Sprout

from the roof on lengths of twine or vine. Leaves had been glued over faces, bird bones and twigs affixed along limbs, backgrounds painted out with green sap or red pokeberry juice or the nacreous fluid that comes out of milkweed stems. Strange ceramic collages made from bits and pieces of broken dishes dotted every available flat surface: simple things, like a teapot’s spout mounted on the base of an inverted mixing bowl, or a half dozen coffee cup handles ringing a dinner plate; and then more elaborate constructions, such as a turtlelike creature, made from dozens of one-and two-inch shards with the necks of four Amstel bottles serving as legs, and several other four-legged creatures that could be identified no more specifically than as quadrupeds. There was only one attempt at a human face: a cracked white oval of dinner plate fragments studded with the circular red base of a candy dish for the mouth, a Wedgwood chariot for one eye, a ceramic Garfield head for the other, and a spiky mane of hair made from shards of Heineken bottles that looked less like grass than the teeth of a shark with serious plaque buildup.
    When he’d finally taken it all in, or as much as he could process, he turned back to me.
    “It’s a little, um, Through the Looking-Glass .”
    I picked up one of the pottery collages. It could’ve been a fish, a sunflower, a ’57 Chevy. “I always thought Humpty Dumpty myself. You know, all the king’s horses, all the king’s men?”
    “Couldn’t put Sprout’s life together again?”
    “Sprout’s … past.” I shrugged. “Sprout’s mom.”
    Ty opened his scabbed mouth, then closed it. Opened it again. Closed it again. I found myself worrying that the scab was going to rip and start bleeding, but all that came out of him was a long sigh. Grimacing slightly, he heaved himself up and took a couple of limping steps in my direction, and then held out his fists to me, knuckles up, palms down.
    On Long Island we’d had a neighbor, an old man named Mr. Villanueva, who used to walk the sidewalks with one pocket full of candy, the other of quarters, and whenever he ran into a kid he would hold out his hands like this, and as Ty did now, he always said,
    “Pick one.”
    Every kid on the block had profited from Mr. V.’s generosity a dozen times, until a family named Smith moved in down the street when I was eight. Mrs. Smith said it was creepy for an old man to give candy to strange children (never mind that he’d known most of us since we were born) and, by the end of her first summer in the hood he’d retreated to his porch, sucking on his candies himself, and jingling a pocketful of change.
    “Before my arms fall off,” Ty prompted.
    I roused myself. “Um, what are my choices?”
    “One of them”—he shook his right hand as he spoke—“holds an ironic comment about your atrocious lack of crafting skills, and is designed to downplay all the implications of this weird-ass little hut you’ve got going on—”
    “Nidus.”
    “—while the other”—he shook his left—“contains a serious inquiry into the state of your mental health, and is meant to show that I’m not, you know, completely insensitive, even if I do think this place is a little, well, freaky.”
    “I call it the nidus.”
    “Yeah, I’m not gonna say that, cuz I’m not a tool.” He put his hands behind his back, made movements as though he were passing the two questions back and forth so I wouldn’t know which hand either was in, then put his fists back in front of him. “The choice”—dramatic pause—“is yours.”
    I stared at his hands for a moment, noticed for the first time that his knuckles were chafed and bruised. Realized with a start that he’d fought back this time. That he’d hit his dad. For some reason this shocked me more than the idea that his dad had hit him, and I looked away guiltily. And there it was. The nidus: TV, computer, altered pictures, ceramic collages, all the rest of it. My own version of bruised knuckles. Or, who knows, maybe just my own version of bruises.
    I turned back to Ty. I put each of my hands on one of his, but instead of tapping one or the other I used them to pull him close to me.
    “I choose this one,” I said, and planted my lips over his, and when I felt his battered hands open and reach around my back to press me against him I imagined his questions falling to the ground and breaking into little pieces, just like all those dishes I’d diligently packed