Sprout

well-observed scene-setting and exposition (that’s Mrs. Miller’s evaluation, by the way, not mine, although of course I’m forced to agree with her), I felt like I knew even less about Ty than when I’d first seen him standing red-skinned against the back wall of the gym. Felt like I had even less of an idea what he wanted from me than when he’d sneered, “At least my hair ain’t green .” It’s kind of funny when you think about it. When I started writing about myself, I waited as long as I could before I told you I was gay, because once you reveal that, it seems like it’s all anyone can think about. Look at the way my dad trashed our computer when he found out I’d been looking at gay sites (as opposed to just forbidding me from looking at certain stuff like the parent of any heterosexual kid would do) or how Mrs. Miller had to grill me on what I had or hadn’t done sexually, as opposed to just giving me “the talk” that every other teenager gets. But with Ty, everything I knew about him seemed to float in the air, and the only thing that would keep it from blowing away like a Kansas tumbleweed was knowing whether or not he was gay. Knowing whether the amorphous feelings that hovered between us were going to solidify into a bridge that would bring us together, or a wall that would keep us apart. And like I said, I’d’ve thought Mrs. Miller would’ve asked me about this, but all she said was:
    “The teachers call it day-tention.”
    I took my essay from her outstretched hand.
    “Huh?”
    We sat in the office behind her classroom. The walls were lined with melamine shelves that sagged beneath the weight of graffiti’d textbooks and dusty stacks of once and future tests, and below the counter-slash-desk thingy that ran around all four walls sat bags and plastic boxes and two-drawer filing cabinets whose drawers looked rusted shut.
    “Day-tention. Detention during the day. Oh, and ‘first recruited’? Redundant.”
    “One thing at a time, please.”
    “Haven’t you noticed Ty doesn’t have to stay after school, even though he gets in a fight just about every other day and pretty much never does his homework and has a mouth like a truck driver crossed with a marine sergeant?”
    “I’m pretty sure that’s a variety of specialty porn,” I said, and then, while Mrs. Miller blushed, I threw in, “Ty told me he doesn’t have to stay late because he works for his dad.”
    Mrs. Miller rolled her eyes. “As far as I know, Phil Petit’s only source of income is stealing copper from construction sites and selling it to the scrap metal yard down in South Hutch, which why that doesn’t violate the eighth commandment is beyond me. Look ,” she silenced me with a semi-parental voice. “The school has known Phil Petit beats his children ever since the oldest one, what’s his name—”
    “L.D.”
    “—ever since L.D. first went home with an F and came back with a black eye. But if you try to talk to them about it they deny everything. Mr. Stickley and Mr. Philpot thought maybe the girl—”
    “June.”
    “June.” Mrs. Miller shook her head like, June , what a Seventh Heaven kind of name. “The Phil-bot and Sticky thought maybe June would fess up, but instead she started dating boys from the south side of town, and, well, when you have three kids—”
    “Four.”
    “Oh!” A slightly embarrassed smile flashed across her face. “The other one.”
    “Holly.”
    “Right. Hollis.” Her eyes softened and she shook her head sadly. “What was I saying?”
    “Four kids.”
    “Right. When you have four kids—”
    “Three.”
    Mrs. Miller sighed heavily.
    “When the children deny their father mistreats them, there’s pretty much nothing the school can do. So we push their F’s to D’s, their D’s to C’s, whatever it takes to pass them through to the next grade, and we invented day-tention, because if we make them stay after school they come in the next day with a fresh set of bruises. Assuming they come in the next day at all.”
    “Oh!” I said like I was just getting it. “Day- tent -ion.” I over-enunciated the t , ended up spitting on my paper. “I thought you were saying day- ten s-ion, like, you know, a really ten se day , or ten- sion during the day time.”
    Mrs. Miller glared at me. “I didn’t make up the term, Sprout.”
    “Yeah, but you use it. You do it.”
    “Actually, I’ve never had a Petit. They’re not exactly what you’d call honor