Sprout

them. Then:
    “Describe me,” Ruth Wilcox said.
    “Um—”
    “Don’t think . Do .”
    I stared at her for a long time, but she showed no sign of going away. I looked at my watch. Nineteen minutes till recess ended. I looked at the troll doll, its googly eyes and tangled polyester thatch of green hair, then back up at the strange girl standing in front of me. Her skin-tight acid-washed jeans were tucked into a pair of beige Uggs, her oldies concert tee worn underneath an outer garment that was less a tanktop than a couple of strips of fabric holding up a little square of cloth. Her face could’ve been a clear glass pitcher filled with milk, with that impossibly long sharp nose sticking out of it like a spout. A striped bluejay’s feather dangled from her left ear, and her right eyelid was painted some kind of bronzy red. The words “etaoin shrdlu” (which aren’t Gaelic as I thought at first, but rather the twelve most frequently used letters of the English language) were painted across her fingernails. Since she only had five fingers on each hand, this was perhaps the most impressive part of the whole ensemble.
    After a long time I sighed and wrote three words. I wrote in all caps, put periods between them, underlined the last one, and then I handed the notebook back.
    Ruth Wilcox stared at what I’d written. In profile her face was so thin it seemed two-dimensional, as if it’d come out of a photocopier. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
    She nodded and closed the book.
    “What’s that all over your fingers?”
    “Huh?”
    “Fingers.” She waggled the etaoin digits at me. “Yours are fil-thy.”
    I looked down at my fingertips, saw that they were covered with black and purple stains.
    “Um, rubber cement and pokeberry juice.”
    She nodded like this was a satisfactory explanation, then tapped the closed notebook.
    “I like it. It’s like the opening monologue before the curtain goes up, when the audience is still leafing through their programs and trying to decide whether they’ll wear their coats or stuff them under their seats or maybe just sneak out at intermission. It’s tantalizing. It could go in any direction.” She looked down that incredibly long, sharp nose at me. “I believe we were destined to meet, Daniel Bradford. Together you and I are going to ditch this loser town and rule the world.” And, turning on her heel, she walked away.
    I stared after her in disbelief, the troll doll pencil still dangling from my hand. All I’d written was:
    YOU. ARE. WEIRD .
    “Sucks about your mom,” Ruth Wilcox tossed over her shoulder, and I looked down at my dirty fingers and burst into tears.
    1 For the record, I am aware “frisbee” should be capitalized—and ultimate frisbee, for that matter. Ditto cup-a-noodles, peppermint pattie, tabasco, internet, sharpie, vaseline, magic marker, post-it, etc., etc. In fact, most of them should be written with a ® too. What can I say? Sometimes that shift key just seems so far away …
    2 See note above.
    3 Ditto; if there’s anything worse than a word with a totally useless capital letter at the beginning of it, it’s a word with a totally useless capital letter somewhere in the middle. And now, having pretty much run this whole footnote gimmick into the ground, I’ll stop. Your eyes can return to the top of the page with my promise that they won’t have to wander back down here again, except to look for page numbers.

The margarita was the only virgin in the house
    “Call me Janet.”
    Mrs. Miller opened an amber door and beckoned me into a tawny living room. Beige dining room to the left; ochre hallway to the right; dun-colored patio through a pair of sliding-glass panels. Beyond that, a yard full of dry grass yellowing beneath the merciless Kansas sun.
    On the wall next to the door, where some people hang framed squares of needlepoint that say “God Bless This Home” and other people hang pictures of their children or parents or dead wives, Mrs. Miller had hung a brass plate reading:
    G OD B LESS S YNONYMS , M ETA PHORS , AND E UPHEMISMS TOO !
    “God Bless Synonyms, Metaphors, and Euphemisms too!” is a pretty weird sentence all by itself, but it’s even weirder when it’s stamped into solid brass and fastened to one of those heraldic wooden plaques that usually have a moose’s head or a stuffed pheasant mounted on them, and is the first thing you see when you walk in someone’s front door to boot. Now Mrs. Miller ran a hand