Sprout

make up for ratting her out. “Why Hurricane Irene?”
    “Duh. His mom’s name was Irene.” Ruthie glared at Ian for a moment, then adjusted the rearview mirror. It’s anyone’s guess whether she did this so she could see me better or so I could see her better, but before she spoke she used a black fingernail to move a magenta bang that apparently wasn’t exactly where she wanted it. Then:
    “I told him about you.”
    “You—”
    “Told him.”
    “Yes, you said that. What did you tell him?”
    “C’mon, Sprout …”
    “No, you come on. I mean, if you could say it to Ian, surely you can say it to me. Or perhaps Ian would like to tell me?”
    Ian’s fingernails dug at his stomach so fiercely they left red scratch marks. “She told me you were gay,” he said finally, then suddenly pulled his shirt down and tucked it deep deep deep into his pants. He tried to turn away, but I locked eyes with him.
    “I—don’t—understand,” I said slowly. “What does me being gay have to do with you dating Ruthie ?”
    Ian stared at me, a deer in headlights, a rabbit transfixed by a rattlesnake. His mouth opened and closed convulsively, but nothing came out. Ruthie’s stare fell on us like a wave of hot air from a suddenly opened oven, but I didn’t look in her direction. I could see the desire to just come out with it in Ian’s eyes, and for a moment I actually thought he was going to. In some ways, this didn’t really surprise me. Ian was one of the most straight-up guys you’ll ever meet. Keeping secrets just didn’t suit him. What surprised me more, though, was how much I wanted him to confess.
    Suddenly Ruthie’s arm appeared in my peripheral vision. She reached over and took Ian’s hand, pulled it possessively into her lap. He jumped like she’d shocked him, then tried to laugh it off, but his knuckles were white where his hand wrapped around hers, and I thought I could actually hear bones cracking.
    “It was like what we talked about the other day,” Ruthie said. There was a question in her voice that she didn’t quite know how to ask, and, after a confused pause, she went ahead with her own explanation. “The day before school started, I mean. When you were saying how hard it was for you to find someone to date.”
    Ian nodded his head so rapidly I thought it was going to fall off. “I—I mean we—we didn’t want to rub what we had in your face.”
    Okay. Here was my best friend, telling me that she’d hidden her relationship from me because she didn’t want me to feel bad about the fact that there was no one for me to date at Buhler, when in fact she was dating the very boy I’d been hooking up with for the past four years. And, to make the situation even juicier, the boy I’d been hooking up with for the past four years was present at this scene, and telling me that he didn’t want to rub his relationship with my best friend in my face because he had to pretend to his girlfriend that he thought I was leading a sexually frustrated existence. I mean, I was sexually frustrated, but I wasn’t celibate, which is really what he was pretending. It was all too rich. Or at least it was until that proverbial lightbulb went off again. Not flickering like it had in Mrs. Miller’s office, but bright white light.
    “Oh. My. God. You two are having sex, aren’t you?”
    Ian’s mouth opened, but before he could answer Ruthie spoke over him.
    “Well, what about you ?”
    “Um-huh-what?” I said, by which I meant: “What do you mean, what about me?” even though I knew exactly what she meant.
    “I mean ,” Ruthie said, “what’s up with you and that Petit dork? You’ve been joined at the hip ever since the beginning of school.”
    All of a sudden—by which I mean, as soon as I tore my eyes from Ruthie’s and looked anywhere but at her face—I noticed that one of my dad’s stumps had fallen over. Sixteen, I think it was, although I can never remember how he numbers them. The grass had grown up around it where the mower couldn’t reach, which meant that it had been on its side for a long time—like, way longer than my dad had been seeing Mrs. Miller, or I’d been hanging out with Ty. While Ruthie stared at me and Ian stared into space, I stared at the fallen stump, trying to figure out why it bugged me so much. At first I thought it was because I’d always considered myself the kind of person who picked up on things like that. I mean, I’d been writing about things like that.