244/365 Lice

"Mrs. Wissinger?" Jillian runs into me in the hallway as I'm chatting with Cynthia. Everyone else is doing their work.

"What is it?" I ask her. Jillian rarely has anything to say. For 3 years, the only girls in my class were Beth and Nikki. Jillian moved in last April and had to vie for a spot with them. It's only half worked. Minh Thu balanced things better for school work and playground games but she didn't understand enough English to really chat at lunch. And then Drina moved in and Jillian practically stood with her arms blocking Drina's way to Beth and Nikki. Jillian was a little rough around the edges and had been in and out of our school, according to Jane and Terri. Jane had hotlined the family, in fact, at one point. Things seemed fine from my point of view now.

"It's Drina," she begins. "I walked past her desk just now, and there were, you know, bugs in her hair."

Crap. Lice. Cynthia rolls her eyes and tells me she'll talk to me later. I go in, over to my desk, and pull out two pencils. Been there, checked those heads before.

"Drina?" I say quietly. "Can I see you in the hallway?"

She follows me out. Her hair is tightly French-braided. I stand over her just a bit and can see there's no lice. No nits, no bugs. "Never mind," I tell her. I don't even touch her with the pencils.

"Jillian?" I call at the door. "Your turn."

I check Jillian's head for lice. "But it's Drina who's got the lice, Mrs. Wissinger," she protests. And then I check everyone else's head to cover my rear.

The next morning, Mr. Avdo is in the office. Hot. He sees me and walks over to me with his fists clenched. "How dare you say my daughter has bugs in her hair," he says. I see Drina in the doorway of the office with her still very pregnant mother. He yells at me in at least two languages and then storms out. Sr. Fern catches him.

"Mrs. Wissinger was just following procedures," she tries to reassure him. But he blows right past her and down the steps to the parking lot. His wife follows with two little children. Drina stands there in the office.

"Drina," Sr. Agneta comes out of the office with her. "Let's go upstairs." And as they step into the stairwell, Agneta smiles the fakest smile I have ever seen. "Sorry," she says.

Fern turns to me then. "Tell me you did follow procedure, that you checked all the children in your room, not just her?"

"Yes," I say truthfully. "Look, another girl said she saw something and I felt like, well, I felt like I didn't want to get lice--"

She laughs. "Tell me about it! When I worked at a school in Cincinnati, we had to close down for a week there were so many kids out with lice. What a pain!"

And it's over. I'm not in trouble, Mr. Avdo doesn't kill me, and Drina shows up in my classroom a few minutes later like nothing happened. Bah.