Sprout

something with your writing coach when you’re alone in a car and you don’t have to look her in the eye because you’re driving. It’s another to talk about it when she’s sitting in your living room and your dad’s five feet away pouring her a Long Island Iced Tea.
    “C’mon,” my dad said, walking over to the chair with the drinks. “Four years, the same color. One whole quarter of his life. You gotta admit, that’s pretty interesting.”
    Mrs. Miller touched one of the leaves in her own hair, as if she could feel the green. “At first, when I saw the vines on the house, I thought he was trying to express a connection with you. But now I think it’s just his way of indicating that he feels different on the inside. But, since he doesn’t have any other way of expressing it, he has to find a way to let the world know what’s going on. It would be different if he’d actually done something . But you haven’t yet—or have you, Sprout?”
    If you could take that squirmy feeling you get when you have to pee at a packed movie theater, but you’re sitting in the middle of a row and plus on top of that the pseudo–teenaged lovers on screen are just about to either do it or else get done by the knife-or axe-or flamethrower-wielding bad guy, and then multiply that feeling times, I don’t know, a supernova , then you’ll just sort of be at the lower edge of the please-God-let-me-melt-into-the-ground panic this conversation was giving me. I couldn’t even nod this time, let alone speak. Mrs. M. took my motionlessness as a yes, rather than assuming I’d been turned into a statue, which is what I was thinking had maybe happened. She took the drink my dad gave her, then plucked one of the leaves from her garland and put it stem first in the glass like a garnish.
    “So, what?” my dad said. “You’re saying that when he starts getting cornholed he’ll stop dying his hair?”
    “You don’t know,” Mrs. Miller said in the lightest, most reasonable voice you can imagine. “ He could be the one doing the cornholing.”
    I was starting to wonder if maybe it was true. Maybe homosexuality really was a sin, and these weren’t my dad and my writing coach, but a pair of demons masquerading as them, and just getting started on a torture that was going to last for the rest of eternity.
    My dad shook his head. “I thought the young ones were always the ones who, you know—”
    “I think the term is ‘passive,’ Bob. Or ‘receptive.’ ”
    Great. Before she couldn’t say the word “gay.” Now that my dad was around, she knew all the vocabulary. Although I bet none of these definitions was in my dictionary.
    “And anyway,” she continued, “what if there are two young guys? Someone has to be, how do they put it, Sprout? The top? And someone has to be—”
    “I HAD SEX WITH IAN ABERNATHY!”
    My dad’s drink slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor. Short fall; shag carpet; the glass already drained; nothing broken or spilled: i.e., as a reaction, it was pretty superfluous. I, by contrast, took the two steps to the square of linoleum that marked the kitchen, took the coffee cup I’d filched from Mrs. Miller’s cabinet out of my pocket, and smashed it to the floor.
    Mrs. Miller looked at the shards for a moment, then brought her own glass to her lips, sipped, and returned it to her lap.
    “I’m guessing the coffee cup was supposed to be a distraction.”
    “Did it work?” I said hopefully. And then: “Um, yeah,” I answered myself. “I didn’t think so.”

There’ll be no dirty parts in this chapter, so don’t get your hopes (or anything else!) up
    It happened the first week of seventh grade.
    Oh, and then it happened again in eighth grade, sometime during track season.
    Then three times in ninth grade.
    In tenth grade … well, in tenth grade it became kind of a thing. Not a regular thing, but not really an irregular thing. Not after four years. By then we’d discovered the janitors’ closet on the first floor, between the cafeteria and the gym. The door had a lock on the inside, and Ian came up with the plan of smoking half a cigarette before we got started, so that even if we were discovered we could pretend we’d just gone there to smoke, and then of course afterwards we had all the supplies we needed to clean up any trace of what we’d done. We never did get caught, although one time Ian got busted for bringing cigarettes to school, and was given detention, which is