Sprout

moment in which the world stopped turning on its axis, the gym floor split open and a demon from the underworld reached one long tentacle out and pulled me down into the depths of hell, I realized Ian hadn’t heard what she’d said.
    Sighing half in relief, half in consternation, I shuffled over to her.
    “Mpmf?”
    Mrs. Miller’s eyelids were still twitching. I wasn’t sure if this was because of what I’d said, or because of the cinnamony eye shadow she’d applied so heavily that it dusted the inside of her glasses with an iridescent powder. It was the first time I’d seen her since she started dating my dad, and I noticed that, in addition to the new eye shadow, her bangs hadn’t been tortured quite so much with the curling iron either. Most frightening of all, her blouse, usually strapped in by a belt that made her stomach pooch out on either side, was casually—insouciantly even, positively brazenly—untucked.
    Ah, synonyms.
    “I just spoke to Principal Stickley. In light of your excellent grades, not to mention your role as the school’s representative in the State Essay Contest, he’s agreed to allow you to take senior English with me, instead of Mrs. Whittaker’s more, shall we say, re me dial class.”
    Like most English teachers, Mrs. Miller has a kind of, you know, English teacher way of talking. However, the strategic deployment of not one, not two, but three dependent clauses told me she’d rehearsed this sentence before she said it, right down to that seemingly spontaneous “shall we say, re me dial” at Mrs. Whittaker’s expense.
    “But what’m I gonna do next year? Take your class all over again?”
    A grin curled up one side of Mrs. Miller’s lips, whose usual layer of cracked pink lipstick had been replaced with a subtler yet—God, it kills me even to write this—more sensual sheen of gloss. “Do you really think you can learn everything I have to teach in one year? Oh, don’t worry,” she said before I could answer, “we’ll arrange an independent study for your senior year, possibly even let you take a class at JuCo for college credit.”
    I closed my mouth. That would be cool. But the past Saturday—the day before Ruthie got back from England—I’d spent my allotted day with the car driving all around town, until eventually, totally by accident, com plete ly by chance, I ended up driving by Mrs. Miller’s house, where I’d seen my writing coach and my dad dancing arm in arm in her too-many-shades-of-yellow living room, which might as well have been the interior of the sun, given the strangeness of what was happening inside it. The idea of spending an hour a day with the woman who waltzed to Patsy Cline with my dad was just too much.
    “Look, I—”
    Mrs. Miller waved a hand. “Let me save you the trouble of thinking up one of your bons ripostes ” (which she pronounced clever retort ). “This isn’t a request. My class. Tomorrow. Fourth period. And, since you’re coming in late, you’ll need to read the first twenty pages of In Our Time tonight.”
    “Janet—”
    “School’s in session, Sprout. It’s Mrs. M.”
    She grinned, and it was hard to tell if she was trying to soften the blow or rub it in, but as she walked off I could swear she somehow managed to make the click of her low heels sound victorious, if not simply smug. Sanctimonious. Pusillanimous even, but still triumphant.
    Damn those synonyms. Or, I dunno, adjectives. Words .
    “Yo, Alfalfa.”
    My head jerked back to the court. Apparently Ian was working a vegetable conceit today.
    “You playing or what?”
    I took one last look at Mrs. Miller, then sighed dramatically.
    “Last again,” I said, and trotted towards Ian’s team. But then:
    “What am I, invisible?”
    Sometimes things happen in your life and you just know everthing’s going to be different afterwards. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious, like the day when I was ten years old and I came home from school to find my mom smoking her first cigarette in more than two years, and she asked me if I knew what the word “metastasize” meant. Sometimes it’s a little more obscure, like the day my dad came home with that first stump rattling on the back of his trailer, and I sensed that he’d found the person he was going to be now. And sometimes it’s just a feeling, a premonition I guess, that only the passing weeks and months will confirm. And for whatever reason, when I heard that strange voice say, “What am I, invisible?”