Sprout

Writing about my house, and my life, and the people in my life, which meant I was supposed to notice things like that. But if I wasn’t paying attention—if I wasn’t writing about how my dad had lost interest in his stumps and how our house wasn’t interesting or weird but just small or how Ian and Ruthie, far from feeling abandoned by me, had actually taken up with each other—then, well, what was I paying attention to? What was I writing about?
    “Sprout?” Ruthie prompted me. “Are you two—I mean, is he, well, you know? Is he?”
    And even as she spoke, I realized it wasn’t the stump that was holding my attention. Wasn’t just the stump anyway. It was actually a pale stillness in the trees, just visible over the stump’s fallen length. In a forest, nothing is ever still, not even tree trunks, which sway in the slightest breeze. Leaves flutter, branches rock up and down, birds and squirrels and termites flit from one place to another. But right in the middle of all this movement one thing was frozen in place, staring at us. An angular white face from which shone two dark hot— furious —eyes.
    “Ty!”
    As soon as I called his name, he turned and melted into the shadows. I stood on the backseat and hopped over the side of Ruthie’s mom’s hand-me-down BMW convertible. Ian’s eyes followed me with that same pleading look leaking out of them like X-rays, but Ruthie’s mouth just dropped open.
    “Sprout! What the fu—”
    “Ty!” I yelled over her. “Wait!”
    I didn’t know how long he’d been watching, how much he’d heard. I mean, there’d been nothing to hear, really, nothing to see, yet somehow my presence in Ruthie’s car seemed like a betrayal. Like I was reverting to my old way of life. My life before him. Maybe I only felt like that because Mrs. Miller’d told me that’s what I needed to do if I wanted to get that scholarship, or maybe it was because Ruthie had called Ty a dork and I hadn’t slugged her. Or maybe it was because of the way Ian Abernathy was looking at me with those pleading eyes. Eyes that wanted not just to reveal his own secret, but our secret, as if maybe something more had gone on between us than an activity we carefully shielded from ourselves with the brim of his hat. I mean, for all I knew Ian fooled around with other guys, but I didn’t think so. Buhler wasn’t that big for one thing. And then, well, four years is a long time to pretend sex is just sex. At a certain point you realize that it might not be just the act that you enjoy, but the person you’re enjoying it with.
    But all that was behind me, at least for now, and up ahead was Ty. He’d disappeared into the undergrowth, but the sound of snapping branches and crunching leaves let me track him pretty easily. He avoided the paths, made a beeline for the Andersens’ pasture, and I found myself hoping he was wearing socks or else he was going to end up with a terrible case of itch ivy. I’m a faster runner than he is, but he had a good head start and plus running through tangles of itch ivy and marijuana—er, hemp—is a lot different from running on an open road, and of course there was that stupid bag of cell phones I was carrying, which why I didn’t leave them in the backyard is beyond me. And so anyway, the long and the short of it is that he made it to the Andersens’ pasture and was streaking across it by the time I pulled up short at the fence. I grabbed the upper strand as though I was trying to snap the wire from its posts. You might think I’d given up or something—the fence symbolizing the barrier that had suddenly grown up between us and all that—but the simpler truth is:
    “Ty! The dog!”
    Ty’s head jerked to the right. The Andersens’ St. Bernard was barreling towards him, a yellowish-brown blur like a backhoe careening out of control. Ty almost tripped over his too-big shoes when he whirled and started running back towards me. The dog was slow and clumsy as dogs go, but it was still closing on him fast, ears flapping like bits of cloth pinned to his head, clods of dirt and cow patties spitting from beneath his paws. Like most scared people, Ty ran like an idiot, arms flailing, torso straight up and creating as much wind resistance as possible, and of course turning around every other step to see how close his pursuer was, which nearly made him trip twice. But I didn’t think offering him this kind of rational analysis would help, so all I screamed was:
    “JFC,