Sprout

number ones. And on the other hand you have this grade-B bimbo with a voice like a parrot dying from throat cancer, who thinks wearing fishnet on your chest instead of your legs is somehow radical fashion, and whose first album, let’s face it, pretty much disappears thanks to the fact that one: it was basically gay disco, which, I mean, nothing against gays or disco but gay plus disco equals, you know, yuck , and two: the videos featured routines that were half spastic imitations of modern dance and half crotch-grabbing. And so whatever, this is what I don’t get: what I don’t get is, why is it that the first girl’s career ends up tanking and the second girl goes on to become the biggest-selling female recording artist in history, picking up a fake English accent, a Kabbalah addiction, and a Malawian orphan along the way? I mean, I don’t get that. Do you?”
“Your cigarette went out.” (Well, what would you have said?)
“Ma don na,” Ruth Wilcox said. “ Duh . And Cyndi Lauper . I thought you were from New York City .”
“I’m from Long Island, which, culturally speaking, is about as far from New York City as Malawi. And your cigarette really did go out.”
“Oh crap ,” Ruthie said, except she didn’t say “crap” but the more common, albeit unprintable (in this context) synonym that she’d been carving into her desk the day I first saw her. (She’d carved the “crap” into my desk too, the year before. “Crap, darn, fudge. They’re all so sixth-grade. Son of a biscuiteater. What self-respecting preteen can say that with a straight face?”) Now, after a couple of failed attempts to light her cigarette (which is very hard to do if you won’t inhale), she threw it into the pond. I thought she’d finally accepted the fact that cigarette smoking is pretty much the grossest thing ever, but instead she nodded toward something behind me. I turned and saw a twentysomething guy walking down the looping path that bounds Carey Park and staring at us with that proprietary look of accusation that adults love to brandish at anyone under the age of eighteen. As soon as he was gone, Ruthie said,
“We’d better go. Just in case.”
“In case what? He throws a phone at us?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. In case … ?”
“My mom gets back from pilates at four. I better drive you home.”
And so ended the first of Ruthie’s unfathomable soliloquies, veered into and away from with all the predictability of a rabid skunk trying to cross a highway (I saw it once: trust me, the ending ain’t pretty). Here’s another:
“I’m named for a character in a book. I tried to read it but it was boring. It was turned into a movie and I tried to watch that, but it was boring too. So I figure maybe I should change my name. What do you think of Desireh?”
And another:
“I’m not anorexic. Anorexics have a distorted body image. I know I’m too thin. You have to be too thin if you want to make it in L.A. Besides, I eat eight hundred calories a day, which is considered a lot for people in places like Malawi. What if I called myself something British, like Fenella, or Hermione?”
And:
“You know how when some people get a piece of bubble wrap in their hands they have to twist it till it pops? Yeah, I’m not one of those people. I have better things to do with my time. Ruby? But if I called myself Ruby I’d have to dye my hair red, and then, well, Ruby and Sprout, that’d be too much.”
But my favorite had to be this one:
“Why is it that the closest word in English that rhymes with anarchy is menarche?”
“Monarchy—”
“ Men arche.” When I just stared at her blankly, she said, “You walk around clutching a dictionary to your stomach like a cheerleader trying to cover up the gift the captain of the football team gave her, look it up. Oh hell. Why don’t I just give in and call myself Britney ?”

Meanwhile, school:
On Long Island, I’d been anonymous. Just one of 2,567 students, not at the top of the heap, not at the bottom. Just a brown-haired piece of the middle. Take me out and nothing would collapse. No one would notice.
But in Kansas, I was marked out. The new kid. The stranger. The boy with the weird accent. The boy with the weird dad, and no mom. From the moment Madison Pagels tripped me as I walked down the aisle of the school bus at 7:07 A.M. to the moment Madison’s best friend Chelsea Monroe tripped me as I walked up the aisle at 3:56 P.M., and all the spitballs, hair-pulling, snickers,