Forgot to Tell You

HEY! So I forgot to say something about the night I got home at 3:40am after the partying. So there I am, minding my own business, walking in my room to take my shoes off and get ready for bed, when I turn around to leave my room to go to the bathroom. And there it is. The bug. The bug that sends shivers down my bottle like Mrs. Butterworth on that Geico commercial. It's there on the wall (just now my keys shifted in my pocket and I jumped because I'm thinking so hard about this bug) like it's decided my room's the best place to be. I eye it as I open the door and... really I don't know how to describe the movement. It like... zigzags or makes circles, or whatever, but really it's just incredibly fast and frankly, I don't know where it went because I got the heck out of there. When I came back it was gone. I'd suspected it went behind the pastel rendition of a bird hanging on my wall. So the next day I told my host mom about it and although she was freaked out, there wasn't much to do. She said we could spray it with something. So...

Then last night my host brother had a friend over and my host mom, while getting dinner ready, told the friend to go down and look with me to see if it's there. So we did... I gingerly lifted the picture to look behind it, and there was nothing. Then the friend (also Nicolas) took the picture off the wall entirely but there was no bug. So we went to the next pastel hanging on the wall (a tiny monkey holding onto a finger with red polish) and still no bug. He asked if it was a spider and waited patiently as I looked up the word for cockroach (cafard) to which he replied "bug." Not quite, kid, not quite. There's a vast difference between a bug and a cockroach. I let it slide. I told him it disappeared, is probably in my bed, and we went upstairs. There, in the kitchen, he told my host mom it was a bug, to which I said "Un cafard," at which point she immediately stopped stirring, looked at me with a petrified face, and frankly I don't remember what she said because of the sheer terror running through both of us.

She made sure it wasn't one of those fancy eight-legged insects, and then asked if it had a lot of legs. To which I replied, yes and it's brown with long antennae. She was relieved, said those are harmless, there's nothing to worry about, and that it's probably under the baseboard.

Yes, harmless. Unless you're me tonight, in the bathroom, minding your business, when a tiny version of the original runs past your foot and under the door. Babies. The thing has had babies. But let's just say it has one less baby because as soon as I opened the door I took a step and swear I stepped on it. It could have been something else, debris from the day, but if it were you, and you felt a tiny bump underfoot, you'd do a crazed karate kick too and run in your room.