Stuart reached behind him and lifted up the shaggy hair on the back of his neck. “Under here’s where it itches most,” he explained. “I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still. I just keep scratching. And the more I scratch, the more it itches.”

Rhymes with bitches, he thought to himself. Sandwiches.

Back in the day, the Blind Mice used to get in trouble all the time for using the word bitches in their lyrics. They heard the scoldings of their critics and agreed that perhaps bitches was insulting and degrading to women, but they kept on using it anyway because there really was no better word, except for chicks, which rhymed with dicks, which opened up doors way worse.

Peaches inhaled indulgently and dug in with the lice comb. His hair was so fine and wavy it was hard to part. He smelled vaguely of smoked meat. Of course he did. He and his kid’s mom—whose name was Mandy, Peaches remembered, and who’d once been a teen model—probably went out to those hip new barbecue bars every night and had a rockin’ roll of a time, doing shots and snorting lines in their leather jackets and perfectly worn jeans, while she and Greg and Liam stayed home and ate penne with jarred red sauce for the ten thousandth time and binge-watched whole seasons of long-forgotten TV shows like Fawlty Towers and Mork & Mindy.

“See anything?” Stuart asked with his eyes closed. Even when he’d been kind of a celebrity he hadn’t done any pampering, like getting a massage or a cuticle treatment or having the pores on his nose expunged. He took a hot shower once a day and went to the barber for a haircut a couple of times a year. Peaches’ comb-through felt awesome.

“So far so good,” Peaches said vaguely. “You have so much hair though. This could take hours.”

Stuart kept his eyes shut. “I tried to do the conditioner thing on myself, but I couldn’t really see what I was doing.”

Peaches pulled the top of his right ear out of the way so she could check behind it. There were half-closed holes all the way up his earlobes. She remembered the studs that used to fill them. They looked like screws.

“So, if you didn’t always want to be a school nurse, what did you want to be?” Stuart asked.

Your girlfriend.

“Oh, I don’t know. A singer or a writer or a musician. Something totally useless.”

Idiot. She yanked hard on a hank of his hair to distract him from the fact that she’d just insulted him, but it was too late.

He chuckled. “Maybe I should become a nurse.” Nurse, purse. Rhymes with verse.

Hot school nurse opens up her purse,

Gives me a Slim Jim for my sick verse!