Sprout

The Petits had a scraggly cedar break planted west of the house to check snow drifts in the winter, and Holly’s ashes were buried beneath them and marked by a single brown brick. Vitrified, ferrous, crenellated: not even the fanciest adjectives in the world could disguise the fact that Mr. Petit had marked the final resting place of his youngest son with a leftover brick from the construction of his dingy subterranean house. Two brass letters had been set in the top.
    H.P.
    Ty brushed dirt and needles off the brick.
    “The crows had eaten his eyes by the time we found him.”
    His voice was nearly inaudible, as if the crows that had eaten his twin’s eyes had taken his tongue as well. With the light coating of dust covering his body, he could’ve been Adam standing up for the first time, his earthen heart pumping a river of mud through his veins, but his eyes remained as lifeless and empty as still water, reflecting only what passes in front of it.
    Well, what would you have done? I put my hand—still dirty, but dry now—on his shoulder. But before I could pull him close he threw me off.
    “I’m not gay, Daniel. Dammit, I’m not! I’m not!”
    He ran for the house then. It was a good hundred yards away, and I could’ve caught him easily, but the field was open to the house’s windows. I didn’t know if his dad was home, but I knew that if his dad saw me everything would be that much worse. Not for me. For Ty.
    I waited though, in case he turned around. He didn’t turn around.
    The door slammed.
    I continued to wait, in case the door opened. It didn’t open.
    A light came on in a back window.
    I kept waiting.
    “Oh hell, Sprout,” Mrs. Miller said when she got to the end of what I’d written. “Is this where everything was going? I could’ve told you all this on the first day of school, if you’d’ve just come to me.”

Everyone’s a clitic
    Oh.
    Yeah.
    Mrs. Miller.
    You might remember her as the inventor of such cocktails as the mojitorita and the margarinha, as well as the hanger of the front-door plaque “God Bless Synonyms, Metaphors, and Euphemisms too!” Oh, and the seducer of my dad. Let’s not forget that.
    You didn’t think she’d let me off the hook just because I was being “sullen and uncooperative,” did you? (That was me by the way: “I’m being sullen and uncooperative,” I told her when she walked in on me trying to raise my left eyebrow without moving my right, which is harder than it looks. “Really?” Her own eyebrows had gone up in unison. “I thought you looked perplexed myself.”)
    As the weeks ticked by, she reminded me with ever-increasing frequency that she’d “staked her reputation on a junior,” and even though she now came to school in untucked, unbuttoned blouses, she was as uptight as ever where the State Essay Contest was concerned. Since time trials weren’t working (I could fill more than a dozen sheets of paper with the word “No” in five minutes) she assigned me weekly papers instead. At first I thought I’d blow those off too. But, well, things with Ty were just so strange. He’d moved into my life and pushed everything else aside, yet hadn’t given me anything concrete to take the place of what was gone. Not that there’d been a lot for him to replace. Ruthie. Shove . Ian. Flick . My dad. Ping . All gone. That left just me.
    Me and Ty.
    I dunno. Maybe Mrs. Miller’d had more of an effect on me than I realized, or maybe I’d just become infatuated with my own linguistic prowess. But every Sunday night a blank page sat in front of me on the table, and, well, something had to go on it (besides my name, I mean, and a few green smudges, Sunday being the night I usually touched up my hair). I wrote hesitantly at first, afraid of revealing too much, but before I knew it I’d produced as many pages about the month and a half I’d spent with Ty as I had about the first sixteen years of my life. But this time I wrote not to reveal something about myself, but to discover something about Ty. Some crucial fact I’d missed during our F2F encounters. And when I say “with Ty,” I mean just that: I didn’t write a word about the strained fifteen-second chats I had with Ruthie when she caught me in the lunch line, the post-its on my locker I didn’t answer or the bazillion and one phone calls I dodged. Nor have I mentioned the various and pretty much transparent attempts Ian made to lure me into the janitors’ closet, or get us both