Sprout

as, invisibly but not inaudibly, the new kid heads for his next class.
    One down. Five more to go.
    And nine more months of the school year.
    And six more years of school.
    ME: Shoot me now.
    CURTAIN
    So.
    That was the first time I’d ever mentioned my mom’s death out loud, and afterwards everything was pretty much a blur. I drifted through my classes, did the whole sitting-by-myself thing at lunchtime, which took all of about five minutes to (not) eat, then wandered outside. The playground was a big dusty square of asphalt next to an even bigger dustier field of, well, dust. Something had been planted on the field that I think was supposed to be grass, but it was so brown and dry it looked more like stale chocolate frosting. I wandered the perimeter like a prisoner checking for holes in the fence, but in fact there was no fence. Buhler Elementary was located more or less in the middle of nowhere, which meant there was nowhere for potential threats to hide, and nowhere for fleeing students to run. On the eastern edge of the playground I found a couple of stumps from trees that had been cut down, or maybe just died. This was before my dad started his collection (and besides, their roots were still in the ground where they belonged), so I didn’t think too much about them. Just sat down and prepared to wait out the twenty-three minutes until my next class.
    The sky was big and empty and not quite blue because of all the dust in the air, and after a while a combination of gravity and boredom caused my eyes to fall to the horizon, which looked like it was about a hundred miles away, and then to the two-lane highway that ran past the school, on which a rattle-trap truck or car passed every four or five years or so, and then finally to my shoes. My dad had taken me to the mall to shop for school clothes the day before. Unlike my mom, he hadn’t vetoed any of my choices. The coolest thing I’d bought by far was a pair of Vans. The classic red checkerboard print reminded me of a brick wall, which had inspired me to bomb it with a purple sharpie I’d picked up at the Hobby Hut. I was trying to come up with a good answer for what other word might begin with F-U-C, but, since I didn’t have my dictionary handy, it was harder than it might seem. Suddenly I heard a throat clear.
    “Well well well. If it isn’t Long Gayland.”
    I looked up to see—duh—Ian Abernathy. You’d think the whole dead mother thing would’ve given me the pity vote, but Ian Abernathy was not exactly what you would call sensitive. Since an essay to him was what a hike up Mt. Everest would be to a blindfolded paraplegic with acrophobia and asthma, he wanted revenge. His eyes glowered out from beneath his straw hat, and his football-throwing arms were bursting from his overalls. Okay, so maybe his overalls were actually a pair of Diesel jeans and an A&F T-shirt, and his straw hat was a baseball cap (Yankees, in fact, which isn’t ironic as much as it’s a coincidence, although I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to help me).
    I must’ve made some kind of funny expression because Ian’s eyes blinked rapidly, and in a slightly unsteady voice he said, “Um, nice kicks.”
    I looked at my shoes, then back up at Ian. Before I could decide what to say to this true but, let’s face it, pretty unexpected statement, I saw a second figure in the field behind him. Because of the height I thought it was a teacher at first, or maybe one of Ian’s friends come to join in the fun. Then I realized it was the girl who’d sat next to me in first period. She strode rapidly across the dust, as tall and thin as a periscope poking from the waves. She was even more angular standing than sitting, the cardboard flatness of her body heightened by the super-severe eighties wedge that cut across one of her eyes like a slice of pizza taped to her face. This isn’t to say she was awkward or anything. On the contrary. Her body seemed as taut and strong as the wires that hold up a suspension bridge. And her face … man, how do I describe her face? Her face seemed to rise above the usual set of seventh-grade adjectives: PrettyUglyCoolWeirdEtc. Instead you thought of grownup words like “haughty” or “composed” or “striking.” It was a face that seemed to come with its own frame; no matter what angle you looked at it from, it seemed more like a picture than flesh and blood. In tenth grade I saw a painting called Liberty Leading the People and I thought,