Itch

by Polly Farquhar

  Between bites, Dad said we should do something awesome, just the two of us. “Paint the living room. Or learn how to cook something really complicated.”

  “I’m not sure either of those ideas is very awesome.”

  “Right. Okay. Sure.”

  “For an old man, maybe.”

  He punched my shoulder. “Maybe one of those really complicated Lego sets?”

  I shrugged.

  “What do you think?” He took a bite of sandwich. The whole kitchen smelled like root beer and peanut butter.

  I didn’t have any bright ideas. I didn’t ask about football. That didn’t even start at school until seventh grade, and I knew my parents would never pay to sign me up for any of the leagues run by the parks department. So I just took a bite of sandwich. It wasn’t as good as you’d think it would be, cold chocolate chips and soft sandwich bread.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE SCHOOL’S CAFETERIA was gone but somehow we still had the gym. How could a tornado miss the gym? It was twice the height of the rest of the school and the tallest building around for miles, if you don’t count the silos. Our gym teacher, Mr. Mullins, thought it was a miracle.

  “How about it, boys? We’re playing kickball today! Do you know what you’d be doing if we’d lost our beautiful gymnasium?”

  Nate yelled, “Rock climbing!”

  Mr. Mullins pointed at him and yelled right back. “More like hard labor with the janitors!”

  “Rock climbing on what rocks?” That was Tyler. We stood around, waiting for Mr. Mullins to blow his whistle and send us off on our warm-up laps. Me, Nate, Daniel, Tyler, and Lucas. And the new kid. It was his first day of school, ever.

  Behind me, Lucas whispered, “Like we couldn’t just play kickball outside?”

  Daniel said, “Who needs rocks? We could just climb a building.”

  “Yeah! Daniel’s right,” Nate said. “We could climb up to the second floor. Just climb up the bricks.” He grinned. “Then climb in the windows.”

  That’s when the new kid said, “It’s called buildering.”

  We all swung our heads around to look at him. No one said anything. The new kid didn’t notice. He kept talking. “Not the climbing in windows part, but the building-climbing part. It’s building as in, you know, a building”—he waved around at the gym—“and then making it into a verb. It’s also like bouldering, which is climbing boulders.” He shrugged. “Self-explanatory.”

  I used to be the new kid. I wasn’t born here. I’m not from Ohio. That matters to people. That’s why when everybody else was silently staring at the new new kid, I said, “Oh. Okay.”

  He’d introduced himself to the class that morning. Popped right up from his chair and smiled and talked about himself as though he was sure we were all really interested in what he had to say. He’d been homeschooled. He was so happy about his first day of school—ever—he smiled the whole time. He’d told us about his summer vacation at the beach. He had food allergies, just like Sydney, and he told us about the foods he couldn’t eat—nuts and some other things—and he pointed out the two EpiPens in a red case he had clipped to his pants pocket. “EpiPens are emergency epinephrine auto-injectors,” he’d said, “and I don’t go anywhere without them.”

  Tyler made his sneakers squeak over the gym floor and asked the new kid, “Do you do it? Climb buildings like that?”

  Nate said, “That’s pretty cool, Homeschool.” Nate elbowed me. “Right, Itch?”

  That’s me. I’m Itch.

  The new kid said no, he didn’t climb buildings.

  Mr. Mullins started up the automatic partition that divided the gym in half. It was motorized and unfolded by itself like someone was smoothing out a piece of folded paper. The girls were on the other side. Sydney waved to me, leaning sideways as the wall crept past her. I waved back. The girls’ gym teacher was pretty new so they never got to play kickball. They measured pulses and heart rates and heart-rate intervals and calculated maximum results, or something, and jumped a lot, which Sydney told us was supposed to strengthen their bones.

  Nate ran past me. He was big—the biggest kid in the sixth grade, tall and solid—but slow. He didn’t like being the last one done, so he always started his warm-up laps early. After we ran our laps we played kickball in half the gym. Even though it was way bigger than playing ball in one of Nate’s grandmother’s storage units, that’s what it reminded me of. Except the gym had a lot of bright lights, and the storage units only had the light that came in through the open doors.

  “This is dangerous,” Nate said loudly. “Half the gym isn’t enough room for a game.”

  Tyler said, “I don’t think it’s any more dangerous than climbing up the walls of the school,” and Daniel said, “I think you mean bouldering.”

  Lucas said, “It’s buildering. Because it’s a school, not a rock.”

  “Right,” Daniel said. “It’s self-explanatory.”

  Tyler said, “Maybe it should be called schoolering.”

  This time, the new kid didn’t say anything. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you can figure out right away. You don’t need all the school years leading up to it to know, right now, that these guys were not impressed to have some new vocabulary.

  Dangerous or not, kickball in a box (that’s what Nate called it) was fun. The red rubber ball got kicked and whipped hard. It burned your face and slapped your hands. Because we played it in half the gym, it was part kickball and part dodgeball.

  The new kid had second base. He hopped around on his toes, waiting. I was on first. Daniel and Tyler had pitcher and third. Nate was on the other team, and he was up.

  Nate kicked. Pow. Bam. Hard, straight to second base. Daniel ducked out of pure self-defense. The ball shot past Daniel and right at the new kid.

  I thought he was a goner. He was skinny. All head, elbows, and knees. It wasn’t just that he had no fat, it didn’t look he had any muscle either, only what it took to move his arms or walk and even that didn’t look like much. He’d never had gym class before. Sure, maybe he’d played on kiddie teams, but he didn’t have a lifetime of gym class experience. But then it turned into one of those gym class moments, the kind you remember forever. He snagged the ball out of the air and whipped it at Nate and dropped him. Boom. Nate flat-out hit the floor. Nate looked like he had just relaxed—as though he’d flung out his arms and was going to flop into a hammock but instead hit the wood of the gym floor.

  For a minute, we just stared.

  And that’s when it happened to the new new kid. No one knew what to call him. We hadn’t bothered to remember his name. We’d only been in school for two hours. We just had the thing Nate had said—Pretty cool, Homeschool. So when Daniel started yelling, that’s what he was calling him. Sort of. Not Homeschool, though. He made it worse.

  “Homer! Homer! Give him your shot! Where’s your shot?” Sweat dripped down Daniel’s face. “Come on!”

  “It’s not for that,” Homer answered. “It’s not for getting conked in the head.”

  “But-But-But—look at him!”

  “Come on, give him the shot!” Some of the other boys joined in.

  “It’s a head injury,” Tyler said. “Like with football or whatever on TV. He’s unconscious. It’s not from food. Obviously.”

  Daniel looked at Homer, hard. It was a staring contest, and Homer won because Daniel had to wipe the sweat off his forehead. His scalp, as pink as a hot dog, showed through his buzz cut. “Can’t believe it, man.”

  Homer wiped his own sweat. “He doesn’t need epinephrine.”

  By then Mr. Mullins was crouching down next to Nate. Nate’s one of those kids who always has to be moving. I bet he can’t even sleep lying down. It was weird to watch him lying so still on the shiny gym floor. Mr. Mullins watched Nate breathe for a second or two and then touched his shoulders. Nate blinked and scrambled t
o sit up. The worst thing about all this for Nate, I figured, was not losing consciousness or being taken out by Homeschool Homer, but being nudged awake by the gym teacher.

  Homer asked me, “What if Daniel was right? What if my medicine could have helped Nate? Maybe it would.” He rubbed his face with the collar of his sweaty T-shirt. “What if there is an off-label usage of which I am unaware? Besides, I really don’t know anything about head injuries.”

  That’s when I first noticed how he talked, like an essay the teacher would read aloud to the class as a good example.

  I said, “But no one does that. At a football game. Tyler’s right. You never see it, the guy lying on the field and then the medic giving him a shot.”

  “I’m concerned I made a mistake.”

  I said what everybody always said. “He’s fine. Of course he’s fine. He’s Nate.” Mr. Mullins called Nate a tough old bird, got the girls’ gym teacher to watch us, and then escorted Nate down to the nurse’s office. Everybody figured the nurse called his grandmother to take him to the hospital, forty minutes away.

  When we went back to the classroom, Mrs. Anderson asked, “How is Mr. Emerling?” She meant Nate. She called us by our last names. We were supposed to write our first and last names on our papers, and then she assigned us all numbers that we always had to put next to our names. I was number ten. I don’t think she really knew our first names. It made it easier for the rest of us to forget them too.

  Daniel answered first. “Unconscious.”

  “He is not,” Homer said. “He’ll be fine.”

  “He’s getting a brain scan,” Lucas announced.

  Tyler said, “Homer knocked him out.”

  Mrs. Anderson turned to look around the room, because even if Homer was the new kid’s real name she wouldn’t know it. She was wondering who Homer was.

  “It was an accident,” Homer said.

  “So I’ve heard,” Mrs. Anderson told him. “The nurse called me. Sounds like quite a gym class for the first day of school.”

  Daniel said, “Homer could have saved him but he choked.”

  “Get your facts straight, Daniel,” Lucas said. “Homer said he carries medicine for food allergies, not brain injuries. They’re to save him, not a kid who can’t duck.” Lucas just kept doodling. He didn’t even look at Daniel. But that’s Lucas. If he’s breathing, he has a pen or a pencil and he’s drawing something.

  “We were playing kickball,” I started telling Mrs. Anderson, but I had to stop because I couldn’t remember the new kid’s real name. I wasn’t going to call him Mister anything, and so the nickname came right out of my mouth. “And Homer,” I said, “Homer threw the ball to get Nate out at first and it hit his head and knocked him out.”

  “Who?” Mrs. Anderson asked. I stuck my thumb at Homer. “Ah,” she said, “Mr. Bishop.”

  “But he woke up,” I said. “Nate.”

  Tyler said, “His head’s not smashed or anything.” Daniel mumbled something about how Homer could have saved Nate but didn’t.

  Nate didn’t care. He was back the next day. He gave Homer a high five. “Homer! Now that’s how to play kickball!”

  Homer’s grin was so big his cheeks were practically in his ears.

  I wanted to tell him to stop looking so happy. Didn’t he know? He was Homer forever. It didn’t matter that he dropped the biggest kid in the sixth grade in his first gym class ever. It was like some kind of airport gift shop T-shirt: I WAS A GYM CLASS HERO AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY NICKNAME.

  CHAPTER 4

  AFTER SCHOOL I rode my bike out to my job at the pheasant farm. I pedaled easy until I was out of sight of the school. Past the line of waiting buses (there’s only four), past the row of houses all flying their Ohio State Buckeye flags, and past the football team my parents won’t let me join. After that, everything is open. The land is flat and it rolls on and on. The sky stretches over the earth, edge to edge, everywhere you look. And then I go. Lung-bursting, leg-burning fast.

  Out here is country. Nothing but sky and farms. There aren’t a lot of trees—just a grouping every now and then by a house or in between fields. All the roads are straight and all the turns are right angles. Sometimes we get Wizard of Oz tornadoes like the one last week, but usually the most interesting weather is fog. Fog like cotton. So thick it’s disorienting. When you look out the window in the morning, you might not be sure you’re on the same planet you were on last night.

  It was one of those hot and sunny days when you couldn’t believe summer vacation was over and school had started. My bike helmet banged against my hip from where it hung off my backpack. I’d put it on once I was through the first stop sign and away from the school. I knew it was wrong to wait. In my mind I could hear my mom—my future sad mom—crying about it, saying how my brain was nothing but an unprotected watermelon.

  It was also part of the deal for the job. Helmet on. Good grades.

  Sometimes the road was all mine—all the space, all the pavement, all the sky, all the air—and I went as hard as I could and as fast as I could. Nothing else mattered. Not the itch. Not my tired legs. I only wanted to go. Maybe if I forgot everything I knew about everything, there could be lift-off, as if the Ohio wind could pick me up too, like a trampoline or a school roof caught in a storm, and give me a ride on the jet stream.

  The yards and fields and trees I biked by were still littered with stuff. Pink insulation was caught in trees. At first, it had looked like a silly picture, like cotton candy decorations, but then it just looked like garbage.

  I wasn’t paying attention to the road and traffic, and then it was too late. A car came up fast behind me. It was going as fast as it could too. All growl like a beast. I knew I didn’t even have time to look over my shoulder, so I pointed my front wheel to the right and off the pavement. Me and bike, we hit the deep drainage ditch at the side of the road. It was the only escape. The car braked but never stopped and then sped away, screaming through the air.

  Sometimes the ditches ran dry, but my luck wasn’t that good. It was muddy and sludgy with farm runoff: dirt and chemicals and fertilizer, which usually means manure, which means you-know-what. It stank. I stank. It was cold too. I tried to remember if I had my lucky peanut shell with me. I thought I had it. So maybe my luck wasn’t too bad. My bike and I were gross, but we were okay. It could have been worse.

  When I got to the pheasant farm, Mr. Epple stood out in the yard.

  “Hey,” he said, “you stink.” That’s what he said. I didn’t always understand him because sometimes he sounded like he had a mouthful of marbles, but I was sure about this. He was loud enough about it too.

  “Yep.”

  I pulled my wet shirt away from my stomach. It fell right back again. Cold. Foul. I didn’t say anything else. Mr. Epple didn’t talk much and I didn’t talk much and I think he liked it that way. What would I say, anyway? He was right. I stank.

  I didn’t always know what to make of Mr. Epple, but I liked the job. Riding on my bike. Getting paid. Taking it over from Sydney’s brother Dylan so he could play football. Out here I wasn’t Itch. Right then, though, with my shoes sludgy and my pants dark and wet, I felt like a freak, waiting to balloon with hives and swelling.

  I didn’t want the itch here. I didn’t want it anywhere, but especially not here. But I was wet and cold and the odds were not in my favor.

  Mr. Epple grunted at me. I think he said okay. Or go. He pointed to the pens.

  “Right,” I said, but he was already gone.

  It was time for the dead check.

  The pens where I worked were past Mr. Epple’s house and a small red barn. It’s called the brooder barn. Mr. Epple hatches eggs and raises pheasant chicks in the brooder barn until they’re about six weeks old. Then they go to the pens.

  The pens are made up of fat wood posts and chicken wire with something like chicken wire nettin
g across the top. The birds don’t have room to fly, even though the pen is called a flight pen. The birds scuttled around. They ran like chickens. Or took off low and landed again. Even though they’re birds, they’d rather run than fly.

  Inside the pens, it’s a rectangle of a real bird world. Dirt and grass and plants and some bushes, and the birds. The birds liked me. Well, they liked the food and water I had for them.

  I’ve never seen one really fly. I bet it would be something. I’ve seen wild turkeys fly, big and heavy over the fields, and they’re interesting because they don’t look majestic or special or even birdlike. Not like a hawk, always on a mission. Once I saw a bald eagle by the river. It was huge, with shoulders like a football player. It was the biggest and most amazing animal I’d ever seen in the wild.

  Pheasants are mean. Aggressive.

  That’s what Dylan had told me when he was training me for the job. Dylan is Sydney’s middle brother. He’s in ninth grade. He’s the one who got me the job with Mr. Epple, right before his two-a-day practices for football started. “It’s not much work,” he’d said. “Mr. Epple doesn’t talk much, but he’s okay. Lets you just do your stuff. Wait till you see those birds fight! Bloodthirsty!”

  The male ring-necked pheasants butt chests and fly at each other, their feet pointing at each other like weapons. They have spurs on their legs. They’ll pluck out each other’s feathers and then they’ll bleed—and then all the roosters will want in. They’ll peck each other to death. That’s what Dylan told me.

  The roosters called as I headed in. They sounded a little bit like a chicken rooster, but the call was short, like a cock-a-doodle-doo without the doodle-doo. It’s squeaky and rusty sounding. The pen was all kicked-up dirt and crowing and the drum-drum-drum of wings flapping in a bird brawl.

  Brutus was winning. The birds don’t officially have names, but that’s what I called the biggest, meanest bird in the first pen. He was the only bird Mr. Epple had to debeak. Every two weeks Mr. Epple grabbed Brutus and tucked him under his arm like a football and took a small knife to his bill, cut it precisely, and peeled back the top third of his beak. He still had a beak but it wasn’t as sharp. It would grow back and Mr. Epple would snip it again. Mr. Epple said he might have to put Brutus in his own pen.