Itch

by Polly Farquhar

  “True.”

  “She wants to video chat soon.”

  “It’s so slow. Email works for me.”

  Dad scratched his unshaven chin. Like a baseball player in the play-offs, he wasn’t going to shave until the job was over and Mom came back. Watching him scratch made me itchy, and Dad was doing it all the time now, scratching his chin. “She wants to see you. Moms and dads are funny like that.”

  We walked over to the barbecue. Like everybody else in Ohio, Sydney’s family is serious about their Buckeyes. They have an Ohio State flag and also a stone goose at the front door that they dress up in Buckeye gear. By their front steps they have a flat garden stepping-stone with the Ohio State logo on it, and I’ve never seen one drop of bird poop on it because someone actually keeps the thing clean.

  Everybody speaks Buckeye like it’s its own language, and I’m just not a natural. I’m getting the hang of it. I’m better than I used to be. And now there was a Homer. The new kid. He might bleed scarlet and gray, but I’d spent the summer hanging out with Nate and Daniel and Tyler and Sydney. Everybody but Sydney called me Itch, but it was just a name. Over the summer, it didn’t mean anything.

  I usually watch the games with Sydney at her house. It’s always a party. I usually start out watching the game by myself in my living room, and then Sydney shows up, climbing through the bushes at the front of house and sticking her face right up against the window next to the television and knocking. At her house, there are snacks and cheering people who rise up out of their seats for the big hits. We eat brats. Brats—bratwurst—are sausage-y hot dogs but bigger, and people boil them in beer and then grill them. They’re the best thing about Ohio. Probably a lot of people outside Ohio eat brats but I never had any until we moved here and we started hanging out at Sydney’s. We ate brats on football Saturdays and when we worked together on our math homework.

  When I study at Sydney’s house, the dining room table is crowded with her and her two older brothers, me, and everybody’s books and notebooks, and then her dad always comes in and drops off a big platter of brats and a pile of paper plates. Everybody talks with their mouth full. The table is too crowded for her parents, so no one tells us to finish chewing before we start talking. My parents would never let me study that way, with distractions. They’d never let me eat that way either.

  Last year, in the fifth grade, we started multiplying fractions and dividing fractions in simple cases. How many one-third-cup servings are in two cups of raisins? How much rice do nine people get if they divide up a fifty-pound bag equally?

  “The answer,” I said to Sydney as we tried to keep the ketchup and mustard off our homework, “is too much. It’s too many raisins for everybody. It’s too much rice.”

  Dylan said, “Maybe they’re making rice pudding.”

  “You can make pudding out of rice?”

  “Sure,” Sydney said.

  “Is it good?” I couldn’t imagine that it would be good.

  “It’s okay,” she said at the same time her oldest brother, Evan, said, “No.” He sat at the head of the table. He was in the tenth grade then. He was as big as a grown-up. He was the backup quarterback on the high school football team.

  Sydney said, “It’s not my favorite. Rice pudding. But it’s dessert.”

  “Anyway,” Dylan said, “it doesn’t matter. Only the numbers matter in a math problem.”

  “You always do this,” Sydney said to me. “You try to argue about the problem instead of just getting it done.”

  “I do not.”

  “Just follow the steps.”

  “Aren’t your parents engineering geniuses?” That was Dylan.

  “What? They just have jobs. Those are just their jobs.”

  “Math jobs. How were you not born not doing fractions and long division in your head?”

  I shrugged. Sydney told her brother to butt out. Her mom came in and switched the empty brat platter with a plate of homemade sunflower seed butter buckeye candies. That’s another thing that’s big here in Ohio. Buckeye candies. Usually they’re balls of peanut butter dipped in chocolate. But since Sydney is allergic to peanut butter, her mom makes them with SunButter. Those are good too. The real buckeye, which is a nut, is inedible unless you boil it for hours or something, and even then no one wants to eat it. Except maybe Nate.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Warren,” I said. And then because it was true, I said, “Brats and buckeyes are pretty much my favorite thing about Ohio.”

  She said I was welcome and then I said, “Because I was really worried that first weekend here when we ordered the pizza.”

  Dylan wanted to know what was wrong with the pizza.

  Sydney flung herself back in her chair and moaned, “Not this again!”

  “It’s rectangular. That’s what’s wrong with the pizza.”

  Dylan stared at me. But it was true. He couldn’t argue with me. The pizza here is rectangular. It’s one of the worst things about Ohio. When people get together to cheer on the Buckeyes, they eat rectangular pizza. It gets me every time. Rectangular pizza. And then it’s cut into even smaller rectangles or squares. Not triangles. It’s like making a square apple pie or something. And everybody knows the crust is the best part. When pizza is cut into triangles, every piece has crust. If you get pizza cut into squares you’re going to run out of the good stuff fast. It doesn’t help that this town is so small the only place to eat out just happens to be the gas station that also makes its own sheets of pizza. It’s not very good.

  Dad and I were right about the brats. We could smell them cooking all through the neighborhood. “Yes!” Dad and I high-fived. I loved a party at Sydney’s. I was going to get to eat brats and chips, and the only vegetable was going to be the ketchup.

  We’d never had a back-to-school barbecue before, and I’m pretty sure the only reason we were having one this year, to start the sixth grade, was because Sydney’s mom was worried about me and my dad because my mom was in China. I knew it for sure when it turned out Dad and I were the only guests. Even Sydney’s brothers weren’t there because they both had football practice. This year, Evan was the starting quarterback.

  “You two can’t live on food from the Chinese place,” Sydney’s mom said to us as we went to the back deck.

  I told Mrs. Warren, “We don’t get Chinese much,” and I was pretty sure she knew that the only thing stopping us from eating it every night was that the closest Chinese restaurant is nearly an hour away, in the same town with the hospital. First it’s long country roads with tractors, threshers, and harvesters rattling alongside you in the fields, ghosting up seeds and dirt and fibers. Then, before the town, come the factories and plants. The foundry that makes car engines. It’s a huge building surrounded by parking lots and gates and railroad tracks, and it smells. There’s the plant where both my parents work. Then the place that makes soup. I’d heard some people say that Nate’s dad used to work there until he was fired for swimming in a tank of soup water. After the factories comes the town’s strip—car dealers and banks and gas stations and a grocery store and a couple of fast-food places and the Chinese place, which is between the dollar store and a fish aquarium place.

  Sydney told me she never eats Chinese food. She’s worried about the peanuts and the oils and the sesame seeds in the teriyaki and all the other dishes she can’t see them in. Once I asked her if she couldn’t just pick them off, the sesame seeds, and she told me no way.

  Mr. Warren turned his grilling fork on me. It was like a small pitchfork. “Kid! What are you wearing? Are you a Boilermaker or something?”

  “What?” I didn’t know what Mr. Warren was talking about.

  “It’s your shirt,” Sydney told me. “It’s yellow. And your ball cap is black.”

  That didn’t really clear things up for me.

  “A boilermaker is an ironworker,” Dad said.

 
Sydney, sprawled out on a cushy patio chair, sat up fast and looked at me as if it were an emergency. “My dad means you like Purdue. Purdue University. Their colors are yellow and black.”

  “Don’t worry, son,” Sydney’s dad said, his barbecue fork still aimed at me, “we’ll make a Buckeye out of you yet.” Turning to my dad, he asked, “So who do you like for the starting quarterback?”

  My dad laughed a little. “I have enough trouble remembering not to mow the lawn on a Saturday afternoon, let alone keep track of all the quarterbacks.”

  Sydney’s dad started to laugh. Really laugh, as though what my dad said was really, really funny. He didn’t know my dad was being totally straight with him. And my dad didn’t know that all the Buckeye sports news was about the three quarterbacks sitting on the football coach’s bench.

  So you can see that what Nate had said about me being allergic to Buckeye football wasn’t really that far off.

  Instead of watching the game, my parents go grocery shopping. Unless my dad’s been called in to work, which happens sometimes on Saturdays when the computers and machines need to be reset. Then Mom is disappointed because I never want to go with her. She says it’s the best time to go because the stores are empty. Do you know where I watched last year’s big OSU–That Team Up North game? At the empty food court in the mall, sixty miles away.

  Even though it was game day and we were all at the mall, we were out of place. Everybody else there was dressed in their full Buckeye gear, as if it were dangerous to go out without it. Jerseys. Sweatshirts. Ball caps. Not us. We were like aliens who had dropped down from another state or another planet.

  That was last November. Before everybody started calling me Itch, before the tornado ate our cafeteria, and before my mom got on an airplane for China.

  Now, at the barbecue, I loaded my brat up with ketchup and mustard, and Mrs. Warren asked me how I liked the job at the pheasant farm.

  “Dylan was sorry to give it up,” she said, “but football takes all his extra time now.”

  Dad said, “It’s Isaac’s as long as he keeps his grades up.”

  “Study session at the Warren house,” Sydney said.

  We bumped fists. Sydney made a soft explosion noise as our hands came away from each other. “Sixth-grade fractions, here we come.” Then she asked, “How long is your mom going to be gone again?”

  “A long time,” I told her. “Until November, right, Dad?”

  Dad said, “That’s the plan. But you know your mom. She might be done ahead of schedule. Fingers crossed.” He rubbed his chin.

  Sydney looked at me and whispered, “Your dad’s beard is going to be crazy. Do you think your mom will even recognize him when she comes home?”

  “Who knows?” I answered, my mouth full.

  “He’s starting to look a little scary.” She still whispered. “And it’s only been, what? A week? Do you think he’ll grow his hair long too? By the time the World Series rolls around, those guys look like Bigfoot.”

  We both started laughing and I nearly choked and I spit out some of my food.

  Sydney said, “I wouldn’t be able to stand it if my mom was away. Just me and my dad and brothers. I mean, as much as I like them, it would be all brats all the time.”

  “You should be so lucky. Mom doesn’t let us eat them at home. She says they’re unhealthy.”

  “Your mom thinks football is unhealthy.”

  “True.” I took a big bite of my brat. My eyes were still watering and I was still coughing from laughing before.

  Sydney asked, “Do you miss her?”

  I guzzled my drink and nodded and coughed some more until my nose burned from the root beer.

  CHAPTER 7

  WHEN WE GOT home from the barbecue at Sydney’s I said good night to Dad and went down the creaky stairs to the basement.

  Then I stuck my head back into the stairwell to call to Dad. “Hey, what’s this?”

  He asked, “What’s what?” but he knew.

  “You moved my Buckeye poster down here.” It was a birthday present from Sydney last year. The Ohio State University football team taking the field in their scarlet uniforms and their silver helmets with the marching band behind them, the gold tubas pointing up to the sun. Brutus, the mascot, ran in front, carrying the school flag.

  “The room looked a little bare,” he said.

  “How about we get a foosball table? And a pool table? Maybe a home theater? To watch the games?”

  Dad laughed.

  “Its edges are curling up. The poster’s.”

  He tossed me a roll of masking tape and told me I had a perfectly fine room upstairs. “It’s lonely up here.”

  “I’ll be back.”

  “Good,” he said. “When?”

  “Sometime.” I made loops of tape and fixed the poster, and Dad called down again to tell me to email Mom.

  Her email was a long list of questions. There were typos. She never makes typos. She’s a detail person. Once, she returned a loaf of bread to a bakery because it had too many air bubbles in it. Dad shouted, “It’s an act of God!” but Mom said, no, it was shoddy workmanship.

  I tried to picture her at work, in a factory, on the other side of the world, or in her hotel room, writing me an email, and I knew she was tired. Because she never makes mistakes. She fixes mistakes. And I kind of wanted to tell her not to write, not if she was so tired the mistakes made it look like someone else wrote the message.

  She wanted to know if I was warm enough, if I’d gotten any hives, about the weather, about school, what my friends were up to, what it was like without a cafeteria, if Dad was feeding me enough, what I ate for lunch since I could no longer bring a peanut butter sandwich, if I wore my bike helmet.

  China is an even twelve hours ahead, so it was easy to keep track of the time difference. It was seven at night here and so it was morning there. She called sometimes. The connection wasn’t very good. It cut in and out and we kept losing sentences.

  I wrote, Dad says you might be home ahead of schedule.

  She wrote back right away. He’s an optimist. Does your lucky peanut shell still work?

  Not for pheasants, I wrote.

  Her next answer was all typos. Dsn’t mean it’s stilll not lucky.. for you.

  She thinks like that. She thinks all the small stuff is big stuff. When the cafeteria roof was spread out in pieces for miles in the fields it only made the local weekly newspaper. We didn’t even make the television news station, an hour away. All those weather folks who talked through the Buckeye game didn’t care. Mom told me that something didn’t have to make the news to be important. If it was important to me then it was important.

  I’d found the peanut shell in our yard last spring doing yard work, raking up any soggy, leftover leaves we’d missed that fall. It was open and empty and cleaned by the weather. Some of it was missing. It felt papery.

  When I found it, I felt the itch and it was the first time I didn’t give in and scratch. I thought I could control it. Because I could, then, that day, and for a while after. Then. I believed that. I thought it might be magic. I didn’t know it was just a coincidence. I didn’t know keeping a good-luck charm might just be a habit.

  I kept it with me since then, the shell. But it was kind of hard to keep. I had to keep it a secret. It was embarrassing. I didn’t need anyone at school finding out about it. And it was crumbly. It ended up snapped nearly in half. Just a few fibers held it together. I usually stuck it into my pocket. I didn’t always remember to take it out again before I put my clothes in the laundry, though Mom or Dad always found it and gave it back to me. Right before she left for China, Mom gave me a special box for it, a small black jewelry-store box.

  I reread Mom’s sloppy note and typed, Eat your breakfast Mom. It’s the most important meal of the day.

  I wondered what her ho
tel was like. Was it like ones we stayed in on our trips back to New York to visit my grandparents? Did it have a pool she wouldn’t use and plates of cookies at the front desk and a breakfast bar with a waffle maker?

  Mom’s answer flashed at me. Eat your breakfast, Mom. Comma!

  I sent her a smiley face.

  Mom: Aw, that warms my heart. Looks just like you (ha ha ha). How’s school?

  Me: It’s only the first week. Nothing to report. The teacher likes to call us by our last names.

  I didn’t tell her that everybody but Sydney was still calling me Itch, same as last year, or that how I itched was a big topic of conversation, or that explaining everything about me to the new kid was so entertaining for all the guys, it erased most of the fun we’d had over the summer.

  Then she went back to luck and sent this: Wanted to tell you about a study I read that said people who believe in luck think they have better luck. What do you think?

  Me: Sounds unscientific.

  Mom: No harm in trying it.

  CHAPTER 8

  IF I’M FAST getting out of school, I can get my bike unlocked and get on the road before the buses pull out. It’s a race. If I lose, the assistant principal and Mr. Mullins hold the leftover kids back until the yellow buses chug out of the parking lot. Today I lost, but only because I was talking with Sydney about Halloween costumes and then we walked out toward her bus together.

  “The best homemade costume I ever saw was a girl as a gumball machine,” I said. “She had on tights and stuff and had all these different colored balloons all over her.”

  “Nah. I want to be original, Isaac. I think I should do scary this year.”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said. “It was back in New York. It’s not a repeat for here.”

  “I’ll think about it. I don’t know why I’m thinking about it. I just don’t want to be a cookie again. My mom is really into me being a cookie. Like, as an encore.”

  “You were a good cookie.” She was chocolate chip. She wore two circles of yellow poster board—one on the front and one on the back—with big brown circles on them.