Sprout

wouldn’t be able to resist temptation. Of course June had her period for like a year before he noticed, but whatever: he pulled her and me and L.D., that’s my oldest brother, L.D., he pulled us out of Buhler like it was Sodom and Gomorrah or something. Sodom or Gomorrah, I guess. One or the other. Me, I didn’t give a crap, but L.D. only had a year of school left and had to give up all his friends. June finished three years later and that left just me, at which point my dad said he was tired of fighting with Central Christian to keep them from expelling me, and so whatever, if I wanted to go to hell, it was my own business. Buhler was cheaper than private school anyway. Christians suck,” he said, presumably to explain why his last school tried to expel him, and then he shoved his hands in his pockets.
    The silence was so loud the leaves bumping against each other sounded like a thirty-car pileup on the highway. One fell to the ground. I guess it was the foliage equivalent of a Mini or a Prius.
    Ty’s eyes followed the leaf to the ground, stared at it for another whole minute or so. Finally he looked back at me.
    “So, uh, are you ever gonna, you know, talk ?”
    Of course I wanted to talk. I mean, I’d talked to him a dozen times in school. But now, away from all those other distractions, all those other people, I felt completely paralyzed, like I was caught in one of those in medias res beginnings of a music video and had to wait for the action to catch up to the opening scene so I could figure out what was going on. I looked around desperately, as if the ability to speak were something I’d dropped, a golfball, a housekey, and all I had to do was find it. But all I saw was a crabapple tree growing at the edge of the Andersens’ pasture. At some point they’d wrapped the fence wire around it, and bark bilged over the steel tourniquets like a kinked rubber hose filling with water. See, those were the kinds of sentences that were running through my brain: over-articulate, pointless observations that, if I said them aloud, would’ve probly made me look even worse than my Marcel Marceau impression.
    “Daniel? Earth to Bradford. Are you there?”
    The ground beneath the crabapple tree was dotted with dozens of mushy green balls. I glanced at Ty, then hopped off the branch and walked over and picked one up. It was spongy beneath my fingers, gave off a sweet yet acrid smell, like a bowl of sugar that’s been peed on.
    “Daniel Bradford. I swear to God . I will feed you your own ba—”
    My shot caught him square in the chest, and even as the green goo exploded over his shirt I was off, my feet following a trail I’d worn into the underbrush over the past four years. Ty’s ridiculous shoes were loud in my ears, along with his curses and death threats and general promises of bone-breaking, life-ending, gender-altering revenge.
    As I ran, I wracked my brain, trying to visualize the terrain around me. South was out. The clearing lay that way: the stumps, the trailer, my dad, all the other things I didn’t want Ty to see just yet. Suddenly I remembered a large catalpa about a hundred yards to my right. Its low branches were perfect for a speedy ascent. Better yet, it linked up with an adjacent tree at a fairly good height above the ground, so I could go up one tree and, when Ty followed, clamber down the other.
    “I’m gonna kill you!” Ty screamed, punctuating his threat with a series of curses.
    I veered off the trail. Immediately my footsteps grew louder, as tamped mulch gave way to years of dead leaves and sticks. Branches slapped my face, vines tangled my arms and legs. I heard my own screams, and my mind flashed back to my first day at Buhler, when I’d heard the little kids screaming and thought they sounded more like they were dying than having fun.
    “I will bury you, Bradford! Right up to your neck! And then I’ll drag a cow over here and get it to chow down on your stupid grass-colored hair until it rips the brains right out of your skull!”
    I saw the tree I was aiming for, sprinted the last fifty feet, launched myself at its lowest limbs. I’d climbed it countless times, knew instinctively where to place my hands, my feet. By the time Ty reached it I was safely out of reach. He took a moment to walk symbolically around the trunk, as if to emphasize that the only way down was past him. Or, who knows, maybe he was just trying to catch his breath.
    “Rookie mistake, Bradford. You’re