Sprout

deliberately ran the car low on gas so we couldn’t go too far.” But then it occurred to me that my dad knew nothing about me and Ty, had no reason to suspect us of getting up to anything. But Mrs. Miller did. I glanced down at the lipstick-stained coffee cups.
    “Well-played, Mrs. M. Well-played.”
    “Um, Daniel? Who are you talking to?”
    “Never mind. We’re gonna have to hitch a lift to a gas station.”
    I reached to open my door, felt Ty’s hand on my leg. When I turned to him he nodded at the river, which was still off to the left, less than a mile away.
    “What’s your hurry? We got all day.”
    If he’d squeezed my leg it would’ve been too much, if he’d leered or smirked or grabbed his crotch (or, God forbid, mine). But all he said was “We got all day” and then he held my gaze, not fearlessly, no, but not plaintively either, as if to say that just spending time with me was nice, and if anything else happened, well, that was just gravy.
    We pushed the car off the road first. That was another thing I’d never done before. Pushed a car, I mean. It was interesting. Made me realize that this vehicle, which had ferried my dad and me across nearly a dozen states and racked up almost 200,000 miles, wasn’t really all that big, all that special. Just a rusty box sitting on top of four wheels that were almost as inclined to respond to a two-boypower push as a 200-horsepower engine. As the Taurus inched into the ditch I thought it could just as easily stay there, and in a blip of time—a century or three—it’d rust away to nothing. But then, when it picked up speed and rolled deeper into the ditch and we couldn’t stop it—hello, boys and girls, this is why you shouldn’t drink—I thought it just might end up staying there after all. The ditch was steep as Kansas roadside drainage ditches go, with a deep narrow channel at its center, just like the river, and the Taurus’ right front tire sank into this depression, which caused the left rear tire to rise up off the ground about six inches.
    Ty and I stared at the seesawing car for a good long time. Finally he handed me the bottle and I drank down the last of it. We were already drunk; the car was already stuck; it couldn’t do any more damage.
    “Who wants to—” I burped “—gimme an ‘Oh crap’?”
    “Oh crap,” Ty said, although he made a minor substitution with his word choice.
    I walked to the car, gave the free-floating back tire a spin, which obliged with a half revolution. “That can’t be good for the alignment.”
    Ty shmirked, which is a shrug/smirk combo, although maybe I should say shmunked, since it was really a shrug/smirk/ wait-am-I-drunk-already? combo, then walked to the front passenger door and leaned into the cabin. A moment later his head was back.
    So was the gun.
    “You bring them phones?”
    Somewhere in my head I knew that if guns were a bad idea, then guns and drinking were a really, really, really bad idea. Somewhere I knew that. I just didn’t know how to get to that place at that particular moment. Did I take a left at the cerebral cortex and then head on down to the medulla oblongata? Or, you know, should I meander through the corpus collosum until I came to the temporal lobe, and from there make my way to the good old cerebellum? I had no clue. As it was, I could barely get the key in the trunk lock, and almost ripped the bag of phones in half as I lifted it out.
    Ty looked in the bag and smiled approvingly. “The thing about target practice,” he said, stuffing the gun barrel-first in his waistband and setting off towards the river, “the thing is, you want something that’ll explode. Cans or plastic bottles just don’t give the same thrill. Glass bottles’re good, but my dad takes them back for the deposit. These phones however—” he turned and looked at me with a wicked grin “—these phones’re gonna be awesome .”
    I nodded my head as if Mr. Schaefer, the world history teacher, had just pointed out a heretofore unconsidered connection between global trade and factors leading to the rise of the American Civil War. Gun + phone = explosions = fun! The fact that there were two equals signs in my equation should give you an idea how clearly I was thinking. I was going to shoot up a bag of twice-stolen cell phones in a stranger’s field a good twenty or thirty miles from home, leaving my dad’s already decrepit old car catterwonky in a ditch with the rear axle audibly bending out