I glanced at Mac asleep on the floor and asked slowly, “Do we have fleas?” I gave him his flea medication on the same day every month.

Dallas sat up and pinched his lips together, and somehow managed to say calmly, “No. You have l-i-c-e.”

“L-i-c-e?” Josh muttered the letters under his breath.

“Li-cee?” That was Louie.

I still had a hand on my head as I wrinkled my nose. “What—Oh my God. No!”

* * *

There are only a handful of things in the world that I’d been embarrassed to buy. When I was a teenager, I’d purposely only buy pads and tampons at stores that had a self-checkout lane. In my early-twenties, I started buying condoms online because I was too embarrassed to buy them at the store. There was also itch relief medicine for that time I had a yeast infection, and lubricant that I had bought for Louie when he’d been a baby and needed to get a thermometer where no thermometer should ever have to go.

And then the lice happened.

Lice. Lice. Fucking lice.

Vomit crawled up my throat each time I thought about the eggs and little critters covering my head and the boys’.

Buying three boxes of medication and a gallon of bleach at the twenty-four-hour pharmacy went on the list of things I was ashamed to buy. When I was a kid, we had gasped over the nasty kids who’d had lice. And now I had three of them in my house, one of them being me.

“You really don’t have to do this,” I had told Dallas the second it clicked that I needed to be at the pharmacy five minutes ago and claimed we needed to leave right then.

Standing in front of me and in between two freaked out kids that had yelled, “THERE’S BUGS IN OUR HAIR?” all he had done was blink and stay cool, and then he’d plucked my car keys from my hand. “I’ll drive. You look up what you need.”

Well, when he put it like that, I swallowed my “I’ve got this.” There were eggs in my hair, in Josh’s hair, in Louie’s. Oh my God. It was disgusting. Really, really disgusting. I swore my head felt even itchier after Dallas had confirmed what the hell was on us. For one moment, I thought about calling my mom, but after we’d ended the night, the last thing I wanted was for her to find a reason to blame me for the boys getting lice, because she would. Forget that I knew for sure I’d gotten it once in elementary school—my entire fourth grade class had gotten them—but it would be a whole different situation if it happened on my watch.

Like Dallas suggested, I spent the ride looking up what I needed to buy and do. He stayed in the car with the boys while I ran in and bought what was needed, the clerk only side-eyeing me a little when he rang me out.

“You do their treatment and I’ll help with the sheets,” Dallas said in that crisp, no-nonsense tone of his as we pulled into the house.

“Really, you don’t have to do that. It’s already almost twelve.” Fuck, it was almost midnight? From the instructions I saw online, I was going to be up all night, washing sheets, clothes, and vacuuming. We were going to have to wake up early too, for Josh’s next game.

I was going to be sick. I could handle blood. I could handle the boys when they were sick and threw up all over the place. Diarrhea and me were old friends… but this lice thing crossed a line into a territory I couldn’t deal with. Bugs and I were not friends meant to have a close, personal relationship together.

I caught him glancing at me briefly before turning his attention forward again, but his hands flexed across the steering wheel. I’d put a grocery bag over the headrest for him because I was paranoid. “I know I don’t have to.”

“I have fleas!” Louie hollered from the backseat.

“You don’t have fleas. You have lice,” I corrected him, crying a little on the inside at the reminder.

“I hate lice!”

“Lou, do you even know what lice do?” I asked.

Silence.

I snickered and laughed a little despite it all. It was for the best that he didn’t. “Okay, which one of you borrowed someone’s hat?”

There was a brief moment of quiet before Josh let out a groan. “I used Jace’s hoodie last week.”

Son of a bitch. How many times since then had we all spent time on the couch together or had I hugged one of them, pressing our heads together? Louie had slept with me and shared my pillow twice the week before. I knew for sure he had slept with Josh one night also.

“I’m sorry,” he blurted out.

“It’s okay, J. It happens.” I hoped it never happened again, but it wasn’t like he’d gone out of his way to get infected, or whatever it was considered.

“I was at sea once when a lot of people got lice,” Dallas piped up not two seconds after I finished talking. “I’ve never seen so many adults cry in my life, Josh. We’ll get it all sorted out, don’t worry.”

Why did he have to be so nice? Why?

“You were in the army?” Josh asked.

“Navy.”

The eleven-year-old scoffed. “What? Why didn’t I know that?”

I could see Dallas’s mouth form a grin even as he kept his attention forward. “I don’t know.”

“For how long?”

“Twenty-one years,” the man answered easily.

The noises that came out Josh’s mouth belonged to a kid who couldn’t begin to comprehend twenty years. Of course he couldn’t. He still had at least seven more years before life started bowling right by him. “How old are you?”