Sprout

trail off. I hate it when people repeat the last thing that’s been said to them because they’re too afraid to ask what the other person meant by it. “You want to remember this moment,” I said finally, because when it comes right down to it, I’m a coward.
    “Maybe,” Ty smirked. “I dunno how it’s gonna turn out yet.”
    “I’m pretty sure it’ll get tired and go home eventually.”
    “I wasn’t referring to the dog.”
    “What were you—”
    Ty cut me off by sticking his tongue in my mouth. Later on I realized I didn’t flinch. I’d’ve thought I’d’ve flinched (there’s a lot of apostrophes in that sentence, by the way; sorry). I mean, I knew I was gay and all. But at the same time: kissing a guy? (I mean, I hope you don’t think I ever kissed Ian .) Everything I knew had taught me that two guys macking on each other was weird or different or at the very least would take some getting used to. But I didn’t think any of those things. In fact, I didn’t think anything at all. The Phil-bot would say that it’s a defense mechanism of a certain type of overintellectual personality—i.e., mine—to insulate itself from a given moment by cutting away to the past or the future in an effort to describe what the moment meant rather than what it felt like. Well, I don’t remember what it felt like. What I felt. Emotionally or physically. I don’t remember what I thought, don’t remember what Ty’s mouth tasted like or whose hands went where or how in the hell we managed to stay on that branch. All I remember is that after Ty sat back the 72-degree air—24.6 degrees less warm than his mouth—the naked breath of the forest felt ice cold on my lips, and all I wanted to do was pull him back on me.
    So I did.
    An image of Troy Bellows and Stacy McTaverty popped in my head, and I found myself giving them a mental high-five. Why? Because, well, kissing is awesome . I mean, you practice with the side of your hand, you see it on TV, your friends do it in the backseat and behind you at movie theaters and, well, wherever else they can, and, you know, you’ve probly had the misfortune of catching your parents at it once or twice, but, I mean: take the hint . It’s fun. Try the Pepsi challenge. Kiss someone. Then don’t kiss them. Which one tastes better?
    By the time we unclinched the Andersens’ St. Bernard had wandered off. Ty looked all around for it as though he almost hoped it was still around.
    “I guess I better get home.”
    “Here,” I said, brushing a finger over his lips. “Lemme wipe the lipstick off.”
    Ty flinched, and I jerked my hand back.
    “Um,” I said, “that was a joke? Cuz I’m not a girl?”
    “I know that! I know you’re gay .”
    In the realm of stating the obvious, this seemed to me to significantly outrank anything I’d ever said. But then I suddenly remembered the conversation he’d overheard, the question Ruthie had asked me just before I saw him.
    “I didn’t tell Ruthie,” I said to him. “I didn’t say you were gay.”
    “I’m not gay!” he practically shouted, and then he grabbed me and kissed me and scrambled down the branch so fast I thought he was going to fall and break his neck.
    “Use the lee side,” I said, remembering the dog marking the tree, but Ty climbed right through the wet patch and hopped over the fence.
    So. A thousand years from now, after we’ve all died from global warming or a neutron bomb or brain death caused by reading one too many stories about Britney Spears, the aliens might come down here to check things out—or the cockroaches that have evolved intelligence, or that one lone human who survived in cryogenic suspension—and the sole survivor or the cockroach or the alien might happen across a cottonwood tree in the remnants of an artificial forest eight miles north of what had once been Hutchinson, Kansas. The tree will be dead by then, of course, probly little more than a crumbling stump, but that stump will be ringed by a half dozen indestructible plastic cell phones (not counting the one that broke against the side of the trunk, of course).
    Was this the site of some minor battle in mankind’s final years? A communications center perhaps? A trash heap? As our resident of the future ponders the imponderable, one of the phones bleeps.
    “The ultraviolet radiation penetrating the depleted ozone layer must’ve kept the battery charged all these years!” is the first thing the resident of the future