Juanice collects creeps. She wants to be an entomologist. She has a vivarium with three African hissing cockroaches named Lee, Harvey, and Oswald. Her roommate Aimee won't hold them. She's kind of a creep herself.

Juanice steals chloroform from the science lab. She rides city buses until they stop service at two a.m. A killing jar floats on her lap, traps the bus' green overhead lighting. Everyone looks dead and drawn within it. Sometimes the passengers watch her, mostly older men who don't try to hide their gaze, not even when she stares back and smacks her gum at them. She's nineteen and still can't blow a bubble.

She has three Snapchat accounts. Her scholarship advisor only knows about one. He's recently married and sweats too much. He has a burgeoning bald spot. Whenever he stares down her shirt, his tiny tonsure flashes her, and she thinks about fontanels, how she heard they could be pierced right through.

She makes forty a week selling plasma. Tries to get Aimee to go with her, but Aimee is afraid of needles. Doesn't see how Juanice can guide a four-inch minuten pin through the small of a butterfly's thorax without missing.

They know how to shotgun beers. They know how to open their throats and not choke. They know how to dance close to one another, so close their lips almost touch and boys stare. They know how to camouflage, to press hard into one another, to hide by being seen.

Juanice collects gypsy moths and praying mantises and stag beetles. She traps them in jars but doesn't tap the glass. Aimee does until Juanice pins her wrists to the bed, tells her don't be cruel. Aimee doesn't struggle but stares at the killing jars, at the mantis' faceted eyes regarding her like prey. Let's huff chloroform, she says. It's poison, Juanice tells her, then says, sure, why not.

She bruises easily, she tells her advisor. A purple blotch blossoms along the crease of her arm from where the plasma tech missed the vein. Does it hurt, her advisor asks. I like it well enough, she says and flexes her arm, opens and closes her fist. I like how it changes shape. Oh really, he says, and presses harder into the base of her throat, runs his thumb straight downward. His thumbnail leaves a white-red line.

Aimee bruises easily too. She wears long sleeves, pastel cashmeres her mom sends her, ones she says look so damn country club. She has Juanice try them on, and Juanice pulls at the sleeves and throat. No matter how much she pinches and smooths the fabric, she still looks like a fraud.

They crowd in front of bathroom mirrors, lean forward, check their teeth for the garish lipstick Aimee steals from Walgreens. Violets and neon pinks that stain whatever they touch. They could stay here forever, under the bathroom's bad lighting, even though it pulls shadows down their faces. But there's music, there's beer, there's alcohol-soaked grapes, each one a 190-proof bomb. There's fingers tugging at beltloops, there's a balcony with fresh air. There's cigarettes and roaches and sodium streetlights. There's mayflies flitting across an amber night, dying.

Sometimes they bring back a third. Sometimes Aimee watches. Sometimes Juanice watches Aimee watching in the dark. Aimee's lipstick glows in the half-light. Forms perfect Os.

Juanice creates another Snapchat account. She orders a selfie stick but prefers when Aimee takes photos of her. She lies on her bed with her arms folded and her skin covered in a fine dusting of gypsum powder. Make me look dead, she says. Aimee poses her and poses her.

Her advisor tells her to get some sun, to exercise, to take vitamins. He's always looking after her best interests during office hours or in evenings when he pays her to babysit and change his diaper. His wife did up a nursery even though they don't have kids yet. Someday, he says. We're trying.

Sometimes she maps her bruises, the ones on her neck or her thighs, the ones she doesn't remember getting and the ones she does. She presses them with her minuten pins until her eyes water. They're blue or yellow depending on how old. Aimee outlines them with her nails, says which countries they resemble. Their favorite is France. When it disappears from her ass, they drink cheap wine to mourn its passing. Then she says she wants another.

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