Free Sprout by Dale Peck Page B

Design—i.e., Creationism—i.e., my God made the world, not yours.
    Kansas: the home of Rev. Fred Phelps, the founder of GodHatesFags.com and the guy who crashed Matthew Shepherd’s funeral with signs proclaiming that he got what was coming to him.
    Kansas: a pioneer of Defense of Marriage legislation. I.e., Straights Only. I.e., gays can design the wedding dress, photograph the ceremony, and cater the reception, but they can’t actually get hitched themselves. Kansas didn’t just pass a law to this effect: it amended the state constitution . Kansas was also the very first state to write a law making homosexual activity illegal, although that law was struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003.
    Oh, and Kansas: the first—and, to this day, the only—state in the country to make it illegal for two kids to have sex with each other. Yup, straight or gay, if they catch you having sex in Kansas before you turn sixteen, you’re going to jail.
    Kansas .
    This isn’t to say homophobia was, like, rampant at my school, or anything like that. I was less worried about roaming bands of gay bashers than some testosterone-charged football player feeling guilty about his fascination with, I dunno, Mario Lopez—not the bubbly Mario Lopez of Saved by the Bell , or the can’t-keep-his-hands-off-her-butt Mario Lopez of Dancing with the Stars , but the bubble-butted Mario Lopez of the Greg Louganis biopic. (“Gee, Mom, I don’t know how this could’ve ended up on our Netflix queue. I must’ve clicked the wrong thing.”) And it wasn’t like coming out was going to help me find a boyfriend. Even though statistics say there should be fifty budding homosexuals enrolled at BHS, half of whom are male, they don’t say who those other twenty-four boys are, let alone when they’re going to work their issues out (statistics do say that only 34% of Kansas high school students are proficient in math, however, so I’m not holding my breath). And, you know, I wasn’t even sure what boyfriend meant, at least not in this context. I tried looking it up in my dictionary, but it wasn’t a lot of help. A girl’s or a woman’s preferred male companion. That seemed to mean I could be a boyfriend, but I couldn’t have one.
    Then again, it was an old dictionary, and this is the age of the internet, right? I mean, it wasn’t exactly hard for me to realize what all those fantasies of Ewan McGregor were about (that would be the skinny jeans-wearing Ewan McGregor of Trainspotting and not the—ick!—bearded, bathrobe-wearing Ewan McGregor of the Star Wars movies, let alone the cheeseball-in-spandex Ewan McGregor of lameoid action flicks like The Island and Stormbreaker ). All of which is another way of saying that coming out to myself wasn’t all that different to staying in the closet. I was still alone. Still living in my dad’s freakshow house and still going to my boondocks school. In a way, I was just like Mrs. Miller. I had a name for myself, for what I was. I just had no idea what it meant.
    By the time we pulled into my driveway, Mrs. Miller was so agitated that she hopped out of the car and marched straight for the door. Well, actually she marched straight for the house, but then she had to walk around it three times before she could actually find the door in the middle of all the vines. But she managed to make it look very intentional.
    She raised her hand to knock. Before she could the door swept open, and there was my dad.
    Mr. Sprout.
    Apparently he’d seen Mrs. M. walking around the house, and used the time to pour her a drink, because he was holding one in each hand. Either that or he was two-fisting it that day, which was an equally plausible explanation (although it didn’t explain how he managed to turn the doorknob).
    “Iced tea?”
    “Long Island?”
    I flashbacked (flashed back?) to the first day of seventh grade (“Long Guyland?”) but I learned later that Mrs. Miller was referring to the drink and not my dad.
    “But of