Sprout

and on Wednesday all we had time to do was link pinks as we passed each other in the lunch line.
    “I’ll never let go, Jack,” she solemnly intoned, “I promise!”
    “A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets,” I responded, and then, Titanic style, we sank into the stygian depths of the rest of the school day.
    And now, how can I say this so I don’t come off sounding totally disloyal? The plain truth was, I was kind of glad. Well, not glad, but relieved. I’d enjoyed spending July and August with my notebook and pen, being my own muse instead of hers, which is pretty much impossible anyway. After four years of churning out monologues, performance pieces, and soliloquies for Ruthie to perform for youtube videos or school talent shows or regional beauty pageants (Ruthie had been last year’s runner-up in the Miss Reno County pageant, which was pretty amazing given that she wore an evening gown for the swimsuit competition, and a swimsuit for the evening gown competition) the only thing I’d ever written that met with her approval were those first three words. “Oh my God,” she said whenever I showed her anything else, “you make me sound so self-involved!” Ruthie’d been right when she told me all the way back in seventh grade that she’d inspire me: there were a lot of things I wanted to write about her. Just not a lot I wanted to write for her. And, once that was stripped away, our relationship mostly consisted of her doing my hair, or me following her around the mall while she shopped with her mother’s credit card.
    Not that eating lunch alone was so much fun either. For three days I put up with people beaning me with peas, carrots, cauliflower and the occasional soggy, ketchup-dipped French fry (a true mark of disdain, since French fries are to high school what cigarettes are to prison). On Thursday, I decided that if my peers were going to throw things at me, I might as well get to throw back, by which I mean that the guys usually got a game of touch football going in the gym during lunch, and I decided—what the hey—to join in. I got in line to be picked, purely as a formality, of course, since on the rare occasions I did something like this (usually against my will) I was always picked last. Still, it was kind of fun, in an anthropological way if nothing else, to see Ian Abernathy and Troy Bellows try to balance the fact that they didn’t want me on their respective teams with the fact that they didn’t want me on the other team because I was the fastest kid in school. And of course it was a completely different kind of fun to watch Ian not watch me, which I have to admit he was a master at. Just lifted his Yankees cap and pushed his unruly mop of dark brown hair off his forehead and wedged it back on (in the process giving anyone who wanted to look a glimpse of the green stains that ringed the inside of the cap), then pulled a coin from his pocket and flicked it a good twenty feet in the air.
    “You call it, Troy-boy. You’re gonna need all the help you can get.”
    Troy’s voice cracked when he called tails, which elicited a snicker from Paul “Beanpole” Overholser. Troy blushed, but before he could say something another voice cut him off.
    “Language, Mr. Bellows.”
    I whipped around. Mrs. Miller was just taking a seat on the bleachers. I didn’t know if she was gym monitor that afternoon, or if she just—
    “Hello, Sprout. May I speak to you a moment?”
    Well, that answered that one.
    There was a faint thwick and then a louder sptt as Ian caught the coin and slapped it on the back of his hand.
    “Heads.”
    “Sprout?”
    “Yeah, um, I don’t want to lose my place. I might end up—” I did a quick count to see if there was an odd or even number of players “—on Ian’s, um, team.”
    At the mention of Ian’s name, Mrs. Miller’s eyebrows raised dramatically, and she blinked rapidly. My blush was the red-rose version of Troy’s carnation pink, and I glanced in Ian’s direction to see if he’d noticed. An expression flickered over his face so quickly that I couldn’t tell what it was. Fear? Hatred? A muscle spasm? But all he said was:
    “Don’t worry, Brussels. I’ll save a spot for you. Railsback, get your ass over here.”
    “Detention, Mr. Abernathy,” Mrs. Miller said, all traces of summer-friendliness squashed beneath her formidable teacherly authority. “Sprout? You don’t want me to give you detention with Ian, do you?”
    After a brief