fingers and gasped again.
“Don’t look at his face if it gets you upset,” my dad said.
What was I, the Phantom of the Opera?
“What is it?” I asked. “My face is kinda itchy.”
“And your arms,” my dad said.
“They don’t itch,” I said.
“They will,” he said ominously.
I looked down. Red spheres were erupting along my forearms, like planets with rings. I looked like a pepperoni pizza, only less delicious. In fact, not delicious at all. I was disgusting. There were some large red patches, an inch in diameter, and some that were clusters of bumps. And my father was right. They began to itch.
“Maybe something bit him,” my mother said. “Maybe he got bitten by a New York bug!”
“A what?” My father was puzzled.
“He should definitely go to the doctor,” my mom said, purposefully focusing her eyes on my father and looking away from my freakish self. “All right, Paul, you get the stuff. And I’ll take Fin—”
She steeled herself to see me and then removed her hands from her eyes.
“AHHHH!” she screamed. My eardrums hurt. And my arms hurt too. And my face. And my legs, below the knee. I was breaking out everywhere, red and stinging and itchy.
“Mom, if you want me to go to the doctor, I’ll go by myself,” I said. “I’m not twelve years old.”
“You can take the car, Finn,” my dad said.
“He can’t drive like that!” my mother said.
That didn’t even make sense.
“I’ll take the train,” I said.
“Do you even know where the doctor’s office is?” my mother asked.
“As a matter of fact, I do!” I exploded at her. “It’s the place where you dragged me the other day to get eight vaccinations and a SARS mask!”
I tried to stomp off, but it’s really hard to do that in flip-flops.
The doctor’s verdict was: “You’re allergic to the sun.”
What? How was that possible? The sun is a natural thing. It’s good for you. That’s like being allergic to water, or air. Or something really important, like Pop-Tarts. I spent twenty minutes at the beach thus far this summer and I’m a monster? “Solar urticaria,” the doctor continued. “That’s what it’s called. The sun made you break out in hives.”
Well, I definitely wasn’t going to be a surfer anymore. And I guess I wasn’t going to school anymore either. Or church. Ooh, this would get me out of church! That was a good thing. But being locked up in my room like the Hunchback of Notre Dame? Not so good.
“Has the sun ever done this to you before?” he asked.
Of course it hadn’t. I’m not exactly outdoorsy, but I’d been surviving summer afternoons outdoors since childhood. For every two hours I spent ogling the children’s librarian, I would serve an hour at the Alexandria community pool working on my farmer’s tan.
“Let’s chalk it up to your change of environment,” the doctor said. “I hope it will be temporary. I would say avoid being in the sun for more than a half hour for the next few months. Okay?”
A half hour?
“I’ll write you a prescription for an antihistamine in the meantime,” he said. “And have the nurses come in to bandage you up. Gotta protect that skin!”
Afterward, I rode the train down to the Bronx to meet my parents at Luke’s football game, all the while looking like an escapee from a leper colony. The doctor had given me a pill that cooled off my skin and I didn’t feel as itchy anymore. But while I wasn’t quite as red anymore (more like a peach than a tomato), the nurses had given me those wraparound sunglasses only considered stylish in nursing homes.
The nurses had also wrapped my forearms in bandages, from my wrists all the way up to the hems of my t-shirt sleeves, so from the neck down, I resembled the Invisible Man. But I was not invisible, even slouched in a corner seat by the train toilet. Toddlers kept toddling by and pointing me out. Stay-at-home moms gave me sad and sympathetic glances but pulled their children away from me in case I was contagious. A man in a suit assumed I was blind and threw two dollar bills into my lap. After this incident, I removed the sunglasses.
Hey, at least no one was sitting next to me. Until the Mount Vernon East stop, when a blond girl about my age got on the train. I hate blondes. I seriously do. It’s not that I think blondes are too good for me. But they think they’re too