O:JA&L Prose Discourse
Fiction: Short Story to 10,000 Words
Thomas Orange
THE LICE ASSASSINS
The 1980s are making a comeback: Stranger Things, Cheri Cheri Lady, and in my school, head lice.
It started in Biology class with Mrs Dye. She got on about antibiotic resistance. We were losing the ‘arms race.’
When she said ‘arms race,’ my mind drifted off, and I thought of a bunch of limbs lined up at the athletics track, the winner at the finish line pointing a finger in the air.
‘Kiera’s catching flies again,’ Chantelle said, looking at me.
Chantelle was the most popular girl in class. She had a talent for bringing me back to reality with a bump.
She was a ‘kidfluencer,’ with an Instagram account (run by her mum) with 10k followers. It was called Chantelle explains, and was like a news show where she explained to adults 6/7 and Labubu dolls.
There wasn’t much about my appearance I liked. I was a little lanky (from dad) and freckly (from mum). I had Grandad Jones’s teeth with the slight gap in the front two.
But what the family couldn’t explain was the mop: thick, brown, tight curls the women in the eighties wanted, like Whitney Houston.
I quickly stuck my tongue out at Chantelle and then closed my trap.
‘So that’s what I want you to remember when the new nurse talks to you. She tells me there is a new strain of… super lice… resistant to the regular shampoo.’
The nurse came in, but she wasn’t a nurse. Grandad McAllister had taught me about Thatcher (the witch) and NHS privatisation. This lady was a ‘private contractor,’ and her company was called The Lice Assassins.
She wore a T-shirt with the logo, showing a beastie being zapped by a special agent with a laser.
‘Hello, guys,’ she said.
Nobody replied, not even the nice gang.
She was weird-looking. Her hair was peroxide blonde, and she had lips like Mattesson’s sausages with Essex-Turkey teeth.
‘As Mrs Dye has told you, we’ve had an outbreak here at St Bede’s, but don’t fear, the lice assassins are here.’
She made a gun with her fingers– which had long, sharp nails– making a pew-pew sound.
Her face didn’t move the way a human woman’s face is meant to.
Botox, according to Mum.
#
Last year, Mr Rogerson, the history teacher, took us on a school trip to an ancient market town.
Beside a fountain was a blue plaque that read ‘Between 1590 and 1595, seven women were drowned here after being accused of witchcraft.’
Some of the other kids were joking about it, but I couldn’t stop looking at the fountain sides. There were grooves, probably made by erosion, but in my mind’s eye I could see a woman desperately scratching the walls trying to get out as people pushed her down with sticks like she was a bathtub sponge.
Some smart arse asked Mr Rogerson how he didn’t know whether all these women had actually been witches and they deserved it, and he gave us a lecture on ‘social contagion.’
Labubu dolls spread like Corona, which spread in the same way as accusations. It only took a few people, trendsetters for good and evil, to get something going.
Rumours swirled about lice. Some kid in year 5 had come down with them. There was purportedly a cluster in year 7.
And then came the ‘measures’. All girls with hair past their shoulders had to have it tied up, and they called us out to the lice-mobile for inspections.
Still, early on, the whole licedemic didn’t really bother me.
I had other things to worry about; I was in charge of our school’s new cycling proficiency program.
I suggested the idea to Mr Gainsborough, our headmaster, and he loved it. Every night after school, I laid out the cones, chalked the lines, and prepared the whiteboard to discuss the theory of being a good cyclist.
We were in year 6, which meant that the next year we’d be going to high school, and Chantelle said schools liked ‘extracurricular activities’ on their admissions forms.
I wanted to tell her she was talking rubbish, that 99% of us were going to Roebuck, the government school, and that to get in there you just needed to be able to spell your own name, but then, like I say, my course numbers were up because some kids now thought like LinkedIn addicts.
Well, one day, as I came into the changing rooms, two figures were hunched over the protective gear.
It was Laura and her assistant, holding a disembodied head over the disembodied helmets.
I’ve already described Lice Laura, but I haven’t described her assistant Tommy.
It was hard to say how they met because they couldn’t have been more different. This faded beauty queen and old Tommy the toady with a belly like a spacehopper.
Tommy’s hair was long on the sides, and he took these long bits and brushed them over the short bits at the top.
And that brings me to Axel. Axel was not a person, which was something I had to repeat to myself, and I didn’t always believe.
You see, Axel was their demo doll. The lice assassins carried him to show how to run the comb through your hair.
Axel could’ve been Laura’s brother. That was where my mind went. He’d been Laura’s younger brother, and she’d chopped off his head and now carried it with her everywhere she went.
He had the same frozen and smooth expression, but sometimes I think I’d see light in his eyes.
‘Yes?’ Laura said, closing a briefcase she was holding.
I didn’t know what to say. She was in my space but acted as if I’d just knocked on the door of the lice-mobile.
I could only think to nod at the helmet. ‘Is it ok?’
‘Have you been following basic hygiene practices with these helmets?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘I’ll take that as a no.’ She snapped back.
I suddenly felt like I was made of the paper that fairy cakes come in.
‘Ok, so how can I make them cleaner…’
‘Well, a numbering system. Each head goes into the same helmet.’
‘I can do that.’
‘Good,’ she answered. ‘We’ll take our samples back to our testing station.’
They left. She held Axel under her arm, and I swear I saw his cheek twitching as they went out of view.
My cycling proficiency crew came in as the school bell rang.
There was usually a feeling of liberation when our little club was starting, but now there was a kind of weight. A suspicion. People weren’t looking at each other whole in the face but out the corners of their eyes.
I didn’t have time to number the helmets yet, so I handed them out and told everyone to get their bikes.
We were being watched by Mr Gainsborough. Mr Gainsborough was a weird guy. Nobody was quite sure how he’d ever been made headmaster.
There was no PTA like in American movies, and my parents thought about making one when Gainsborough got the job.
My Dad called him a sap. On parents’ night, he overheard him with Jamie Clark’s parents saying, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, but your son was implicated in the condom on Mrs Ward-Prouse’s exhaust.’
And Gainsborough kept apologising in his middle-class manager’s voice.
Dad said the Clarks were like Putin, and if you rolled over, they’d see it only as weakness.
Mum told him to shut up, eat his marmalade, and not talk about Putin at the breakfast table.
I’d rather Gainsborough hadn’t been there, but he was the one who signed the certificates. Still, he spent most of his time on his phone.
‘Right, guys,’ I began. It was a big thing for me to speak in front of 30 people. ‘Before we start riding, we need to check brakes, tyres and chain.’
Chantelle yawned dramatically.
‘Now, I’ve set up some signs on our course,’ I continued. ‘Real road signs, and we must practice reacting to them.’
‘God,’ Chantelle answered, ‘we’re here to ride bikes, not sit an exam.’
‘We’re here to ride bikes safely and…’
‘Boring,’ she replied. ‘Don’t you think we have enough exams to worry about?’
She did have a point, which peeved me. We were taking our SATs, and teachers never got sick of telling us that it was the most important exam of our young school lives.
‘I know what you mean, Chantelle and….’
She cut me off again. ‘Kiera, did you hear about Mattie Myers in Year 5. She’s been out of school for a week.’
Chantelle was Queen Gossip. If it wasn’t Matty Myers, it was Jess Anderson who’d given herself a hickey and said it was from a boyfriend in Doddsdale who didn’t exist.
She was also credited with starting the rumour that Mrs Debagge had a secret OnlyFans account and would take her clothes off for money, even though she was 45.
‘Well, she’s probably sick,’ I answered.
‘Her older brother is off too, and Faith Thompson said she saw her at the window with that special shampoo in her hair.’
My mind is as jumpy as a March hare, and it zoomed to something I’d heard Mr Street say in History:
‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ I said.
Chantelle looked at me like I was a real oddball, which I guess I am.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Well,’ I paused, ‘they’re just nits. They’re not really gonna hurt you.’
She looked at me suspiciously and then continued holding court.
‘I spoke to the lice assassin lady, and she said these aren’t regular nits. They’re uber bloodsuckers. She said there was a homeless man found dead in Coquetfield, and they checked his whole body for a cut because he’d obviously bled to death, and nothing. Then they checked his long hair, and he had millions of nits which had completely drained him.’
‘I think that’s a fib,’ I answered. ‘My mum says every school has nits at some point and they come and go and don’t do any harm.’
‘Not these nits. They were genetically modified in a lab in China as a weapon against British people.’
I could see some of the other kids nodding, mainly the ones with phones. Chantelle was a kidfluencer after all.
‘You’re acting exactly like someone with nits!’ Chantelle continued. ‘You’re defending them.’
‘I don’t have nits.’
Why would it really matter if I did? I’d use the shampoo and the comb, and it’d be over in two weeks. I didn’t like the idea of blood-sucking beasties, but as Granny McAllister says, everyone needs to make a living somehow.
But even as I thought that, there was a strange feeling of shame and fear. I couldn’t have the other kids thinking bad of me.
‘Look at her hair,’ Chantelle continued. ‘Look how thick it is. It’s like Disneyland for them.’
‘Shut up!’
I lost my temper and felt the hot sting of tears in my eyes. Well, Chantelle was like the Clarks, whom she was related to, and I’d made the mistake of showing weakness.
‘I think Kiera is a superspreader! That mop is spreading nits like a dandelion spreads seeds in the wind.’
My brain is not my friend. Really. I had such a vivid picture in my mind’s eye, and then, before I knew it, I was crying and running away; the toilet door slammed behind me.
#
The nit-mobile was a converted transit van which stood in the playground, and each kid in the school made the long, lonely walk to be inspected.
It reminded me of something I once saw on TV. When the plague came to town, they’d raise a flag of death to warn anyone against entering. Well, the mobile was our flag of death.
I stood a while at the back door, not wanting to go in.
Laura was discussing business things with Tommy.
‘With these SEO tools we can increase visibility by 200% and…’
I tapped lightly, and they turned.
‘Oh, it’s you again,’ Laura said.
‘A snoop,’ Tommy replied.
Laura smiled like you would if you taught an old dog a new trick.
‘Yes, Tommy, a snoop.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I answered. ‘I didn’t mean to.’
‘Well, come on, hurry up,’ she said, ‘time is money.’
I stepped into the van. It was state-of-the-art. The first thing I noticed was a map on the wall labelled St Bede’s outbreak. It looked like something a detective would have to track suspects in a murder case.
Laura was one of those people who liked to talk about themselves and their projects.
‘Wet combing is our first method of attack, mixed with a smothering agent like petroleum jelly.’
There were too many words and images in my head. Smother made me think of a news report I once read about a baby whose nose and mouth were covered by its mother until it was dead.
But smother was only one letter different from mother. Could only mothers smother? My mum wouldn’t do that.
And the petroleum was Shell, and jelly was what Granny McAllister kept in the fridge on Tuesday to mix with Vienetta ice cream, which the fridge goblins used as a trampoline. And Vienna was a city in Austria where Hitler came from and… It went on like this, and Laura snapped her fingers.
‘You’re not listening?’
‘I am,’ I answered.
One thing I’ve learned is that if you meet someone who likes talking, you always have to pretend you’re listening.
My eyes flashed to another device. It was some piece of kit. It looked like a hairdryer mixed with a space-age laser.
‘That is the Pediculus Buster 2000. It blows filtered air at 57degrees over the scalp, no chemicals, an 88% effectiveness rate.’
‘Nine out of ten beasties,’ Tommy said.
Something had been wrong this whole time, or more wrong than it already felt, and I realised what.
Axel was staring at me.
Axel, the dummy head, was sitting on a table near the driver’s side of the van…
There was once a school trip to France that I didn’t go on because I was a homebird and would miss Mum and Dad too much.
Anyway, all the kids in class took pleasure in telling me what I’d missed out on, and the main thing was that they went to the Lover Museum, where the Mona Lisa was kept.
Billy Bob Tait told me the best thing about the Mona Lisa was that it didn’t matter where you stood in the room; it felt like her eyes were following you.
That was how it was with Axel. His eyes tracked your every move, like a tiger or a face recognition camera.
‘Ok, sit down,’ Laura continued. ‘Quickly.’
The main inspection chair had the kind of light attached to it that you might see in a surgical theatre.
I felt a dread that reminded me of the feeling Harry describes in The Prisoner of Azkaban when his face is sucked by a dementor.
I was staring into this surgical light, but it was like all the light had left the world. The sun had run out of puff– it still moved across the sky, but as cold as a bowling ball and if I tried to hug mum, we’d be repelled from each other like the wrong end of magnets.
Laura tossed her hands up theatrically.
‘Well, take out your bobble!’
I did as she said and released the mop.
She tutted a little. She didn’t like the mop, which I suppose made sense. She was looking for enemies, and they were easy to find if the land was empty.
‘You won’t go bald anytime soon,’ she said.
‘Definitely not bald,’ Tommy intoned like a parrot.
I watched him. The word ‘bald’ had made him drag the greasy, lank streaks of hair over his dome.
She started sectioning my hair, and I yelped because she was doing it too roughly.
‘You’re making a fuss,’ she continued.
It wasn’t like how Mum washed my hair. Mum wet it first, ran her fingers through the curls, and said, “Ok, Ms, a hand massage is included in the service,” and then I’d sink under the water.
I could hear and feel the gloves she wore squeal and pull against the strands.
After ten agonising minutes, she said, ‘All clear.’
‘That’s a relief.’
This seemed to offend her, and she fixed her pale blue eyes on me.
The eyes, by themselves, weren’t totally crazy; it was the eyes, mixed with eyebrows painted in the same style as the McDonald’s arch, but jet black.
‘You know, when I was a girl, hair like that was called messy.’
I brought my hands up defensively to the mop and rearranged it, but that was like trying to rearrange a rose bush.
‘Harder to keep clean,’ Laura continued, ‘And you wouldn’t want your head to smell, would you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’
Could I really cut the mop? I was deeply attached to it. Literally. Ten million curly hairs were corkscrewed into my scalp.
‘Are you interested in head lice?’ she said.
As I said earlier, around crazy people, it’s usually best to indulge them, so I nodded, maybe a bit too enthusiastically.
There was a screen in the wall beside Axel, and she pressed play.
A graphic appeared that read ‘Lice Assassin Production.’
The narrator said:
From the dawn of time, lice and humans have coexisted– all 532 species.
The video was weird. It was almost like it had been made by a louse itself to talk of the accomplishments of the lice kingdom.
Female head lice are very productive and can lay up to 8 eggs per day, with 1 week to hatch. A head louse can hold its breath for 8 hours, so good luck washing it out unless you take a very long bath!
And there was a graphic of Laura dressed in superhero clothes.
Infestation? Call the lice assassins.
She looked at me almost expectantly.
‘It’s very… good,’ I answered.
‘They’re a worthy enemy.’
‘Brave beasties,’ Tommy said.
‘Yes, they’re amazing,’ I answered.
Laura seemed even more keen. ‘Would you like to see some?’
‘I thought they’re too small to see.’
‘Ah, we have a microscope.’
I was in deep. I didn’t want to see a head louse, but I took after Mum.
We had a neighbour called Old Mrs Pollard. Mum would talk to her over the garden fence, and she felt sorry for her because Old Mr Pollard had died, and her daughter in Burnley never visited. So Mum went around to ‘keep her company for 20 minutes.’
But Old Mrs Pollard would talk her ear off for 90 minutes, and then ask Mum to run some errands for her.
Mum was like a ‘live-in carer’ according to Dad, and Mum would just sigh and say it wasn’t in her nature to say no.
Well, it wasn’t in me either, so I was looking down a microscope at this seed-like thing between two slides.
‘Keep looking,’ Laura said.
And I pretended to, but really I was closing both eyes, not just the one away from the lens.
‘Fascinating,’ I said, the same way as Mum did when Old Mrs Pollard showed her polaroids of Devon.
‘Oh, we have something better than that.’
When people say ‘better’, they usually mean a second portion of cheese on toast with brown sauce or an extra tenner in pocket money, but when she said the word ‘better’, I knew it was almost certainly worse.
She went into the drawer and retrieved the chamber.
My friend Ally Williamson’s brother kept a snake, and it looked a little like a snakebox with clear glass and a warming light. This light burned dark orange.
I couldn’t see inside because a sudden blast of fog went over it like a rainforest.
The fog cleared, and I gasped.
There was an outline of a head in the chamber, sawn off at the eyebrows.
The head was covered in a warm, bubbly gel, and artificial hair grew from it.
‘Wh, wh, what is it?’
‘That is a scalp unit.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘A nutrient-rich head identical to yours kept at a temperature of 36.3 °C and with a humidity of 83 %.’
Laura took the back of my head gently and moved it toward her beastly science experiment.
‘And what you see in the hair is our cohort of homegrown lice.’
‘But… why?’
Laura was transfixed on it and seemed to be studying its contours like a jeweller might a diamond’s points.
Then, maybe she realised she’d given too much of herself away because she quickly secreted it.
‘Why? Well, for science.’
I still remembered Coronavirus well.
Everything went online, and that was hard for Dad because he is a mechanic; if people aren’t driving cars, they don’t break down.
He went a bit nutty and, like all of us, spent a lot of time on the internet, but in the wrong places.
He would sit at the table and say it was from a biolab. The Chinese had been doing experiments in the bat lab, and it had escaped quarantine.
They were crazy. And mum told him he was being crazy.
But you know, long after anyone had stopped caring, I saw on YouTube that it had probably escaped from a bio-bat lab.
And that was all I could think about when I looked in the lice terrarium.
#
The sensible parents kept their kids out of school until the lice were killed.
Kids would disappear and then say on Insta that they were actually in Gran Canaria or that their Grandma’s budgie had died.
Still, you had a fair number of parents who had completely forgotten what it was like to be twelve.
They effectively ruined their kids’ cred for the next six years.
You see, if you came down with lice, you could still come to school as long as you wore a shower cap.
There was a whole painful assembly on it about how kids with rizz wore caps.
The caps all said the same thing. ULAP- Under Lice Assassin Protection.
God, their life was bad.
People think, maybe because of Woke, that schools are, I don’t know, nice places, but bullying hasn’t disappeared; the bullies have just levelled up, the same way kiddy-snatchers have. They don’t sit outside the school gates in a white van with a toffee apple. They add you on Snap.
Bullying is about emojis, view counts, and followers. It’s not so much what you say as what you don’t say, or a certain look.
The ULAP kids were lepers, and I went along with it, too.
Niamh Reynolds came up to me one day, and I felt repulsed by her.
She was shorter, much shorter than me, so I could see the whole top of her daft shower cap with its ULAP banner. And I felt like I could see the little beasties in there, and in my mind’s eye, it looked like one of those dystopics.
It was New York, lice New York, and some plague had wiped out millions, and the streets were piled up with rubble and dead and dying lice bodies, but ‘life finds a way’, and there’d be a few thousand strong super warrior nits who might even have the power to break through the plastic cap and set up a new colony in my mop.
Niamh was a nice kid from a nice family– too nice a family. Dad called them the happy clappers of Cleverly Court.
They were into Jesus, not so much God, i.e., the old man in the sky, but his son on Earth.
Jesus, as far as I could see, was very soft, and if you followed his teaching, it didn’t set you up well for a life in modern England.
Niamh didn’t have many friends, and here she was, with little hope of making more with her infestation.
‘Hey Kiera, I just wanted to make sure the cycling proficiency class is on tonight as usual.’
I winced. It’s hard to be nice to someone when you’re phobic of them.
‘Are you sure you’re ok to go, Niamh?’ My eyes scanned her head.
‘Oh, this is fine. I’m under Lice Assassin protection.’ She touched her cap, then showed me a badge, and finally a bag containing their shampoo. ‘And I have my own helmet.’
‘Listen, Niamh,’ I said, ‘I think maybe you should take a break, you know, just for a week or two while, well, you know.’
I watched as her face crumpled, but then I tried to remind myself of my brand.
As much as we mightn’t like it, we’re all brands. My cycling proficiency kids would think about the open road, the wind in their hair, but their mind’s eye would jump to Niamh Reynolds, whose hair was in a shower cap, and the whole time she gave off a chemicalised aroma of pomegranate shampoo.
‘It’s ok, Kiera,’ she answered. ‘I understand.’
Nice people always understand, and that’s half their problem in life.
I watched as she walked away, shoulders slumped, and that was when Chantelle came over.
‘You two are discussing tips?’ she said.
‘Tips?’
‘Yeah, tips to infect the whole school.’
I tried to ignore her, but some people have a way of getting under your skin, like ringworm, which we didn’t have to worry about… yet.
‘We all know you’re the superspreader, Kiera.’
‘I’m warning you, Chantelle.’
She turned to her two cronies and some other girls who’d stopped to watch.
‘Warning me about what? You’ll set your nit army on me?’
My life would be much easier, but for two things. One is that when people look at me, I go as red as a strawberry. Secondly, it compounds because what always follows the redness is the sting of tears.
If I’d just had it out with her there and then, let my face get as red as an explosion at a tomato tinning factory at sunset, maybe I’d have felt better, and it wouldn’t have happened the next time, but again I ran away and back to the toilet where I didn’t even have Moaning Myrtle for company.
#
I began avoiding Chantelle whenever I could. I knew she’d be there at cycling proficiency, so I did something I’ve never done before, and that was to fake being ill.
I didn’t even have to ham it up because, like I say, I’d never done it before, and Mum and Dad trusted me 100%.
Dad came in from work about 6, then went up to my room.
‘Kiera, petal, mum says you’re not well.’
‘I’m not, Dad.’
He sat on the edge, the single bed creaking under his weight.
Dad was big, bigger than Grandad McAllister ever was before he shrank…
In the nineties, Grandad McAllister was forced into a trip to Egypt– Sharm el Sheikh– and they took him to some hot springs so hot he came out like he’d been boil-washed.
I genuinely think he believed it. He said the cheapy fake clothes he bought at the market the day before were all too big now, and when he was on the plane on the way home, he asked the air hostess why he’d been upgraded to a seat with more leg room, and the woman replied it was the same plane and they were in the same seats.
I don’t think Dad was proud of being a working man. I mean, he loved the Boss Springsteen, but he’d say, ‘You know, Kiera, the whole point of those songs like Thunder Road and Born to Run is the people get out. They aren’t changing oil on their backs in their forties.’
He put his big mitt on my forehead to check my temperature.
Dad took care of his hands. Each night, he’d soak them in a secret mixture that’d wash away all the oil and dirt, leaving them smelling like peaches.
‘Is everything ok, Kiki? Tell me, honestly.’
‘Just a little ill.’
He looked at me hard.
I think every kid has to make a decision eventually. When you’re young, you tell your parents everything, and then at some point you have to stop.
You see that they’re people too, and a problem shared is not a problem halved, at least not for them, because they’ve accumulated all these other halves.
They’re worrying about the taxman, such-and-such a customer, and Aunt Kelly, because she refuses to take her pills.
You promised you’d never lie to your parents, but then you’re not really lying… you’re just…omitting.
Dad was strong; he was a wardrobe, but even I knew he had a few screws loose. God knows what he’d say if told about the goings on with the lice assassins.
He nodded and ran his fingers through the mop, which was all over my pillow.
‘I love you, Keeks,’ he said.
‘I love you too, Dad. I’ll be fighting fit in a few days.
What was true to say was that I couldn’t fake being ill anymore.
But I could skulk!
There was a craze last summer for liminal spaces. The backrooms. And it’s amazing how, if you put your mind to it, you can become a kind of ghost.
At break time, you sit in the gap between the geography and history block, and there are always store cupboards galore in a school. Nobody tends to ask what you’re doing in a store cupboard, at least if you don’t have a reputation for mischief.
My number-one place to lie low was the school showers.
The abandoned showers were a skulker’s paradise. It was just the spiders and me; then one day I heard the conspirators come in.
Lined up in front of them were all the cycling proficiency helmets.
It’s funny what your mind snaps to, because I thought they might be helping out. Before I left the cycling proficiency program, I had gotten into the habit of checking each helmet for damage because I read online that a cracked helmet increases your chance of death by 60%.
But then I noticed something was wrong, creepy wrong. Laura was spectating Tommy as he held each helmet. He wore a large magnifying glass strapped to his forehead, like the doll fixer in Toy Story.
They had their lice terrarium with the sawn-off head coated in gel, and they were doing almost a kind of surgery, like transplanting the hairs into the helmets.
Suddenly, all the pieces came together. It made perfect sense. They were in the lice business. What better way to stay in business than by spreading infection?
#
There was a brief lull in exams, and I had a mission: expose them.
They gave weekly updates during school assemblies, and I decided to sneak into the mobile when they weren’t there.
After months of skulking, I’d become an expert at moving unseen, so it wasn’t hard for me to get inside.
A laptop was sitting open on the desk, and I edged towards it, still checking over my shoulder for any sign of someone watching.
And there was someone watching: Axel.
The doll’s eyes locked on mine; I felt a cold shiver in my freckly skin. Axel seemed to look into me like the Sorting Hat.
He was an inanimate object, yet he could see into your soul, whether you had a soul, and evoke the thing that scared you the most.
But then I stared back at him, challenged him with my gaze, and because it was just the two of us in the van, I felt his power weaken.
This was a turning point.
I wasn’t exactly sure what had turned. At first, I thought it was the difference between being a kid and being grown up, and it was a little like that, but something more.
Kids see ghosts, but then adults do too, and what matters isn’t how old you are; it’s that you stop seeing things that aren’t, whether you’re 13 or 30.
Axel was just a doll, no matter how lifelike his eyes were, no matter how powerfully his stare seemed to illuminate on an ugly part of you.
The sun was the sun, not a God that meant you had to chop off a slave’s head and kick it down the steps, and Axel was just a cheap doll.
I turned back toward the laptop.
For one moment, I thought it was going to be straightforward– that it’d be unlocked and in the right file, and there’d even be a pop-up message from Jesus saying, ‘Well done, Kiera, you’ve done the right thing.’
Obviously, it was password-protected.
There really was no explaining if I was caught, so I sat like an ADHD squirrel, my head on the swivel, and frantically tried to guess.
The first I tried was password because that was Dad’s laptop password, and then 123456789 because that was Mum’s. Neither worked.
I didn’t know Laura’s birthday. She was one of those women who would die before telling you what year they were born.
I had a sudden stroke of genius: humanuspediculus, the name of the common head louse, but incorrect flashed up again.
I knew that too many more failed attempts, and I’d be locked out, so I looked around the walls of the lice-mobile for clues.
They didn’t have filing cabinets, but they did have glossy magazine pages and print-on-demand posters that displayed their success.
‘Lice Assassins Strike Again’ and ‘Lice Assassins Triumph.’
I tried Lice Assassins, then the lice assassins, but nothing.
And then it hit me.
There is a meme going around as I write this about never dating a woman whose phone background is a picture of herself.
So true.
I hadn’t seen Laura’s phone, but I knew she was one of those women.
What does somebody like that care about the most? What is memorable to them? It’s not family, friends or work. It’s…themselves.
Under one of the articles was her full name. Laura Pennington and sure enough, I typed it in, and the laptop sprang to life.
First, Google Drive. Of course, it was empty. They were boomers. Nothing was in the cloud. I could probably sink this whole thing if I threw the laptop in the river.
I searched the desktop files. There was an accounts sheet and some stuff I didn’t really understand, but again, being boomers, they made it obvious.
Operation Pestis.
Operation Pestis was in its own folder and exactly what I was looking for.
It shocked me how much it was like something from a movie. They had a blueprint of the school, a student count and even a density map showing where and when most of the traffic was congregated.
It was all there. Their conspiracy. How they started the outbreaks purposefully and then poured fuel on the fire.
Their checks weren’t checks. That was the time when they had the clean heads right in front of them, and the tools to infect the kids.
From there, the pathogen would spread naturally with a few more interventions, such as transplanting hair into cycling helmets just before practice.
Most of their secret files were just how much money they were making from all this. Their kits shifted for £100.
It wasn’t like a vaccine either. If you get smallpox, you can’t get it again, but in theory, if you got head lice, the morning you got rid of the last one, a new one could be hitching a ride by afternoon.
They also had a database listing every student’s name and current status.
Of course, the first thing I did was check myself. I was listed as ‘bad candidate.’
Tightly coiled or kinked hair is unsuitable for headice, and even worse if it’s thick or coarse. They also had a temperature reading for my scalp, which was 35.9– on the chilly side.
But for some reason, what bothered me the most and even made me tear up was the bit that said socioeconomic status: poor.
I looked around their shelves again, where their machines and products were. Their isopropyl lotion with added pine needle oil, a Terminatrix comb with an immaculate stainless steel finish, and all the other stuff.
They didn’t care if you were dirty; they only cared if you were dirt poor.
It should’ve made me happy; after all, I wasn’t getting head lice anytime soon, but it didn’t. It pissed me off, and I lost focus on why exactly I was there.
I began looking through the student list and ended up on Chantelle. Well, wasn’t she perfect with her long straight blonde hair and warm scalp and enough money to bathe in ethoxylate every night?
I scrolled to her infection status: currently undergoing treatment.
I let out a yip of delight. She was infected. The person who had made my life miserable, and not just mine, but everybody’s, had beasties.
All logical thought went out the window. I printed screen and dashed out of the van, just in time, too, because the kids were coming out of assembly.
And then I saw Chantelle and her cronies. They were breezy, not a care in the world, acting like the untouchables.
It’s worth saying, the outbreak at Bede was generating her more views than ever before, and kids from other schools liked it and called us the dirty Beders, and a fair amount of adults insulted us, too.
Chantelle didn’t care. It was ‘driving traffic.’ She presented it as if she were above it all, like her golden head was removed from her body and floated above the lice landscape.
‘Everybody look at this!’ I roared.
I didn’t care about the consequences. I just needed Chantelle to hurt, to hurt the same way I had when I read that I was poor, or when she accused me of being a superspreader, or the pain I felt at getting older and knowing that my head wasn’t exactly screwed on right, and life was not as easy for me as it would be for other people.
The first few kids looked at the paper, and the news spread quickly like a contagion, and Chantelle, without knowing exactly what was wrong, rushed to me, where I was holding up her infected status.
Her eyes scanned it, and a look of profound fear suddenly entered them.
I drank it in like Grandma Jones’ warm cocoa on a winter’s night.
‘You liar!’ she screamed.
‘It’s all here, Chantelle, ’ I answered, ‘Beasties in your hair.’
She might’ve played it off. Might’ve said it was photoshopped, but she cracked under the pressure and made a crucial mistake.
She reached up and scratched her head.
#
I don’t like to swear, but I’ll allow myself one here. What followed next was a shit storm.
Chantelle said the report was AI. It didn’t really matter whether anyone believed her, because by then the trolls were out.
On every live stream she did, her comment section was brigaded, and soon she stopped doing live streams, and her subscribers fell off.
Something happened at school, too. She lost her social power. I suppose people saw that the empress had no clothes, and what’s worse, she had nits.
She would sit alone in a category all on her own, away from the ULAP kids and the normies. She became something like me: a skulker.
Second, my personal shit storm. Nobody could quite say exactly what I’d done, but I was in a hell of a lot of trouble. I’d hacked private medical records and made them public. This was something far worse than bullying. This was what people did on the true-crime podcasts Mum liked.
Mr Gainsborough called my parents in for the first time in my life, and we sat in his office as he showed them, first, the footage of me coming out of the van, and second, proudly displaying the paper with Chantelle’s infected status.
The first thing Dad said was, ‘Well, isn’t it a little weird to have a database of who does or doesn’t have head lice in the school?’
Mum burned a hole in him.
It was funny because Mum and Dad had met in school, and now they were back again because of their wayward progeny.
Mum had been a good girl who did what the Head said and kept her own head under the parapet. Dad pushed boundaries.
‘Mr McAllister, it’s completely normal for a medical team to keep records during an outbreak.’
I could see Dad raring to go– to jump in on my behalf, but there was one glaring problem, and that was my cruelty. There was the video and audio, me proudly holding my trophy up as if I’d just won the Triwizard Tournament.
Dad, for all his rebelliousness, could not stand bullying.
He looked to me to explain it, and I couldn’t meet his gaze.
What had my need for revenge cost me?
It was right there. It was right bloody there! I had evidence, hundreds of pages of evidence.
‘Kiera,’ Dad said, ‘what were you thinking, petal?’
He was crushed. I knew that. And I wanted to scream out loud about the conspiracy I’d uncovered, but I knew it was pointless.
That’s another thing you learn from mum’s true crime dramas. Someone kills their wife, and the first thing they do is come up with some crazy story about how an owl caused her to fall down the stairs.
‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ Mum said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I answered, and then the waterworks started.
‘Anything else!?’
‘She said she’s sorry,’ Dad answered.
And if looks could kill, the look Mum gave Dad would have finished him off– and his ghost too.
#
When I got back to school after my two-week suspension, I kind of accepted the new reality.
There were these lunatics going around, and they were giving people head lice, and we lived under them as the Russians did with Putin.
That was the mood in school, too. Inevitability. Nothing would ever change, and we had to like it or lump it.
The lice assassins gave their assemblies twice a week, and they hammed it up. They walked the tightrope well, making it sound like a forever war.
They reported about how many people they’d ‘cured’ but always with a caveat like some new strain had been detected and how climactic conditions favoured the lice, and there might be some losses before more ground was gained.
And Mr Gainsborough gave them more and more power.
It was weird to watch him around Laura.
Maybe the most important thing Dad ever taught me was that adults don’t have it figured out any more than kids do. He distrusted authority, even his own over me.
He told me once we’re all recovering from our childhoods, and no more could I see that than with Mr Gainsborough.
There were kids like him in our school–nobodies–and I don’t mean that to sound so cruel when I have already in this story just been so cruel to Chantelle.
When I say nobody, I mean a kid with no real personality, no likes or dislikes or loves or hates.
They exist the same way a tree does, without any of its beauty. They get by being agreeable and non-offensive, moving whatever way the wind is blowing.
But still, in these people, there is a kind of regret, loneliness, and need for a pat on the head.
Still, a tree might have the power to angle toward the sun, and without knowing why, they lean toward people with status– the rich, gorgeous and charismatic.
Laura had Mr Gainsborough wrapped around her little finger. She’d flutter her eyelashes and get another assembly and another batch of posters distributed.
But the biggest insult was to come: the day I had to go for inspection at the lice-mobile.
I thought it was a sick joke, and I said no instantly.
Mrs Dye sent someone to get Mr Gainsborough, and I was taken out of class.
(I wondered if Mr Gainsborough knew what was going on. You hear of funnier things, especially in true crime podcasts.)
‘Kiera,’ he said, ‘this is mandated by health policy. If you object, I’ll have to tell your parents again, and we’ll discuss further suspension.’
So, with tears in my eyes, I went across the playground to the lice-mobile and into Laura’s hands.
‘Ah,’ she said to Tommy. ‘It’s our little sneak.’
‘Our little sneak,’ Tommy repeated dumbly.
I wiped the tears from my face and tried to stop the top lip quivering. She knew about me searching in her records. She’d probably deleted anything that was incriminating, and now this was her victory lap.
Dad always taught me to be strong. He said Kiera, there are a hell of a lot of creeps out there, and they’re bigger than you, but you know the one thing you can do is make sure you’re not a victim.
But I was defeated now. I just nodded and said, ‘Yes.’
She sat me in the inspection chair and turned on the high-watt lights.
‘Take your hair tie out,’ she commanded. ‘It’s a shame you haven’t had this thing thinned… You know, before I was a public health worker, I was a hairdresser… That’s why I became a lice assassin. I saw too many heads colonised.’
I felt her fingers yanking and pulling my kinked hair. She was sectioning it off like a farmer would a field ready for planting.
Yank. Yank. Yank– the tears again in my eyes.
And I could also hear Tommy in the background, and it wasn’t like I needed to imagine it too hard because I’d seen their plans, how their operation worked. He was probably preparing fresh samples for transplantation.
‘Parasites,’ she continued, ‘parasites everywhere. You’re al…’
And I snapped. I jumped up and thwacked my head on the lamp, sending it flying.
Laura was shocked, stunned like a surgeon might be if a patient woke up mid-operation. She probably thought her poison was anaesthetic enough.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘I saw your dastardly plan in the files.’
I don’t know why, but I expected her to defend it as a normal person would, but of course, she wasn’t normal.
Instead, she clapped her hands and cackled.
‘Very good.’
‘So you’re not denying it.’
She flipped the viewing glasses off her eyes and shrugged.
‘No, I’m not denying it.’
‘Well…’ I paused, surprised, ‘It’s going to stop.’
Once again, she laughed like a witch. ‘Oh, it’s not going to stop. It’s just starting…’
The words hung in the air.
‘Just starting?’
‘Junior school.’ She continued, ‘High school, university, your workplace, your retirement home.’
‘And funeral home!’ Tommy shouted
‘Oh yes, and a funeral home,’ Laura replied. ‘Nobody wants their loved one to go into the ground with head lice.’
My stomach did a somersault, the bad kind when you don’t land on your feet, but instead the back of your head.
‘You’re… evil.’ I said.
‘We’re the Lice Assassins.’
‘I’ll tell everyone the truth,’
Laura liked that one and cackled again, glancing around the room past Tommy and onto Axel as if to say, ‘Are you hearing this?’
Finally, she looked at my records. ‘Kiera McAllister… In 2026, nobody cares about the truth.’
#
My skulking reached new heights, taking a packed lunch to school so I didn’t have to go to the canteen, and deliberately getting lost during cross-country.
I even asked for special permission to stay behind to revise if we took a school trip or did a special activity.
The sky always seemed slate grey and uniforms always seemed damp, and of course, heads always itched.
Every student had a pathological fear of raising their hands above their necks, so we all walked around like miserable Irish dancers.
The changing-room showers were still my number-one hideout. That’s where I’d disappear to with my books and notepads and read and write stories– stories that took place in distant lands where Pandora’s box had not been opened, and inside, still trapped, were hate and fear and beasties.
And then one day, I heard shuffling in the corner, and she emerged from the shadows.
‘Chantelle.’
‘Kiera,’ she answered, bitingly.
She sat down opposite me in the near light.
I got the feeling she didn’t particularly want a chat, but then it felt kinda awkward, so I had to say something.
‘Are you ok?’
She looked at me like I was the biggest moron in England.
‘No, Kiera, I’m not ok! I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody talks to me anymore.’
‘Well, that’s your fault,’ I answered a little defiantly. ‘You hyped up how bad it was to have headlice. And then, well, you got them.’
Chantelle had made one more crucial error since news of her infection spread. Her Mum had gone full Liver King and said it wasn’t true, and then one of the online trolls had hacked a bank statement for the Lice Assassin products– and now they knew she was a liar and an idiot.
‘You ruined it,’ she continued, ‘do you have any idea how many followers I’ve lost?’
‘They weren’t followers,’ I answered.
‘Yes, they were!’
‘Followers don’t wander off the path so easily.’
‘Jesus, Kiera, you are weird.’
We sat hushed as the pipework groaned around us. The school, like a dying animal, was trying and failing to warm itself fully.
‘Don’t you know, can’t you see, I had more to lose than regular kids.’
‘Oh, shut up, Chantelle.’
‘Thousands of pounds in ad revenue.’
‘You’re a kid. Act like it.’
She was about to argue back, but realised it was futile, or maybe she was just tired, as we all were.
‘I’m not your enemy,’ I said. ‘They are. The lice assassins.’
‘Crazy Kiera’s kooky conspiracies.’
‘I’m telling you,’ I answered. ‘It’s true. They’re deliberately infecting the whole school. I’ve seen the plan with my own eyes.’
‘So what,’ she answered, ‘it is how it is. You know, you always have a go at me, telling me I’m a little kid and should act like one. Well, I sometimes think you forget you’re a little kid, too. Do you have any idea how crazy it was to break into their van like you were James Bond? And still you’re acting like you have the power to change anything. No kid ever made a difference.’
Something deep in me rebelled at this idea.
‘No! We can make a difference. You’re a kid, and you got 10k subscribers.’
I was loath to admit it, but Chantelle proved my point, at least partly.
‘I didn’t start anything,’ Chantelle answered. ‘I created a moment–the skibidi-dance thing–and as soon as you have a moment, it has a life of its own…It goes viral.’
And then it came to me. Eureka!
#
Chantelle and I discussed it for a long time in the changing rooms. She thought it was a prank at first.
I didn’t have much street cred, but one thing other kids knew about me was that I was earnest.
Finally, she said. ‘You’re crazy, Kiera.’
‘Yes, and that’s why you can trust me. Because you know I’ll follow through.’
It had to be during assembly. That’s when the most eyes would be on us, and although I didn’t like the idea of eyes on me, I knew I needed them.
The kids filed in drably, looking oppressed.
Mr Gainsborough and Laura were on the stage chatting like old friends, or was that lovers?
Social distancing was in place not because of Coronavirus but this new plague. It was ‘highly advised’ to wear your hair up or, better yet, wear one of the new ULAP head coverings, which weren’t full shower caps but a kind of rip-off of what Muslim girls wear.
I proudly let the mop hang down, and the other kids looked at me like scared old religious women. I imagined them muttering, ‘Well, she took the risk because she has loose morals.’
And then Laura came forward and took the podium.
‘Thanks,’ she said, ‘your weekly update. We identified 15 new infections and can proudly say that 5 new students were confirmed as all clear. Let’s give a round of applause to these children, who are now recovered, but the bad news,’ Laura continued, ‘is we have identified a new strain, known as the West Saharan, so we are updating our prevention and treatment line.’
Dad and I once watched a war documentary, and the government was bullying the monks because they were Catholics and not Buddhists, and this monk walks into the middle of the street with all the cameras watching, pours petrol over his head and sets himself on fire.
I felt the protest rising in me, like something vicious and alive, something that had been collecting for four months, something that might have been collecting since the day I was born.
‘Stop!’ I jumped up.
Everyone turned to face me, and I mean everyone.
And you know, when I worked out this plan, I thought, Kiera, you won’t get any further than standing up. You might, on a good day, shout stop, but all those eyes on you and all that terror and anxiety will make you freeze up.
But I didn’t. And I thought about that monk who, although he was on fire, sat down calmly in the street as the flames licked around him.
‘This has got to end.’
Mr Gainsborough was the first person to recover himself from the shock, and he bawled, ‘Kiera McAllister, sit down!’
But I didn’t sit down. I went into my bag and pulled out my weapon.
Don’t worry, this is England, not America. I didn’t have a gun, but I did have something as powerful: My Dad’s hair clippers.
I reached up and felt the mop one last time, and then whispered goodbye, old friend, before running the clippers straight through the weave of tangles.
Now there were audible gasps.
My hair fell away like a sheep’s fleece, and when I was as bald as I could get without a mirror, I handed off the clippers to Chantelle.
She was as wide-eyed as the rest as the hair collected around my feet, and the teachers dashed this way and that, completely clueless about what to do.
Laura from up on the stage peered at me like a malfunctioning cyborg. Her cheek and eye twitched.
The kids had now recovered, and several had taken out mobile phones they weren’t meant to have and started filming.
I think this spurred Chantelle because she had her global audience.
She took the clippers from me and cut a perfect mohawk down the centre of her head, the clippers working less hard against her smooth, glossy hair.
There is a moment, a critical moment for virality, and when Chantelle made that pass over her head with her audience both in school and online, there was no going back. The ‘fallen girl’ was reborn.
Niamh, under ULAP protection, ripped her cap off, took the shears and went to work on her own mop that hadn’t seen the light of day since her diagnosis.
Soon, a mob formed; the mania of it, and other kids who’d lived under the boot were now free.
#
Born again– shorn again- Bede 2026. That was what people called it online.
Our bald revolution. Of course, not all kids did it, not even a quarter, but the shock of seeing 10% of girls in school bald made the board of governors launch an investigation.
It turned out Mr Gainsborough had been failing in multiple ways he’d kept hidden, but, more importantly, payments from the lice assassins to him had been found.
That was the end of him and the lice assassins, too.
Dad said they’d rebound and rebrand because that’s what greedy, private companies did, but Gainsborough was screwed because he’d been in public office.
There was talk he might even get arrested, but I don’t think that was necessary. Deep down, I don’t think he knew the lice assassins’ plan and maybe just took a sly £500 to buy ornaments for his garden.
Or maybe he did it for approval, just the wrong type from the wrong person.
#
From my cubicle in ‘on-site isolation,’ I watched as the lice assassins went. My stunt had bought me a month, which the ‘new administration’ hadn’t overturned.
Laura sat behind the wheel, with Tommy in the passenger seat and Axel on the dashboard.
She gave me such a look of hatred that I didn’t think it was possible for an adult to give a kid, but then I’m beginning to learn there are some adults who only know how to hate.
The glass and playground separated us, but I wasn’t scared, not at all, not anymore.
So what I did was stick my tongue out at them. It was childish, but as Chantelle reminded me, I am a kid.
And something about it seemed to pierce Laura right in her heart, which was an achievement because her ticker was the size of a skittle.
The lice-mobile pulled out of our school carpark, into traffic, and disappeared.
Dad picked me up from isolation in his work van.
We walked over the playground, and he tried to take my hand, but I shook it off because there were kids watching.
Since the incident, Shit storm part 2, we hadn’t spoken about why I’d done it. He’d tried and failed a few times to approach me, and it didn’t help with Mum saying I’d gone crazy and the internet had broken my brain.
‘You know, Kiera, you can tell me anything,’ he said.
It was hotter than it had been all year–the seasons were changing–the first birds returning.
‘I know, Dad.’
We stayed in silence.
‘You just have to tell me one thing. In all this,’ he said, ‘did you do the right thing?’
‘I did the wrong thing, and then I did the right thing.’
He nodded, and we got to the work van, where he opened the door for me so I could climb up.
‘I never had any doubt in you, petal, and I never will.’
At this, he kissed the top of my head where the mop was tentatively sending up curly shoots like a plant in Springtime.
About the writer:
Originally from Newcastle, England, Thomas currently lives in Hanoi, where he can devote himself to becoming a full-time writer, with occasional days off for Bia Hoi and rocket-fuel coffee. His fiction has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and appears in several literary magazines. Since 2023, he’s run a growing Reddit community (publishing his fiction exclusively) under the name originalloquat, which now has 900+ members.
Image: The Indispensible Duty (AI-assisted digital image) by O:JA&L staff creative. 2026. Public domain via Midjourney AI.
OJAL Art Incorporated, publishing since 2017 as OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters (O:JA&L) and its imprints Buttonhook Press, HOT BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Issues, and HIGH BUTTON PRESS Contemporary Art, supports writers and artists worldwide.
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