Imagine your eyes are closed. That Melissa ties her school tights over them. That they smell of feet but not feet feet. More like Mary Janes. Like running for the bus during a drizzle.

Imagine she switches off the lights and silhouettes are stripped away. But left behind are a few choked breaths. Some giggles like blinking Christmas lights. Bodies uncertain of their appendages—where they stand, where they'll end up.

Imagine movement to your left which makes you lunge. Setting off a thunderstorm of thuds and bangs as your victims make contact with a desk or a bookshelf or a bed. 

Then, the room settles to whispers, and the one whisper wedged against the closet door is left exposed. Has no time to react as your body, a net, absorbs it.

Imagine Pilar awaking. Her bedroom door complaining open. Her stamping down the hall toward Melissa's room. A muttering minibus in fuzzy slippers that can't quite catch us as we dive back under the covers. Feign sleep through cartoon snores.

And when she's gone, we return to groping for each other in the darkness, spreading apart that dark with our fingers with their glitter polish.

Inevitably, someone gets caught. Somebody always gets caught. And maybe there will be that jolt that no one speaks of—not at the point of contact, but just before. The one that tells us just the idea of touch is all we will ever need to make electricity. Now imagine we still believe this.

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