Lice
When I was in fifth grade, I got lice. Addendum: in fifth grade, my whole Girl Scout troop got lice after spending the weekend before Thanksgiving camping in a lodge that smelled unnervingly like butterscotch. The bunk beds we slept on had questionably “clean” sheets and pillowcases that gave off an unsettling odor as if they had been cleaned by a four-year-old who thought dipping a thing in water was equivalent to washing it.
Upon our return to school, we unknowingly gave lice to everyone in the fifth grade. Moms were especially happy about this given that it was the week of Thanksgiving.
Every other kid in class put mayonnaise on their heads to mend the situation and they were fine. Maggie and I were the exceptions to the mayonnaise treatment. Maggie shaved her head.
Maggie’s mom also shaved her head in solidarity.
My stepmom said, “No, mayo isn’t strong enough. Get the chemicals,” and she had my dad comb through my hair for nits five hours a day for a week. It was a cloudy, rainy week as he poured cold water over my head to “kill the nits faster”. It was cold, he was cold, I was cold. He was catching himself right before swearing the way dads do before their kids enter some level of teenagehood, you know, “son of a…nit!” But I was just happy he decided not to shave my head. He was on the edge of that precipice for several days before resolving to just cut my hair (at an unintentional 150 degree angle).
While my dad combed through my hair for lice eggs, he gave me reading material. He gave me three booklets: “Puberty and Me”, “There’s Hair There?!”, and “Boys Can Wait, But Heaven Can’t”. Is the last one implying I should die before meeting a boy?
All of the booklets were clearly written in the late 80s on account of the four-sizes-too-big solid-colored billowy sweatshirts worn by the kids and the abundance of upper lip sweat on the ethnically diverse cast of cover model tweens.
The puberty-abstinence booklets were a strange choice for me at ten. If you saw me in fifth grade, you would see why.
No mothers were locking their sons up for fear I would seduce them. No one was going, “that kid is at risk of tween pregnancy”. Prior to reading the American Girl book on puberty, I was still hanging onto the stork theory of baby delivery.
I looked like I would be the kid in charge of the other kids’ timeouts at a science museum. “Jeremy, stop rolling your grapes down the spiral coin collector! Just wait outside by the fountain with $200 worth of pennies in it and two stray baby shoes.”
“Camden, stop throwing gum drops at Alexis! You’re being a real Mike Teavee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory right now, which is off-brand given that we’re in a science museum!”
When lost PTA moms wandered onto my elementary school campus during the day, a look of rushed panic in their eyes, I would often be the one they asked for directions. I was the
non-threatening, approachable, she-won’t-grow-up-to-undermine-my-child-for-an-office-position kid. A real off-brand American Girl type, like Samantha but with Kit-length hair and a real
Kirsten personality (she’s the mid-19th century one who carries a spoon bag). Moms would ask me for directions to the bathroom or the library or the auditorium for the second night of the third grade play where their red-headed Irish sons were playing Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X—which we wouldn’t realize was less than ideal for another decade.
“Oh [little ethnically ambiguous boy], where is the auditorium?” Mrs. Fisher would ask (because it was always Mrs. Fisher).
“Right this way, Mrs. Fisher,” I would say as I listened to her black heels click on the cement behind me while I led her towards Ms. (was she married? Was she single? The mystery!) Carmichael’s racially-concerning third grade production of “I Have a Dream…”.
I was the non-threatening kid moms trusted. I looked like my grandma was a preschool director at a Christian school. Which she was.
I looked like a kid who read abstinence books on the weekends “for fun”. Which of course, was not true at all. I read abstinence books on holiday weekdays while my dad combed through my hair for lice not for fun, but because I was a Kit-Kirsten-Samantha hybrid: obedient. Spoon bag.
And the books weren’t all that bad. I actually learned a lot from “There’s Hair There?!”. At the time, I didn’t actually know there WAS hair there. And by “there” I mean armpits, of course.