A monster under my bed.

Le 13 mars   Okay, so it wasn’t a monster. And it wasn’t under my bed, either. But it sure as hell scared me.

At the end of a very lovely, relaxing day, I came to my room to unwind before another week of school and running around at 100 miles an hour. To make sure I’d start the week off right, I decided to tidy up. Being busy so often means rooms get disheveled quite frequently.

Just as I was about to pick up a pile of clothes from my chair, I spotted movement on the desk. Did I imagine that? No… that movement just continued on off the desk and onto my exercise ball, then scurried away along the edge of the room.

What exactly is protocol for seeing a rat? In the movies, the woman stands on a chair and screams while jabbing at it with a broom. Me, well I’m in a convent at 9pm – I can’t just scream. So I run next door to Petite Gisele’s room (which I’d just left moments before) and knock franticly on the door. I tell her what happened and she comes in to survey the scene. (Mind you, she was not nearly as flustered as I was.)

I search with my handy dandy flashlight along the perimeter of the room – he can’t have gone too far. Sure enough, behind the stacked up luggage that has no place to be put away and thus has been turned into a table, I see him – beady-eyed – staring back at me. Poor little guy, he was probably just as uncomfortable to be looking me in the eyes as I was him.

“There he is! Do you see him? There he…aah!” and he scurried his way right on out the door. WHEWPH!

But he took a right. As my dad well knows, taking a right out of my room is a dead-end. Unless you’re Petite Gisele, that is – she’s the only one in my neighborhood. Onward runs the little guy (not little – he was definitely a rat and definitely at least the size of a hotdog bun), turning into the only place he had to go… right under the closed door of Sr. Gisele’s room.

Oh, good. That’s so much better.

Trying to think quickly, I ran to put my sweatshirt along the bottom of my door to prevent my new neighbor from returning to my room. We searched high and low, but no luck. (I suppose, really, it was a great deal of luck that we didn’t see him.) Discontented that we weren’t able to verify for sure that he wasn’t there, but pleased to know that the door to the outside was open down the hall and he could have easily run past us in our frenzy and out to safety, I left Petite my flashlight and we again said our goodnights.

I had been tired before. I had been quite content after a peaceful, refreshing day and was about to head to bed to get a solid night’s sleep, but now I can’t. The sweatshirt’s still barricading the door, but until I relax a bit more I won’t be able to get to bed. No worries – it’s only a rat. God forbid it’d been anything worthy of truly fearing!