Sprout

look. I could tell you that profanity’s just not going to fly at the contest, but you already know that. You broke the rules on purpose, to see what I would do.”
    I sort of grin-grimaced, which had the unintended effect of causing my ears to rise, which in turn had the unintended effect of driving the two halves of my broken pencil a little deeper into my auditory canals, which in turn, well, hurt . I took them out gingerly, inspected them for wax, or blood.
    “It’s easy to shock people, Sprout, as I just demonstrated.
    But you have to realize that it doesn’t always stop with the initial jolt. Sometimes the tiniest stunt can alienate people forever, which in turn causes them to lose sympathy for you, and what you’re trying to say.”
    “You’re saying keep it clean.”
    “I’m saying remember lesson one. Know your audience.”
    I thought back to the B+ Mrs. Lentman had given me on my Catcher in the Rye paper. I’d raised my grade to an A+ by writing my final paper on To Kill a Mockingbird , which, I piously informed Mrs. Lentman, had taught me, “along with countless generations of readers,” that racism is, you know, wrong. Really, really wrong .
    “You’re saying dumb it down.”
    “I’m saying know your audience . Remember that when you sit down to write your essay in that gymnasium-turned-testing hall on Jan. 4, you’re writing about yourself. Not to yourself, or to your peers, but to an audience that will be composed almost exclusively of white, middle-aged, middle-class educators with an equally conservative educational profile. The three R’s. Family values. Intelligent design. You have to find a way to make this audience understand who you are, not some imaginary group of people you might wish was reading your words. Save that for the locker room, or your Facebook page.”
    “I don’t have a computer,” I said. “And teenagers curse. It’s just something we do.”
    “You think we don’t know that, Sprout? We all know the words. And we all know everyone says them. The people we tell not to say them, and the people who tell the people not to say them. But if using them is going to cause you to lose the contest, you have to think of a creative way to let people know what’s being said without actually writing them down.”
    “What, like when a spammer puts a space in the middle of a word so the spam filter doesn’t recognize it, or an asterisk or something? F-star-C-K?”
    “I said creative . And I thought you didn’t have a computer.”
    “Duh. I use the ones at school. And how do I know where to draw the line? Like, is ‘butt’ cool?”
    Mrs. Miller rolled her eyes. “‘Butt’ is cool.”
    “Ha ha, you said butt is cool. What about ‘ass’? Is ‘ass’ cool?”
    Mrs. Miller glared at me through her glasses. “Think about it this way: if you’ve ever seen the word in a book you checked out from the Buhler High School library, it’s okay. And if you haven’t, then, well, there’s a reason why.”
    “Buhler bans books?”
    “All high schools ban books. Buhler just happens not to be ashamed of it. And Buhler’s pretty much a bellwether for the state Board of Ed.”
    “Bellwether?”
    “Look it up.”
    (I did. You should too.)
    “What about sh—”
    “Sprout!” Mrs. Miller’s voice squeaked. She tapped her watch. “We’ll set the clock at four minutes. Now go.”
    I held up my broken pencil. “I was going to say, what about showing me where you keep the pencils.”
    Mrs. Miller pulled a pen from her cleavage and handed it to me. It was shockingly warm.
    “Here,” she said, “use my ballpoint.” She put the slightest extra emphasis on the first syllable, and whatever mental circuits hadn’t been fried by her stream of profanity fizzled out for good.
    When she was seven years old, Ruth Wilcox saw Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth . Even before her parents shut the TV off she’d decided she was going to be a queen or a movie star. Regardless of which role she eventually chose, she realized she needed to be at least a foot taller than her mom—and four inches taller than her dad—so she immediately set her mind to growing. The photographic evidence was on display the first time I went to her house. At eight, Ruthie could rest her chin on top of a yardstick; at ten, she already came up to her mom’s eyebrows; at twelve, her mom stood eye to eye (well, eye to nipple I guess) with the very visible ribs of her daughter’s chest—which, despite her height,