Sprout

metaphor, but “fraction-of-an-inch” makes an even more awkward verb than “millimeter”). It’s sort of like the difference between the Eloi and the Morlocks in The Time Machine : the surface dwellers pretty and tall and slim and careless, the underworld beings hunched and ugly and doing all the work. Of course, in TTM it turns out the Morlocks are also eating the Eloi. Sometimes I wondered if my dad’s stumps had a similar fate planned for us.
    By the time Mrs. Miller came over, there were thirty-six of them. Six rows of six, evenly spaced over the whole acre and a half of our clearing. My dad had even taken pictures, got some kid from the JuCo to make him a website. He paid him in booze.
    Check it out: www.thestumpman.com .
    Make sure you type the stumpman, or you’re going to end up seeing something you really don’t want to. Trust me on that one.
    It turned out Mrs. Miller was a nervous (read: incompetent, or maybe just dangerous) driver. Our driveway is a good quarter mile long, but it’s still pretty much just a couple of straight lines connected at one end (that’s called an L, by the way, which maybe I should’ve just said). Despite this, she somehow managed to back onto the lawn and get stuck between two stumps. She slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting one, shifted gears so hard they ground. This was impressive, since she drove an automatic. The first thing she said was:
    “Your father should not be buying alcohol for minors.”
    The second thing she said was:
    “That is a great subject for an essay.”
    I looked around the clearing. Sometimes I thought my dad was a genius. There was something so extreme and obsessive about his strange, bristling grid and the weird green thicket of our house in the center of it. But I was also afraid that liking these things might mean I was like my dad—that I would end up like him, alone and drunk and devoting all my time to building a monument that communicated nothing besides its maker’s lack of connection to the normal world.
    “Listen to me,” Mrs. Miller said now, trying to maneuver her car out of its trap. “It’s like they say on American Idol . It’s all about song choice. Or, in your case, subject choice.”
    “You watch American Idol ?”
    Mrs. Miller did something with the gear shift, and the car made a sound like a cow being stuck with an electric prod. I’m not sure if it had something to do with driving, or if she was just using the car to communicate her impatience.
    “Most kids your age either write earnest essays about how they’re trying to understand ‘this crazy world’ ”—she said this like, Al-Qaeda Al-Schmaeda, what’s the big deal—“or else about how they want to ‘fulfill themselves.’ No offense, but no one really cares what a teenager thinks about Islamic extremism. I mean, we want you to devote a due measure of consideration to these kinds of blah blah blah [yes, she actually said the blah blah blahs] but we don’t exactly want you writing policy papers for the State Department. A solid, concrete essay about a personal experience will stick in the judges’ minds far better than some earnest tract that begins ‘The problem of terrorism is a complex one.’ Getting out of your clearing is complex, tell me something I don’t know.”
    “Um, Lawnboy.”
    “Do what?”
    “Lawnboy. Like the lawnmowers. That’s what I wanted my nickname to be. After I started dying my hair.”
    Mrs. Miller’s eyebrows knitted in confusion. “Lawnboy.”
    “You said to tell you something you didn’t know. I figured you probly didn’t know that.”
    Mrs. Miller opened her mouth. Closed it. Didn’t say anything until we were safely on the highway. Then:
    “Is that a dictionary?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t exactly have a computer anymore.”
    Mrs. Miller turned and looked at me for so long that the car began to edge off the asphalt. She sighed, and jerked the wheel to the left.
    “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”

Now I gotta cut loose …
    So about seven pages ago, when I was talking about how I had no one to invite me to pool parties and ultimate frisbee, I think I might’ve given the impression that I’m an outcast or a geek or something (too geeky for ultimate frisbee even, which is like super geek). 1 Anyway, I hope you don’t think I’m one of those troubled teens with a subscription to Guns & Ammo who walks around in a black trenchcoat with death metal blasting out of his headphones, just