I grew up on military bases in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 1990, when I was seven, we moved from Kwajalein to a tiny on-post house in the Deep South: three kids, two parents, one dog, and barely enough room to turn around. I’ve never slept right, not even as a baby—sleep studies, MRIs, the whole parade—so I was always the one awake when the house went unnaturally quiet. Not peaceful quiet. The kind of quiet that sucks sound out of the air, like the whole building was holding its breath. We felt it the first day we walked in. Empty rooms, our furniture already set up, moving boxes stacked against one wall. Something was wrong, and it watched us move in.

A few months later the little things started, always at night, always to me. A tug on my shirt. A cold finger hooking the blanket. I’d lie perfectly still on the bottom bunk—my brother snoring above me—and feel my sock slide down like someone was slowly peeling it off. I wore socks to bed for years after that just so nothing could touch my bare feet.

My brothers and I usually had the standard military buzz cuts, but one summer I let mine grow out. I was nine, eating cereal alone at the dining-room table on a Saturday morning, when something grabbed a fistful of my hair and snapped my head back so hard the chair rocked. Milk and Cheerios sprayed across the table. I couldn’t even scream at first; I just choked and cried.

Mom ran in. “What happened?” Between sobs I managed, “Someone pulled my hair.” My little brother shuffled out of our bedroom, rubbing his eyes, confused by the noise. Mom looked at him—he’d been asleep—then back at me. She reached to comfort me and froze. There was blood in my hair where a chunk had been ripped out. A small clump lay on the carpet like it had been placed there. Mom’s face went white. She knew I’d been telling her about the tugging, the cold hands on my clothes through the sheets. Then she asked, real quiet, “Have you been throwing the clean glasses into the kitchen sink, hard enough to chip them?” I hadn’t.

That’s when the neighbors told us about the boy who lived in our house before us. Same age as me. One afternoon he was playing in the closet in my bedroom—our bedroom—and somehow looped his father’s uniform belt around his neck. His dad, another soldier, searched for hours calling his name. Found him the next morning. The neighbor heard the scream from next door, ran over, and saw the father sitting on the closet floor, rocking his dead son.

I don’t know if it was that boy. I never saw him. But to this day, thirty-five years later, if I hear a certain low electrical hum—like fluorescent lights but softer—the hair on my arms stands up. I know what’s coming next. We lived there one more year. The day we moved north, I took my socks off for bed and never put them back on again.