Would riding my bike at the river even be the same without Sydney? Even if we were still friends, would she be too busy with Abby and Maria?
“I hardly see any helmets.” Mom sounded as sad as when she found out about what had happened to Sydney. Mom finally held the phone as far away as she could and then I could see her whole face. “So many cyclists,” she said, “but hardly any helmets. Promise me you’re wearing yours?”
“You know I am. Will you be back before—”
“Good. Good.”
“—Thanksgiving?”
“You bet,” she said. “Good luck on your test. Love you, buddy.”
CHAPTER 18
THE SATURDAY BEFORE my makeup test, Ohio State lost to Michigan State. The Michigan State Spartans—the other school from Michigan—are not the Buckeyes’ archrivals. It was the second-to-last game of the season. I’d watched half the games alone, grounded. Dad never watched. Next week was the big rivalry game and Homer’s party that I couldn’t go to and then Mom would be home and then it would be Thanksgiving. The Michigan State game was played in the cold, dark, and rain. On TV, the game was the center of the world. Bright colors. Lights. The flicks of rain on the coaches’ faces glittered. The stadium was filled. “Record crowd here tonight at the Shoe,” one of the announcers said. Beyond the lit-up stadium, the whole world was darkness.
“That’s what they always say,” Dad said. “It’s always a record crowd.”
I didn’t answer. He sat next to me on the couch and watched the end of the game. He’d never done that before. The fans cheered and waved. Some wore rain ponchos and some guys didn’t wear much more than body paint.
Ohio State lost on a last-second field goal. Three points.
It was like all the air had been let out of the balloon. That’s what the announcers said, and they were right. Whoosh. All the people in the stands who’d been moving the whole game, bouncing up and down and waving, dropped their arms. The game on the field was over and the Buckeyes lost and so no one in scarlet was jumping around and the band didn’t move or play and the only thing that happened was that the coaches ripped off their headsets. I could picture what it was like at Sydney’s. People stuck standing—everybody on their feet to watch the final play, and then when it had gone wrong they were frozen in disbelief. Her dad groaning. Her brothers so upset they couldn’t even get out a real sentence. Sydney’s hands over her mouth.
The Michigan State players moved. They jumped up and down and bumped off each other and pushed their faces in the camera. There weren’t as many of them, though, as all those Buckeye fans, so they seemed small and lonely, even if they were triumphant.
Dad slapped his hand down on my knee. “Good game.”
I gave him a look of disbelief. “What?”
“Close. Suspenseful. There’s going to be a lot of bellyaching about it at work tomorrow. All those armchair quarterbacks.”
“They lost. They haven’t lost in…” I couldn’t remember when they’d lost. At least not in the regular season.
“You can’t win them all. You know that. It would be boring too.”
“Dad. There’s nothing boring about winning. Winning is winning. It’s all about winning. That’s the object of the game.” How did he not get that?
“Just think how exciting it will be if they beat the other Michigan—”
“The other Michigan? How can you not even keep them straight?”
He waved me off. “This will make it way more exciting if they beat the University of Michigan next week.”
“No way.” Last season when I watched all the games at Sydney’s house, the Buckeyes rolled over everybody. It was awesome. It was awesome to sit down on Saturday and know that your team practically had superpowers.
“This way, when they win, it’ll be even more exciting. Pulling together. Digging deep. Finding out what they’re really made of. All those things the commentators always say.”
He’s told me practically the same stuff about my schoolwork before. About dividing fractions. He told me that once I’d learned something hard I wouldn’t just have learned how to do that thing but also how my brain worked. I told him I liked it better when I just got it. I’d asked him, Wouldn’t you rather I aced it the first time? He’d said it was a learning opportunity.
“Last year a guy broke his leg during the game and they still won,” I said.
“Sometimes, when you’re a kid, it’s hard to believe that your team can lose.”
“Who was your team?” That made me wonder. “What’s even your sport?” Dad laughed. “A long time ago,” he said, “I was a Boston Red Sox fan.”
“So?”
He laughed some more. “Well, when I was kid they were famous for not winning a World Series in ages.”
“Yeah, well, that was a long time ago.”
* * *
—
Monday, the game was the only story at school. Michigan State 17, Ohio State 14.
“It was a close game,” Daniel said.
“Good teams win close games.” That was Tyler. He wore a Boston Red Sox T-shirt, but I didn’t say anything to him about it.
“No way,” Nate said, “The score was close. The game wasn’t. We didn’t play worth nothing.” He shot a finger at Daniel. “Nothing.”
“A close score is a close score. How can you argue with that?”
Homer said, “I don’t know what the coaches were thinking. There were lots of inefficient and uncreative plays. They should have been much more aggressive about running the ball.”
Nate crossed his arms hard enough to hear. “No kidding. That’s what I said two minutes ago.”
Homer said, “Well, that was kind of just a cliché.”
“A what?”
“And it was actually a little unspecific.”
“Are you kidding me?” Nate threw his hands up into the air.
Daniel leaned across the group and whispered loudly, like always. “Guys. My neighbors? They’ve got a kid who goes to school in Michigan. They have a Michigan flag hanging up in their garage.”
“Darn straight it’s in their garage.”
“State or University of?”
“Does it matter?”
Nate sat all hunched and scowled up. “Uncreative,” he muttered. He didn’t care about Buckeye traitors sixty miles from the state line. He cared about Homer and Homer’s vocabulary words.
Then like magic, Homer changed the whole conversation. “You guys ready to turn out for the Bucks at the party next Saturday?”
“You know it!”
“O-H, I-O!”
He was still Homeschool Homer, but he got to pull the Buckeyes out of his back pocket and just like that Nate and everybody were happy again.
Grabbing my lunch, I left them all to talk about the Buckeyes and went to the quiet and empty dead-end hallway where Sydney and I had studied. The test was tomorrow. Maybe I’d do okay. I’d have to do okay. If I stayed messed up in math there was no way Mom or Dad would let me keep working at the farm. It would have to be all math all the time.
Homer had left all that Buckeye talk and followed me. He hung back like he was stalking me, carrying his lunch box and his math book and notebook, and I spotted him peering around the corner. By the time he caught up with me I was already sitting on the floor, looking at my math book and eating an apple.
Homer said, “I heard you had a retest.”
“That’s personal information if I do.”
“Do you want to study?”
I took another bite of apple before I asked, “Did you follow me?”
Homer shrugged. “Do you need any help? Because I’ll help you. I’m not as good as Sydney, but I’m pretty good. I got a ninety-eight on the test. And that was just because of a careless error. It was hard to concentrate.”
If I’d felt li
ke talking with him, I’d have asked if that was his curved or uncurved grade. “I studied with my dad.”
“Oh. Okay.” He stood there funny, his elbows kicked up as he held on to his school things and his lunch, and like he’d stopped in the middle of a step. “Are you sure you can’t come to my party? I mean, your dad let you go trick-or-treating.”
The thing was, I hadn’t even asked my dad. He might let me go but I wasn’t sure I wanted to anymore. But I told Homer the truth, which was that my mom had already said no a bunch of times.
Then I asked what had been bugging me since he’d shown up. “Why aren’t you with the guys? I mean, your big Buckeye Bus party is Saturday. You should be living it up. You can’t do any wrong right now. You just lead the whole class in the O-H cheer.”
He shrugged again. He said, “You know, Nate did okay. On the test. I think he got another B.”
Why was he telling me this? Was he telling me that even Nate was smarter than me? And that grade, that grade had been the curved one, right?
“Do you think it works?”
“Studying?” I couldn’t believe Homer would ask me that.
Shaking his head, he thumped his math book against the side of his head and he grinned, but it was an embarrassed kind of grin. “Osmosis. Do you think it works?” When I didn’t answer right away, he added, “Remember how Nate said he studied? By sleeping with his head on his math book?”
Homer was weird but he usually made sense. “No,” I said, “I don’t think osmosis works for math.” I made a face too. Like he was ridiculous. Because he was. Even if osmosis probably made about as much sense as a good-luck charm.
He said, “I kind of hope it does.”
“Um,” I said, and he just stood there in the hallway, still looking like he was hinged like a robot, and I thought about how different he was on Halloween when we ran up and down the streets, trick-or-treating. So this is what I did next. I thumped my math book to the side of my head too. Itch and Homer in a dead-end hallway, holding books against their heads. It was funny stupid but we didn’t laugh very much.
By then I’d figured out that he wasn’t really talking about math.
“Maybe it works,” I said. I wanted it to be true. Osmosis. Right? Figuring out how to fit in just by showing up, just by being there, by living here. Wasn’t that what I’d been doing for three years?
Then because it was awkward with him standing there, I asked him if he was going to sit down. I wanted to be alone. I didn’t say that, though.
Homer shook his head. “I believe I’ll go join Mrs. Anderson. She said I could eat with her anytime.”
I lowered my math book. “You aren’t eating with the class?”
“No.”
“Why not?” Everybody was psyched about his party. “You’re good now.”
He took the book away from his head. “It’s hard to tell.”
I thought about saying he was fine, but he was right. It was hard to tell.
Then he said, “Be sure to get a good night’s sleep before your test. It’s really critical for your information retention.”
That night Dad and I went over the study sheet again and he had some problems he found online and we baked a frozen round grocery-store pizza and I went to bed a little bit early. Dad let me borrow one of his mechanical pencils. I took the retest during lunch.
Mom: How do you think your retest went?
Me: ???? Maybe ok.
Me: The big game is tomorrow. And the party I can’t go to.
Mom: Remember how empty it was at the mall? Are you and Dad going to go again?
Me: No way. Dad says you’re coming back Monday.
Mom: Yes! See you Monday night at the airport!!!
CHAPTER 19
THE MORNING OF the big game against That Team Up North, Dad woke me up early. At first I thought he was going to tell me I could go to Homer’s party, and I wondered what would happen when I told him I didn’t want to go anymore. Or maybe Mrs. Anderson had called him about my test grade. He’d only wake me up if it was good. He wasn’t mean like that, to wake me on Saturday morning to tell me I’d flunked.
But that wasn’t why he woke me. He had to go in to work.
“Today?”
“Yeah, today,” he said. “The world doesn’t stop just because it’s Saturday.”
“I mean because of the game, Dad.”
He told me to take my face out of my pillow because he couldn’t understand me.
“Dad, it’s game day. It’s the game day.”
“The machines don’t know that.” Sometimes Dad had to go in on Saturdays to reprogram them. “You’re still not going to that football party,” he told me as he headed back up the basement stairs.
It had snowed overnight. We didn’t get as much snow here as I was used to in New York, though we still got plenty. Usually it was the wind that made it a big deal. Wind whipped the snow across the roads and the snow looked like waves of white in fields, or like a carved, frozen ocean. The snow that morning was different. Big, heavy, wet snow. The kind that’s for snowmen and is hard to shovel and when it warms up it slides off roofs in avalanches.
The snow changed everything.
Standing on the bed to look between the slats of the blinds on the basement window, I knew what I was going to do. I knew today was the day and I knew how I was going to do it.
I know it was only weather, but right then it felt like a miracle. And I know my dad having to go in to work was only work, but that felt like a miracle too. As if this one time everything was going to go my way. I was going to the farm. Mr. Epple needed me. He’d told me once how he lost half his birds one year when heavy snow made the pens collapse.
I’d get Nate his egg. Or eggs.
Egg, hand, glove, pocket, go. Egg, hand, glove, pocket, go, gone.
Upstairs in my regular bedroom, I dressed the way Mom would tell me to. Long johns and extra shirts too, and two pairs of socks, including one of Dad’s really good pair of special wool socks, the kind that aren’t scratchy.
I took my medicine just like I was supposed to and stowed the extra in my pocket.
And then I was gone. Out the door. Grabbed a ratty old towel from the garage for extra egg insulation and my bike off the front porch. Backpack on. Helmet on. It was tight, over my black, full-face ski mask. My helmet had a flashing light on the back. My bike had lights on the front and the back, and reflectors on the wheels.
The flying football flags hanging on the houses were bright red marks against a world of snow.
The roads were messy and thick with slush as the snow melted. Sometimes the bike rocked out from under me. Sometimes a foot slipped off the pedal. I was cold and hot at the same time—my clothes were wet but I was sweating.
I couldn’t go fast. Pedaling through soup. I tried walking my bike because maybe that would be faster but it wasn’t, and all it did for me was get my legs even wetter.
When a car drove down the street, waves of slush fanned out behind it like a wake from a boat. The drivers all stared at me. Sydney’s car went by. I could see her in the backseat, her hair in a ballet bun because it was Saturday morning and she had a class before the game.
If the roads had been good I could have caught up with the car. In town with the speed limit and stop signs at the corners I could always catch up, if I pushed. But not in this stuff. At the stop sign, Sydney’s mom turned left to drive to the town with dance classes. I went right. The press of the slush was loud and my ears were covered, but I thought I heard Sydney shout out the window as the car drove away. Maybe Go Bucks. Maybe Beat Michigan. Maybe. Maybe it was, “Good luck!” Even if that wasn’t it, it carried me a little farther down the road.
My hands ached from clutching the handlebars and my lungs were about to burn out of me by the time I came up to the Storage-U. It was the most beautiful thing I’d
ever seen in my whole life. Long rows of cinder blocks with red metal doors and a mix of old roof, new roof, and blue tarps.
It wasn’t hard to find an empty storage unit. Nate’s. The door wasn’t shut all the way. Snow had drifted in. Though it was out of the wind, it wasn’t very warm. I left my ski mask on. With all the sweat, my watery eyes, and my runny nose, it was probably frozen to my face anyway.
Nate’s unit wasn’t an empty dodgeball cage anymore. A folding lawn chair sat open in the corner. Underneath it were a couple of empty sports drink bottles and some candy bar wrappers. Knowing him, it was probably a special raccoon trap. I pushed the door up higher so I could get enough daylight into the corners to be sure a family of skunks wasn’t hiding out. Off to the side were a couple of desk lamps and an old and broken grandma’s-house-looking chair that someone had probably left behind.
Then I spotted an unplugged space heater. Its cord was long and orange, and I knew that meant it plugged in somewhere outside and it wasn’t long before I found it, an outside outlet covered with small outlet doors.
It was the best thing ever. The best thing I’d ever found in my whole life. A hundred-dollar bill at the side of the road couldn’t have beat it. I sat in the rickety old lawn chair in my long underwear, the space heater blowing on me and drying my jeans I’d draped over the old chair’s arm.
Nate also had a collection of empty soup cans. Every single one of them was clam chowder. There were a lot of them. All chowder. Everybody knew that if you worked at the soup plant you got free cases of soup. It was only one flavor, though. Maybe you’d get twenty-four cans, and maybe that seems awesome, until you realize it’s all clam chowder. Or pea soup. A case of pea soup would be worse. Nate had stacked the empty cans into a pyramid.
For the first time, it felt like I was trespassing.
That’s when I noticed it. By the desk lamps. A rough wooden box. Inside were some straw and sawdust and two empty bowls. Nate was waiting for a bird, just like he said. And he really was counting on me.
CHAPTER 20
WHEN I FINALLY made it to the farm Mr. Epple came up to me and thumped my shoulder. He laughed out loud. Happy.
Itch Page 13