the backstory

I was hunched over a worksheet, its language in an imprecise, smudged purple. I scratched my head thoughtfully. In one of the worksheet’s blanks, a single tiny bug writhed.

In horror, I realized it had fallen from my head.

My hand shot up. I think I have lice, I hissed at my fourth grade English teacher, before she had even made it to my desk. Classmates dropped their pencils.

She calmly bent at the waist, the tip of her nose nearly brushing against my scalp. I felt her nails scratch through my hair. It felt nice.

I think you do, too, she said flatly, pulling herself upright. Her nose made wrinkles.

The school nurse, to whom I had immediately been dispatched, had very short nails. They were almost imperceptible through the thick skin of her latex fingers. She worked through my hair expertly. She tugged at a strand of my hair, tugged at it beginning at its root, held it pinched between her fingernails, scraped the hair from root to tip with her gloved short fingernails. She indicated what must have been a microscopic white speck, adhered to her thumb’s tip.

You don’t have lice, she said. You have nits. This is a nit. Do you see it?

No.

Well, it’s nits. She pinched the white speck again, and then peeled her gloves away from her hands. She left them in an inside-out ball in the wastebasket. A nit is just an egg. It’s nits.

I think it’s lice, I said suspiciously.

Nits, she corrected me. So I have to call your parents.

My face brightened. I get to leave school? I asked her.

She looked at me. She winced. Yes, you get to leave school.

I lay on the rustling paper of the nurse’s examination bed, scratching my head and staring into a fluorescent light. Twenty minutes later, my aunt appeared in the doorway. She looked stricken.

School’s almost out, I told her. I said it like an accusation.

—

The only thing I’d ever had removed from my hair was gum, and also some peanut butter. We added the peanut butter so that the gum would slide out, but the gum ended up having to be trimmed away with scissors. But now, for whatever reason, I believed that peanut butter could somehow stifle my hairbugs. Apply food to my head, please.

In an after-school program in Seattle’s public school system, a woman had tried to remove this wad of gum — I’d almost certainly put the gum there myself — with peanut butter and a stainless steel spoon. I’d loved it. Peanut butter had squished between each strand of hair.

A short time later, this woman, this day-care-care-taker, would phone my grandfather, one grey day when I would be forgotten and left at daycare by both parents until nightfall. Some time later, my grandfather, this grand man who was most like a father, would phone my aunt. Some time after that, my aunt would meet me in Texas, and reënroll me in the first grade.

Once, when I’d caught chickenpox, my grandfather filled our bathtub with oatmeal, and then put me square in the center of it, like a happy strawberry.

—

A pediatrician prescribed the local grocery store. Specifically, he prescribed some embarrassing box located publicly in one of its aisles. This kit offered a fine-toothed comb, some ointment or shampoo, and simple, easy-to-understand instructions for shamed parents and their thrilled children.

He’d tried to ease my aunt’s horror. Children get lice from other children, he told her. Adults don’t really get lice because of the very hot water in the shower, so if they catch lice, it usually dies.

My aunt had pointed at me. We give her baths, she’d said.

Now my aunt had turned my hair into a turban of foam, with coils of infested hair bound to my head by still more foam. I sat and waited, naked, on the toilet seat. My aunt held a wristwatch.

Okay, she instructed. She pointed at what was a very, very hot shower. The water was already running.

In, she said. I slowly stood. I tiptoed into the shower and reluctantly bowed my head into the beams of water.

Instantly, the foam thinned, uncoiling my topknot.

I screamed. Tiny bugs — bugs! I knew it! — wriggled on my shoulders. They wriggled on my chest. Little jets sent streams of bugs down my abdomen. The last of them landed on my feet. It was probably only my imagination, but I believed I could feel them wriggling. I strained to see the nape of my own neck. Bugs wriggled on the backs of my shoulders. I screamed.

I picked at my hair with the prepackaged lice-comb, long after my aunt had declared my head safe again. I stood at the mirror, picking with the comb, slowly scraping from the root down to the tips of my hair, examining the comb’s teeth after each pass.

When I found a tiny speck of white, or black, I captured it from the teeth of the comb. I pinched it between the nails of my thumb and forefinger. I will never be cured, I thought.

I kept the comb for years after. I would pass it through my hair and examine its teeth. I would scald it first, and again after. I was never certain of what I’d found. I continued this self-examination, until at last, the comb cracked from wear and age. I was too ashamed to ask for another.

—

I had learned about lice, snot, gas that could be contracted from chronic farters, and other legendary species of Cooties, from the mysteries of hushed recess rumor.

A year later, in fifth grade English class, we were assigned a book for class reading. That is to say, our teacher read the book’s entirety to us aloud during class. I hid my eyes from the paragraphs about lice.

In China, they eat flied lice, was how one line of the book went. The character pulled at the corners of his eyelids when he said this.

The fifth grade English teacher had read it aloud to us, and howled. We children stared at her blankly.

Does anyone get it? she asked, her smile faltering. We looked at one another, and slowly shook our heads no.

No one gets it? she sighed. She held the sentence in place with her thumb, and closed the book around it.

—

When my aunt returned to the school to apologize to my fourth grade English teacher, a day or two after my head had been cured, the teacher told her this: The twins had it last week.

Not the twins!

The English teacher’s daughters, twin girls, were almost perfectly identical, with straight pearls of baby teeth that had tiny spaces between. Their hair was blonde almost to perfect white albinism. It curled from their hairlines and fell in perfectly circular yellow-white ringlets on their tiny, matching round shoulders. Their arms were golden with athleticism. They had the loveliest clothes in the entire elementary school — except for one horrible muumuu with tropical print, which they shared — though the twins were much too young, any observer felt, for their tight acid-wash denim, their belt buckles, their boots. The twins had shy drawls, with perfectly mastered inflection. The twins were perfect miniatures of their mother. The twins were beloved.

Not the twins!

I’m not sure where they caught it, the fourth grade English teacher said lightly. Kids play. They catch these things from each other.

She turned to eye me.

My aunt shrugged, her apology wilting under the English teacher’s reassurance.

In the fourth grade, I received two Ns in the same six-week period. On a report card, each class’s average would be followed by two numbers: there was the letter average grade (A, B, C, F) and the conduct grade (E, A, N, O). N stood for “Needs Improvement.” I can’t remember what O meant, but it wasn’t for Outstanding. I don’t think I ever got an E.

My aunt was beside herself. Two Ns? Two Ns? she asked me.

I knew I’d get one, I explained. I don’t know why I got two. I could explain nothing.

The first N, fine, my homeroom teacher and I had met and settled on. Each sentence spoken in class, “out of turn,” resulted in a single infraction for that day of the week. A prominently displayed sheet of posterboard, which nearly consumed one classroom wall, visually charted us students’ progress into the bowels of delinquency. It took one infraction per day to move entirely into the red.

I was a schoolyard victor, having successfully moved my cardboard coin down the velcro spectrum, from one end clear to the other, redder end — and with consistency! Nearly each and every week! I had been sent to the principal! More than once! One time, I was sent to the principal for having gotten into a fight! A physical fight! With the school librarian’s son! This, my homeroom teacher and I discussed congenially, was certainly grounds for one hard-earned N.

The second N! How could I have possibly captured myself an elusive, peripheral N? My mind reeled. How could any child, spending only a half hour in any class (other than homeroom) on alternating days, possibly net enough time in any one place to possibly earn herself an N?

My aunt appeared before the fourth grade teachers to ask.

I thought we’d all agreed, the fourth grade English teacher said meekly. Didn’t we all agree to give her Ns for this period?

The other teachers shook their heads.

I said I’d give her an N? my homeroom teacher offered.

Well, the fourth grade English teacher said, turning to face my aunt, I thought we were agreed.

—

Much later, when I was driving a car, I scratched my head thoughtfully.

Gabriel, I said to my passenger. Here’s something horrible. When I was a kid, I caught lice. Maybe from the twins.

Gabriel looked at me. Who?

The twins. The coolest girls in school?

Ah, he said.

And sometimes, I said, scratching behind one ear, I worry that I never got rid of the lice. I worry that I have some sort of freaky adult super-lice.

Ew, Gabriel said. I don’t think so. You’d know.

I put on my turn signal. Would I? I asked him.

I’ve always loved how Gabriel is able to recoil in a very polite way.