It stands to reason that if lice are discovered roaming around on your head, you want them to be fresh lice. You don’t want to become an amateur epidemiologist, thinking back to when your head first started itching, and to how none of the dandruff shampoos you tried did the trick, and to all the upholstered things you slept and sat upon recently, including the lounge area of a charter boat, and to all the lingering, meaningful hugs you’ve given since your symptoms started, and to how, with Google’s help, you’ve privately begun to attribute the incessant scratching to a rare neuropathy or perhaps advanced skin cancer of the scalp.

Because it makes more sense that a solitary louse would be born behind my ears this week, fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s forehead, and not conceived by other lice who were running rampant through Bean’s classroom toward the end of the school year, lice which then crawled onto my child and laid their eggs in her tangled hair, which always, inexplicably, has lollipop in it, eggs which then spawned more lice, which were then drawn to a new blood host as she relayed the adventures of Harry Potter and Hermione to her rapt, infested daughter, who also wanted cuddles.

But it’s been wonderful to confirm that so many scalps in my immediate and extended family also maintain temperatures of 82-86°F. If not for the lice, we wouldn’t have known. Now I wonder if during Covid times I should’ve circulated more, so we all could’ve learned more things about the human body.