Grabbing the papers, I told Homer, “I’m not going home.”
“Get better, not bitter.”
“I’ve heard.” When I shoved the papers into my bag, the box with my peanut shell fell out.
It was a hard black cardboard cube. Tiny gold dots lined the edges. The top of the box had a small strap and a snap to close it. The lid opened up in the middle like two doors, and inside it was white and cushiony.
“What’s that?”
“A box,” I said. I got that hot taste in my mouth, the one right before you throw up. It had nothing to do with itching. “Hey! Don’t touch it!” I swatted his hand away.
“It looks like a little coffin.”
It was all over then. The beast was out. Even standing there with Homer by the first-grade classrooms, I was ready to itch myself inside out and upside down.
“Oh, wow. Itch. You should see your face.”
Until that moment, I thought I could fight the itch. I thought it was possible. That’s what my lucky peanut shell habit gave me. But then in the hallway I wondered. What if as something changed on the outside of my body, something changed deep inside me too? What if fighting the itch was pointless because I really was the itch? What if it really was goodbye, Isaac Fitch, and hello, Itch?
When we got to the nurse’s office, Homer filled the nurse in with all the details, right down to my hamburger hands. He sounded like a TV doctor and made hamburger hands sound like a real thing.
The school nurse had a lot of dark hair she wore in a bun on the top of her head. It was the size of a cake. She always wore white. She looked like she’d been there since the school was built, which was before my parents were born. It’s one of those buildings that was supposed to look new forever but then was just ugly.
“Hey, buddy,” she said, like we were old friends. Maybe we were. Maybe it was pretty memorable, in a day full of stomachaches and throw-up, when I came in. “I’m going to give you one of your antihistamines, okay?” She brought me a small paper cup of water that turned soggy while I held it and dug into her locked box of medicines until she found mine—sealed up in a plastic bag with paperwork stapled to it.
As I chewed the purple pill, Homer said, “That’s it? Your whole body transforms and all you need is an over-the-counter allergy pill from the drugstore?” He didn’t close his mouth when he was done talking. That’s how surprised he was. Or disappointed.
The nurse said, “I’ll call your mom.”
I told the nurse my mom was in China.
Homer wished me good luck before he left, and I lay on the crinkly paper cover of the bed in the nurse’s office. I could see through the windows that looked out to the front of the school. I held perfectly still, arms out, legs apart. The itch didn’t stop. The medicine would take about an hour to work. I stared up at the ceiling. My dad always told me that when he had nothing to do but stare at the ceiling he counted the holes or dots or whatever in it. Or he found patterns. Or he counted the dots on each square and then counted each square and figured out how many dots were on the whole ceiling.
He’s the kind of person who could do that in about thirty seconds.
I thought about my latest emails with Mom. She wrote me that she always liked school cheeseburgers. She wrote me a story about someone she knew who ate a hard-boiled egg every day. They boiled one egg a day and it had to be perfect. If it wasn’t perfect the person wouldn’t eat it. I typed, Was it you? She wrote, Not me. Boiling only a single egg is inefficient. But I could only not itch and think about eggs and perfection and China and ceilings for so long.
I started thinking about Sydney. I started thinking about Sydney and lunch. How she didn’t say anything when Homer said I was rude. She usually stood up for herself. But this time she must have known I was fighting the itch. She knew I was going to balloon into the beast. She was being nice. She wasn’t going to get into a big argument with me and Homer over my air sandwich while I was trying not to itch. But maybe she agreed with Homer? I didn’t want her to be nice. If I hurt her, I wanted to know.
After a while I pointed to the windows and told the nurse, “My dad’s coming in. Can I go?” I wanted to say, I’m going, I’m gone, goodbye.
“Sure,” she said, the hair cake bobbing. She probably thought I was going to meet my dad in the office while he signed me out. “Take care of yourself, okay, buddy?”
The school’s heavy front doors clunked closed behind me but I kept my cool. I knew how bad I looked. No one was going to stop me. I grabbed my bike and rode out to the farm.
It was harder than I thought it would be. The medicine was starting to make me sleepy. My hands were so swollen I couldn’t get them all the way around the handlebars. My helmet made my head itch so I took it off.
Scraping my teeth against my tongue, I decided it felt normal. Not swollen. I took a big gulp of air, just to check. Stretched out my lungs. Everything still worked, on the inside. I wasn’t going to die out here on a country road, at least not from idiopathic angioedema.
At the farm, Mr. Epple’s truck was gone. A thin daytime moon shone in the clear blue sky. There wasn’t a soul around. It felt good. I didn’t have to have a name. The wind rustled the high, yellowing grass. The birds called and their wings drum-drum-drummed. They scuttled all around me when I went in to feed them. I missed Brutus.
It wasn’t long before my dad found me. He didn’t even shut the car door when he got out, just charged into the pen, and the pheasants all around me chucked and called and ran to hide in the scrub.
“Isaac! Isaac!”
He’d never hit me before. He was close now, but once he got a good look at me he stopped moving. His clenched-up mad hand stuck out unmoving in front of him. That’s how I knew for sure how ugly and red and swollen I was.
“Isaac.” He said it quietly. Then he marched up, grabbed my ear, and started to drag me off.
“Wait! Wait! I’ve got to shut it up right and lock it.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” He let go of me. He looked different with his beard. Madder. More serious. Bigger. Maybe he really would hit me.
After I secured the pens, he shoved me in the back seat of the car, cop-style, and we drove off. I didn’t tell him we’d left my bike behind.
We were quiet as we drove past the ditch I had crashed in, the school, the buses starting to line up, Nate’s grandmother’s storage units, the long straight street where we lived and where Ohio State flags snapped in the wind. My hands still looked like raw hamburger.
CHAPTER 11
I FELL ASLEEP AFTER we got home. Dad woke me up before dinner and set his laptop on my bed and said Mom wanted to talk to me. It was six a.m., China time.
Mom was frozen in a slow-connection smile and that’s why I didn’t like to see her, stuck, her face blurring out. Her second night of the trip we’d tried this and I hated it.
Her picture jerked to life again and filled in with detail, but when she said, “Your father and I just had an interesting discussion,” she sounded as though her voice was coming through pipes under the ocean.
“Okay,” I said. No surprise there.
“Dad talked to your doctor. You’re getting some new medicine. You can take the pills every day to keep things under control.”
“Are they going to put me to sleep?”
“What? I didn’t hear you.”
I leaned over to the laptop’s mic and said it again. Mom said they weren’t supposed to make me drowsy. “You take one pill every day and then one if you feel itchy. You don’t have to wait for the hives and everything.”
“Am I grounded?”
She sounded human and not so far away when she answered. “Of course you’re grounded. Work and school. And you’re lucky to keep work, young man.”
She didn’t say anything about the terms for my job at the farm, which meant her conversation with Dad wasn’t as
interesting as it could have been. It meant Dad didn’t tell her about my math homework. Because Dad knew. He’d found it crumpled up on the basement stairs right after we’d gotten home from the farm. First he was upset about finding something on the stairs. “You’ll trip and crack your head open. You know better.” Then, “Isaac, you have to try.” He’d opened the crumpled ball. “If you can’t start doing better, then that’s it. No more pheasant farm. Do we understand each other?” The real answer was no, we did not understand each other, but I told him yes.
Mom asked, “How’s school going? How’s math?”
I asked, “How am I supposed to do well in math if I can’t go over to Sydney’s to study?”
“Maybe your dad will let her come over. You can also go see your teacher for help. And ask Dad! He’s right there. And I promise you, he can do any math problem you can throw at him.”
“Ha. He can do the math but he’s no good at waiting for me to figure out how to do it.” But I liked the thought of literally throwing math problems at him, like they were ninja stars.
She froze again, her eyes half closed, her mouth open, like a bad photograph you’d delete right away. “I hate this,” I said. “This doesn’t work.”
I thought I’d lost the connection, but Mom was still there. “Love you!”
* * *
—
While Mom is gone, Dad and I play Spit. We don’t do math together. I don’t ask him. He doesn’t ask me.
I used to play it with Sydney until her life got busy.
Spit is a two-person card game. It’s the kind of game that can get rough. So me and Dad, we’re always slapping hands and waving arms and sometimes we knock heads. It’s the kind of card game that counts as exercise.
When I first taught it to Sydney on my front porch, I didn’t tell her part of the objective was speed. It didn’t matter. She rose up on her knees and started slamming down cards, and when she beat me she hollered and waved her arms and the tail of her braid whipped across my eyes and I couldn’t open them for ten minutes.
“Sorry! Sorry!” She was laughing, though, so it didn’t sound sincere.
I had my hand over my eyes. Tears ran down my cheeks.
“I’m really sorry, you know.” She put her hand on my shoulder and crouched in front of me. “Can you really not open them?”
I nodded.
“Well,” she said, starting to laugh again, “maybe you deserve it. You know, for tricking me.”
“Maybe,” I told her. “But maybe not. Man, that braid is lethal.”
“Yeah,” she said, “that’s what I’ve got it for.”
“Nate didn’t catch on nearly as fast.”
She snorted. “I think he’s been drinking the green river water.”
The late bus stopped down the street from my house, and usually these days Sydney waved and kept running.
Today she hollered “Isaac!” her hand up in a wave, her backpack banging behind her, her cleats clicking on the sidewalk. She wore tie-dyed-looking orange knee socks and her legs were splattered with mud. When my parents wouldn’t let me sign up for football, Sydney tried to get me to sign up for soccer instead. She said maybe my parents would let me be a kicker. She said plenty of football kickers got their start in soccer. I got the job on the pheasant farm instead.
She shouted as she ran closer. “Hey! Do you want to do our math together? Come over tomorrow.” She stopped running and took two walking strides, her hands at her hips, kicking through the yellow maple leaves I’d have to rake later. “You okay?”
Was Homer right about the things he’d said about my air sandwich? And had Sydney let me off the hook because she knew I was getting itchy? Can she tell when I’m going to turn into the beast? I didn’t ask her about any of that.
I asked, “Do you ever wish it would go away? Your allergies? Don’t you wish it would just stop?”
Just like that, everything about her changed. Standing on the sidewalk at the bottom of my front steps, she wilted. Her happy-to-see-me, on-the-run face melted into something sad. She looked tired from soccer. Seeing her like that, sad and still and tired, felt private and at the same time big and obvious. Maybe it was something I should have already seen. “Sure,” she said, “of course I do. Don’t you wish your itch would go away?”
“It’s not the same. It’s just a…a…thing. It’s not life-threatening. It doesn’t mean I have to raise my hand anytime somebody is checking to see if someone has an allergy and it doesn’t mean I can’t eat the birthday cupcakes or the pizza for the class party, and it doesn’t mean I can’t go out and get Chinese food.” Just thinking about it put a pinch in my chest. “It doesn’t mean what’s regular for everybody else is poison for me.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly, “it stinks.” She dropped down onto the first step and slumped into her backpack. “Sometimes it’s a long line of stink with some terror thrown in.”
“Do you think Homer was right about my air sandwich? Am I being a jerk?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. I mean, I know how hard it is to get the right food all the time, so I kind of just want to leave you alone about it, but living without peanut butter for a few months really isn’t that big of a deal.”
“Right.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a peanut-eat-peanut world. A peanutty, sesame seedy, cheesy world. And that’s just the stuff that I’m allergic to.” She sighed. “Have you ever noticed how much dairy is in the world? And peanuts on everything? And don’t even get me started on hummus.”
“Hummus?”
She waved a hand. “It’s got mashed sesame seeds in it, except it’s called tahini.”
“I didn’t know that.”
She shrugged.
I told her, “I like the food you eat. Your mom’s cookies? The best ever.”
“I mean, the world is practically cheese-covered. Totally disgusting, revolting cheese. Just orangey, melty cheese and moldy cheese and gloppy yogurt. And then people mix peanuts into it. Ugh.”
“Yeah. What’s up with cottage cheese?” I was trying to make her laugh. “And, and, headcheese?”
“Itch,” she said, “that’s not cheese, it’s brains.”
“Oh. Then for sure I’m definitely not eating it. So, um, it’s good to know Homer now, right? Because he gets it? What it’s really like to have food allergies?” It killed me to say it, but I figured it was the truth and I owed her at least that much. What if there really were teams in school, and Sydney ended up on Homer’s team instead of mine?
“Sure, it’s nice. Homer’s a good guy. But he’s still not my best friend or anything.” She pulled her orange socks up to her knees. She was ready to run the rest of the way home.
“About the math? You’ll have to come here. I’m grounded.”
“For how long?”
“For forever.”
“How about we study during lunch?”
“I can do that.”
She asked, “You’re grounded for Saturday’s game too?”
“Yeah, Saturday too.”
“Rough,” she said, and then she was running again and was past my house. She looked back over her shoulder. “Watch out, fractions!”
* * *
—
The next day, Sydney and I slipped away from our class as we were herded to the auditorium for lunch, turning down the hallway and past the hanging sheets of clear plastic that surrounded the wrecked cafeteria. Drills whirred and there was some banging, and in the distance a radio played. We went to a little dead-end hallway past the empty band room and sat on the floor near an exit.
We sat cross-legged, and Sydney ate a SunButter sandwich. I didn’t have an air sandwich. I ate a jelly sandwich, no peanut butter, no SunButter, and it wasn’t any good. It was soggy and too sweet. We balanced our open math books on our knees. “It’s just a lot
of little math problems inside one big one,” she said, before reading through a word problem about how humans sleep for a third of each day and then figuring out the number of days the average person sleeps in a year.
“It says a year is three hundred sixty-five and one-quarter days,” I said. “One-quarter. Now they’re just trying to make it extra hard.”
“Come on!” She knocked her shoulder into mine. Then she asked, “Are you going to tell me why you’re grounded?”
I shrugged. She wouldn’t like hearing that I’d skipped school. Not even Nate would do that. I only told her I went out to the farm without my dad’s permission. I left out everything else, including how yesterday after school I walked out to the farm because we’d left my bike there.
The floor was cold and dusty. As Sydney went through the next problem about yards of fabric, I rubbed the pink pencil eraser over the back of my hand. Erase, erase, erase, scrub, scrub, scrub, until my hand was under a snow of pink flecks.
Sydney grabbed my arm. “What are you doing?”
“Not paying attention?”
“Yeah, that’s obvious, but look at your hand. You’re itching.”
“Math makes me itch.”
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t you have medicine? Doesn’t your mom give you medicine or call the doctor’s office, or—” She stopped, brushing all the pink eraser pieces off my notebook. “Sorry. I forgot about China.”
I shrugged. “It’s okay. It’s not like I’m a baby. I can take my own medicine.”
“Yeah, but you don’t.”
“It’s not like it’s a guarantee. It’s not like it always works.”
She shook her head. Her face was tight. Frowning. “Okay, look, you know how me or my parents always carry my epinephrine? Two injectors, all the time, like you’re supposed to carry? Even when I’m not going to eat anything? Somebody always has them because what’s the point of having lifesaving medication if you don’t have it with you?”
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