Sprout

maybe the crows, contemplating their celestial movements while I contemplated his face to see if it looked any different. But then:
    “This is as far as I’ve ever been from home,” he said, and by the time I thought of something to say to that, we’d both fallen asleep.
    When we woke up we did it again. It had been early when we left and it wasn’t very late now, and we didn’t rush. There are any number of reasons why I’m not going to tell you what we did exactly, let alone describe it. I will tell you that there were a lot of giggles and a couple of “Ouch”es, one “Um, no, not yet,” and, later on, a “Now.”
    “Now.”
    Now .
    It was only after we were finished that we got fully undressed, because we had to shake the wood crumbs and dust and bugs out of our clothing, not to mention all those other little bits and blobs and blemishes we didn’t examine too closely, this being nature after all, and nature being full of things that, like Ty, go to the bathroom outside. The cold gave us goosebumps, and there are certain parts of the body that look particularly funny when they’re covered in goosebumps. I pointed at his and laughed, and he said, “At least mine don’t have green streaks on it,” and laughed even harder, and everything was the same as it had ever been between us, only now we’d done what we’d been wanting to do for a long time.
    “Since the day I told you about Holly,” Ty said, in answer to a question I hadn’t asked.
    “Since the day I saw you,” I said, though the truth of the matter is it felt like I’d been waiting my entire life, or at least since I moved to Kansas.
    …
    It took us about twenty minutes to flag down a pickup truck. The driver never told us his name, but he bought us five gallons of gas and towed us out of the ditch as well, which turned out to be a lot easier than it looked. Never asked what we’d been doing or why we looked like we’d just stumbled out of a lumbermill, just tipped his hat and shook his head, and though it would’ve been portentous to imagine the word he muttered as he drove away was “Faggots,” I’m pretty sure it was actually “Meatloaf,” which I’m guessing is what his wife made for the noon meal.
    Ty held my hand in the back of the pickup truck on the way to the gas station, and in the car on the way home he held my leg. I thought about how before his fingers had fumbled at my flesh nervously, but now they just sat on my thigh midway between hip and knee. Sex: it calms you down.
    “You want to pick up Mickey D’s?” I said.
    “Who’s that?”
    I glanced over, saw that he wasn’t kidding.
    “Lunch,” I said. “You want something to eat?”
    “Nah. I should get home before my dad does.”
    He kissed me short and hard when I stopped the car in front of his gate, then jumped out of the car and disappeared up his driveway. I waited a moment, and I don’t know, maybe he heard the car still running by the gate, or maybe he just heard my heart doing its trapeze act inside my chest, cuz a moment later he was back and I was cranking down the window and we kissed one more time.
    “I miss you already,” I said, cuz when you get right down to it I’m a cheeseball, and then I stomped on the gas, and, slowly, the Taurus lumbered away.

No good deed goes unpunished
    The best thing about that day was the fact that Ty’s dad never found out he left. Mr. Petit didn’t like his children wandering around like stray dogs. One time when Ty came home with a long scratch on his arm that he said came from a barbed-wire fence, Ty’s dad said the nearest barbed-wire fence was two and a half miles away, and chained his son to the doghouse overnight—which would’ve been warmer, Ty said, if his dad hadn’t shot the dog three years earlier for killing a rabbit and not eating it, which Ty’s dad regarded as a sign that the dog had gone bad. Not the killing part. Killing was perfectly natural. But a normal dog—or person for that matter—ate what he killed. I didn’t want to imagine what he’d’ve done if he’d found a bitemark on Ty’s butt.
    Oh, and what the hell am I saying? The best thing about that day was the sex. Hands down. Numero uno. No question. If you’ve had sex, I don’t have to tell you what I mean by this, and if you haven’t had sex, well, let me just say it lives up to the hype. But even so, the really good parts are the things you never thought about—the things that don’t make it into pictures or