Sprout

winning the contest, graduating high school, and going to college, I was like, Oh. Duh .
    A little humor: lest we forget, I have green hair, and everyone calls me Sprout.
    “I mean, don’t take this the wrong way,” Mrs. Miller told me sometime in early July. “These are serious issues, I don’t want you to ex ploit them or anything. But, you know, everything happens for a reason.”
    “I don’t think my mom died so I could write about it.”
    Mrs. Miller looked at me for a long time, then picked up my glass and headed inside.
    “This is why teenagers should be kept away from alcolol,” she said, and hiccupped.
    For the record: I wasn’t drunk. I wasn’t even tipsy. In fact, I hadn’t had anything to “drink” at all. A few weeks into our lessons, Mrs. Miller developed the habit of “remembering” she’d left something in the kitchen after she came out to the patio with the pitcher of virgin margaritas (or virgin daiquiris, or virgin mojitos, which, if you’ve never had one, DON’T! ). I guess she liked to think of herself as a cool teacher or a with-it kind of grownup or whatever; the trip back to the kitchen was to allow me to doctor my own drink while allowing her to maintain plausible deniability. But I liked tequila (or rum if it was mojitos, or vodka if it was bloody marys, or cachaça if it was caipirinhas, or Pisco if it was Pisco sours) even less than the various virgin versions, so all I did was pour a jigger of whatever kind of alcohol was on offer onto the grass beside the patio. Over the course of the summer a dead spot spread there, which provided as good an illustration of the deleterious effects of drinking as anything else (this is your brain; this is your brain on cocktails). At any rate, when she came back outside with the straws or napkins or tabasco (for bloody marys) or whatever she’d pretended to forget, she would always wink at me, and I would always wink back, trying to make it look as intoxicated as possible. It didn’t cost me anything, and it made her feel like she was down with the kids.
    “And ready … set … go !”
    The school banned my graffiti’d Vans on Tuesday; on Wednesday, Ruthie drove me to the mall to buy a new pair of shoes; on Thursday she wrote “FU” in tiny letters on the heel of my right shoe, and “CK” on the heel of her left, so that when we stood next to each other it read “FU
    “And … stop. Stop stop stop stop stop stop stop .”
    “Huh? It can’t’ve been five minutes.”
    “It’s been fifteen seconds.”
    “Then—”
    “C’mon, Sprout.” Mrs. Miller tapped the last word on the page. The last partial word. “You know you can’t write that.”
    “Can’t write … ?”
    “ Profanity , Sprout.”
    “I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Could you tell me more about this ‘profanity’?”
    Mrs. Miller nodded at my dictionary. “I assume you don’t need a definition. Perhaps you’d prefer an example?”
    “That would be so helpful, thank you very much.”
    Without missing a beat, Mrs. Miller rattled off a stream of obscenities so fully and completely unexpected that I fell off my chair. Mothers were defiled, and their male and female children, as well as any and all offspring who just happened to’ve been born out of wedlock. As for the sacred union that produced these innocent babes, the pertinent bodily appendages were catalogued by a list of nicknames so profoundly scurrilous that a grizzled marine, conceived in a brothel and dying of a disease he contracted in one, would’ve wished he’d been born as smooth as a Ken doll. The act itself was invoked with such a variety of incestuous, scatological, bestial, and just plain bizarre variations that that same marine would’ve given up on the Ken doll fantasy, and wished instead that all life had been confined to the single-cell stage, forever free of the taint of mitosis, let alone procreation.
    Somewhere during the course of all this I noticed that I’d snapped my pencil in half, and now I used the two ends to gouge out my brain.
    “Guhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh guhhhhh,” I said, by which I meant: “You have shattered whatever tattered remnants of pedagogical propriety I still possessed, and my tender young mind has broken beneath the strain.” Nervously, I climbed back into my chair, the two halves of my pencil sticking out of my ears like an arrow that had shot clean through my head.
    Mrs. Miller allowed herself a small, self-congratulatory smile. “So