Sprout

present” and 10 is “reaction felt most intensely,” which scale I asked the Phil-bot to repeat at the end of every single question, only to respond 5.5 each time, because there is no middle number on a 1-to-10 scale, which is just, you know, stupid .
    “Okay then,” the Phil-bot said when he’d completed his suicidality checklist. He tore the top sheet off the pad, which had nothing written on it besides my name, and put it in an empty manila folder, which also had my name on it, although in this case it had been typed onto a label and stuck to the folder’s tab, which made it seem more official. He handed me a bumper sticker that said “MY SON IS ON THE HONOR ROLL,” which is kind of ironic if you think about it, since the whole reason I’d been called into his office was because my dad had gotten a DUI and lost his license.
    “If you ever need to talk …”
    “I need to talk every day,” I said, which put a bright, eager smile in the middle of the Phil-bot’s pudgy face. “Just like anyone else who wants to, you know, say something .”
    The Phil-bot’s jowls fell so far he looked like a basset hound in a bowtie. I almost felt sorry for him, but I told myself that’s how they get you. As he pulled open his door, he glanced at his watch and said, “I’m afraid I’ve kept you past your bus. Do you have a way to get home?”
    And there was Ian Abernathy, flirting with Mrs. Helicopter, the 125-year-old front secretary whose real name was Heliocopulate or something like that, but who had long since given up on getting anyone to say it right.
    “Don’t worry,” Ian flashed Mrs. Helicopter his best James Dean, then turned to the Phil-bot. “My mom’s coming to pick me up. We’d be honored to drive Sprout
    “Sprout? What are you writing?”
    I looked up to see Mrs. M. in the doorway with a fresh pitcher of margaritas, and I flipped the page quickly. I pantomimed jogging in place, like a runner stopped at a red light.
    “Nothing,” I said. “Just keeping my muscles warm.”
    Mrs. Miller’s time trials often involved leaving something out, like that exercise with the sunset she’d had me do the first day, where I couldn’t mention why the husband was sad. “Less is more,” she said. “Necessity is the mother of invention.” One week I wasn’t allowed to use any form of the verb to be , which was bad enough, but the next week I wasn’t allowed to use the letter e . Let me tell you, I came pretty close to having a drink that day. Then sometimes I had to focus on some specific thing or another. Mrs. Miller was big on all five senses, but especially smells. I knew something was up that day, because she was wearing an especially strong perfume. My dad only wears cologne when he’s trying to cover up the fact that he’s drunk, so I assumed that was the case here, until she said, “Describe everything you smell in this car.” Just to make her blush, all I wrote was: “Did you eat onions for lunch?”
    And then other times she just let me freestyle. She’d press the button on her stopwatch (did I mention she had a stopwatch? she had a stopwatch) and off I’d go:
    At twelve, Ruthie was too young for a license, but that didn’t stop her from driving wherever she wanted to go. With a little lipstick, she looked at least sixteen. With a lot of lipstick—which is what she usually wore, along with a lot of eyeliner and enough eye shadow to keep Revlon’s quarterly profits in the black—she looked like my mother, or maybe just the Demoiselles d’Avignon .
She drove her mom’s hand-me-down BMW. The silver convertible emerged from the leafy tunnel of our driveway like a minnow jumping from a pond—Carey Pond, let’s say, in Carey Park, on the southern edge of Hutchinson, which is where she took me to smoke cigarettes (“nature’s natural appetite suppressant,” she told me, which, as far as redundancies go, verges on brilliant ).
“See, this is what I don’t get.” She stood on a fallen elm trunk admiring her reflection in the scummy water, took a drag and held the smoke in her mouth (she hadn’t figured out how to inhale yet), then blew it out with a long sigh, peeking to see if I could tell she was faking. “This is what I don’t get,” she said again. “On the one hand, you have this incredible singer with this like in cred ible voice and this look no one has ever seen before, a junk-store carnival nymph whose first record sells fifteen million copies and produces four