Sprout

and basketballs, soccer balls and kickballs was flying through the air. The new kid stood pressed up against the “Crew-saders” banner at the back of the gym and didn’t even bother to cover his face, as if he knew it was his lot in life to suffer through the time-honored hazing rituals of the American secondary school system.
    At some point a ball bounced wonkily in my direction, and I lunged for it and caught it because, well, that’s what you do when a ball bounces in your direction. It was a tetherball of all things, a U of hard, solid rubber poking from its surface where the rope normally went. I wondered how much it would hurt if that U was the part of the ball that made contact with your thigh or your gut or your cheek. If it would leave a welt instead of just a red burning patch like Ian’s football had left on my head. But the new kid was hidden behind a wall of bodies, and every time it seemed like I had a shot someone would get in the way. Before I could do anything the bell rang, and sixty or seventy screaming kids disappeared the way only high school kids can, scattering like leaves shunted by a leafblower.
    Brown, orange, white, striped, and pentagonally patterned balls came to rest like a field of psychedelic mushrooms around the new kid, but all by himself he was a surreal sight. His farmer’s tan had disappeared: the bare skin of his upper body, from the off-white stretched-out waistband of his granddad underwear to the golden peach fuzz covering his head, was a swirling splotchy field of angry pink and bitter red and birthmark purple, with here and there the blue-veined spiderweb of a bruise just beginning to swell up. His torso was like a human-shaped flame spouting from the nerdy base of his polyester pants and his wrinkled tube socks and his stupid, stupid, stupid shoes. The only part of him that was still white was his teeth, which were bared in a wide, taunting smile—and aimed, out of everyone else in the gym, at me.
    “Yup,” he said. “My hair still ain’t green.”
    All at once the tetherball in my hand felt as heavy as a cannon shot. I bent down, set it on the floor so it wouldn’t bounce or crash through the freshly waxed boards to the locker rooms below. It seemed to me that the dozens of balls between me and the new kid were evidence that everyone had taken a shot at him except me, but when I let go of the ball I saw that it was covered in green—fingerprints and handprints and a million sweaty-palmed smears, a clear indictment of the eager, almost desperate way I’d waited for my own chance to throw. To make sure it really hurt. To make sure it left its mark.
    By the time I stood up the new kid was gone, and instead it was Ian Abernathy again. He nudged the stained tetherball with his toe. The expression that had flickered over his face at the beginning of the game was back again, and this time I saw it was fear and hatred. But it wasn’t me he was afraid of, me he hated.
    “You wanted to,” he said, “didn’t you, Sprout?”
    For a long time I just stared at him. And then, surprising even myself, I reached out and flicked his green-stained baseball cap to the floor.
    “Yeah?” I said. “Well, so did you .”

Welcome to the jungle
    Time passed.
    Specifically, eight days passed, but it could’ve been five years. It was what Mr. Schaefer, the world—i.e., advanced—history teacher would’ve called an “epochal shift.” One age was ending, another was beginning. We just didn’t know it yet.
    The first sign of the change was that afternoon in the gym. Well, in fact the first sign of the change was actually that afternoon before school started, when Ruthie told me she was interested in Ian. The second sign was that day in the gym. I thought the change had something to do with Ian—like maybe Ian was going to turn out to be straight after all—but it turned out Ian was just a distraction. This was made clear by the third and final sign, namely, a pickup truck rattling down 82nd Street’s washboard ridges. It was a Tuesday, around four; I was getting in my after-school run, and I hung back a little from the intersection so I wouldn’t have to wade through the truck’s cape of dust. I had my pretend ipod on, a pair of old earbuds plugged into the waistband of my underwear, and I did jumping jacks while singing along with the song in my head.
    “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine …”
    (I’d try to make an excuse here, but really, there isn’t