Content warnings:

Sexism and misogyny, teen sex, blood, death

9:48am
can i see ur tits
please

10:02am
🙁

• • • •

The day after the picture of your boobs gets sent around the school, a mosquito lands on your tongue and bursts like a ripe cherry.

You are crying in the disabled stall of the girls’ bathroom where you took the photo to begin with. You hate that you’re back here, but it’s where you were that day four months ago because it’s the only private mirror in the whole school. It’s exactly the same. Paint-stained, clogged-up sink, graffiti all over the door that you’ve contributed to, no toilet paper on the roll. You are crying because you didn’t know until your friend Maya texted you that morning—did you know?—and when you got to school, all the boys were looking at you with a gleam in their eyes, and one of them looked at your chest, looked up at you, and said, so you’re stuffing them, or what?

You grip the edge of the broken sink and try to girlboss yourself into stopping the tears. You don’t fucking cry in school. You are the It Girl. Captain of the netball team, valedictorian-to-be, one half of the hottest couple in school. Or at least you were. Until you yelled at Del too long and he dumped you. You forgot about sending him that picture, or at least you never thought he’d do anything like this. Everyone knows it came from him, even though it was anonymously uploaded, but who the fuck cares enough to do anything about it?

There’s a whine in your ear that sounds almost understandable. At first you think you’re hallucinating and it’s just the broken lights—why does this school have so much money to throw at useless merchandise, and not enough to fix the lights?—but then the mosquito darts across your reflection.

You smash it, hard enough to make the stained mirror vibrate. You breathe heavily, shocked by the sudden rush of exhilaration. When you peel your palm away, the bug is streaked across your skin, a dark smudge of wings and blood, one leg spasming like a staticky antenna.

You lift your stained palm up next to your tear-stained face, stare at the two things side by side in the mirror. You don’t know what comes over you, but you turn and lick the blood off your hand.

It tastes like copper. But also something sweet, something carbonated; it fizzles on your tongue. A heat shoots through your veins, and when you blink again, your eyes are miraculously dry and unpuffy.

You don’t think much of it until you’re in maths class and there’s a mosquito on the neck of the boy in front of you. He’s one of Del’s friends. When he turned around to pass down the worksheet at the start of class, you felt his gaze siphon something out of you. Now, in the middle of trig functions, you watch the mosquito swell like a dark little cherry with his blood.

Your restlessness fades away, suddenly, replaced by a sharp clarity. A strange warmth seeps into your throat.

The swollen mosquito takes wobbly flight. It bobs drunkenly toward you, six legs and a blur of wings, proboscis fluttering. There’s that whine again in the back of your head, but this time, you can make out what it says. Drink. This time, you can tell it’s coming from the insect. This time, you can recognise the glee. The reverence. The offering.

You open your mouth just slightly. The mosquito flies past your lips. Its threadlike feet settle lightly on your tastebuds. You close your mouth, curl your tongue, and swallow.

It’s like fireworks going down. You can’t help but gasp.

The boy turns around and does a tiny double take. You stiffen, biting your tongue, but he doesn’t seem suspicious. Instead, he looks a little stunned. “Wow,” he says, stammering like the words are entirely new. “You look really good today.”

You don’t know how to respond. He hurries to fill the silence. “You want gum?” he whispers hurriedly, rummaging in his pocket.

You accept the stick, your brain neurons firing. As you take it your fingers brush the back of his hand, and he visibly shivers.

He watches you almost giddily as you pop the gum into your mouth. It’s grape-flavoured, but as you chew a succulent tang seeps in, making your throat dry up with a sudden thirst.

Your teacher snaps at the both of you and the boy turns reluctantly back around, allowing you to view the raised red bump that has blossomed on the back of his neck. You can almost feel the inflamed heat coming off of it.

Huh, you think.

• • • •

3:21pm
ok but i think you’re kind of just always finding excuses
can’t always be saying you’re moody
oh my period’s coming
oh i don’t feel like it
lol
i’m not asking for much
all you have to do is suck

• • • •

You are a slut.

You are a goddess.

You are a mythic bitch.

The boys can’t figure out why they love you so much, why they were slandering the fuck out of you being a psycho a week ago but now their pulse starts jumping whenever you come near them. They trip every time you pass them, stuttering out some offer to carry your books, or buy your lunch, or run to get you an iced tea. You have never had to pay for so little in your life.

All together, the swarm is a blanket of staticky voices wrapped around your brain stem saying drink. They like you. They like you so much. You indulge them, send them all across the school. Drink. You figure out you can see through their eyes, too, if you try; you can see the chaos you leave in your wake. When you walk away the boys deflate; when you wave goodbye they linger in the receding shadow of your hand and sigh. The more you sit in a locked toilet cubicle with mosquitoes bursting boys’ blood on your tongue, the less they can stop wanting you.

“How have you not gotten bitten?” Maya complains at recess, scratching feverishly. You haven’t deliberately been biting the girls, but with the number of bugs you’ve been summoning into the school, some of them are bound to go rogue. You don’t mind. It covers your tracks.

“Not sweet enough, I guess,” you say. You are watching Del across the cafeteria pretend not to be watching you. He is scratching his ankle. Everyone around you is scratching, scratching, but it only inflames the skin. With every skritch the heat builds in the air, thickens with the smell of sweat and skin and blood just beneath the surface. Your classmates try to bring electric swatters to school, but you make the mosquitoes dart cheerfully out of their reach. The static lingers in the air.

Del is mad, so mad. All his friends are falling to your feet. You feed extra on them; you make sure bites blossom on their arms and neck like acne; you swill their blood around on your tongue to make it last. You swear you can taste the difference, too—this one is the tennis player, this one is the debate champion, this one is the creep everyone says follows girls home. You are a slut, you are a bitch, you are a connoisseur.

After Del’s best friend runs two floors after you to bring you a pen that you dropped, your mosquitoes overhear Del spitting, What are you doing? What the fuck’s gotten into all of you?

Del sounds insane. Even you can feel it, across the space-time of a dozen mosquito eyes. He is completely out of touch. He is so filled with this irrational hate. You think he can feel it too, the way no one else is jumping in to agree with him, the way it seems the world has rewritten itself when he wasn’t looking. It makes him afraid, and the fear makes him angrier.

I told you, she’s a psycho!

His friend takes a step back, as though Del has just insulted his mother, or Jesus. Dude, his friend replies, maybe you’re overreacting. He walks away, probably dreaming of you, and Del is left standing there, jaw-dropped, falling apart.

This is when you know that you have won. You are a stock that has shot back up to the top of the market, and Del—quarterback number two, student council president, inevitable prom king—cannot be the only one without a stake. You have screwed with his head so beautifully.

From the next hallway over, you pull back from the mosquitoes to send Del a text:

meet me at the carpark after school

just wanna talk

will make it worth i promise

• • • •

8:37pm
i just feel like u could afford to cut down
didn’t ur coach say u need to lose weight anyway

• • • •

You are on the roof of the multistorey carpark behind your ex-boyfriend’s house.

You picked this place because the two of you used to make out here all the time, to avoid his satellite parents and the bedroom you share with your sister. You picked this place because you remember: every time you sat here with your school skirt hiked up and your prefect tie tightening around your throat, you got bitten on your thighs every single damn time. Like the bugs wanted a piece of the action too.

You are on the roof of the multistorey carpark behind your ex-boyfriend’s house, and now you hear the voices in the drains, the cracked lights, the murky undercarriage of the stalled cars. Drink, they whine. And because they’ve been learning from you, they’ve started evolving: Blood. They’re so proud of their new word. Blood!

In response, you hum.

Del emerges from the stairwell, backpack slung over one shoulder. He stops when he sees you, as though he didn’t expect you to actually be here. “Laura,” he says. “What is this?”

But you know you have him, by the way he’s looking at you. Because you promised, and now he is remembering all the other times you fulfilled promises. You picked this place to Pavlov his dick. You have him because he’s here; because he couldn’t resist, even now, even after what he did to you (not that he thinks he did anything).

“I miss you,” you say. It’s possible he says something in reply, and you say something else, and there is actually a conversation in which you have to convince him. But the next thing you know, his tongue is down your throat and half your buttons are popped.

The bugs are needy and have no sense of timing. You can feel them hovering impatiently on the sidelines, and it takes all your willpower to keep them back. Wait, you tell them, wait, not yet, we’re not ready.

At some point your top comes entirely off, and then your bra. He’s hard in more places than one; you never said he didn’t have a good body, just that he made it his whole personality. It’s not enough, though, for what you have in mind. You’re too eager to get him naked, but luckily, he doesn’t realise. He’s too eager himself.

His heat pulsates against your skin, his whole body hot and electric. He mauls your chest and bites your neck and you think now.

At first it looks like his shadow, something overhead getting in the way and dispersing the light. But the dark swathe in the shape of him lifting off the ground are your mosquitoes. There’s so many of them that you can barely see through the cloud. Their whine is lost behind the traffic below, but their high-pitched excitement crescendos in your head as they descend on him.

BLOOD.

You tug him close, dig your nails into his back. He moans as they sink their proboscises into his skin and start to drink.

You feel him get slower, though, and the moment it becomes too much for him, he chokes and goes stiff in your arms. You lean back and push him off before he can collapse on you. Slightly delirious, you think he’s grown back hair. But no, those writhing lines are the swarm. They coat his back, his ass, his thighs, swelling into grapes that make your mouth water.

So you sit there on your knees, tits out, mouth open. The mosquitoes land on your tongue so many at a time you lose track. You swallow and swallow. They pop in your throat, bursts of hot, salty rivulets that make your body shudder. They keep coming, and Del’s skin is a throbbing blister pack of bites now, and he is growing paler and paler and paler, and as you take all of him you can almost hear him thinking, this bitch.