Sprout

Miller says to avoid hyperbole when characterizing bad guys or else they become satirical, but it’s hard not to sound O.T.T. when you’re describing a man who has a sign on his front door that says:
    God Bless Our Home
And CURSE the Homes of Sinners!
    complete with a picture of a mushroom cloud in the background. All this, and a picture in the living room, right where some people put pictures of their family and other people put needlepoint aphorisms and still other people put bark paintings or chrome rims. The picture showed a pasty, slightly pointed face (not unlike Ty’s actually) scowling above one of those police-number boards you get when you get arrested. The caption read:
    Timothy McVeigh
A REAL American hero
    All this makes it sound like I actually met Mr. Petit, but that didn’t happen until later. Ty told me up front that if his dad caught a glimpse of my green hair he’d forbid his son from coming near me (what he actually said was that his dad would forbid him from visiting my grave, since Mr. Petit would shoot me on sight), so the only times I went to Ty’s place were when the house was empty, which, not coincidentally, were the only times I let Ty come to my house, because I was pretty sure that if my dad saw Ty he’d forbid me from going near him too, if for entirely different reasons—reasons that had a lot to do with the condom he left in my bedroom one day, along with the note, “I don’t want to know. But I don’t want you dead either.” What gave the gesture added significance was the fact that my dad’d taken the condom from the box he’d bought when he started dating Mrs. Miller. Touching, right? Not dysfunctional at all .
    But I’m getting ahead of things. Before we get to sex we have to get to Ty’s house, and before we get to Ty’s house we have to get to the forest, which was the neutral ground we chose to have our first out-of-school meeting. Which just about brings us to:
    “Hey. You found it.”
    You’d think his play clothes would be different from the slacks-and-buttondown ensemble he wore to school, but nope: he was dressed as he was every day, from the weird shoes right up to the collar of his shirt, still buttoned tightly against his Adam’s apple. The end of his belt had come free from the loops, hung down like the rope a monk uses to cinch his cassock.
    In the sunlight beaming down on the Andersens’ pasture he was as bright and indistinct as a candle flame. A stiff breeze swayed the branches and the world pixilated like a screensaver. For a moment I was afraid he would disappear, but the crunch of leaves beneath his feet testified to the concrete existence of his body. I could tell from his expression that I was looking at him the same way he was looking at me: as if he were nothing more than a dream.
    “We, um, we don’t have trees like this on our land,” he said when I continued staring at him as if he were a ghost or Pamela Anderson or something equally improbable. “I, um, I used to sneak over here when I was a kid. I’d crawl through the fence and hop over that branch you’re sitting on, and when I was done I’d go back over it too, even if it was way out of the way and I ended up being late.”
    As it turned out, I knew the tree Ty was talking about it. I even knew the branch of the tree he was referring to, and not just because I was sitting on it. It splintered off from the tree’s base and sloped upwards like a staircase for a good twenty-five or thirty feet, where it poked from the forest’s edge over the Andersens’ pasture and gave you a view for miles in three different directions. In fact, I’d read so many books in the crook of this particular branch that I’d even given it a name. Originally I called it the Northern Branch of the Hutchinson Public Library, but, in addition to being stupid, that name was also unwieldy, so I shortened it to the Lending Library, which, though also stupid (hey, I was twelve) was easier to say. But, stupid or not, I’d been right to think there was something special about this particular tree, this particular branch, because Ty’d noticed it too. Now, though, you could see he was wondering if there wasn’t something “special” about me too, and not in the good way.
    “So, um, yeah. When my sister June got her period my dad pulled us out of Buhler and sent us to Central Christian. He said he didn’t trust her in a ‘heathen school’ now that she had the ‘blood of Eve’ on her. Said boys