Mosquitoes

Summer. Night. Your hair smells of OFF! The flat pillow smells of OFF!, the damp sheets. Still they sneak in. The buzz. The whine. The slap. Gagging a little when you see the curl of black legs, the smear of blood. Through the sliding window you see flickering lights from the house where the grownups drink wine and watch TV. You can almost hear the laugh track, the air conditioner’s hum. If anyone’s fighting, you can’t tell. They feel light-years away, like a planet seen through a telescope lens. You are camping out. Roughing it. You hug your legs close, tenting them under a long t-shirt, trying not to leave a molecule of flesh exposed. You think about encephalitis, about yellow fever. An experiment you read about: two men sleeping in a room, one infected, one not. When they slept with a screen between them, the other man stayed well. It was mosquitoes that carried the disease.

Your cousin balances the flashlight upright in the middle of the room, a single brave beam. Everyone takes a breath. Everyone listens.

“Once there was this girl, at a slumber party…”

A bubble on your leg rises. You try not to scratch but the itch won’t let go. You scratch until the undersides of your nails are dark with blood. You scratch until it gets infected, leaves a pink, pocked scar on your leg. Long after all the cousins have grown and scattered, after your parents cut your family down the middle and left for opposite coasts, you will look at that scar and think: That was the summer we slept in the camper van. You carry it with you like a ghost story, repeated so many times. You remember every word.