Sprout

smudge on it, but this didn’t make me think of my hair. It made me think of Ty’s skin, and I had to resist the urge to lick it.
    A fat man in a gray suit got up and droned for a few minutes—eyes front, write on one side of the page only, if you need your pencil sharpened hold up your hand and someone will come do it for you—and then, with a mischievous smile, he pulled out a starter’s pistol and fired it into the air. The gym was filled with the sound of ripping paper as 499 students tore into 499 envelopes to find out what the topic was, but I just stared at the gun still raised above the gray man’s head. A puff of smoke wafted from its barrel like a lazy genie reluctantly summoned from its bottle. I felt Ty’s arms curled around mine, his fingers steadying my aim, his body pressed up against mine from his lips down to his toes. His voice in my ear.
    Are you looking at the gun?
    Yes.
    Why would you do a stupid thing like that? Look at your target , Bradford.
    Oh. Duh.
    I reached for the envelope, opened it, pulled out a full-sized sheet of paper on which had been printed only:
    “Actions are visible, though motives are secret.”
—Samuel Johnson
    and below it the instructions:
    “Discuss, using examples from life and/or literature.”
    …
    Secrets, huh? A little snort came out of my nose, seemed to land on my notebook in the form of a couple of sentences. I looked down and read the words as if someone else had written them.
    I have a secret. And everyone knows it but me.
    I lifted up my pencil, then stopped, looked again at what I’d just written.
    I have a secret. And everyone knows it but me.
    The more I looked at it, the less sense it made. How could I have a secret that only other people knew. So I crossed out but me and put a period at the end of the sentence, added another. Now it read:
    I have a secret. And everyone knows it. But no one talks about it.
    That’s better, I thought, and pushed onward.
    I have a secret. And everyone knows it. But no one talks about it, at least not out in the open. That makes it a very modern secret, like knowing your favorite celebrity has some weird eccentricity or other, or professional athletes do it for the money, or politicians don’t actually have your best interests at heart.
    I stopped again. Looked at what I’d written. Realized suddenly that it was all a lie. No, not a lie. Just a deflection. A way of avoiding that original statement. Before I knew it I was scribbling out the whole paragraph so hard I snapped the lead on my pencil. I reached for another and with a shaking hand rewrote the first version.
    I have a secret. And everyone knows it but me.
    I set my pencil down and stared at these two sentences for a long time. I mean, there it was. Right in front of me. Some peculiar facet of my being on display to everyone but me, like the small of my back, or the crown of my head—my freshly shaved head, covered with an eighth of an inch of pale brown peach fuzz. But that wasn’t it. My hair—long or short, green or brown—wasn’t my secret. Neither was the nidus, the trailer, my dad’s alcoholism, my mom’s death, or the fact that I liked to have sex with boys. There was something else. I knew it, even if I didn’t know what it was. There was some part of myself I didn’t know, something about my character I didn’t understand. Something that might’ve been the thing to make me fail Ty at the crucial moment, but then again something that might be the one thing that he could hold on to. That could bring him back. And if I was going to discover that thing then I was going to have to chase it down and corral it like a wild horse. And so I picked up my pencil and started writing furiously. But this time I wasn’t writing to run away from something. I was running after something, and I wasn’t going to stop till I caught it.

First published in Great Britain 2009
Copyright © 2009 by Dale Peck This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc The right of Dale Peck to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
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