I sit in the nurse’s office and watch the other girl, who is staring out to the playground, swinging her feet and acting like I’m not there. She is in my grade and has a white T-shirt under her blue-jean dress and she doesn’t have any spots on her shirt even though we had chili-cheese dogs for lunch. Her socks are white and so are her shoes, and her fuzzy dark hair is put up in pigtails and fixed with shiny pink plastic beads on the ends. The girl doesn’t look sick, and I think about telling her that and asking her why she’s here, but the nurse is sitting right there and has told me to be quiet twice already. The nurse already called Aunt Ronnie to come get me because that’s the phone number that was next to my name, even though I told her not to because me and Josh don’t live there anymore. I heard Aunt Ronnie answer on the other end and she told the nurse not to call her again because me and Josh don’t live there anymore.
The door opens and a pretty woman in a dark green skirt with a dark green jacket and black high-heeled shoes comes in. The girl by the window hops off her chair and the lady says thank you ma’am to the nurse and takes the girl’s hand, and they go out the door, leaving it open so I can hear the noises from the hallway. Now I can see my reflection in the window in the space where the girl was, and I have dried blood on my knee from falling during kickball and I’m wearing Josh’s shirt with the wolf on it. One time Danny Boudreaux made fun of me for wearing boys’ clothes so I beat him down, which then I got in trouble, but it wasn’t too bad because I got to go home early, and then Aunt Ronnie didn’t care anyway. And I have long hair that hangs in strings and is a color that’s part blonde and part brown and looks dirty because it is, and also because it’s just that color.
I hear lots of kids coming down the hallway, running and screaming because they just got done with recess or lunch. Josh comes into the office and tells the nurse that he’s going to take me home, and the nurse tells him about the shampoo to buy, and that we can get it at the Dollar General, and how to wash all of our clothes and sheets in hot water and vacuum everything and put everything else into plastic bags, and Josh nods like we will do those things. She tells him all this right in front of me, like she couldn’t have told me or that I wouldn’t have been able to remember. Then we leave and the nurse doesn’t ask Josh if he’s coming back to school that day, probably because she’s new and doesn’t know that Josh is still in fifth grade.
Josh is almost thirteen and he’s still in fifth grade because he’s stupid. I’m not saying this to be mean but just because it’s true. He’ll even tell you so if you aren’t just saying it to be mean. He’s good at things like knowing what to do and fixing things and telling me stuff he’s learned, but he can’t really read and it is hard for him to do math but he’s okay at counting up money and reading clocks. I didn’t learn how to read until this past year, but my teacher hasn’t noticed that I learned yet, or she just doesn’t care because I still go to Special Ed during Reading. I still can’t read fast, but if I go slow I can read not just by saying the words out loud and skipping the hard ones, but by being able to tell you what happened in the story.
It’s hot today and the air feels heavy and full of water. We both breathe hard as we walk up the road from the school toward the Dollar General. Josh combs his wet hair back over the top of his head with his fingers. His hair is the same color as mine for the same reasons, and he hasn’t got it cut in a long time so it hangs down in his face and his ears stick out from under it. His eyes squint in the sunlight and this makes him look kind of like a rat, but I don’t say that.
The Dollar General doesn’t have air conditioning, but it has fans hooked up by the check-out so it’s cool and breezy by the door. We walk over to the soap aisle and a lady is there stocking the shelves with soap and body washes and lotions for old ladies. We find the shampoo and it’s $10, which is something the nurse didn’t tell us.
The lady looks over at us all nosy and asks if we have bugs. I stop scratching my head and I give her a look for being pushy and stupid because why else would I be holding the bottle but mostly because I’m mad that she’s standing right there so we can’t steal it.
“That stuff don’t work for shit,” the lady tells us. “With my kids, the only thing that worked was kerosene.”
That’s not what the nurse said to do, and it sounds like she wants to sell us something that costs even more than $10. But Josh talks to her, and he says he knows what kerosene is and he thinks Daddy has some, and the lady tells us how to do it and she gives us some of the store’s yellow plastic bags to wrap things up in even though we don’t buy anything. I feel bad for a minute for thinking about stealing from her but not bad enough to say thank you.
We walk home. We go back past the school and past the road that goes down to Aunt Ronnie’s and the Pentecostal Church, and then we have to wait for the train. It creeps back and forth over the tracks, letting go of some cars and hooking up to others. I want to get close and watch underneath the train, but Josh doesn’t like it when I do stuff like that. So I don’t because he’s here with me.
I try not to scratch, but my head itches worse now that I know what’s in it. Josh doesn’t tease me about the lice. Besides all the other things he’s good at, he’s good at being nice to me. But he also knows that I hit and bite pretty hard.
After the train leaves, we go on and turn past the Church of Christ and then there’s the Seventh Day Adventists. Right past there the yellow middle stripes end. We walk on for a ways. We go past the Black First Baptist, and then the road turns to dirt and these pine trees here are tall because they haven’t been cut down in so long. There are fewer houses out here. We cross the muddy part in the road that the creek floods over when it rains, and pass the house with all the dead and rusty cars out front. We go around the corner and a few steps down the path and then we’re there.
Daddy let us have the big bed in the room in the back when we moved in, and he sleeps on the little bed that comes out of the couch in the front. Josh and I take the sheet off of the bed and bring it outside with my other clothes. They’re mostly Josh’s old ones except for my favorite shirt with Minnie Mouse on it that’s got a hole in the armpit and a pair of pink shorts that Aunt Ronnie bought for me that are getting too tight to wear anymore.
It’s dark in the trailer because there aren’t many windows. It’s hotter and stickier in there than it is outside. We go into the kitchen and Josh digs through all the stuff under the sink until he finds the big jug of kerosene. He looks at the back of it like he is looking for instructions about how to get rid of lice that he wouldn’t be able to read anyway. He untwists the cap and I lean my head over the sink and pull my shirt up from my neck to cover my face.
He pours it all through my hair. I can smell it real bad. He stops every few seconds and rubs it through my hair and onto my head. I try holding my breath but that just makes it worse when I finally have to breathe in. When the bottle is empty, he goes outside to fill up the bucket with some water to start washing the sheet and my clothes with the bar of soap. I stand with my head hanging upside down over the sink for a while but I’m getting dizzy, so I take off my shirt and wrap my hair up in it, like they did with a towel the time I went with Aunt Ronnie to the beauty salon. I go sit outside on the steps by the door. It is better than being inside, but it is the stickiest part of the day and there is no breeze and the smell hovers around my face.
After a while my head starts to burn, not too bad but a little bit, so I figure that means it worked. I go over to the hose and pull my shirt off of my hair. Josh drizzles water over my head as I scrub hard with my hands. My fingers get stuck in the knots in my hair, and even though we keep rinsing, my hair stays clumped together and feels really slick and oily. The smell is still making me feel sick. I ask Josh if we can try rinsing it more with some soap, and so we try that for a while. It works okay but then he says that he doesn’t think the rest of it is coming out right now.
The sheet and my clothes are in a big bucket full of water that’s a muddy grey color because of the soap and because my clothes needed washing. We stay outside because now the house isn’t just hot, but it stinks too since we poured stuff down the sink, which wasn’t a very good idea. I wring out my hair and Josh gives me his shirt because he says I shouldn’t be sitting there without a shirt but he says he doesn’t have to wear one, which is unfair. No one lives out here anyway except us and sometimes the guy in the house next to us with all the car parts, but that man hasn’t been there in a long time. I swirl the clothes around in the bucket with my hands, and a few tiny spidery bugs float to the top, some kicking around in the water and others just floating there. It’s hard to believe that they live in my hair, especially since Josh says he heard that lice like clean hair and he jokes that there are probably much better heads to live in than mine. I’ve seen them crawling around on my clothes and on the sheet before, but I thought the trailer just had tiny spiders. I always thought lice were supposed to be too small to even see, almost invisible.
After a while we go wring out the sheet and my clothes and rinse them with the hose, then hang them up on the line so that they dry during the night unless it starts to rain. As the sun gets lower Josh says that he’s hungry so we go into the kitchen. In the cabinets there are crackers and peanut butter. We take them and go sit back out on the steps to eat them, but the smell near my face makes it so I don’t feel like eating. The crickets and cicadas start chirping and buzzing, and some fireflies come out.
I’m tired and my head hurts, so Josh opens the window beside our bed and I lie down on the mattress. Josh sits outside on the steps carving a stick into a point with his pocketknife. I start praying so that the bugs and the smell will go away and this makes me fall asleep. So I don’t know when Josh comes in, but when I wake up in the morning he’s there asleep with his back to me on the edge of the other side of the bed.
When he wakes up, Josh pokes through my hair because he figures that we should check if the lice are gone, but he says they aren’t. He jumps away when he thinks he sees one because he doesn’t like spiders or things that look like spiders.
Josh says that he heard that if you cut off your hair short it helps get them out because there are fewer places for them to go. I don’t want to because it’s my hair and I already look like a boy. He promises me that it will look okay. I still don’t want to but he tells me that we have to so that we can go back to school.
He gets the scissors and I make myself be brave. I squeeze my eyes shut and I feel my hair fall onto my shoulders and into my lap in big chunks. I keep thinking he’s done but he keeps cutting and cutting. I finally tell him to stop, and I reach back to touch my hair on the back of my neck. It’s so short that I can barely hold it between my fingers. I know I’ll never be able to put it into pigtails. I run into the room and look in the mirror and all I see is ugly and dirty.
I don’t like crying because it’s for wusses, but I start crying worse than I can remember for a long time. I wish that somebody else was here, even though they’d probably be mad first off that I got lice, and then that we tried to fix it the way we did. Josh comes in and stands by the door with his hands in his pockets. I haven’t cried in front of him since I was a little baby and didn’t know any better. And I know that I should be glad that he is here with me but that just makes me hate him even more instead. After a while of me crying and him standing there nearby, he says that maybe we should’ve used mayonnaise rather than kerosene, because he’s heard that it works too, and I turn around and I hit him hard in the chest.
