Sometimes it seems that the feeling of my childhood can be summed up in one event—
Late one summer at my friend’s house, her mother leaned over me and told me to hold still. Is that a tick, she asked, looking at the back of my neck. In fact it was a tick, and she pulled it out with tweezers.
It was engorged, she said, the first time I’d ever heard that word.
I asked her what engorged meant.
It means he’s been drinking your blood for the better part of a month.
I had come home from summer camp some weeks earlier, and summer camp was the only place I was ever in the woods. Neither of my parents had noticed the tick. Fat on my blood and dead now.
Alas, my little friend. He’d been so close to me for so long.