Sprout

Had to hold on with all my might, before he slipped away again. Slipped away for good.
    I guess what I’m trying to say is that the past has a way of catching up with you. I mean, duh, right? Paging Dr. Freud! But sometimes the past is more present than other times. In the last six weeks of the semester—the last six weeks before the State Essay Contest—the ghosts of my pre-Kansas existence seemed to dance before my eyes, and sometimes it was hard to tell who I was looking at. No, that’s not quite it. I always knew who I was looking at, but sometimes I forgot who was doing the looking. Who I was: sixteen-year-old Sprout Bradford, well-coifed gay teen on the make, as opposed to eleven-or twelve-year-old Daniel B., praying fervently to a god he didn’t believe in to save his mom. To bring her back. It didn’t help matters that Ty was the first person since my mom to call me by my given name. We’d be in the middle of things when one whispered “Daniel” would knock me out of orbit, and I’d fall back into that awful year and a half after my mom’s diagnosis. The whispers. The smells. The endless hours in the waiting room.
    “Endless,” I call them. But of course they ended.
    I dunno. Maybe it happened because, once the whole physical thing with Ty worked itself out, my mind was free to look elsewhere. Or maybe it was just because, well, we needed a place to get physical. To have sex. I only had the car on Saturdays, remember, which meant we had to find a rendezvous closer to home the other six days of the week. Someplace secluded, but offering certain, shall we say, horizontal amenities. Ty’s property was out, as was the Regiers’—frosty fields and the threat of being disemboweled by ostriches don’t exactly set a romantic mood, and plus Ty said his dad had taken to wandering the Regiers’ land with a rifle, ostensibly to hunt deer or pheasant or turkey (or ostriches), but Ty was pretty sure he was really just looking for evidence of what his son’d been getting up to the last couple of months. That left our place. The trailer was no good. My dad went to Mrs. Miller’s pretty much every night, but he was usually still home when school let out, and then too he sometimes popped in because he’d “forgotten” something or other—a pretty lame excuse, but he was my dad, so what could I do? The only alternative was the forest, and, though there were any number of trees that would’ve worked in a pinch, there was one place that made more sense than any other, and it was high time I showed it to Ty.
    And, I suppose, to you.
    “I call it the nidus.”
    “Okay.” Ty peered at the shadowy outlines barely visible through several layers of moldy plastic.
    “Nidus means nest.”
    “Sure.” He was running his fingers over the plastic now, trying to find a seam.
    “Because, you know, it’s kind of like a nest.”
    “Yeah, I got that.”
    “And also cuz I’m a geek.”
    Ty turned just long enough to give me a little kiss. He used only the right side of his mouth, to avoid pressing on the scab on the left. “Yeah, I got that too.” He found the flap then, pulled it open; a long low whistle plumed from his mouth in a foggy cone. “Jesus, Daniel.”
    So, uh, you remember the things that hadn’t fit in the trailer? The sofa, the dining room table, etc., etc.? I think I told you my dad left them in the front yard, like it was our second home or something, albeit one without walls or floor or roof. He even slept there on warm nights—said he was going to spend some time in “the summer house, har har.” (His hars, not mine. Really.) Anyway, maybe his joke inspired me, or maybe I just got tired of looking at all his crap, but a month or so after we moved in I decided to drag everything into the forest: sofa, table, three mismatched chairs, the bottom half of the china cabinet (the top never made it off Long Island), the long dresser that’d been in my bedroom, the tall dresser that’d been in my parents’, a big Navy trunk that’d belonged to my father’s father, a tall IKEA-style computer desk with attached shelves, and then an endless assortment of pretty much random stuff: books, dishes, lamps, clothes, board games, pictures, and, well, a lot of junk. My dad’d draped plastic dropcloths over everything to protect it from the rain, and I took these into the forest too. Tied some clothesline between a trio of tree trunks and laid the plastic over it to make this kind of bulbous opalescent