Sprout

I knew even before I turned and looked at the speaker that something important had just happened.
    So. My head jerked to the right. A kid I’d never seen before was standing on the sideline. Crewcut, dark eyes, prominent zit in the crease between lower lip and chin. He was short enough that I wondered if maybe he was a freshman, but something in his stare—aggressive, but also amused—seemed a lot older than fourteen.
    “I mean, I know my hair ain’t green. But on the other hand, hey, my hair ain’t green .”
    White buttondown shirt, gray polyester pants, a cracked patent leather belt that was at least twice as big as his waist. And the shoes. The shoes were … dude, I don’t even know what they were. They were from Sears . Sears brand. Ultrasuede uppers the color of dirt, with big bulbous rubber soles that looked like they’d hold you up if you tried to walk on water. The killer detail though—the detail that let me know that after two years of High School Hell I’d finally climbed from the bottom of the social ladder to an eminently respectable one rung up: a pocket protector. From the local Stuckey’s. The t had been worn off by the repeated passage of a pen handle or, I don’t know, an air-pressure gauge, which was why Troy Bellows sighed like a punctured tire and said:
    “I guess I’ll take Suckey’s.”
    Beanpole Overholser snickered, and for the first time in my life I was tempted to join him.
    It turned out Mrs. Miller really was the gym monitor that afternoon, and her victorious—cum-smug—cum-sanctimonious walkoff meant that twenty-two teenaged boys playing flag football had been left unsupervised before an audience of about fifty teenaged girls, which is the long way of saying we played shirts versus skins, so at least half of us could show off for what Troy Bellows called, in a completely unconvincing appropriation of hiphop slang, “the shorties.” He whipped off his shirt with a flourish, exposing a surprisingly thick growth of hair curling over his chest in the shape of Croatia. One by one the members of his team did their version of the half Monty, equal parts blush and braggadocio, futzing and flexing—and one seriously shocked ouch! when Carl Peterson’s navel ring caught on his shirt—until it was the new kid’s turn. The whole gym was staring at him. No, scratch that. The whole gym was staring at him, and doing that bump-and-grind music that strippers, you know, strip too. But all the new kid did was roll his eyes, undo the top two buttons of his clerk-in-a-video-store shirt, and pull it over his head. Dropping it on the floor, he looked Troy Bellows in the face.
    “Yo, Sasquatch. Let’s play already.”
    Giggles erupted from the girls on the bleachers. Not because the new kid had a bad body or anything—his skin was stretched tightly across the wiry muscles of his chest and abs—but because he had the absolute worst farmer’s tan I’d ever seen. His neck and his arms up to the middle of his biceps were light brown, but his shoulders and the front and back of his torso were so white they were almost blue. The line between the white and the brown was so neatly drawn you could almost believe he was wearing a T-shirt, if it weren’t for the freckles spread over his torso, and two nipples the size of pink Skittles, and a nervous little outie that poked from his stomach like a piece of chewing gum stuck on a radiator.
    After that I lost sight of him. Indoor flag football is fast and rough. The end zones are a hundred feet rather than a hundred yards apart, and, with no monitor on duty, blocking involved a lot of stiff-arming, tripping, and headlocks. One time Troy Bellows even tried to pants me, but I’d cinched my belt in for precisely that contingency, and all he exposed was a little cheek. He kept shaking though, till finally Ian Abernathy called,
    “Hey-yo, Troy. I don’t wanna put words in my wide receiver’s mouth, but I don’t think you’re his type.”
    “I heard you put something else in your wide receiver’s mouth,” Troy muttered.
    I couldn’t help looking at Ian to see if he reacted.
    “Yo, Green Day,” was all Ian said, “heads up.” A brown speck left his hands and grew rapidly larger. I’m not sure if he was throwing the ball to me or at me, but a second later it bounced into my chest and I took off, not so much towards the end zone as away from the dozen hostile boys who converged on me like a horde of zombies going after that girl in the