Free Sprout by Dale Peck

Daniel—”
    “It’s Sprout, Mrs. Miller. Really. Sprout .”
    “I’m sorry, Spro—”
    “And if I do do this thing,” I said, talking over her, “I want to write about being gay.”
    There was a long silence, and then I giggled.
    “I said do-do.”

Rural gay boy, party of one
    Betcha didn’t see that coming, did ya? Neither did Mrs. Miller, and she actually knows me. Anyway, you know this much: being gay isn’t my secret.
    Bet you forgot about the secret too, didn’t you?
    Don’t worry. I won’t.
    “You’re … ?” Mrs. Miller didn’t seem to know any hand gestures that would indicate homosexuality. I could’ve shown her a few, but I didn’t think it would help the situation, and besides, I had my hands glued to the wheel in the approved 10-2 position.
    “Gay.”
    “Gay?” She repeated the word as if she’d never said it before, and who knows, maybe she hadn’t. She rubbed her head as if maybe the word had given her a headache, rather than the mojitoritas (she’d kind of combined two different recipes that day).
    “Yup,” I said. “Gay. Gay gay gay .”
    My voice squeaked on the fourth gay .
    A year earlier, when my dad found a couple of gay sites in the cache of Internet Explorer, he threw my dictionary into our PC. I think he thought I’d learned how to be gay from the web, although the truth is I’d only looked at those kinds of sites after I was pretty sure about myself, and then only once or twice, or maybe three or four times (hey, I had to be sure). The fact is, they kind of weirded me out. The old guys were so muscly they looked more like statues than people, whereas the kids around my age were showing off their bodies with leering expressions that made me want to put on padded coveralls and zip myself into a sleeping bag. The only problem was, once I was in the sleeping bag, all I could think about was their bodies.
    After my dad broke the computer—and knocked back a couple of shots—he went for a walk in the woods, leaving me to pry the dictionary out of the broken monitor and vacuum up the glass. The cover had half ripped away from the pages but it was otherwise okay. Score one for paper in the ongoing battle between books and computers.
    Computer. One who computes.
    What can I say, it was an old dictionary.
    By the time he came back I was learning the definition of a nice set of p-words. Produce, profane, profess . It wasn’t as exciting as the web, but you make do with what you have.
    My dad wavered in the doorway like a tree in a heavy wind, an image reinforced by a couple of vines he’d dug up and curled around his upper body like a beauty queen’s sash. Unfortunately for him, the vines were itch ivy—he never could remember what they looked like—which meant he was going to suffer more than I was.
    “I should have seen it coming. Absent mother, poor role model for a father. I apologize, son. I should have found another maternal figure for you.”
    “I thought it was supposed to be too much mothering that made you gay.”
    My dad’s eyes crossed as he tried to figure this out, and I thought he was going to fall down. The leaves shimmered as he shook, and he scratched at his neck. Finally he blinked hard, twice, and said,
    “Whatever. Toss me a beer, would you?”
    I looked at the dictionary, the TV, back at him. “That’s it? A beer?”
    “Oh, okay, two.”
    “Dad.”
    He didn’t meet my eyes. “Hey. You’re a fag. I’m a drunk. Nobody’s perfect.” The leaves shook as he scratched the first red speck of an itch-ivy rash. “That was mean. You’re gay. I’m an alcoholic. Now toss me a beer so I can go get these in the ground.”
    I aimed for my dad’s head, but you know drunks: they can’t jerk the wheel of their car to avoid hitting a four-year-old running into the street, but they never drop a cold one.
    Just before he went outside, my dad said, “Just promise me you won’t tell anyone. I don’t want to have to identify my son at the