At first, we tried to laugh about it. Whatever had become tangled in her hair looked too strange to recognize, and joking felt easier than admitting we were frightened. She repeatedly asked whether it was moving. I answered with a confidence I didn’t actually feel. We examined it between our fingers, then scrolled through image after image, searching for something that could explain its unsettling shape. Eventually, the comparison seemed to fit: a crushed tick, its appearance distorted by time, water, and shampoo.
Having a name for it brought relief, but not the kind that lets you immediately forget. We still couldn’t answer the question that bothered us most: how long had it been there? That night, we checked her scalp twice and washed everything. By bedtime, the panic had faded into unease. Something so small had escaped our notice—and then, for a while, become impossible to stop thinking about.