I've Had This Itching in My Shoes Since I Was Just A Little Kid

After my run-in with the friendly, scruffy boy at the school the previous Friday, I was careful to remain in the house away from any more dangerous situations. So I stayed home, drank copious amounts of chai tea, and wrote poetry on my walls.

Not directly on my walls, obviously. I’d had enough encounters with angry landlords in the past. This was the only way I “made myself at home” in every new place we inhabited. One of my friends a couple towns back called it “scrapbook poetry,” which I kind of resented, but I guess that’s the easiest way to describe it. The way I write is very different from the way most conventional writers write: hunched over a typewriter, cranking out page after page. I think and write in little, shredded pieces of paper. When a line gets stuck in my head, or a series of words sticks with me, I write it on the closest piece of paper I can find and, once I get home, I tape it to my otherwise bare wall. Then I would organize and reorganize lines until I was satisfied.

Other than that, though my rooms in all of our houses were bare and simple. A bed, a dresser, and a closet were all I needed. Before we moved around so much, I was a total packrat. But once houses changed from permanent residences to temporary shelters, that habit quickly died. Now, I lived on the essentials and dropped any excess cargo.
My mother, however, was a different story. She liked to collect trinkets from every city we lived in, as if she actually cared about them. The shelves of our living rooms were lined with all kinds of worthless memorabilia: snow globes, figurines, things you’d find in a gas station next to the five dollar hats and sunglasses. The most embarrassing collector’s item she gathered in each town, however, were my school pictures.

They lined the walls of each house, usually embossed with the logo of whatever photo company took the pictures (my mother was too cheap to actually buy them, but still wanted to keep up the appearance of a normal, suburban mother in each town we went to). They were the epitome of my ever-changing personalities, each depicting a different girl.

In one, I sat with my shoulders hunched, just barely making eye contact with the camera, with my hair falling over my shoulders and hugging my face, almost protectively. In this town, somewhere in Connecticut if I wasn’t mistaken, I was shy, introverted, and soft-spoken; probably the closest I’ve ever allowed myself to stray to my real self. The next picture over, I was a changed woman. With my hair pulled back, I held my head high, meeting the camera’s gaze self-assuredly. I remembered this town in particular, we had stayed longer than usual, and the strain of keeping to only one person for more than the usual 2 or 3 months had begun to wear on me. Self-confidence is hard to keep up, apparently.

I usually browsed the walls of pictures at the start of our stay in each town, looking for a new personality like most people look for a new brand of shampoo. I would try to remember how each personality affected other people, and how each one suited me. This, however, was not the only step in my process for choosing a new personality. My mother was the other key piece.

When she came home from work later that Saturday before I started going to school, I was sitting on the counter in our new kitchen, already holding out a cup of tea for her. I could feel a cold breeze come in through the door with her, and the chill seemed to radiate off of her coat as she hung it up on the hook on our door, and as I handed her the cup, it slid from her fingers to mine when they brushed against each other.

“Thanks, hon,” she said in that breathy voice people always seem to have when they first come home.

“No problem, Ma. How was work?” I said, innocently enough. She saw right through it, looking at me bemusedly.

“Ohh, no,” she said with an ever-annoying glint in her eye, “I’m not helping you with this weird little social experiment you’ve got going.”

She paused then, drinking her tea and exhaling into the mug, making her glasses fog up slightly. I smiled at the effect and swung my legs back and forth, making a repetitive thumping noise against the still-empty cabinets, knowing it would eventually get under her skin, while I took comfort in the dependency of rhythm.

She eventually gave in, running over and holding my legs down with one arm and laughing.
“Alright, alright,” she said exasperatedly, “Work was nice, actually. My boss is a very nice man, and the other waitresses aren’t total bitches, like the last town…” She trailed off there as we both shuddered internally. We left the last town we were in not entirely of our own accord. Apparently, my mother hadn’t been on the greatest of terms with some of her co-workers, and …well it all went downhill from there. Needless to say, it was the fastest move we’d ever accomplished.

I hopped off of the counter, satisfied with her answer, and hugged her tightly. It was funny, how she always managed to find this one brand of perfume wherever we went. She always smelled just like she should; not too overpowering, but not so “understated” that it went unnoticed. That scent and our old beat-up Rambler had carried us across fifty states.

We let each other go, and I headed up to my room. It was still bare, with a few pieces of paper taped to the wall above my bed from the past couple of days. Various lines had been coming to me, but none of them seemed to have a common theme, yet. I went over to the boxes by the closet and started sifting through them formulating a wardrobe along with a personality.

It was looking like we were going to be here for longer than usual, since my mom seemed pretty satisfied with her work, so I didn’t want anything too extreme; that would get tiring eventually. So I decided to go with staying under the radar, maybe have a couple of friends, but nothing too extravagant. Probably keeping closer to myself than I cared to, but hey, we were after all, going to leave eventually. This was going to be a pretty boring town, nothing out of the ordinary.

That Monday at school, I wandered my way to each of my classes, resulting in a couple of tardies, nothing a shy smile and a quick explanation that I was “new in town” and “still getting used to my schedule” couldn’t fix, though. It’s funny, how teachers were always the same in every town; always easily won over by a smile.

My classes seemed pretty simple for the most part, nothing I was dreading that much. The reading list for English was all books that I had already read.

English class was the only class that really caught me off-guard. So far, I had managed to avoid the boy I ran into last Friday, but when I entered the English room and glanced around, trying to find a seat to take, my eyes unfortunately caught a pair inquisitive brown ones that quickly lit up with recognition.

“Hey!” He said generically, waving with a pleasant smile on his face as he gestured to the seat next to him. I risked a quick scope across the room and decided that the place he was offering was no worse than any other one, so I walked over slowly and sat in the desk, smiling politely.

“I’m Alex, by the way, I realized I wasn’t really formal on Friday,” he said.

“I’m Marilyn,” I said, smiling.

He looked me over with a puzzled expression. I could understand his confusion; when he had seen me the previous Friday, I had been dressed in jogging shorts and an old gym shirt from one of my old high-schools. Today, I had obviously put a bit more effort into my appearance, and I had directed it towards the image I was portraying in this town. I was dressed in “boyfriend style” jeans and a button-up shirt I had bought at a thrift store in Connecticut. My hair was thrown into a messy kind of ponytail that didn’t really serve any function, and I had actually put effort into my makeup that morning.

“You look …different,” he said with a bemused smile on his face.

I laughed a bit nervously and nodded, toying with the cuffs of my shirt. “Yeah, I was kind of dressed down on Friday, to say the least...” I said lamely, trailing off and hoping he’d drop it.
He shrugged and turned in his seat to face the front of the room where the teacher had entered and began to write notes for us on the board. Right before the teacher started talking; he turned towards me and smiled a heartbreaker’s smile.

“Looks nice.”

I would be lying if I told you I didn’t blush a little. When I played this kind of “down to earth” character, I didn’t usually get much attention from the opposite sex. Cheesy movies may tell you other things, but when it comes down to it, guys in high school are mostly interested in girls who care more about their makeup than poetry and sunsets.

The class itself was fairly boring, nothing I hadn’t heard before about proper citation within research essays. About halfway through it, I started writing idly on my notes, my feet already starting to jiggle impatiently, itching to get out. For obvious reasons, the academic system and I didn’t mix well. I didn’t like staying in one place for too long, and it required me to stay in the same classrooms five days a week for fifty-minute intervals. Not the best mix.

Towards the end of class, I heard a low chuckle to my right as my nervous kicking got more intense. I looked over only to see Alex watching me, laughing subtly.

The bell rang, and I immediately leaped up, eager to get my feet back on the ground and moving. He got up and walked alongside me, the bemused smile on his face all the while.

“Do you have Restless Leg Syndrome?”

“Do I have what?” I asked, not stopping, but slowing down, letting him catch up to me as I made my way out of the building.

“Restless Leg Syndrome. It’s a condition where people’s legs feel like they’re covered in bugs, or something. They always have to move them,” he said, smirking slightly.

I laughed in surprise. That one, I had never heard. “No, I don’t. I just get… restless sometimes,” I said, still smiling.

He laughed under his breath and looked around. We were now outside of the building and I realized that I had been walking with no plan of where I was headed to. It was lunch break, and I had no clue where anything was. He seemed to realize this at the same time I did.

“Did you have any place in mind, or were you just walking for the sake of walking?”

I blushed slightly, now feeling a bit stupid and said: “Yeah, I just got really nervous in that building, it felt like I had been in there for ages,” I said, not thinking. Even then, he had a way of always getting me to say more than I meant to.

He was looking at me as if I held some kind of great secret, a bemused smile that I was beginning to think was a permanent thing with him still resting on his face.

“Do you have anywhere to be right now?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I don’t really know where anything is, so I’m going wherever there’s food,” I said, feeling the emptiness in my belly that would soon give way to embarrassing rumbles.

“You wanna come with me? I usually hang by myself, it’ll be nice to have someone along,” he said. It didn’t seem like he was embarrassed that he usually ate alone, he said it like it was just a fact. I liked that.

“Sure,” I said, smiling at him and turning the direction he did down the gravel path outside of the building. The gravel crunched beneath our feet, and I could already feel the nervousness from before subsiding and giving way to a pleasant feeling I couldn’t quite put my finger on.