Itch

by Polly Farquhar

  With the dark and the fur I couldn’t see who was in the costume, but I recognized the voice right away.

  “Homer? Jeez, man, you’ve got some unexpected skills.”

  That pulled him up short. “Itch?” He didn’t sound happy to see me and he didn’t think what I said about skills was a compliment. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I mean, you’re skinny and all but you’re good at knocking people down.”

  Homer said, “Looks can be deceiving.” Rocking back on his heels, he swung his candy bag as he pointed. “Is that your house?”

  “Yeah.” I waited for him to say something about how it wasn’t decorated, not with Halloween stuff and not with Buckeye stuff, but he didn’t say anything about it at all.

  Instead, he asked, “Who are you? What are you supposed to be? Where’s your costume?”

  “I’m not really out. I’m grounded.”

  “What did you do?”

  I hadn’t even told the whole story to Sydney, but something made me tell Homer. “Skipped school.”

  “Oh,” he said, “I don’t blame you.”

  “Seriously?” I’d been hoping to shock him. I’d get a kick out of that. He’d wave his arms around and scold me and his eyes would bug out and maybe I’d forget how pathetic I’d been, trying to talk to Sydney.

  He kind of shrugged. It was hard to tell, the way he was covered in a fur shirt. “Well, if you cut school and you’re out here now violating your parole, you can go up the block with me.”

  Trick-or-treating was scheduled for two hours. It had been going on for a while, and now the streets were emptying out. I looked for Nate and Tyler and Daniel but only saw the same group of little kids who’d run past me right before Homer ran into me.

  “Who are you out here with?” Was he out with the guys? Did they stay in town? They hadn’t even asked me. They didn’t know I was grounded, did they? They’d probably gone to the towns with the big neighborhoods and good sidewalks and miles and miles of candy.

  Homer pointed up the street at the group of kids. He pushed the piece of furry stuff back off his forehead. “I thought I’d see more people out here. From school. Now that I know more people. Classmates. You know. Friends.”

  “Sydney was just out.”

  Homer squinted at me and I shrugged. “I saw her. With Abby and Maria.” I left out all the rest.

  “What about the guys?”

  “They usually go somewhere else. To the town. To one of the rich neighborhoods.”

  “They didn’t invite you?”

  “Like I said, I’m grounded.” I didn’t point out that they didn’t invite him either, but I guess he already knew that.

  He scuffed his unfurry white sneaker across the sidewalk. “Do you think they’ll always see us as new kids?”

  I snorted. “You’ve got the bus and the party.” Homer bled scarlet and gray. Heck, he sneezed scarlet and gray. I didn’t have any awesome trick up my sleeve like the Buckeye Bus.

  “I can’t wait for the party. It will be different, after the party. You’re coming, right? You haven’t RSVP’ed yet.” Homer crossed his furry arms. “That means you didn’t répondez s’il vous plaît, to the invitation.”

  “I told you, I’m grounded. I can’t come.”

  His mouth hung open. “Not even for this?”

  “Sorry.”

  “But it’s going to be great.”

  “Yeah.”

  The pack of kids started shouting and waving at us, and Homer waved back.

  “Those are some kids from my youth group,” he said, “and some old homeschooler friends.” Homeschooler sounded different when he said it.

  “Homer, those are all little kids.”

  “Yeah, I’m kind of a group leader, if you can believe it. Hey, your dad! He actually gave out candy I can eat.”

  Homer pointed to my dad, standing on the porch. He didn’t wear a costume either, just the roadkill on his face. “Your dad knew I was Bigfoot. And, man, I didn’t know about his beard. It’s like he’s Bigfoot. Maybe we’re related?” He laughed and I laughed too. “Actually,” Homer said after a little while, “I’m the Ohio Grassman.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the Ohio Bigfoot. He’s supposed to live out east. East in Ohio.”

  “No way. No way. There’s a special Ohio Bigfoot?”

  “Grassman. That’s the name. For the Bigfoot in Ohio.”

  “That’s a bad name. I mean, that’s a really bad name. Why isn’t it the Buckeye Bigfoot or something?”

  We laughed and Homer said, “Tell me about it.” Then he said, “I don’t know. Maybe Grassman is some specific scientific classification. Like, Grassman, Sasquatch, Yeti.”

  I laughed some more, because that was classic Homer.

  The kids up the street called out something. I couldn’t tell what it was. It wasn’t Homer. Waving, he shouted, “Coming!” Then he looked at me. “Come on!”

  When I didn’t move he yelled for the kids to wait up.

  “You need a costume.”

  His group had crossed the street. They were opposite Sydney’s house, which made the idea of going with him more appealing. It didn’t mean we were a team. It meant I was lonely. And Homer, he seemed different out here. He wasn’t Homer. He wasn’t the same kid he was in school. He even moved differently. Like he wasn’t thinking about it too hard. It was a lot easier to think of him as one of the guys or even a friend and not the kid who thought we should team up.

  “Come on,” he said, “come with us.”

  “I don’t have a costume.”

  “You should have a costume. I mean, how much longer do we have Halloween for? In a couple years we’ll be the big kids running around in lousy costumes and all the grown-ups will be giving us the stink eye.”

  I looked over at my own personal Bigfoot, still standing out on the front porch with a big bowl of candy. I stuck out my arms and shrugged. That was my Can I go? Dad gave me a thumbs-up.

  “I’ve got an idea.” Homer dug through his candy bag and eventually pulled out a pair of thick red mittens. “My mom packed them. In case it was cold. Like the Ohio Grassman has red mittens.” He held them out for me but I didn’t take them. “Come on. With these and your black eye you can be a boxer.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well, look, it’s no Ohio Grassman costume but it’s not bad. And I’m in costume here so it’s not like anybody will know you’re with me. And, you know, trick-or-treating in a group isn’t exactly a blood oath of friendship.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean everything else. I mean the sandwich swapping. And Sydney’s reaction and all the rest.”

  Homer pushed the mittens at me. Inside they were warm and soft. “Get better,” he said, “not bitter.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I REPLAYED MY ENCOUNTER with Sydney on the sidewalk on Beggars’ Night over and over. How she just stood waiting. How I didn’t say anything. “Trick or treat” didn’t count. It’s too embarrassing to count. It was worse than saying nothing at all.

  At school the next morning I wrote her a note. Sorry. I folded the page of notebook paper into triangles until it was as hard as a rock and held it hidden in my fist, thinking about how to give it to her.

  All around me, kids were talking about trick-or-treating. How much candy they got. Their costumes. The good costumes they saw. The houses where people went all out with talking skeletons and fancy lights and spooky sounds echoing out of garages.

  Somebody asked Lucas about his costume—an elaborate, homemade Star Wars costume—and when he was done talking about how he made it he said to Homer, “I saw you and Itch. That was a cool costume, Homer. You weren’t a Wookiee, were you?”

  “Nah,” Homer answered. “Bigfoot.”

  Lucas nodded and started drawing in his noteb
ook.

  “Grassman.” I said it under my breath. I’d been sitting slumped with my arms crossed, holding my note for Sydney against me, but when I saw that everybody had heard me I sat up straight. “Homer said he was the Ohio Grassman.”

  The guys did exactly what you think they’d do, and burst out into loud laughter.

  “Tell me, Homer,” Tyler said, “does the Grassman climb buildings? What’s that called?”

  “Schoolering,” someone said, and then someone else said, “No, it’s buildering.”

  “Right. Right. Self-explanatory.”

  Homer squinted up his eyes at me. “Itch was a boxer.”

  “Ha! Cool.” Nate stuck out his fist, but since the last time I’d seen his fist he’d punched me, I didn’t bump him the way he wanted. Nate knew exactly why too. He laughed. Then he pointed at my black eye. “I told Sydney I avenged her.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. Since it was your fault.”

  “What did she say?” Why are you not even talking to me anymore, Itch? When did Nate tell her? What did she say? How did she react? Was she glad? I wouldn’t have thought she’d have been happy about Nate punching me, but I didn’t know anymore. Not if she was calling me the same stupid thing everyone else called me. I could still hear her voice from that day in the gym. I couldn’t decide how she sounded. Sad? Angry? I snuck a look at her across the room. Trick or treat. When I finally found some words that was all I’d had. The note’s corners poked into the palm of my hand. Sorry. It wasn’t very good, was it? And why would she even want to read my note? I mean, Nate’s punch had said way more to her than that Sorry line and a tiny box of candy ever could. Right? Like the sign the football team had hung up by the bleachers: DEEDS, NOT WORDS.

  Nate’s face settled into something less proud of himself. “She said none of it was my business and that punching people was stupid. So when are you getting the birds? I got to know so I can be ready.”

  That’s when Lucas showed us the picture he’d drawn, which was Nate riding a pheasant as if it were a horse. The pheasant looked more like a chicken. I didn’t tell Lucas that. Lucas had drawn a word bubble for Nate: Please!

  Nate looked at the picture and said, “Yeah, that. With a cherry on top?”

  Mrs. Anderson called for eyes up front. I decided to pay attention to her and ignore Nate. She announced she was going to put us all back in our math study groups. Maybe we were supposed to get quieter then, but we only got louder. Mrs. Anderson held up a hand like a stop sign and stood there for a minute before she said, “You know, let’s switch up the groups. I think we need this.”

  And then the class was all moaning about how we’d just had the test last week, which made us all think about Sydney, who knew it. She glued her eyes to her desk.

  Mrs. Anderson put us in new study groups. Sydney’s group was up at the front of the room by the door and I was in the opposite corner in the back of the room. Me, Tyler, and a girl I’d probably never ever spoken to, so that was good. Tyler leaned across and asked, “Are you getting Nate those birds soon?”

  He wore a Toledo Mud Hens shirt, and I got some of that pig farm smell from him, probably from his boots. Tyler would be the first to tell you that it’s not the pigs that smell, it’s their poop, and that’s what he told everybody, and he’d say that the stinky poop smell was the smell of money.

  I shrugged. Tyler flipped open his math book. When I went to sharpen my pencil at the front of the room I detoured by Sydney. I put the folded-up note on her desk carefully, as if it wasn’t just a piece of paper folded into a triangle. As if it might crack or break.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Fitch? Have you lost your way back to your seat?”

  Sydney didn’t touch the note.

  Kids snickered and I mumbled, “No,” and when I got back to my desk I snapped off my pencil’s new sharp point and Sydney took her braid and drew it across her eyes and held it there until Mrs. Anderson tapped her shoulder. Even then, she arranged her braid in a funny way so it sat on the side of her face. She curled it around her ear to make it stay in place.

  Nobody gave her a second look or gave her any trouble for sitting there like some sideways Star Wars character.

  My eyes burned. Sitting at my desk with my math book open in front of me, I thought of a hundred different, other, better things I could have written to her besides only Sorry.

  Daniel leaned over and flicked the paper triangle away and off Sydney’s desk as if it were a game of paper football.

  I wanted the itch. I wanted it to grow inside me and simmer on my skin and boil out and go. I could fall to the floor and itch just the way everybody always said I did—like a dog on a rug, my leg thumping because I didn’t have a tail, and whine that dog whine that’s somewhere between happy and suffering. I’d go and go until I was as puffy as a dead gassy fish just waiting to explode.

  Maybe Mrs. Anderson could use it as a math lesson easy enough for me to get. “Look, class, here is Mr. Fitch. Seventh-eighths of him is covered in hives. How much of him remains?”

  But that’s not the right equation. It’s backward. That seven-eighths that’s hives, that’s all me.

  Even Sydney saw it now. How I was all itch.

  I rubbed my neck. Scratched my hands. Sawed my arms against my rib cage. Pressed my forearms down hard on the desk and scraped them down across the desk’s edge, over and over again. And it started. I was glad for it. Relieved, maybe. That’s what that itch was. Relief. Giving in. Knowing that this was it so I might as well just do what I wanted.

  Off to the side someone snuffed. Huffed. Shifted in their seat. I could tell it was Homer. I could hear his big wet eyes rolling.

  I didn’t raise my swollen red hand to ask to go to the nurse’s office. When I scraped my chair back it tipped and I caught it before it fell but I ended up knocking everything off the desk, and my number-two pencil sounded musical as it rolled onto the floor.

  I grabbed my stuff and waved. Yep, here I go, I’m Itch, I’ve got hives and swelling again, excuse me, I’ll just be going to the nurse’s office.

  Once there, I took a dose of my new medication, the way I’m supposed to after the itch starts. The nurse let me stay there until we were sure it worked, and then a little longer until it was lunchtime. “Don’t think I’ll let you do this every day,” she said.

  And then Mrs. Anderson showed up. “Mr. Fitch. Why don’t you come join me for lunch?”

  The rest of the class herded past her, probably on their way to the art room again. Nate said he heard when the cafeteria finally opened it was going to serve steaks. Homer said, “Who cares about steaks? I want a tree-nut-free, peanut-free table. Will there be one of those?”

  Sydney walked next to Homer. “Sure,” she said. “Anybody can sit there, as long as their lunch is okay. I just want to eat in a big room again. In a room where we can talk loudly. Don’t you wish—” She stopped talking when she saw me.

  And do you know what I wanted? I wanted her to say Trick or treat to me. It would be mean. But it might also be funny. I’d say Trick or treat back to her, and then I’d say I was sorry and maybe something else I didn’t even know I wanted to say. I wouldn’t even care if she called me Itch.

  Back in the classroom Mrs. Anderson sat at her desk and I sat in a desk from the front row she’d pulled over next to hers.

  “You know, Mr. Fitch,” she told me, peeling back the plastic cover on a steaming microwave lunch that smelled really good, “you can eat lunch in here anytime. I’m usually working on things, and my door is open. You don’t need an invitation.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “If you don’t really like where you’re eating lunch that day, or the company.” She looked right at me then, waited for me to say something, and then dropped the plastic film in the trash by her desk.

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

&nb
sp; She stirred her lunch—it looked like ravioli but it didn’t have anything red with it—and I started on my sandwich (ham). She told me she’d heard my mom was in China on business. Her brother had lived in China for a year. “What city is she in?”

  “Suzhou.” I said it carefully the way Mom had me practice it as we drove her to the airport. She said we should pronounce it correctly. Even if we didn’t get it exactly right, she said we should take the time to try. “It’s near Shanghai.” I’d checked a map. I’d even looked up her hotel. The website didn’t say if it had a waffle maker or not.

  “Very cool.”

  “It’s been two months. My dad’s growing a beard. It’s wild.” I didn’t tell her all the rest of it. It was a lot of things, but it wasn’t cool.

  “Sounds like your mother has an interesting job.” Long pause. “Is she the one who helped you with your math?”

  “Sometimes. Sydney used to help me too. But, also, I didn’t used to need help.”

  “Ah.” That’s when she laid my test faceup next to my lunch. Except for my name and my number ten next to it, there wasn’t a mark on it. I’d written nothing else and she hadn’t written anything on it either.

  “I think you can do better than this.”

  It was funny. “Yeah. I sure hope so. I mean, it wouldn’t be too hard, right?”

  “Can you take the test again next week?” Even though she got down to business, she was smiling too. “Let’s say sometime during lunch? Next Tuesday?”

  “You’re letting me take the test again?”

  “I sure am.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “You bet,” she said. “I’m the teacher. I can give you a retest.”

  I’d flipped the test over. I hadn’t even doodled on it. I didn’t even fake it. I didn’t even try. I’d stared out the window, watching the dust trail of a giant farm machine harvesting. Instead of solving equations, I watched a soybean field go from green to dirt.

  “It seems unfair. I mean, everybody was pretty upset. I’d think everybody did lousy.”

  “What’s fair isn’t always obvious. It doesn’t mean that everything is always the same for everyone.” She leaned back in her chair so she could watch me better. “I graded the test on a curve. I can’t curve a zero.”