Sprout

my hands and knees. I had an urge to lie down and roll around in it, but before I could Ty screamed.
    “Daniel!”
    The panic in his voice: I thought something had happened to him , but it turned out he thought something had happened to me . When I turned I saw that he’d kicked his stupid shoes off but hadn’t actually ventured into the mud. Instead he paced its edge like a sandpiper skirting the tide back on Long Island.
    “Jesus, Ty. You scared the crap out of me.”
    “You should get out of there. It’s not safe.”
    Still on my hands and knees, I looked around at the expanse of mud. My body had already acclimated to the chill and my fingers kneaded the clayey goop. Ty’s fear made me think of the La Brea Tar Pits, but only in a hey-aren’t-I-a-good-student-to-remember-the-La-Brea-Tar-Pits-( just-like-I-know-about-Schrödinger’s-cat)? kind of way. There were no sinkholes or pools of quicksand in Kansas. Just mud so thick we could’ve made pottery out of it, ashtrays or blobbies or voodoo statues to take down our enemies: Ian Abernathy and Troy Bellows and Beanpole Overholser, either of our dads. Both of them for that matter.
    “Dude,” I said to Ty, “calm down. It’s just, you know, mud.”
    Ty wrung his hands like a nervous monkey. “You don’t know. There could be holes. You could sink in, I couldn’t reach you in time. You should get out, Daniel. You should get out now.”
    Something in his voice told me this wasn’t the time to reason with him. I stood up awkwardly, made my way to dry ground, lurching in the thick soup. I fell once, and he stifled a yelp. When I stood up again I held my goop-encrusted hands in front of me like the Swamp Thing, lurched stiff-legged the last few feet. In my best old-time horror-movie voice, I said:
    “What strange creature lumbers forth from the infernal blackness, its external appearance human, but unspeakable desires lurking deep within its breast?”
    “Cut it out, Daniel.” Ty stepped back as I stepped towards him. “You get that crap on me and I’ll kick your ass.”
    I dropped my hands.
    “Sorry to spoil the tea party, Mary Jane. Just give me a moment to spread my tablecloth and then we’ll have some poppy seed muffins with black currant jam.”
    Ty cursed. It wasn’t the word, wasn’t even the accompanying finger gesture, which was reflexive more than angry. It was the look on his face. As if I was a ghost and he wished I was the real thing, or that I’d stayed dead.
    “Dude. What’s up?”
    Ty turned, started walking away. “Nothin’.”
    By now I knew that when Ty started dropping his g’s somethin’ was up. Ty hated rednecks, and hated sounding like one even more.
    “Ty!” My voice was sharper than I’d intended. I reached out for him, saw my mud-encrusted hand and pulled back just in time. “Hey. It’s me. It’s Daniel.”
    Ty took three more steps, then dropped to his knees as though the great puppeteer in the sky had released his strings. He cursed again, his voice wet with that clot of mucus that collects at the back of your throat when you’re swallowing back tears.
    I wanted to touch him on the shoulder, or maybe trace the line of his ear or the hairline at the nape of his neck, but my hands were covered with mud, and anyway boys don’t touch each other like that. But I told myself it was just the mud.
    “My brother,” Ty said.
    I started slightly. For a moment I’d thought he meant me. I thought he was calling me his brother.
    “L.D.?” I said, even though I knew he didn’t mean L.D.
    “No.” Ty made a blustery, whinnying sound, and I knew he was fighting with all his might not to cry. “No. Not L.D.”
    “Holly.”
    He nodded. “Holly.”
    Suddenly I had one of those 1 + 1 = 2 flashes. I remembered what had set Ty off in the first place, which was my comment about our hole being like an open grave, and I remembered his didn’t not doesn’t of our first day in the forest, and then I turned and looked back at the muddy bog. I stared at it for a long time, then looked down at my hands, my feet, my knees.
    “Aw, crap,” I said, and began flinging and scraping the mud off my skin as well as I could. “Crap crap crap. Here,” I said to Ty. “Really? Here ?”
    Ty nodded miserably. When it seemed like I’d gotten all the mud off that I could without a fire hose, I walked in front of him and sat down.
    “Here.”
    Ty’s cheeks were red and puffy. “I dunno why I’m getting so worked up. It was a long