Sprout

trapped now.” He looked up with an evil grin on his face. “Your ass is mine .”
    He heaved himself into the tree gracelessly, his slick-soled shoes slipping against the bark of the trunk, his hands grabbing at branches that were obviously too thin to support his weight. A twig snapped off in his fingers and he swung by one hand, legs kicking wildly.
    While he was distracted, I transferred to the second tree. It was a tricky business: I had to shimmy out on the proverbial limb, which quivered beneath my weight in a way that I didn’t remember from the last time I’d done this (growth spurt, I guess). I reached for an even thinner branch growing off the second tree. Once I had hold of it, the only thing to do was swing free and loop my legs around the new branch—a relatively easy monkey bars—type maneuver, but complicated by the fact that the branch I was grabbing swung beneath my weight like a fishing pole with a great white on the line, and plus too I was thirty feet up in the air, and between me and the ground were several thick branches that didn’t look like they’d break my fall so much as break my neck. I half wished Ty wasn’t stuck twenty feet down, so he could see how gracefully I pulled it off. (Hey, like I told Ruthie: don’t hate the playa. Hate the game.)
    Once safely on the new tree, I climbed closer to the trunk, made my way a couple branches higher so Ty couldn’t see where I’d gone across. I sat down then, and waited.
    Assuming I was trapped above him, Ty concentrated on his climb. God, those shoes. You’d think they’d been sprayed with WD-40 or something, they were so slippery. The fact that he’d outgrown his pants at least a year ago didn’t help, and his shirt, in addition to the big green splotch in the center of it, was soaked with sweat.
    “What the—”
    Ty suddenly realized I was no longer above him. He looked around wildly, finally found my smirking face a dozen feet over from his.
    “That damn hair. It’s like camouflage.” Then: “How in the hell did you get over there?” Instead of waiting for an answer, he began making his way towards me. He stood up, held on to a branch above him for balance, and tightroped away from the trunk. The branch he stood on was too thin to support his weight, and before he’d gone a half dozen steps he was bouncing up and down. This seemed to amuse him, and he sproing ed up and down until one of the branches, either the one he stood on or the one he held, cracked in protest.
    He looked over at me again, then looked up and down for an alternate route. The branch he needed was actually off to his left; but by this point in the season the catalpa leaves were as big as sheets of printer paper, and I doubted he could see it. But just to make sure he didn’t look too hard, I began throwing sticks to distract him. I’d broken off about fifty while I waited for him to get up here, so I had more than enough.
    “Jesus Christ, Daniel, what’s up with you and the throwing ?” ?” He broke off a stick and threw it at me, but his perch was so unsteady that it sailed ten feet wide.
    “Hmmm,” he said, as if he were thinking aloud. “This is a pickle.” He pursed his lips, furrowed his brow, tapped his temple with the index finger of his right hand. “What will I do?” The next thing I knew he was reaching for his belt, slipped it free of the loops in one long flourish. The kinked, cracked length of patent leather hung from his hand like a dead snake, or maybe just a snakeskin. It had to be at least five feet long.
    “My dad always buys clothes we can ‘grow into.’ I think he went a little overboard with this, don’t you?”
    He leaned towards me. For a moment I thought he was actually falling off the wobbly branch he stood on, but then I saw he was reaching for another branch about three feet in front of his face. This branch was a bit thicker than the one he’d been holding on to, about as big around as his upper arm.
    I remind you that his upper arms were not particularly thick.
    His upper arms were, in fact, particularly thin.
    His body was at an incline now, like a trapeze artist caught midair in the jump from one bar to another. As I watched, he looped his belt around the new branch, pulling the end through the buckle and tightening it so that almost the entire five feet hung free. He yanked on the belt several times, testing to make sure it would take his weight. Then, looping the end of the belt around one hand, he