Sprout Read online

  “Hey, newbie!”

  “Yo, Long Guyland!”

  “Der, what’s up, doof-butt!”

  We only had two classes together. One of them was first-period homeroom, where Miss Tunie did a pretty good job of keeping him under wraps. The other, however, was gym. Depending on your attitude, or whether your name was Ian Abernathy, Mr. Balzer was either the dream gym teacher or a total nightmare.

  “Girls, I see that many of you have begun developing. I want to let you know, first of all, that a sports bra is not acceptable outerwear, and secondly, that having your period is never an excuse for sitting out class.”

  “Mr. Bradford, I don’t know how they do things in New York City, but in Kansas we wear the proper attire to gym class. Proper attire does not mean blue jeans and canvas loafers—especially not ones with writing on them. Now drop and give me ten.”

  “Yo, Abernathy, wassup my man! Are we gonna take Nickerson this year or what?”

  Mr. Balzer wasn’t really the problem however. I actually liked gym. I used to like team sports, but when enough people aim a basketball at your face (or a football at your crotch) the shine kind of goes off them. That’s why I took up cross country. When Mr. Balzer—who also coached the track team—saw how fast I ran the mile, he pretty much let me alone, and nobody else could catch me. But no matter how fast I ran, how far, I always ended up back in the locker room forty-five minutes later. Let’s face it, the only thing worse than being teased with your clothes on is being teased when you’re naked, and the only thing worse than being teased when you’re naked is being teased when you’re naked and in a communal shower surrounded by fifteen other naked guys.

  “Hey, newbie, I think I dropped my soap. Why don’t you pick it up for me?”

  “Yo, Long Guyland, my good friend Beanpole Overholser dropped his soap. Why don’t you pick it up for him?”

  “Der, doof-butt, looks like we all dropped our soap. Why don’t you crawl around the floor on your hands and knees and pick up every single bar? Don’t mind that yellow streak. That’s just some Gatorade I drank, oh, about a half hour ago.”

  But as bad as all the public harassment and humiliation was, it wasn’t nearly as bad as when Ian got me alone.

  It happened that first Friday of seventh grade. Ian had gotten detention from Miss Tunie for picking on me, and I had gotten detention from Mr. Balzer for having the first three letters of the most unacceptable of all four-letter-words written on my left shoe. The rule at Buhler was that at least one of the detention-giving teachers had to stay with the detention-given students. Mr. Balzer sauntered into Miss Tunie’s classroom about ten minutes after school let out.

  “Yo, Abernathy, wassup?”

  Like gym teachers the world over, Mr. Balzer liked to walk around the halls in his shorts, as if to rub in the fact that all the other male inhabitants of BGS, students and teachers alike, had to wear long pants, even though the school didn’t have any air conditioning and September temperatures often broke the 100-degree mark. Now he hooked one of his bare, tanned, sweaty legs over the edge of the desk where Miss Tunie was impatiently tapping her nails, his shorts riding up and exposing an inch of milk-white thigh.

  “Hey, Brenda. So. How shall we work this out?”

  Miss Tunie rolled her eyes and reached into her purse, brought out her car keys and a quarter. “Let’s flip for it, Norberto. Heads I win, tails you lose.”

  “Sounds like a deal,” Mr. Balzer said. “Tails.”

  Miss Tunie flipped the coin and let it roll on the floor. While Mr. Balzer scampered after it like a puppy, she walked towards the door.

  “Tails!”

  “Huh,” Miss Tunie said. “You lose.” And she was gone.

  Mr. Balzer spent about five minutes trying to figure out what happened, then shrugged it off.

  “Yo, Abernathy. They’re waxing the gym floor today, and if I don’t supervise they do a half-assed job.” He winked at Ian. “If I catch you trying to sneak out before 4:35, I’ll tie your butt to the chair with a jump rope.”

  And then he was gone too.

  I looked out the window. The last buses were pulling out of the parking lot. The sound of badly tuned diesel engines faded like distant thunder, giving way to the electrical whine of cicadas as they shrieked their way through their twenty-four-hour existence. I wondered how I was going to get home. My dad hadn’t bothered to put in a phone yet, and we lived five miles away.

  A more mechanical drone added itself to the cicadas’ whine, and I felt a faint vibration through the soles of my now-banned Vans. I was hoping it might turn out to be an earthquake, but then I realized it was just the buffers that were putting the wax on the gym floor.

  For a while that’s all there was, the cicadas and the buffers and the inescapable tingle of dust in my nostrils, and then I heard a quiet thump. Even though I knew I shouldn’t have, I looked over at Ian. Miss Tunie had seated us a few rows apart in those dumb grade-school desk-chair combos where the chair and the desk are welded together so you can’t ever get comfortable, since you can neither scoot your seat in nor shove it back. Now I saw that Ian had stood up a couple of inches without getting out of his chair, so that the desk part rested on top of his thighs and the four rubber-soled legs floated just off the floor. Scooching around, and making sure to hit as many desks as possible, he crabwalked his way across the room until his desk was right in front of mine, where he set it down with a final ominous clunk.

  “Don’t mind me, newbie, I just have to do my exercises.” He pushed his Yankees cap back on his head, as if it might get in the way, and then he started making big exaggerated kissy faces at me, pursing his lips so that he looked like Mick Jagger after a fresh round of collagen, then opening his mouth so wide that he looked like the stretchy faces from that old Soundgarden video, or maybe Terrance and Phillip on South Park. In between pursing and stretching, he would stick out his tongue and waggle it up and down and back and forth like he was trying to pick an imaginary lock.

  Of course, what I should’ve said was, “What’re you doing, practicing?” But instead what I said was, “What’re you doing, practicing?” which might look like the same thing, but it’s not. Not when your voice cracks, and you’re the one who ends up blushing.

  “Uh,” Ian said, which I think was supposed to be “Yup,” although maybe it was “Duh.” It’s hard to make consonants with your tongue sticking three inches out of your mouth. “Uh ay-ees uv ih.” I’m guessing that was “The ladies love it,” but you’d have to ask Ian to be sure.

  I tried watching the clock over Ian’s head, but how long can you stare at a clock—especially one that doesn’t have a second hand? I tried looking out the window, but it was Kansas, so there wasn’t much to look at. And plus Ian added slobbery noises to the weird facial movements. I tried staring him down, but Ian turned out to be a master at staring contests. Before I knew it my eyes had slipped to his spittle-bordered lips. He must’ve been getting tired, because his mouth wasn’t opening quite as wide now, and the lip pursing wasn’t quite as exaggerated and gross. It looked less like a cartoon, I mean, more like he was yawning, or maybe hungry. Hungry, and blowing kisses at me.

  The only thing worse than saying something that makes you blush is blushing when nobody’s said anything, because then only your thoughts can be the cause. Ian suddenly stopped making kissy faces and squinted at me from beneath his Yankees cap.

  “What?”

  “What?” I parroted, but I could still feel the heat migrating across my cheeks, crackling and popping like tiny electrical charges.

  Ian stood up out of his chair and hooked a leg over my desk just as Mr. Balzer had with Miss Tunie’s. He was wearing pants, though, not shorts, and the denim pulled tight around his thigh from the knee all the way up to the top of the well-worn inseam. He leaned over my desk and used the bill of his Yankees cap to tap me on the forehead, twice.

  “What?

  ”

  “Nothing,” I said. Except, since I s
till had my Long Island accent at that point, I heard myself say “Nuttin’,” which only made me blush more.

  “I think it’s sumpin’,” Ian hissed, doing a not-very-good imitation of my accent. “I think there are dirty little thoughts swirling around beneath all that wavy brown hair of yours, aren’t there, newbie?”

  I could hear the meanness in Ian’s voice, but I could hear something else too. Curiosity. But not regular old garden-variety curiosity. No, this was something more. This was almost . . . salacious.

  Curse that dictionary.

  “Let’s see if we can find out what’s sprouting beneath that mama’s boy haircut, a’ight newbie?” Before I knew it, Ian had wrapped me in a headlock with his right arm, was using his left knuckles to give me what used to be called an Indian burn in pre-P.C. days, and what is now usually called an Indian burn, because most twelve-year-olds don’t really care if what they say is P.C. or not. I stumbled out of my chair, but because it was fastened to the stupid desk I ended up tripping and falling to my hands and knees, and this allowed Ian to straddle my waist as though we were playing piggyback, and, well, how can I phrase this so this book doesn’t get banned not just from BHS, from every high school in America?

  I felt something.

  Felt something besides Ian’s fist on the top of my head, I mean, which was burning into my scalp like a hair dryer blowing on one spot for way too long. Still, I tried to focus on that, so I wouldn’t have to focus on that other thing. The thing that I was feeling on the small of my back, about two inches above my belt—assuming my belt was still where it was supposed to be, and hadn’t slipped a few inches south. Ian too, seemed to direct all his attention on the Indian burn, as if he was afraid to pay attention to anything else that was happening, but at the same time his thighs had locked around my waist, and his hips started rocking back and forth as though I were a mechanical bull. “Yee-haw,” he called out, “ride ’em, cowboy!” which, when you get right down to it, is possibly the most embarrassing part of the entire afternoon.

  After what seemed like maybe the whole of recorded history, Ian suddenly relaxed his legs and arms and I fell to the floor. I landed on my hip, rolled over slightly, so I was facing him. The top of my head felt like it was on fire, but most of my attention was focused on that warm spot on my back, which was now cooling rapidly as it pressed against the cold, gritty, vibrating linoleum (the buffers, remember?). Ian was panting, and I was too, and when I looked up I saw that his face was every bit as red as mine felt. We stared at each other for a long time, as if waiting for someone to come and interrupt us. But no one came, which meant that we had to decide what to do on our own.

  In the end gravity did the work. You’ve probly noticed by now that I have a hard time looking at one thing for a very long time, but have to keep shifting my focus from place to place. This was especially true of Ian’s eyes, which were not so much asking me a question as just . . . asking. After a lifetime of silent pleading, my eyes finally fell away from his. Fell to his nose first, the nostrils flared and white-edged, and then to his mouth, slack and sucking in air, and then to his chin, his corded throat, the slanting lines of his collarbones coming together at the top of the hard, sweaty seam that ran all the way down his chest and stomach to his belt buckle, which had two words written on it: “Dodge” and “Ram.”

  What can I say? I chose the latter.

  At some point I felt something soft encircle my head. At first I thought it was Ian’s hands, and can I tell you something? That’s when I knew I was gay. Because I wanted it to be Ian’s hands. Wanted to feel the hands of the handsomest boy in school running through my light brown hair even as I labored at something that both of us knew the name of, but had never connected with real life. But then I realized that Ian had just slipped his cap on me, and even as the brim cast its shadow across my closed eyes (and nose, and cheeks, and mouth) I knew he’d put it on my head so that he wouldn’t have to look at what we were doing either.

  Then, later, when all I really wanted to do was disappear:

  “How’re you getting home?”

  “I guess my dad’ll pick me up.”

  “Jew call him?”

  “Um . . . ?” It took me a moment to realize he’d said, D’you call him? “We don’t have a phone.”

  So his mom gave me a lift, the ten-minute drive filled with her constant patter about how was I finding Kansas and had I seen Cats before I moved away from New York and did I miss the ocean, the mountains, traffic jams? She drove a pickup—I won’t tell you what make—and we all had to crowd on the single bench seat, and just to drag the ride out an extra five minutes she missed the turn at 81st and had to drive down to 69th. “Dios mio,” she said, presumably in response to the three crosses that marked some accident or other, although maybe she was just put off by the lavender-and-chartreuse paint job of the house on the corner, and then she asked me if it was true that Israel was behind 9/11, not Osama. Her voice died away in a single “Huh” when she pulled into our clearing and saw the shimmering green cocoon of our trailer. It was her son, Ian Carlos Abernathy, his right leg pressed up against my left from hipbone down to the muscle of his calf and his left leg similarly pressed against his mother, his thatch of rock-star hair ensconced beneath the brim of his Yankees cap still damp with my sweat, who took one look at the house my dad had chosen to raise me in, and said in a perfectly calm, completely honest voice:

  “Cool.”

  Attendons: entendre!

  The first time I did it, it hurt. A lot.

  The second time I did it it hurt even more, because I had a rash from the first time, which broke open, and bled.

  I waited a while before I did it a third time.

  I even wondered if it was worth doing again, but eventually—uncontrollably you might say—I gave in. I went to Ruthie for advice though, because she’d been doing it for years. But Ruthie said what I was doing and what she was doing were two completely different things, and passed me off to her mom. Mrs. Wilcox was “on the market,” which meant she had every kind of health and beauty aid you can imagine (and some that, well, you can’t). She gleefully filled me in on all the “tricks of the trade.”

  “Nowadays people prefer to use a water-based lubricant instead of vaseline, but I think a petroleum product is crucial—absolutely crucial. And always shower beforehand. I mean, not only does it improve the effect, but, well, you’re a teenager. An extra shower is never a bad idea.”

  Mrs. Wilcox had one of those shower nozzles on a long bendy hose, which was a lot better than having to use the little sprayer attached to the kitchen sink (not to mention about a bazillion times less messy). If she was home when Ruthie and I went at it, she’d even lend a hand.

  “Don’t worry,” she’d tell me afterwards, bending me over the tub and rinsing me clean with smooth, practiced sweeps, “I’ve done this for longer than I care to remember, let alone admit. We’ll make you look like a regular leprechaun.”

  Why leprechaun? Because leprechauns have green hair, pervert. Get your mind out of the gutter!

  The bleach was the hard part. In the first place, it stung like crazy, and if it dripped in my eyes it felt like acid (probly because it is acid, duh). That’s what the vaseline was for: you smear a thick border of it from ear to ear, just under the hairline, to keep the bleach from dripping down your forehead. We’d stick one of those granny showercaps over my head too, but even then the fumes leaked out and my eyes would water and my head would itch and all in all it felt as if a colony of fire ants was eating its way into my brain. This lasted for at least a half hour. You had to leave the bleach on long enough that all the pigment in the hair was leeched away, but not so long the strands became brittle and broke like dead grass. A couple of times I ended up with bald patches that I had to color in with green magic marker, and one time when Ruthie and I got sucked into a particularly bloody episode of The Ultimate Fighter we left the bleach on so long that I just had to shave my head, and went to school with an eigh
th of an inch of green fuzz clinging to my scalp like moss on the north side of a tree. In fact moss grows on every side of a tree, but we’d just read Huck Finn, and there was that question the Judith Loftus character asks Huck when he’s dressed as a girl, and, um, why did I bring this up? I can’t remember now . . .

  Anyway, after about a year we had it pretty much down to a science, and from then on my head was covered in three to five inches of bright green hair. Although I could do it on my own, I went to Ruthie’s house whenever I could, not just because the Wilcoxes had better facilities, but also because it gave Ruthie a chance to play hairdresser, which she enjoyed. In addition to dying my hair, she’d usually give me a trim, and then she’d experiment with different looks: gelling it flat and combing thick lines into it like a well-manicured golf course, or using a combination of mousse, hairspray, and spit to sculpt it into a fauxhawk or liberty spikes (as opposed to what I did at home, namely, rubbing a little goop in with both hands until basically my head looked like a shock of wheat left in the field so long that the wind has blown it half to pieces). Ruthie called this my “topiary look.” I didn’t bother to point out that a topiary is a hedge that’s been clipped and shaped to look like something, and it would’ve been more accurate to call it my “untrimmed topiary look” or my “overgrown topiary look,” or maybe just my “messy” look. Or maybe just messy. But hey, just because language is my thing doesn’t mean I have to shove it down everyone else’s throat.

  Then there were the stains.

  The stains were everywhere. Let’s start with my face, my neck, my hands. The first time I did it, I ended up with an olive forehead, a limy neck, and hands that looked like they’d been sifting through a pile of freshly mown grass for a dropped house key or a contact lens or something equally hard to find. Ditto the second time. The third time Mrs. Wilcox taught me the vaseline trick, which kept the dye from running down my skin, and she gave me latex gloves too. But even then I ended up with a green forehead and neck and hands, because I didn’t do a good job rinsing the dye out, and when I ran my hands through my hair the color spread like a virus in a kindergarten classroom.