Sprout

our Long Island house.
    “Life’s cheap out here, Daniel. With a little budgeting, I can get by till you go off to college.”
    “And then?”
    My dad reached for whatever he was drinking that day.
    “There don’t always have to be a then.” He poured, drank, swallowed, grimaced. Left his hand on the bottleneck. “Hell, there ain’t really a now, so why should there be a then?”
    And he poured, drank, swallowed, and grimaced again.
    You might recognize my dad’s words as a tautology. Circular reasoning. The unsubstantiated assertion that there won’t be a then is based on the equally groundless claim that there isn’t a now , when, clearly, there is, whether or not my dad chooses to sober up and face it. Mrs. Miller taught me you can get away with these kinds of logical fallacies when you put them in dialogue, which transforms them from rhetorical errors to idiomatic expressiveness.
    I.e., poetic license.
    I.e., lies.
    There were a lot of lies in our life, and if I end up telling a few, it’s only because I’m repeating what I heard.

What else would I do with my summer vacation?
    Mrs. Miller drills me on grammatical issues like tautologies and redundancies and the like because I am my school’s representative for the statewide essay contest held each year in Topeka between the fall and spring semesters. (Man, that was a boring sentence. Glad I finally got it out of the way.) Buhler High is small even by Kansas standards—not quite five hundred kids in all four grades—but Mrs. Miller’s had four winners and three runners-up in fifteen years of teaching, which pretty much makes her the Bob Knight of the Kansas essay-writing circuit. Even to be selected as our school’s representative is an honor, since I’m only a junior, and there’s a $2,500 scholarship at stake, as well as a traveling silver cup that gets displayed in the cabinet along with the handful of dusty trophies that commemorate various football and basketball and tennis and track victories that took place in the distant past. In Mrs. Miller’s “considered opinion,” I could be the first person to win the cup two years in a row. All the other teachers in the state, she added proudly, hate her.
    In fact she didn’t have to look that far. All the teachers at Buhler hate her too. But that’s getting ahead of the story.
    …
    It played out like this:
    Shortly before the end of sophomore year, a tall, thin (well, thinnish) teacher with not particularly natural-looking blonde hair approached me in the hall. Wispy bangs had been tortured with repeated applications of curling iron and hairspray in clear violation of the Geneva Convention; a pair of oversized square-framed glasses rode so low on the bridge of her nose that I had to resist the urge to push them up; her pleated khaki pants had been ironed so viciously that the creases had turned white. She carried a couple of pieces of paper in her right hand, which she used to fan her face in the un—air conditioned hall. Something—ketchup maybe, raspberry jelly?—stained the corner of the top page. The stain winked at me as though it had some kind of Rorschach significance, but the teacher was fanning the pages so rapidly I couldn’t get a good look at it, or them.
    “You are”—she stopped fanning long enough to push the glasses up her nose—“Sprout Bradford?”
    I thought it was a little pretentious to say “You are Sprout Bradford?” instead of “Are you Sprout Bradford?” so I said, “I are Sprout Bradford!” in my best half-hick, half-retard voice.
    Behind her square frames, the teacher’s eyes rolled. They were gray and large and … and skeptical . No one had ever looked at me skeptically before. I’d never earned anything more than garden-variety doubt. It made me feel grownup. A little scared, but grownup.
    The gray eyes floated to the top of my head.
    “Well. At least I understand one thing now.”
    I scratched my scalp. The dye job was fresh, so my fingertips came away green, and I wiped them on my pants. Like most of my clothes, they already had a liberal smattering of green: stains, smears, and smudges; flecks, flakes, and drops (one of which turned out to be a pea, and which I flicked off as discreetly as I could).
    “Look, uh, Miss—”
    “Mrs.”
    Like that helped. “Look, Mrs.—”
    “Miller.”
    I must’ve pulled some kind of face, because she smiled, kind of grim, but kind of proud too.
    “You’re not the only one with a reputation.”
    I