Let down your hair, babygirl. Lousey’s home. 

Oh, autumn. Our favorite time of year. Folks start bundling up, huddling together, wearing hats, braiding hair. Oh, hair. Oh, scalp! Nothing gets us off like head-to-head contact. 

Labor Day is our Black Friday. Getting ready to leave home and find somewhere we can gobble up enough blood to lay eggs and die. You guys really don’t understand how much preparation this journey takes, you know. We’ve gotta practice our long jumps! 

Once school starts, it’s feasting time. Don’t even ask us where we come from. We just arrive. The past month or so, we’ve been dong really well. Jumping, sucking, ovipositing, and dying. The usual. 

But this year we’ve got a bone to pick. Or, uh, exoskeleton. We’ve been orchestrating a bit of an expansion, you see. Jumping up to the big shots. We haven’t taken on the moms yet—no, they’d notice. The dads we conquered years ago. But this September, we decided to launch Operation Babysitter. 

College students should be a much better target than children, no? They live in close quarters, so we’ll spread like wildfire. They don’t have their mothers to immediately catch on, and they either haven’t learned how to spot us yet or never will. Too busy, too nihilistic, too unobservant, we’ve been told. 

It’s been going well, thanks for asking. Until our operation was busted by a writer from BWOG. And yes, we are miscapitalizing their name on purpose. BWOG, more like Bugphobic Writers Opposing the Grind. 

This article states that PCHS, Barnard’s health service (which we also wholeheartedly hate—more people should live in filth) has been checking for us. The absolute pigs. We’re here to start a battle against PCHS. You think you can check for us? Well, we’ve been practicing our coordinated jumping. And our jumps are not only getting more synchronized, but they’re getting longer. That’s right. 

By the way, if you’re itchy right now, that’s us. Nobody can save you, motherfuckers. 

Header Illustration via Xuyin Zhong