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The bug emerged from Ernie's hair in the middle of class one day in fifth grade. It was a black one, a beetle of some sort--I wouldn't be able to tell you much more than that. It looked like cockroach, but it lacked the large antennas. Years later, in reinventing the incident in a short story, I would look for the bug on the Internet and in various identification guides, but I found nothing resembling what it had become in my memory. Instead, I settled on describing it as a black cockroach and including the antennas because they made for some good descriptions. Bugs don't have a lot of personality without antennas.
As in that story, which, unless you're one of about six people in the world, you haven't read, Ernie was from the lone Catholic family in my school. As one of eight children, he was certainly from the largest family registered at the school, though only one other sibling of his attended--his sister, a freshman in high school. What made Ernie and his sister's attendance even more unique was that this was not some secular private academy; it wasn't even a mainstream Protestant one. It was a school primarily for children of members of the Worldwide Church of God, a church that, among other things, believed in keeping the biblical (i.e., Jewish) holy days and the Sabbath and that kept to the biblical food laws. Doctrinally, it wasn't what one would term "Catholic friendly"; it wasn't even mainstream Protestant friendly. Why would Catholic parents send their children to such a school? And how, if the school was as elite as we children were always told, did two Catholic kids get in above the requests of hundreds of others from our very own church? Maybe there were state regulations.
Ernie was dirty--and poor. Or at least, that's how I thought of him. The same blue and gray plaid shirts worn each day, the same blue pants. His black hair was slick and oily, as if it were never washed. The bug coming out of his hair was just confirmation of how poor--and dirty--he was.
Ernie sat in front of me in class, so the bug's dropping out of his hair to the floor was something that bothered me in particular. Ernie sitting so close to me, it was only a matter of time before a bug made its way to my desk. Indeed, my attention became riveted for the next few minutes on that bug in the aisle as it slunk across the floor. Luckily, it moved forward, away from me rather than toward, albeit too slowly. And then Ernie stomped on it. He didn't even seem to register that it had come from his own head. I figured he was used to such bugs.
A few months later, there was a lice outbreak. I expected that Ernie would be sent home. He wasn't, and I was surprised. It seemed unfair in fact, that he would check out okay, when I knew better--that not only lice lived in his hair but bugs twice as big as a fingernail. I was destined to catch something.
The next school year, to my relief, Ernie was gone. Sadly, this incident--and his sister, talking animatedly with other teens at the high school car wash--is all I remember of him. He was, along with a black kid--the only African American boy in my class--one of the kids on the periphery of my circle of friends, not one of the three or four closest but one who often could be found with us. Hosea, the black kid, fascinated me, with his white, white palms and his thin hands, fascinated me as all black kids did at the time--but of him, I remember only those hands. And there was a girl, Wendy. She too left after that year. Of her I remember even less. I remember only an image: that she had feathered black hair and was rather tall for a fifth grader and awkward in the way she stood. Each of these kids, reduced to a part of the body, an incident, the shade of their hair.
I look now at our class photo of that year, Ernie, in a white shirt and red V-neck sweater, his hair combed back slick 1950s style. He is the sharpest kid among us. He was poor after all, and dirty, so he had to impress extra hard on photo day. Those kind of things are important to poor people. That's what I would have thought at the time. In the photos, the only kids in blue and gray plaid button-downs are Chris, a Filipino who would also leave at the end of the school year, and me.
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