Read Sprout for Free Online

in shame. What’s it gonna be?”
    I’m not sure if it was the basic truth of what Ruth Wilcox said that drove Ian Abernathy away, or just the sheer number of words. His mouth opened and closed several times, and so did his fists, and then he turned to me. “This ain’t over, newbie,” he said, and marched across the playground.
    Neither of us said anything while Ian walked away, the sound of dead grass crunching beneath his sneaks gradually drowned out by the distant screams of first-and second-graders playing tetherball and four-square and game boy. Why do little kids scream like they’re dying when they’re supposedly having fun?
    “I said , is that a dic tionary?”
    I glanced up at Ruth Wilcox, who was staring at me as impatiently as Ian Abernathy had a moment before. I found myself wondering if she’d chased him off so she could beat me up herself.
    I glanced at the ground on either side of the stump. “Huh?”
    “Home room, duh . Did you actually bring your own dictionary to class?”
    I shrugged. “You know, budget cuts and all. I wasn’t sure what sort of resources a rural school would have.”
    She rolled her one visible eye. I’m guessing the eye under the wedge of hair rolled as well, but I couldn’t say for sure. Ruth Wilcox struck you as the kind of girl who could learn to roll one eye at a time.
    “Miss Tunie said you were good at English and composition.”
    “Yeah, I don’t really know what she meant by—”
    She held up her hand, not so much “stop” as “Stop! In the Name of Love” (although, given Ruth Wilcox’s love of all things eighties, it would’ve been more like Stop Making Sense by the Talking Heads). She reached into her purse, pulled out a sparkly silver notebook and something that was, depending on your point of view, a long pink pencil with a troll doll on the eraser end, or a troll doll that just happened to have a pencil hanging from its butt. She held them out until, not knowing what else to do, I took them. Then:
    “Describe me,” Ruth Wilcox said.
    “Um—”
    “Don’t think . Do .”
    I stared at her for a long time, but she showed no sign of going away. I looked at my watch. Nineteen minutes till recess ended. I looked at the troll doll, its googly eyes and tangled polyester thatch of green hair, then back up at the strange girl standing in front of me. Her skin-tight acid-washed jeans were tucked into a pair of beige Uggs, her oldies concert tee worn underneath an outer garment that was less a tanktop than a couple of strips of fabric holding up a little square of cloth. Her face could’ve been a clear glass pitcher filled with milk, with that impossibly long sharp nose sticking out of it like a spout. A striped bluejay’s feather dangled from her left ear, and her right eyelid was painted some kind of bronzy red. The words “etaoin shrdlu” (which aren’t Gaelic as I thought at first, but rather the twelve most frequently used letters of the English language) were painted across her fingernails. Since she only had five fingers on each hand, this was perhaps the most impressive part of the whole ensemble.
    After a long time I sighed and wrote three words. I wrote in all caps, put periods between them, underlined the last one, and then I handed the notebook back.
    Ruth Wilcox stared at what I’d written. In profile her face was so thin it seemed two-dimensional, as if it’d come out of a photocopier. I couldn’t stop looking at it.
    She nodded and closed the book.
    “What’s that all over your fingers?”
    “Huh?”
    “Fingers.” She waggled the etaoin digits at me. “Yours are fil-thy.”
    I looked down at my fingertips, saw that they were covered with black and purple stains.
    “Um, rubber cement and pokeberry juice.”
    She nodded like this was a satisfactory explanation, then tapped the closed notebook.
    “I like it. It’s like the opening monologue before the curtain goes up, when the audience is still leafing through their programs and