Sprout

should see him .”
    In fact, Mike Weise was in first period calc with me, and I didn’t recall a scratch on him. But I didn’t mention this to Ty.
    In fact, I always knew when Ty got in fights, because he didn’t show up for lunch. Apparently Mr. Petit’d convinced Principal Stickley that Ty absolutely had to come home right after school to work in the family business, and so whenever Ty got in trouble (i.e., two or three times a week) he had to spend lunch period in the front office.
    I only ever saw him fight once: Chad Paglia, who, besides being the only kid in school with an Italian last name (besides his sister Christina, I mean) was also the welterweight star of the school’s wrestling team. That’s 184 pounds if you don’t know wrestling weight classes; Ty weighed about 125. So you kind of get how it went down: Chad beat the holy royal crap out of Ty, or he would have, if Mr. Pollack hadn’t told them to knock it off. Actually, Mr. Pollack told them to knock it off, and Chad was totally like, whatever, I wasn’t really fighting anyway, but Ty kept swinging at Chad until Mr. Pollack, who just happened to be the assistant coach of the wrestling team (and one-time All-State heavyweight), put Ty into some kind of headlock. Even then Ty was struggling to throw himself at Chad, lifting both feet off the ground so that Mr. Pollack was more or less holding him up by this throat, and it was hard to say which of them had the redder cheeks.
    “Step to me!” Ty half screamed, half choked (though God only knows where he picked up a phrase like “step to me”). “Step to my face and say it to me!”
    “I already said it to your face,” Chad Paglia said, doing that fake dusting-off thing with his shirt and jeans. “Your friend is a faggot.”
    “I’ll hunt you down!” Ty spat. “I’ll find out where you live!”
    “We’re the only Paglias in the phone book,” Chad said. “Come by any time you want to get your face broke.” He turned and strolled down the hall then, and Mr. Pollack dragged Ty to the principal’s office, kicking and screaming the whole way.
    “I’ll kill you if you go near him! You hear me, you piece of trash? I—will—kill— you !”
    Meanwhile:
    The dog days of September metamorphosed into the why-yes-it-really- is -autumn chill of early October. Fall was a tricky time for me, because that’s when the leaves started falling off the trees (that doesn’t even deserve a duh), and the heretofore impenetrable Trojan Wall of foliage that protected our house from prying eyes was suddenly revealed to be nothing more than a thin strip of trees that, because they’d been planted in straight lines, almost seemed to point your eyes towards our dingy little trailer choking inside its net of vines. Not that the leaves had fallen, yet. They’d just gone limp and brown around the edges, maybe one or two blowing to the ground like shoppers trying to beat the Christmas rush. The sun set earlier too, bringing with it cold breezes that seemed to blow off the snow-covered Rockies five hundred miles to the west. It was barely light when I got up for school, which made it that much harder to wake up, and then it wasn’t light at all, and the only thing that got me out of bed was the thought of seeing Ty at his locker before classes started and then seeing him for a whole twenty-five minutes at lunch and then again for one final chat outside his bus, where, like a cheating spouse, he would tell me whether or not he thought he could get away to see me that night.
    So. The hole. Our original intention—to build a human-sized coyote den—faded pretty quickly, and what we ended up with was, well, a hole. But a covered hole: if it ever actually rained on the plain we would’ve been protected, or at least our heads would’ve been, although I’m sure our butts would’ve gotten soaked since, well, it was a hole, and holes tend to fill up with water when it rains, don’t they?
    What I can tell you for sure is that it was a filthy job. Filthy . Every night we went there we emerged coated with dirt that our sweat had turned to mud, which is fun when you’re five or six or seven or eight, but a little gross when you’re sixteen. At the same time, however, the fissure opening up in the earth’s skin seemed to promise so much, as if, if we kept at it long enough, we would make a tunnel to a place far from Kansas and broken dads and missing moms and a school full of kids who hated us and we hated