Sprout

one.)
    The truck was dark and funny-shaped. Everything rounded, bulbous, protruding, concave. Running boards, flared wheel wells in front and back, a windshield curved like a bow. The hood stuck out like the snout of a bloodhound and the engine made a sound like a dog stuck midbark. A shadow filled the window on the driver’s side. On the passenger’s side, a head and arm hung out like a balloon on a stick.
    “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey!”
    (Like everyone else, I only knew that one line of the song. Oh, and also? I have a terrible singing voice.)
    As the truck grew closer, I could see that the arm hanging out the passenger window was thin but wiry. Corded muscle lay over bone, under skin. What little fuzz remained on the shaved head had gone white-blond under the sun. The cheekbones were sharp, the jaw pointed, but I didn’t recognize him till I saw the zit on his chin. Sometimes I wonder if I really saw that pink pinprick—he was in a moving truck, after all, enveloped in a cloud of dust. I found myself wondering if he recognized me too. I imagine my green hair was pretty much a giveaway.
    His eyes were already looking at mine when I met his. I felt my mouth move, saw his lips pucker and curve. If it hadn’t been for the name each of us voiced, you could’ve thought we were blowing kisses at each other.
    “Mouse …”
    “… Sprout.”
    And then the truck was gone.
    It seemed like I didn’t stop running till I found him the next day in school.
    “Hey.”
    “Hey.”
    Later, we argued over who said “hey” first. Never did agree.
    “Was that you yesterday?”
    “Yeah. That was you?”
    “That was me.”
    The words could’ve come from either of us. Our first conversation: we both had the same questions, the same answers.
    “You live around there?”
    “Yeah. With my dad.”
    “Me too.”
    “I didn’t know there was anyone my age in the hood.”
    “Me neither. I never saw you before.”
    “I never saw you either.”
    My heart thrilled. Never had a lack of connection made me feel so connected.
    “It sucks living out there. No one around.”
    “Yeah. But school sucks worse, right?”
    “Right. Damned if you do—”
    “—damned if you don’t.”
    We had cursed together. We were friends for life.
    “Ty,” he said, and stuck out his fist.
    “Daniel,” I said, and touched his, knuckle to knuckle.
    We argue over who said whose name first too. But I know: it was him. It was him, because I’d’ve never said what I said if he hadn’t said what he said first. Never would’ve said Daniel, I mean, if he hadn’t said Ty.
    I noticed his zit had popped, faded.
    One of us said, “I gotta get to class.”
    “Yeah, me too,” the other said.
    We walked down the hall then, side by side, and didn’t say anything.
    Over the course of three lunch periods, eleven breaks between classes, two chats before school and a couple more on the way to our respective buses (and one time when I ran into him outside Stickler’s office, during which all we said was “Hey”), I learned that he lived on the other side of Tobacco Road, which is the next road over from the one I live on. I’d probly gone past his place a hundred times but never once noticed the house. Like all the land on the west side of Tobacco, Ty’s dad’s property was pretty much tree-free, but it was hilly (or what passes for hills in Kansas), the house set back from the road a good quarter mile, and built into a south-facing slope to boot. The asphalt shingles had worn to the color of the dusty fields surrounding it and sported a few wisps of grasslike hairs on an old lady’s chin. When you got close enough to see it (by which I mean when you crawled under the padlocked gate that barred the entrance to the driveway and made your way past a half a dozen signs informing you “Trespassers WILL Be Shot”) you didn’t think house as much as storm cellar or bomb shelter , or maybe just bunker .
    This wasn’t an accident.
    It turned out Ty’s dad was convinced the Russkies, China-men, Islams, or Aussies (I know, random) were going to start Armageddon any day now, and he’d built his house accordingly. Metal shutters flanked the narrow windows and the concrete-walled “sub-basement” held more canned food than a supermarket, not to mention an armory of pistols, shotguns, deer rifles, semiautomatic weapons, and a couple of compound bows and military knives in case the ammo ran out. Mrs.