Sprout

suddenly stepped off the branch into empty space—not like a trapeze artist at all actually, but like a yo-yo in the hands of a skill-less yo-yoer, his spasmodic bounces gradually flattening out until he hung thirty feet above the ground.
    “Ty!”
    My voice reverberated through the vibrating branches.
    “It speaks!” Ty said, his own voice thin with the effort of holding on to what was proving to be a slippery liferope.
    “What are you doing? Get back on a branch!”
    “I intend to. Just not”—Ty’s voice disappeared when he kicked a leg out and began swinging back and forth—“the one”— kick —“I was”— kick —“ on .” He was swinging a full 180° now, a violent yawing motion like the pendulum on a grandfather clock that just happened to be caught in an earthquake. The branch his belt was tied to creaked ominously, and other, smaller branches broke as he kicked them out of the way.
    “Ty, c’mon. Enough already. Get back on the tree.”
    “ I’m—gonna—get—on—your—tree—in—STEAD! ”
    How he did it I’ll never know. Hell, what he did I’ll never know. Well, I mean, I know what he did: he jumped. But how he jumped, and how he managed to grab the end of one of the branches growing out of the tree I was on, is a complete mystery. Ty’s feet swung forwards and upwards till they were higher than his head, and then, when they swung back, he hoisted himself up so that his waist pressed against the branch, his hands hip-width apart, his arms rigid, the muscles of his chest straining against the crabapple-splattered buttons of his shirt.
    One of his ridiculous shoes slipped off his foot and, like a bird that leaves the nest too soon, bounced off one branch after another before thudding, dead, to the ground. His foot was surprisingly small, his sock phenomenally dirty.
    “Daniel? What’re you looking at?”
    What I was looking at was a distant silver shadow just visible though the forest, a plastic dome beneath which huddled all the furniture we’d brought from Long Island that hadn’t fit in the trailer. For five fantastic minutes I’d forgotten every stupid thing in my life, but that shiny blob was a reminder that it would all be waiting for me as soon as Ty went home.
    “Daniel?” Ty said again, his voice curiously gentle. “Quick. Gimme the name of a famous gymnast.”
    I looked at his hands, gripping the branch. His muscles, corded with effort. His face, purple as a pokeberry.
    “Um, Nadia Comaneci? Mary Lou—”
    And then the branch broke.
    “Sh
    ih
    ih
    ih
    ih
    ih
    ih
    —OW!—
    ih
    ih
    it!”
    His voice and body bounced off one branch after another. He didn’t manage to grab onto any of these branches, but at least they broke his descent into a series of three-or four-or five-foot drops instead of one thirty-foot plunge, which is why this book doesn’t end here, but still has another hundred pages to go before it reaches its (dramatic and deeply satisfying) climax.
    He hit the ground with the kind of dull thud that a fifty-pound sack of dogfood makes when you drop it off the roof of your house (did I mention that we had a German shepherd named Fang for three weeks? For three weeks we had—oh, never mind, it’s not important right now), and then he just lay there, unconscious, and, as far as I could tell, unbreathing. His belt hung limply from its still-swaying branch, the frayed end of a gallows rope after the hanged man has been cut down.
    “Ty?”
    His mouth was open, and there was a brownish bubble of blood below his right nostril. His arms and legs splayed out from his body, but none of them was obviously broken or twisted out of socket. I stared at his chest for I don’t know how long, trying to see if it was moving, if he was breathing, before I suddenly realized that if he wasn’t breathing it was more likely I could help him down on the ground rather then up here in a tree. I started descending, cautiously at first, then faster and faster, more or less falling the last ten feet or so, then running towards him.
    Just as I reached him he shot up from the ground with a huge gasp, eyes wide, arms thrown out as if to ward off a blow. I could’ve almost thought he was faking it, save for the single word he screamed out:
    “Holly!”
    The pure aching empty need in Ty’s voice could’ve stopped traffic, distracted soldiers in the line of fire, caused a stream of lava to split and run around either side of him. I don’t know if there’d been any