Sprout

hair. He waggled his fingers at me. Green smudges winked like flecks of moss.
    “There you are.”
    I took his hand and licked the stains off, then, braving the cold, stood up and looked for anything that even hinted at green on his skin, and licked, nibbled, chewed and otherwise rubbed it off. I’d’ve painted his whole body green if I could have, just to let the world know he was mine, but I was afraid his dad would see. The bruises scattered over his body—blue-black smudges that wouldn’t rub off no matter how hard or gently I kneaded—reminded me what the consequences would be of leaving my own mark on Ty’s flesh.
    He had his shirt on now, and the expanse of skin between it and his socks was whiter than either. The last time I’d seen skin as green-white as Ty’s butt was on my mother’s face after a round of chemo.
    Yeah, I know. Totally inappropriate. What can I say? The unconscious doesn’t give a crap about propriety.
    He stopped dressing, took two steps towards the TV. “Oh wow,” Ty said now. “Is that the famous dictionary?”
    He wiped a spiderweb from the glassless cube, reached inside to pull it out, blew dust—well, dirt really—from the open spread in front of him.
    “ Homily to honesty ,” he read. “Any reason why—oh.
    Homosexual . Of, pertaining to, or characterized by sexual attraction between persons of the same …” His voice trailed off. “Let’s just turn the page on that whole question, okay?” He turned about a hundred pages actually, backwards, forwards, backwards again, until he reached the inside front cover, which nearly came off in his hand. There was a long moment of silence while he stared at the inscription, and then he read it aloud, as though I might not know what was written there.
    Presented to Irene Morgan
upon her graduation from Brentwood H. S.
in the year Nineteen Hundred and 81.
    There was a little puff of dust as the cover fell closed. “It was your mom’s?”
    “She always said it was her favorite book.”
    His eyes fell on the circle of books planted around the perimeter of the nidus. “What was she, an English teacher or something?”
    I walked over to him with his underwear, exchanged it for the dictionary, put it back inside the TV. “Come on,” I said, “we need to get you home.”
    It’s tempting to call the nidus our home away from home, but really, it was pretty much a shagpad. November had given way to December by then, which meant fall was pretty much over. We had our first frost on the 2nd, and a stretch of days afterwards when the thermometer never went above 20°. And despite what Ty said about never wanting to leave, the truth of the matter is that when every minute you spend away from the house increases the likelihood that your dad is gonna beat you with a belt or a wooden paddle, throw a cup at you, a boot, a brick, a bible, might lock you in the basement or a closet or a dog collar, or, hell, just get it over with already, grab that baseball bat and bring it down BAM! on your skull, you really don’t think about much besides buttoning buttons, zipping zippers, pulling on shoes and gloves and stocking caps, and getting your ass home to be kicked before it freezes off. And, as well, once the hump’d finally been crossed, Ty’s inhibitions fell away faster than the leaves on the trees. We snatched kisses in the bathroom before school started, behind the cedar break at the northern end of the football field, under the bleachers during lunch, and then I had a brainwave (or maybe just a stroke) and I told him to cut out of history and I cut out of civics and we met in the study carrel in the library that I had occasional access to as a student working on a semester-long project—i.e., the State Essay Contest, which was just weeks away. It helped that the librarian thought she and I shared some kind of magical bond (her name was Mrs. Greene, and even though she scolded me for the fingerprints I left all over her books she was so proud of me for reading something besides Harry Potter that she was willing to overlook it). The carol was 4'×4' and half the floor space was taken up by a desk, which meant we had to do it standing up, but it was still better than feeling a blast of frigid air on your private parts, which could cause them to wilt like summer squash caught in an early frost. But at the same time, the carol was in the library, which meant we couldn’t talk, let alone, you know, moan, curse, cry out, or sing