Sprout

birds singing before, but they weren’t singing afterwards, and the only sound was my last footfall before I reached him, thudding against the earth like a boulder falling off the side of a mountain. Don’t get me wrong. I’d’ve stopped too, at the sound of his voice, but momentum worked against me, and I more or less ran into him.
    His hands clutched my legs blindly, pulling me into him. He slammed his face against my knees, his choked breaths tearing from his body like pages ripped by the handful from a book.
    “Ty?” My hand hovered above his head for a moment; then, as delicately as I could, I placed it on his crewcut, matted now with bits of leaf and bark and dirt. “Are you okay?”
    He stiffened, shuddered, then relaxed. He let go of my legs and, shakily, sat back.
    “That—” his voice caught in his throat, he coughed. “That knocked the wind outta me.”
    “It knocked you out is what it did.” My voice was almost as raspy as his.
    “I’m fine. Just—” He coughed again. “Have to catch my breath.”
    “Who’s Holly?”
    He reached for his oversized, ugly shoe, pulled it on.
    “Hollis. My brother. My other brother.”
    “Oh. Does he have green hair?”
    Ty looked up at the sky then. No, not the sky: the trees. His belt.
    “Screw it,” he said, though it didn’t seem like he was talking to me. “Least this way he can’t hit me with it.” Then, standing unsteadily: “No,” he said. “He didn’t.”
    The difference a tense makes. Not doesn’t . Didn’t .
    “Hey!” Ty did his best to make his punctured voice sound cheery. “What’s this?”
    He pointed to something on my chest. I looked down, and he smacked me in the face, nearly peed himself laughing, then nearly choked to death coughing.
    “I gotta go,” he said when he could talk again. And, coughing and crashing, he ran off through the trees.
    But he found me before first period the next day, still wearing yesterday’s green-stained shirt. The little bubble of blood below his nose had swollen into a fist-sized pink and purple bruise that stretched from his cheekbone down to the corner of his mouth, and he was limping too, his left foot half sliding out of his oversized shoe with every dragging step—which was weird, since he hadn’t been limping yesterday. From a distance he looked like the old battered jockey in the Hemingway story we’d read for Mrs. Miller’s class, but when he got closer I saw that his smirk, though shrunken by the bruise on his face, was even more self-satisfied than usual.
    “ Dude .” He lifted up his shirt (which was covered with hay for some reason) to show me a black and blue mass laid over his ribs like the 72-ounce porterhouse at Amarillo Andy’s. “That was awesome .”

We know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of a hormone?
    The Andersens’ St. Bernard had acquired legendary status two years earlier, when it pulled down a six-tined buck whose flight had been hampered by snowdrifts from a recent blizzard (it almost never snows in central Kansas, but when it does it tends to dump a foot or two, which the wind whips into four-or six-or eight-foot drifts that’re a lot of fun if you’re a kid, but apparently less so for things like rabbits and deer). According to Vernon Andersen, his St. Bernard ripped the buck’s throat out and fed on the rotting carcass for almost two weeks before he—Vernon, not the dog—was able to get a rope around its—the deer’s, not the dog’s—antlers and haul it away. I suppose I should mention that this story came to me through my dad, who heard it from Vernon at the 4th Street Tavern, the bar my dad went to on the rare occasions he wanted to drink with other drunks. Among other things, the 4th Street is actually on 5th, so it’s hard to trust any bit o’ wisdom that manages to stagger out of its door (although my dad told me the name/address discrepancy is just to throw wives off the track of wayward husbands, but whatever): my point is, however vicious the Andersens’ St. Bernard was, he still wasn’t the major obstacle preventing me from visiting Ty’s house.
    “Oh—my— God ,” Ty laughed so hard a pea flew from his mouth, landed on my thigh, disappeared into the sea of green stains. “When my old man saw my shirt he kicked my ass from one end of the house to the other. Course, we live in a pretty small house, which when I pointed that out he kicked my ass back to the other end, and then kicked me out the