When I was a kid, every boy had cooties. Didn’t matter who he was or if we were friends. If a kid had a pee-pee, that kid had cooties. You couldn’t see cooties, and there was no cootie-indicator — it was just that boys had cooties, and girls didn’t, or vice versa. Cooties were a family of germs: microscopic, contagious and dangerous. Worse yet, you only had to touch someone to get them. (Thankfully cooties, at least in my neighborhood, were not airborne pathogens.)