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 \u201cclean\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Maggie\u2019s mom also shaved her head in solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My stepmom said, \u201cNo, mayo isn\u2019t strong enough. Get the chemicals,\u201d 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 \u201ckill the nits faster\u201d. 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, \u201cson of a…nit!\u201d 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While my dad combed through my hair for lice eggs, he gave me reading material. He gave me three booklets: \u201cPuberty and Me\u201d, \u201cThere\u2019s Hair There?!\u201d, and \u201cBoys Can Wait, But Heaven Can\u2019t\u201d. Is the last one implying I should die before meeting a boy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The puberty-abstinence booklets were a strange choice for me at ten. If you saw me in fifth grade, you would see why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No mothers were locking their sons up for fear I would seduce them. No one was going, \u201cthat kid is at risk of tween pregnancy\u201d. Prior to reading the American Girl book on puberty, I was still hanging onto the stork theory of baby delivery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I looked like I would be the kid in charge of the other kids\u2019 timeouts at a science museum. \u201cJeremy, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cCamden, stop throwing gum drops at Alexis! You\u2019re being a real Mike Teavee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory <\/em>right now, which is off-brand given that we\u2019re in a science museum!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/p>\n\n\n\n non-threatening, approachable, she-won\u2019t-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<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kirsten personality (she\u2019s 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\u2014which we wouldn\u2019t realize was less than ideal for another decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOh [little ethnically ambiguous boy], where is the auditorium?\u201d Mrs. Fisher would ask (because it was always Mrs. Fisher).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cRight this way, Mrs. Fisher,\u201d 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\u2019s racially-concerning third grade production of \u201cI Have a Dream…\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was the non-threatening kid moms trusted. I looked like my grandma was a preschool director at a Christian school. Which she was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I looked like a kid who read abstinence books on the weekends \u201cfor fun\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And the books weren\u2019t all that bad. I actually learned a lot from \u201cThere\u2019s Hair There?!\u201d. At the time, I didn\u2019t actually know there WAS hair there. And by \u201cthere\u201d I mean armpits, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","meta":[],"genre":[28,26],"year":[44],"class_list":["post-137","writing","type-writing","status-publish","hentry","genre-essays","genre-writing","year-44"],"acf":{"contributor":"Kylie Necochea","bio":"Kylie is a student at UCSD studying public health and literature. She likes re-reading Judy Blume and Nancy Drew and is fascinated by how tweens are taught about puberty.","text":"","contributor_page":null},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writing\/137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/writing"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/writing"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"genre","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/genre?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"year","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dekonstruktr.com\/tidepools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/year?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}