Sprout

Ty, RUN !”
    I stepped on the second strand of the fence, held up the third, but he didn’t bother climbing through, just vaulted it. The cottonwood with the long sloping branch was about fifteen feet behind us, and we’d’ve never made it if the dog hadn’t got held up by the fence. He yelped when he shoved his scarred, slobbery muzzle through it, jumped back, but then he shoved forwards again, leaving fat, blood-stained clumps of fur on the barbs, which might’ve made me feel sorry for him if he hadn’t been trying to kill us. By then Ty and I had scrambled as far up the branch as we could go. Leaves shivered and fell off with each footfall, and the branch itself swayed like the arm of an oil derrick, but seemed to be holding our weight just fine. The St. Bernard actually jumped on the branch (it was about three feet in diameter at its base, in case you’re having a hard time picturing this) but when he tried to clamber after us he fell to the ground. A little bark burped out of him when he smashed into the forest floor. Twice more he tried, twice more he fell, and after that he just stood on the base of the branch, his beady, bloodshot eyes glaring up at us, ropes of saliva hanging from his flappy jowls.
    For a long time Ty and I just looked down at the dog. We’d glance at each other every once in a while, then turn back to the dog. Glance at each other, turn to the dog. Each other; the dog. Then one of the phones let out a BLEEP , and it was only after we jumped and let go of each other that we realized we’d been holding hands.
    Our eyes flitted to our fingers in the same way they’d flitted to the dog. As though the thing we stared at was capable of ripping our bodies limb from limb. We scooted as far from each other on the branch as we could get, which is to say, about one and a half inches.
    “Um,” I said.
    “Yeah, Ty said.
    BLEEP , one of the phones said (which bleep was actually the sample from Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love”).
    Twenty feet below us, the Andersens’ St. Bernard barked.
    A distraction! I leaned over, looked down. “We should give it a name!” I said, pointing. Then I realized I was pointing with the hand that’d been holding Ty’s and I shoved it in my pocket.
    Ty blushed a deep, deep red. “Why? A name’ll just help us remember this embarrassing moment,” he said, and his hand, the one that’d been holding mine, curled into a fist.
    “Well, at least we outsmarted him. We should feel proud.”
    “He’s the one walking around. We’re stuck up a tree.”
    I looked down at the dog, who had lifted one leg to mark our trunk. I made a mental note to climb down on the lee side, then, more because I didn’t know what to say to Ty than anything else, I took one of Mrs. Miller’s confiscated phones out of the bag and tossed it at the dog. I don’t have a good aim even when I’m concentrating, and the phone missed the dog and hit the tree trunk instead, snapped into two or three pieces and fell to the forest floor.
    When I looked up, Ty was staring at me.
    “Did you just throw your—no, wait. First of all, you throw like a girl. Now: dude, did you just throw your cell phone at that dog?”
    I nudged the bag in his direction, opened it. Ty stared at it for like five minutes with an unreadable expression on his face. He could’ve been looking at gold coins, or dead snakes, or a TJ Maxx bag full of cell phones.
    “You know what? I’m not gonna ask.” And he took one of the phones and chucked it at the dog. The dog was at that particular moment licking himself in the place only dogs can lick, and the phone bounced off his thick fur. If he even felt it, he didn’t react. There being nothing else to do, we threw three or four or five or six more phones at the dog in the same halfhearted sort of way. I think the word for how we threw them is “desultorily,” or maybe “perfunctory,” but I didn’t have my dictionary with me to check. I was about to throw the precious BlackBerry when I noticed Ty looking at me funny.
    “What?”
    “Nothing.”
    “ What ?”
    “I dunno. I was just thinking maybe you’re right.”
    “Maybe—?”
    “Maybe we should give the dog a name.”
    I looked down at the dog. His tongue was still lapping away, accompanied by snuffling noises it was all too easy to misinterpret.
    “You want to name the dog?”
    “I want to remember this moment.”
    I let the BlackBerry clatter back into the bag. “You want to …” I let my voice