“Pfft. She’s not gonna get head lice. She takes a bath every day. She’s a pretty little girl. Only fat boys who smell like old clams get head lice.”
“I’m sure she won’t, but I don’t like the idea of the head lice kid going to school with her every day.”
“She’ll be fine,” I said. “No way she gets head lice.”
Many Months Later
The girl got off the school bus on a Friday afternoon scratching her head and I thought nothing of it. She scratched it as she walked down the street. She scratched it while she was watching TV. She scratched it while she ate dinner, and while she colored in her coloring book, and while she begged me for an ice cream sandwich. At some point, after hours and hours of scratching, enough to tear off her own scalp, I finally connected the dots.
“Hey,” I said to my wife, “she sure is scratching her head a lot.”
My wife’s eyes widened. “I was just gonna say that!”
“Maybe she has dandruff. I have lots of dandruff. Look . . .” I scratched my head and thirty pounds of dead skin sloughed off. “Dandruff.”
“I’m worried she has lice.”
“No way.”
“Remember when Marshall Reilly got it?”
“Who?”
“One of her classmates. You’ve met his mother several times.”
“I have?”
“You know! She has brown hair. Her husband’s name is Mike. He’s a lawyer.”
“(blank stare)”
“Oh, for God’s sake. I’m gonna check her.”
“Don’t do that. She’s fine.”
I was trying to keep my wife away from the girl’s hair because little girls do not like it when you touch their hair. Every time I dared to approach my daughter with a hairbrush, she would scream as if she were being subjected to Civil War–era surgery. Then I would tell her to stop screaming and she would scream even louder, and then I would brush her hair anyway as punishment for all that screaming. This was not a healthy way of doing things. My daughter will probably grow up with an intense fear of hair. Wigs will scare her to death. She’ll marry a guy with alopecia and that will be that.
So I was averse to exploring the girl’s scalp, but my wife was more than happy to attack other people’s heads. At random hours, she would walk up to me and begin looking through my hair without even bothering to ask me if that was something I wanted. If I had an eye booger, she would jam a finger into my eye socket without so much as a warning. And she happily assaulted the girl with a hairbrush for minutes at a time every morning. She had no fear of reprisals. She’d be great at mugging people.
She walked up to our daughter, who was parked in front of the TV, and began rooting through her hair.
“What are you doing?” the girl yelled. “STOP!”
“I’m checking your hair,” my wife said.
“Go away!” she said, burying her head in one of the throw cushions on the couch.
“No, no, no! Don’t put your head there. If you have lice, they’ll get in the cushion.”
“STOP!”
“Drew, I see little things in here. Come look.”
I stared down into my daughter’s wriggling head and saw a bunch of little blond capsules, as wide as two hairs across. They were shiny, almost greasy in appearance.
“It’s probably dandruff,” I said.
“That’s not dandruff.”
Now the research began. My wife hopped onto the computer, Googled “head lice symptoms,” and opened up every single link.
“Look here,” she said. “It says, ‘Nits resemble tiny pussy willow buds. Nits can be mistaken for dandruff, but unlike dandruff, they can’t be easily brushed out of hair.’ That’s what she has.”
“You’re overreacting,” I said. At this point, I was like the clueless sheriff you see in movies, the last guy to acknowledge that aliens have invaded.
“Well, let’s look at the pictures and see,” she said. I tried to stop her from clicking “IMAGES” because when you search for an illness on Google Image Search, it gives you photos of the ugliest people imaginable exhibiting the worst symptoms imaginable. Also, you get a picture of a penis, for no reason at all.
But I was too late. She hit search and I was confronted with a mosaic of severely lice-ridden scalps. Nits, nits everywhere. Bleeding heads. Broken skin. Pus-filled abscesses. In the center of it all was a photo of an adult louse, swollen to ten times its size after feasting on a child’s blood. Oh God, it was so awful. I can still see it in my head even though I don’t want to.
“Close the browser! Close the browser!” I said.
“You see now? She has it.”
“It could still be dandruff.”
“Oh my God, Drew. What is wrong with you? Can you please accept reality here?”
I still clung to the now-infinitesimal chance of this all being an elaborate ruse. I didn’t want it to be head lice because I didn’t want to deal with what was certain to be a world of bullshit involved in ridding my daughter of it. I stood in the dining room and watched from afar as my wife went back and dug into my daughter’s head.
“STOP!!!!”
“Honey, hold still,” my wife told her. “You definitely have lice.”