Itch

by Polly Farquhar

  Homer showed up then. “What are you talking about?”

  Daniel told him. He still whispered, but he was grinning the whole time. Homer laughed so loud he snorted.

  “Shhh!” Daniel spit as he hissed at him.

  “No way,” Homer said. “That’s the best story I’ve ever heard. Swimming in the soup.”

  “It wasn’t the actual soup,” Daniel said, “it was the water that was going to be turned into soup.”

  Homer was still laughing. “Whatever. That’s pretty funny. It’s awesome.”

  Daniel said, “I’d relax about it, if I were you, Homer.”

  He said, “My name’s not Homer.”

  Homer ate lunch with us almost all the time, and he was Homer now for sure, for good, forever.

  “Fact of life,” Daniel said, shrugging.

  “The soup story makes no sense,” I told them. “How did he even get into the soup?”

  “I said it was the water!”

  If it had happened, there would have been a recall. My mom would have taken every can out of the house and back to the grocery store, and she would have called the company up and complained and they would have sent her a boatload of coupons.

  “It could never happen. Wouldn’t someone see you? Aren’t there security cameras? Wouldn’t you die in an industrial accident?”

  “Nope. Because the guy—well, you know, same color as tomato soup,” Homer said. Daniel said he was going to throw up and Homer laughed some more.

  Tyler showed up and punched Daniel’s arm. “It’s not true,” he said. He made a face at Homer. “It’s not.”

  “Sure it’s true,” Daniel said.

  “It’s not.”

  Abby was with him. “It’s just some rumor,” she said. “No food place would ever let that happen.”

  “Yeah,” Tyler said, “it’s an urban legend. Guy swims in soup.”

  “It’s not an urban legend,” Homer said to Tyler and Abby, crossing his arms in a way that signaled he thought he was going to make some kind of really excellent point.

  “You calling me a liar?”

  Homer said, “Au contraire. You’re not a liar. You’re just wrong. This place is country. Urban means city. We don’t have any such thing as urban legends.”

  The group broke up, except for me and Homer. He looked at me. “That’s an awesome story.”

  “It’s not that awesome,” I said. I knew why he liked it. It was obvious why he liked it.

  “I’m going to call him something. Nate. Mr. Soup, maybe.”

  “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Why not? You’re Itch. I’m Homer. I don’t know why he can’t be Mr. Soup.”

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  The game of Horse had started up again. Tyler, Daniel, Nate, Sydney, and Abby were playing. Abby missed and said she thought the game shouldn’t be Horse. It should be a longer word. “Hippopotamus,” she said.

  “It’s funny,” Homer continued. “The guys will think it’s funny.” When I shook my head, Homer said, “You’re just against it because he’s your friend.”

  “That’s not it.”

  “But he is your friend. And he calls you Itch.”

  “That’s not why you can’t call him Mr. Soup. I’m just telling you, I’m just letting you know, it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Well, it should.” Homer kicked at the crumbly playground blacktop.

  I shrugged.

  “My mom says I’m a stickler,” Homer said. “You know, for the rules. Protocol. How things are done. So I don’t get why you have a different name and I have a different name, and nobody’s calling Daniel Chrome Dome and no one calls Nate Mr. Soup.”

  “Because it doesn’t work that way.”

  Homer watched me for a while. Then he said, “I thought you’d be on my side. I thought you’d be on my team.”

  As soon as he said the word team, my brain started firing with all the ways I didn’t like it and how he was wrong, how no way after spending three years learning to speak Buckeye and, you’d think finally, this year, no longer being the new kid, was I going to let Homer divvy up the class and put me on his side.

  “I mean,” Homer went on, “since we’re the allergy kids—”

  “I’m not allergic to anything. It’s not an allergy.” It bugged me that he didn’t know the difference. Mr. Stickler.

  “—and since we’ve got the nicknames.”

  “They’re not for teams,” I said. “We’re not on the same team. There’s no team.”

  “I’m just trying to fit in,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, that’s not how you do it.”

  Homer was quiet for a minute, and I desperately hoped he wasn’t going to ask me how he was supposed to fit in, because I did not know the answer. Sometimes I think it’s just dumb luck, or magic, or just not having a body that betrays you, which is all the same thing.

  “There are so teams,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Itch. There are teams. Of course there are teams. I mean, why else would you put up with being called Itch? Because if you complain, you’re afraid you’ll get kicked off.”

  I stared at him. “You’re Homeschool Homer. How much do you really know about school?”

  “School’s weird, that’s what I know.” He was worked up. He stood squared up with me and waved his arms. “You don’t want to be on my team because you’re scared you won’t be on their team. If we all had nicknames, though, it’d be different.”

  “Don’t mess with it,” I told him, backing away from his flailing arms. “It’s not about nicknames.” I rode my bike with Nate. We played ball at the storage units. I got dizzy on the tire swing with the other guys. We all ate lunch together.

  He huffed at me. “There’s power in numbers.”

  I’d given up saying anything. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Think about it,” he said. Then he ran over to the basketball hoop and announced that Horse should be called Giganotosaurus because it was two letters longer than Hippopotamus.

  It stayed Horse.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the classroom after recess it took us a while to get quiet. Rustling coats and scraping chairs and kids still catching their breaths. Mrs. Anderson returned our math homework and, after a while, we settled down, and the only sound was the click of her shoes across the tile floor and the sound of papers rustling like dry leaves.

  She returned our work facedown. Like it’s a surprise. Like you can’t read the grade and her comments, backward, through the paper.

  I didn’t even need to see the backward number to know it was lousy. I knew when I turned it in. There was an extra note too, written in cursive.

  Sydney had been right to warn me.

  The note said See me. Mrs. Anderson hit the first side of my homework hard—lots of red lines and corrections—but close to the bottom she drew a line and a note. “Too many errors to correct. Please come and see me.”

  I saw Nate’s paper. His pencil lines were heavy and dark, like if he was going to get the assignment done he was going to take down the paper and pencil while he was at it. Eighty percent. Eighty. Nate.

  “Yes!” he shouted, holding up his paper for the whole class to look at.

  “That’s a B-minus,” Homer said, and you could tell he was never going to be impressed with a B-minus. I didn’t used to be either.

  “Yes! It’s a B-minus! And,” Nate said, “this is how I did it.” He conked his head down onto the math book on his desk. He closed his eyes. He fake snored.

  Homer said, “I don’t get it.”

  Nate fake snored louder.

  “I sleep with my books under my pillow.”

  Homer snorted, and Nate said, “It’s called osmosis. Don’t knock it.�
��

  Homer told him it didn’t work that way.

  We all quieted down when Mrs. Anderson returned to the front of the room. “If you’re lost today, you’ll be lost tomorrow.” She stood at the blackboard and reminded us to raise our hands and ask when we had questions. Then she looked around the room and glanced right over me and I knew she really meant, Mr. Fitch, you’re lost.

  “So here’s the plan,” she announced. “I’m putting you in study groups this week. You will help each other learn. If you understand what you’re doing, you’ll learn even more by explaining it. If you don’t understand what you’re doing, well, maybe it’s me. Maybe you’ll understand it better if someone else explains it to you.”

  Daniel mumbled something about calculators. Mrs. Anderson read through a list. She put us in groups of three. She separated Nate and Daniel, which is what every teacher does, always. Nate got to work with Sydney, who is my secret math weapon. Daniel was in a group with Abby. Abby rolled her eyes. Tyler got a couple of girls.

  Then Mrs. Anderson came to my group. “Mr. Fitch, Mr. Bishop, and Mr. Mott.” That’s me, Homer, and Lucas.

  Homer was all about teams again. He wanted us to have a name. We changed seats and pushed desks together, and he was all, “Let’s call ourselves the Common Denominators,” and Lucas said he didn’t think we had to come up with a name.

  That didn’t stop Homer. “Team Fraction?”

  Lucas said, “The Fractured Fractions?”

  “That doesn’t sound very teamlike.”

  Lucas said, “It wasn’t supposed to. It was a joke.”

  “Because we’re not a team,” I said. “We don’t need a name.”

  Mrs. Anderson asked us if we were working hard or hardly working. We opened our books and I realized that both Homer (no surprise there) and Lucas knew what they were doing, and this group was all for me.

  PS. In the math book, there was a problem about a pizza concession stand and leftovers and it had pictures of different kinds of pizzas. Round pizzas.

  Lucas’s notebook was a mess of numbers, fractions, and pictures, all smudged gray, matching the gray that always smeared the pinky side of his writing hand. He had drawings of helicopters and smoke and snakes and squiggles, and he gave some of his numbers faces. Eights had googly eyes. Sevens got hats. Some of the nines had arms and they pointed at the other numbers. If a number was double digit, he drew them arm-wrestling. Homer’s eyes bugged at all the drawings. “Mrs. Anderson accepts that?”

  “Yup.”

  Mrs. Anderson might not have looked me in the eye when she spoke about getting help, but my group was the first one she sat down with to go through our homework. It wasn’t that I didn’t get it. I did. But it was temporary. It was like memorizing something for a test—spelling words, or labeling the US states on a map—and at the time, in class, it didn’t seem so bad. I’d get them right. I’d peek at my notes or the map once or twice. I thought I knew it because I’d looked. But I didn’t know anything. I let it slide right out of my brain. And so when I’d get home I’d forget all the stuff Lucas and Homer had helped me with.

  Once Mrs. Anderson went to work with the next group, Homer said, “Hey, Itch, I’ll help you after school.”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “Maybe I could go to your house?”

  “Sydney and I usually study together. And I’ve got a job too. I’m busy.”

  “Sydney can be there too. We could be a supergroup,” he said. Then he sighed. “I’m not talking about being your friend. It’s your math. Don’t you want help with your math? I mean, I get it. You don’t like me. But your math. You can get better.”

  “It’s just math,” I said. “My parents are both engineers. I can handle fractions.”

  “Well, I’d think you’d get it already then. I mean, you can’t be an engineer if you get stuck on sixth-grade math.”

  As if I’d ask Homer for help. It would be like some cartoon. Itch and Homer. No way. “You can if you’re in the sixth grade.”

  CHAPTER 10

  ONCE IN A while we ate lunch outside at the picnic tables near the parking lot. We watched the high school seniors, who could leave school for lunch, come and go. Some drove off, but it was a long way to the nearest fast-food place. This is the country, remember. Most of the seniors walked to the gas station, which sold the bad pizza and slushies and hot dogs, and hung out in the parking lot.

  I can tell if something is cold just by looking at it. I don’t have to touch it. I can just look at it, and then I itch. It’s that easy. So I can tell you, from twenty feet away, I knew those shaded picnic tables were going to be cold. I knew I was going to sit down on the cold bench and between the cold and the pressure of me just sitting—only sitting—the itch would crawl out of me and run down my legs, up my back, anywhere it could get to—which would be everywhere—and I’d have to spend all of lunch either wanting to scratch or scratching.

  The wind didn’t help. It was like an extra hand on my skin.

  When I didn’t sit down, one of the lunch ladies came over and told me to park it. Because we still had lunch ladies.

  Sydney asked, “What are you eating, Isaac?”

  “An air sandwich,” I said. “Want the recipe?”

  Taking apart my two slices of bread, I gave each one a little wave. I looked at Nate, because I knew he would laugh. “Freshening it up.”

  He thought it was pretty funny. I was glad. It was good to make him laugh after I’d annoyed him about not getting him a bird. I was relieved. I might have laughed too, but all I could think about was not itching. So far I was following my rules. No itching. No witnesses. But every time I stopped myself from itching the wind kicked up and did it for me.

  Homer said, “That’s rude.”

  “What’s rude?”

  “Flapping your bread.”

  “You mean like table manners?”

  “No, not like table manners. You’re rude because you’re flaunting it.”

  My face got hot and the back of my neck felt even itchier and I wanted to scratch at it but didn’t dare while Homer was after me about table manners. “I don’t get it.”

  “You’re waving your empty sandwich around.”

  Sydney said, “It’s two slices of bread. It’s not a sandwich.”

  Homer said, “You’re making a big deal out of not eating peanut butter, and everybody knows that peanut butter is your favorite food.”

  “It’s not,” I told him. “I’m not. And I’m not breaking the rules. I’m not eating peanut butter. I’m doing a good thing here.”

  “Like it’s so hard to find something to eat,” Homer said. “Everybody else has managed it.”

  Sydney was busy polishing an apple with her shirt and so she wasn’t looking at me. I thought about the day of the tornado and my lucky-not-lucky peanut shell. I’d showed it to Sydney. I told her it was my good-luck charm. I told her it worked for her too, but she laughed and said it was her own power and my house that got her to safety.

  “I’ve got muscles,” she said. “I didn’t need luck from a peanut shell.”

  What if Homer was right? Was I being a jerk, flapping my bread around? Before, he was all about helping me out with math and now he was sneering at me and my air sandwich. Maybe he’d decided to stick with his idea of teams, after all, and I wasn’t on his.

  Anyway, the guys were laughing and I decided I wasn’t going to worry about Homer.

  * * *

  —

  What started at lunch couldn’t be stopped. Even the not-coolness of the classroom was no relief because just warming up became its own kind of itching. All I wanted was to itch. Itch until I burned and it felt better and worse at the same time and then itch some more.

  The next thing I knew, I heard Daniel say, “There he goes again,” and Mrs. Anderson volunteered Homer to es
cort me to the nurse’s office.

  Was Mrs. Anderson kidding me? Was she trying to make this worse? “No,” I said, “no, thank you. I know the way.”

  That made the class laugh. I rubbed my hand across my face. My cheeks burned and prickled.

  “Mr. Bishop. Please escort Mr. Fitch to the nurse’s office.” Everybody laughed some more. Everybody except Homer. And Sydney. But then, thanks to that swipe across my face, my eyelids were puffing up and maybe I wasn’t seeing things clearly. “I’ll call the nurse to let her know you’re on your way.” Mrs. Anderson handed me my backpack and sweatshirt.

  Walking was going to be murder.

  And no way was I going to put on my backpack.

  I wasn’t going to let that beast out. Not any farther.

  Homer closed the classroom door so quietly behind us you would have thought the whole place was filled with sleeping babies, not kids talking about dogs with no fur and bloated fish on the beach.

  “So you’ve got it now. The itch.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it going to be bad?”

  I tried to be like Mr. Epple. I didn’t want to give him any words.

  “Well?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want it to be bad?” Because he sounded like watching me itch would be really interesting.

  “Of course not.”

  “Because it’s not going to be bad. It’s going to be nothing.” I stopped walking. I had to stop.

  “Look at your hands,” Homer said. “They are amazing. They look like raw hamburger meat.”

  “It’s not amazing. It’s the total opposite of amazing.” I didn’t need to look at my hands to know they were splotchy and red.

  Homer stood with me, his back against the smooth blue tile wall near the first-grade classrooms. The hallways always made me think of a swimming pool.

  Homer handed me some papers from the teacher. “It looks like she’s already assembled your homework.”