Sprout

Fortunately, years of hard drinking had pretty much burned out my dad’s sense of taste (both the oral and aesthetic kind), so it didn’t really matter.
    That “fortunately” was ironic, by the way.
    Duh.
    And so yeah anyway.
    The stains.
    Everywhere.
    And everyone noticed them.
    But no one noticed I was having sex with Ian Abernathy. Not even when one time Beanpole Overholser saw a couple of green smudges around the base of Ian’s cap and asked Ian if I’d dared to snatch it off the top of his head.
    “Nah,” Ian didn’t even blink. “The wind blew it off, and I made ol’ Saladhead here run after it for me, him being such a fast runner and all. Right, Saladhead?”
    “Suck an egg, Abernathy.”
    No one noticed, that is, except Mrs. Miller, who might not’ve known the who but somehow figured out the what . I gotta hand it to her. She was good. I gave her dead mom, drunk dad, cross-country move—everything she asked for, plus crazy friend and the eccentricities of dictionary and dye job, and of course my thoroughly disarming wittiness, and she saw right through me. Made me wonder what else she might know about me—maybe things I didn’t even know about myself. Tell you the truth, it scared me a little. Scared me a lot actually. So much that I skipped our last summer session, and then school started, and then, well …
    Then everything changed.
    (She was wrong about the cup though. The one I stole from her cabinet and broke on the kitchen floor. It wasn’t a distraction. Wasn’t just a distraction anyway. But first things first. Or, well, in this case, second things second. I.e.:)

This is the second part!
    Superman: Easy, miss. I’ve got you.
Lois Lane: You’ve got me? Who’s got you ?

Wake-up call
    Seven A.M. Sunday morning.
    Who in their right mind would call at such an ungodly hour?
    “Mmmmyello?”
    “I’M STILL ON GREENWICH MEAN TIME!” a foghorn blared into my ear. “MY BRAIN THINKS IT’S ONE IN THE AFTERNOON!”
    I mentioned that Ruthie’s dad took her to England for two months, right? They went on “a motor tour of the historic British countryside” (that’s the brochure talking, not Mr. Wilcox) for July and August. Before she left I predicted she’d return with a fake accent. Sure enough, the voice on the other end of the line made Madonna sound to the manor bjorn. Ruthie’s consonants were sharp enough to cut butter. Her vowels floated along the roof of her mouth like helium balloons trapped in the gym after a dance.
    Fortunately, I’d prepared for this.
    “ Scouse me?” I said in the worst British accent I could muster, given the hour and my general lack of interest in all things English. “I Kent understand you.”
    (Ruthie’s dad bought Google, by the way. Not a lot, but enough to let him spend two months in the middle of the summer “motoring acrost” the British countryside. Oh, and he’s a lawyer. That’s how he was able to afford Google in the first place.)
    “You are such a dork. D’you want to do your hair?”
    “Say again? My Cockney’s stuck in my Middlesex, and I’m just about to Cumbria.”
    A groan rumbled over the line while I inspected my roots in the mirror on the other side of the living room. It was hard to focus—my face was all warped and wobbly for some reason. At first I thought it was distance, or darkness, but our trailer’s only seven and a half feet wide for one thing, and plus it turns out the sun is pretty much up by seven in the morning. Who knew?
    Then I remembered we didn’t have a mirror in our living room.
    I squinted. The thing hanging on the wall was actually one of those big-ass chrome rims you see on Pimp My Ride —judging from the size, it had come from an Escalade, or one of those Suburban/Yukon/Denali clones. You gotta hand it to my dad. He could always surprise you. The rim had a few dents, so my guess is he found it by the side of the road.
    “Hell-O?!” Ruthie apparently felt the silence had gone on too long. “School starts tomorrow, and we need to review our schedules.” She dropped the accent on everything but the last word, which came out “shed-yules,” albeit in a quiet voice, already half-defeated.
    “Shed-yules?” I looked around for the three cottonwood bark paintings that used to hang where the rim now protruded from the wall. Saw that my dad’d made a mobile out of them, hung them over the dining room table, i.e., the kitchen counter, i.e., the end table for the loveseat, i.e., the place where