Sprout

students.” I must’ve made a face, because she raised her hands helplessly. “What do you want me to do? Call Child Protective Services and say hey, I think this guy beats his kids, even though they claim he’s the bestest dad in the whole wide God-fearing world? Maybe I should just go to his house and tell him he’s a bad, bad man?”
    “I think you should stop”— BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP— “ing my dad.” I broke off, stared at Mrs. Miller in surprise. “Was that a cell phone ?”
    Not only did Mrs. Miller not carry a cell herself, she was said to have once made a girl hand-copy the entirety of her user’s manual when her phone went off in class—including the Spanish, French, German, and Japanese versions. Mrs. M. blushed now, but a smile flickered across her mouth, a little proud, a little defiant, a little hopeful too. She rolled her chair backwards to the opposite side of the room, a move that would’ve come off better if the casters hadn’t tangled in the half-shredded industrial carpeting and almost tipped her over. She used her heels to drag herself the last couple of feet, pulled a TJ Maxx shopping bag from beneath the counter. A tangle of black cords protruded from the bag, plugged into a power strip. She tipped the bag towards me. It was filled with dozens of Sonys, Sony Ericssons, Nokias, Motorolas, LGs, even a BlackBerry. Blue, gray, silver, pink, green, some cracked and scratched, some covered with FUCT and OBEY and R stickers, others shiny and new. There’d been a second BLEEP BLEEP BLEEP as she scooted across the room, and now a closed Samsung clamshell let out a truncated BLEEP BLEE and then presumably went to voicemail.
    “Twenty-nine,” Mrs. Miller said before I asked. “Eight years of confiscation by Mr. Johanson and I.”
    “Mr. Johanson and me . You keep them plugged in? Really?”
    “Freddy and I got curious. We wondered how many students deactivated their phones after we took them away, as opposed to how many were too embarrassed to tell their parents that their phone’d—their phone had been confiscated. So we picked up a few chargers, rotate them to keep the batteries powered up. You’d be surprised. Some of these puppies have been yipping away for more than a year. And the buzzing.” She moved her thumbs like she was texting. “It sounds like a sarcophagus full of scarab beetles.”
    I thought about asking what a scarab beetle was, but figured I could just google it Monday. The Samsung BLEEP ed, announcing a new voicemail, and Mrs. Miller chuckled. “That’s Vicki Watkins’. I took it from her yesterday, so it’s been busy.”
    “She’s a popular girl.”
    “She’s a slut, is what you mean.”
    I shrank away from the overladen shelves as if they might fall down like the walls of Jericho. For a teacher to call a student a slut—on school property, no less—was a bit like wearing a hooded black robe in a Baptist church at Christmas. But then Mrs. Miller wheeled back across the room and took my hand and said, “I’ve missed you, Sprout,” and I suddenly realized the word and the hopeful look in her eyes had more to do with me than Vicki Watkins (who was a slut, when you got right down to it, which most of us would be if we had the guts for it, or, in her case, the ass). Mrs. M.’s use of the word “slut” was the equivalent of leaving me alone on her patio so I could pour tequila into my margarita, or dissing Mrs. Whittaker’s English class as remedial . She wanted to prove she was still on my side, not theirs, whether they were cliquey girls or square teachers.
    I looked down at my hand in Mrs. Miller’s as if I was just noticing it sat in a pot of boiling water, but I didn’t pull it away.
    “You’ve had me in class every day.”
    Mrs. Miller held my hand a moment longer, then let go. “I have Peter Bowen in class too. And—ugh!—Samantha Hardy, and that Loomis girl.” She barked a brief, bitter laugh. “For her paper on Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver, she wrote Booger and Carter, every time, I swear to God.”
    “That was probly spellcheck.”
    “That was probly laziness, if not simply stupidity. That is definitely what I have to deal with around here, ninety-nine days out of a hundred, with ninety-nine percent of my students, and ninety-eight percent of my colleagues.” She sighed again, but it was less plaintive, more wistful. “I’ve missed you,” she said again. “Missed this. Our little talks.”
    “Hey, no one