Sprout by Dale Peck

she realized she needed to be at least a foot taller than her mom—and four inches taller than her dad—so she immediately set her mind to growing. The photographic evidence was on display the first time I went to her house. At eight, Ruthie could rest her chin on top of a yardstick; at ten, she already came up to her mom’s eyebrows; at twelve, her mom stood eye to eye (well, eye to nipple I guess) with the very visible ribs of her daughter’s chest—which, despite her height, remained as flat as the Kansas
    “No no no ,” Mrs. Miller cut in again. “Exposition. Background. Don’t start with a character sketch. And for God’s sake, please . No nipples . I’ll give you three minutes. Now go!”
    “Maybe if you’d stop inter—”
    “Two minutes fifty-five seconds. Go, Sprout. Go!”
    My pen quivered above the page, just as it had when Ruthie first commanded me to write. How were you supposed to compose something meaningful when someone was standing over you, stopping you every time you got started? Telling you what to write about, but not what to actually write . But that reminded me:
    “I will be your muse,” Ruthie said to me, standing on one of the stumps at the edge of the playground with her arms in a Statue of Liberty pose. “Nancy Spungeon to your Sid Vicious, Patti Smith to your Robert Mapplethorpe, Courtney Love to your Kurt Cobain.”
At first I was like, my muse? And then, after she explained to me who everyone was, I was like, my muse ?
“I’m a little worried here. All those guys are dead.”
“Death,” Ruthie didn’t bat an eye, “is a crucial component of fame. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Eva Peron, River Phoenix, Tupac and Biggie. Heath Ledger. Anybody worth their salt is planning for death from the moment they’re born. Otherwise what’s the point?”
“How much is salt worth?”
“I mean, everyone knows Princess Di, but who was that guy in the car with her? No one remembers.”
“Dodi Al Fayed. And isn’t salt, like, cheap?”
“I’m thinking pills,” Ruthie pirouetted on the stump. “On the eve of my fortieth birthday. Or maybe I’ll become a terrorist. Patty Hearst was so glam in the SLA. She wasn’t smart enough to get shot though, and what is she now? Just another heiress with bad plastic surgery and a tall gate around her house, dreaming of the days when life used to be fun. Like, yuck .”
“Di’s boyfriend was named Dodi Al Fayed.”
“Yeah? And who read his biography?”
    “And … time. Pen down, Sprout.”
    Mrs. Miller looked over what I’d written.
    “Getting there, getting there. You’ve certainly got good material in your friend. Although I wonder if I need to report her to Mr. Philpot.”
    The Phil-bot was the school counselor.
    “Mrs. M.!”
    “Just kidding, S. ,” she said, her laugh fluttering behind her own joke like a Confederate flag on the antenna of a muddy pickup truck. “But seriously. I’m wondering where you are in all this. You kind of disappear, you know.”
    I nodded. I did know.
    “Ruthie’s like that.”
    Mrs. Miller’s nod echoed mine, although, like her laugh, it went on too long. Then, out of left field:
    “Have you ever talked to Mr. Philpot?”
    Cue smile going hard and sharp as a pizza cutter, eyes blinking faster than a gat, fingers clutching at my dictionary cover. (That’d be me, by the way, not Mrs. M.) I had the sudden urge to drop my glass on the patio, but I fought it off.
    “Have you ever talked to the Phil-bot?” That was me, too.
    Duh.
    “The—? Oh.” Mrs. Miller couldn’t quite suppress her smile. “I know he can be a bit stiff.”
    “He wears bowties.”
    “Effective counseling doesn’t require that he be ‘down with the kids,’ as you say.”
    “If I ever employed such a doof-butt phrase, I was doing so ironically. And the Phil-bot’s bowties have smiley faces on them.”
    “In fact ”—apparently Mrs. Miller was feeling persistent today—“it’s often better when you don’t think of your