar or bomb shelter, or maybe just bunker.