Sprout

catcalls, “Kick me” notes, and fistfights in between, the school day pretty much seemed to revolve around me. After one rock-solid week of this, I decided that if there had to be a target on my head, I’d paint it there myself.
When Ruthie honked in the driveway (“Daniel, your friend’s mom is here!”) I found my dad planting some vines to fill in a patchy spot in the back of the house, and asked him for some cash.
“How much do you need?”
“How about a hundred?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“How ’bout fifty?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“How ’bout twenty-five?”
“How ’bout twenty?”
“Really, I just need ten.”
“Well, here’s twenty. If you go by Wal-Mart, buy a couple of plates. You seem to’ve broken them all.”
“Gosh, thanks, Dad. That’s more than I asked for. You’re the best .”
A few days earlier, my dad had shown up on the lawn of some house in Hutch in the middle of the night and interrogated it for six hours— Why did you kill my wife? Why did you destroy my life? Why are you the cause of so much strife? —which made more sense when Ruthie drove me by the house and I saw that it was a one-story ranch made out of pale brown bricks topped by asphalt shingles. Our house on Long Island had been made of pale brown bricks. Its asphalt-shingled single story had barely made an impression against the sky. As I looked at its Kansas doppelganger, I vowed that I would be more than a single story. I would sprout a second story, a third if I wanted, a fourth. I would grow like a beanstalk or a skyscraper. Like the Tower of Babel, I would tell my stories all the way to heaven.
I looked over at the colored streaks in Ruthie’s hair.
“Where’d you get your dye?”
“Duh. This is Hutch. Wal-Mart.”
“Let’s go there. I need to buy some plates.”
On Monday, when I walked down the aisle of the bus, I was greeted by silence, followed by titters. Then more silence. Then more titters. And then a shockingly long wave of silence, so complete that only the squeaking springs of the bus could be heard, and then scattered snorts that could’ve been backfires.
And then silence.
Blessed, blessed silence.
Of course, not everything goes according to plan. What I mean is, when I walked into Wal-Mart, I meant to buy red dye. Aggressive, but also clownlike. The color of anger, but also love. But my hand, or my unconscious, betrayed me. Who knows? Maybe it was just my dad’s vines.
What I mean is, I reached for the red bottle, but I grabbed the green instead.
    I put my pen down. I was pretty sure Mrs. Miller should’ve told me to stop about an hour ago, and I looked up to find her dozing in her chair. I took the margarita glasses and pitcher in the kitchen and washed them, filched a coffee cup from the cabinet and dropped it in the cargo pocket of my shorts, then woke her. I drove her car back to my house while she sat in the passenger seat and read over what I’d written, yawning occasionally, although I hoped this had more to do with the alcohol than my story. When she finished she looked up blearily at my head. Nodded one of those A-ha! nods; then:
    “And ‘Sprout’?”
    From the corner of my eye I saw her curl the index fingers of her hands towards each other, like one earthworm popping up out of the ground and saying “Hi!” to another. “How you doin’? I’m an earthworm! Are you an earthworm too? Great!” If I’d felt confident enough in my driving skills to look away from the road, I probly would’ve realized she was just making quotation marks like she had at the beginning of summer (“Would you like a ‘drink’?”) but what can I tell you? I’m an even worse driver than Mrs. Miller.
    “Sprout?” she said again. “Still there?”
    I shook myself. “Ian.”
    “Abernathy?”
    “‘Der, hey, Sprout!’ ”
    Mrs. M. was silent for a long time. So long that I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep again.
    “That’s it?” she said finally. “‘Der, hey, Sprout’?”
    “Like I said, I wanted Lawnboy.” I shrugged. “You were only married to Mr. Miller for a year. Sometimes you don’t know what’s going to stick.”
    Mrs. Miller laughed quietly. “You should write that one down.” She tapped the notebook in her lap. “You should write it all down,” as if maybe the words in her hand weren’t writing. “This is good stuff, Daniel. It’s all good. Now all we have to do is whittle it down to six pages.”
    “You said eight—”
    “Eight tops . And