Sprout

treatment. “Still, I’d be, you know, curious. To see how it all works.”
    “Yeah? Then why don’t you go down there?”
    What Ruthie was talking about (in case you’re curious) was Carey Park. (See also pages 63 and 64, and Ruthie’s soliloquy on Madonna v. Cyndi Lauper.) You might remember that a man had walked by towards the end of Ruthie’s monologue, and she’d chucked her cigarette in the pond and driven us home. At first I thought it was because she was afraid of getting busted for smoking, but in fact it was less paranoid than that. Well, maybe not less paranoid, but at least more serious: about six months before I moved to Hutch, the dad of one of the kids in eighth grade had been picked up in Carey Park for “loitering with intent.” Apparently Carey Park was where Hutchinson homosexuals went to meet each other and, well, do the things homosexuals do when they meet each other. In parks. Apparently the dad of the kid in eighth grade had approached some guy who was only nineteen (the dad was forty-seven) and, while this is not illegal, it’s still pretty ick, and gave rise to a bunch of rumors about predators and that sort of stuff. Even though none of those rumors were ever proven, twelve-year-old Ruthie was still creeped out enough to want to jet. But after I told her I was gay she did a complete about-face, and started pestering me to hang out in the park and find out if there was any truth to all the stories. I was like, no thanks. I’d just as soon remain sexless as get it on with someone old enough to be my dad. Ruthie had argued that if there were old guys looking for young guys then that meant that there had to be young guys, right? I could just hook up with one of them? The scary thing about this was that her argument made some kind of sense—make no mistake, Ruthie Wilcox could be diabolically clever when she wanted to be. But still. Trolling a park in search of a kid who was so desperate to get his rocks off that he’d risk being picked up by a middle-aged pedophile (or, for that matter, a cop) was not how I wanted to take the next step on my sexual adventure. Not that Ruthie knew anything about the first step, of course. But I was pretty sure that even if I hadn’t fooled around with Ian I still wouldn’t be horny enough to work Carey Park.
    While all this was going through my head, Ruthie was rinsing my hair. She pressed the strands between her index and middle finger, expertly squeegeeing out the excess dye without tugging at the roots. I closed my eyes, let out a long, tired sigh. Talking to Ruthie could be so exhausting. If only she could just rinse my hair forever, we’d get along great.
    In fact, she continued to run her fingers through my hair for so long that I risked opening one eye. The water running into the sink was clear, which meant that she’d drifted off, and I knew she was imagining what it would be like to have sex with Ian. Which is kind of ironic when you think about it, since I was doing the same thing.
    I closed my eye again and smiled to myself, wondering what Ruthie would think if she knew I’d beaten her to Ian Abernathy. It was nice to have one thing to myself. Not just something she didn’t have, but something she didn’t even know about.
    Turns out I was wrong about that.
    On both points.

Like that girl in the pink coat in Schindler’s List
    At BHS the lunch period is spread out over the course of seventy-five minutes. Classes come in at ten-minute intervals and get thirty-five minutes to eat, nap, study, make out, play video games or band together in marauding packs to pick off the glasses-wearing outcasts and top-button-buttoned pariahs and overly-afflicted-by-acne future internet millionaires. In addition to not having a single class together, it turned out that by some cruel twist of fate Ruthie went in on the very first shift of this byzantine schedule and I went in on the last. Normally we spent the first week of school lunches deciding which of the new freshmen were going to lose their virginity to upperclassmen and which of the seniors were going to be pregnant by graduation. On the first Monday of our junior year, however, our entire lunchtime interaction consisted of her warning me to avoid the “hamburger”; on Tuesday, she advised me not to sit anywhere near the northwest corner of the cafeteria, where one of the Special Ed kids had puked up the twenty-three Jell-o cups that the football team had been “kind” enough to give him;