THE GIRL sitting ahead of him came in mornings smelling woodstove and destitute. Terry’s head itched, and he scratched at it with his tooth-bit fingernails. The civics teacher, a man shaped like an apple, called Charles Hawthy, stopped talking and asked him to come up front. Terry raised from his desk, up front stood with his back to the class, at one side of the teacher’s metal desk. Terry smelled the aftershave he used, the kind on television with the pearl white bottle and the pirate ship on front, and felt his stomach turn when he did. He hated the smell; it made him think of the rich man, Nola Walker, and others like him, handshakes and white tooth smiles, church clothes and money clips. Charles Hawthy looked close at his hair and shook his head.
Leave now, he said. Go straight to the nurse.
Terry didn’t understand. The girl in front of his desk wrote at her paper. Charles Hawthy got him by the arm and tugged him at the door.
All of us will end up with it, all of us, he said. Can you be responsible for that? Can you?
He pushed Terry into the hall and shut the door hard. Terry scratched one side of his head, and then the other one, and then the top and the back.
The nurse found lice. She wore plastic gloves and picked at his hair. How did you get this? she said. I don’t know, Terry said. Do you wash your hair? Sometimes.
Sometimes.
She went to a cabinet and got a small white bottle and gave it to him. He looked it over.
Use it twice today, twice tomorrow, then you need to wash your hair every day, soap, hot water, it doesn’t matter.
Terry nodded and put the bottle in the inside pocket of his jacket.
They start to come back, you see me alright?
Thank you, he said.
He walked past the door to his class, and he kept going, and then he pushed the double doors near the front offices and made down the main walk. No one came after. He walked on the shoulder.