Spiders
~A Cautionary Halloween Tale~
Smashwords Edition
By Frank Provo
Dedicated to Edward “Lynn” Ware, Jr.
Thank you for helping to kindle my creativity.
May you rest in peace.
Copyrights
Copyright © 2011 by Frank Provo.
All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for personal use only.
No part of this story may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, for commercial purposes without the permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and events depicted are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, locations, businesses, and/or events is entirely coincidental.
CHAPTER 1-Yesterday
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!—*Smack!*
Ten minutes passed.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!—*Smack!*
Ten more minutes passed.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!—
“Julie!” A voice yelled from downstairs. “It’s time to get up for school!”
Fifteen-year-old Julie Swanson vaguely registered the sound of her mom’s voice calling out to her. Groggy, she reached out for the alarm clock she had been snoozing and slid the switch to the [OFF] position.
“Mmmph,” she mumbled into her pillow.
Julie planted her hands into the mattress and struggled mightily to sit up. She wondered what sort of cruel joke life was playing on her this time. She had just been having a marvelous dream about Chip Jackson, the cute boy in her gym class. He was the only reason she hadn’t begged out of the class this year with a headache or some other “get out of jail free” excuse. Not once.
Now, her alarm wouldn’t stop ringing and her mom was yelling at her to go to school. Could it have been Monday already?
She reached out to the nightstand and checked her cell phone. Yep—Monday.
“Ugh,” she sighed, peeling away the covers and sliding her legs over the side of the bed.
Her body shivered when her feet touched the carpet. “So much for shag carpeting,” she murmured quietly while dragging her five-foot-five-inch, 135 pound frame over to the closet.
What to wear? What to wear?
She opened the closet’s folding door and a small, brown object fell onto the carpet. Julie saw it out of the corner of her eye, but it took her a second to register it. After a slight pause, she let out a blood curdling scream that shook the house.
“Yaaaaaaaaargh!!!” She yelled, as she fell onto her butt and scootched backward as fast as her arms and legs could drag her.
The small, brown object was crawling toward her on eight stick-like legs: It was a spider.
“Go away, go away, go away!! No, no, no,” she cried.
And she very nearly was crying. Her eyes welled up. Her voice developed a fearful timbre. To cut right to the heart of the matter: Julie Swanson was deathly afraid of spiders.
It all started when she was a little girl. Her mom had left her at an aunt’s house for the day so she could go job hunting. Julie must’ve been seven at the time. Her aunt had a son a year older than her, named Zack.
As you can imagine, the two kids found trouble in short order. Zack thought it would be fun to go out into the woods and throw rocks at squirrels. That boy never was right in the head. Julie didn’t want to hurt the cute, fuzzy squirrels, but she idolized Zack—so she went with him anyway.
Not very deep into the woods, they came across the husk of a fallen tree that had been long since hollowed out by the elements. When Julie stared into the tree, she voiced concern that it was pitch black inside. Zack, of course, picked up on this and dared her to crawl through to the other side.
He double-dog dared her.
She was paralyzed with fear, but crawled into the dark log regardless.
Zack waited on the other side.
And waited.
Julie hadn’t come out.
He called to her a few times and, just as he was about to run back and tell his mom, he heard a faint voice call out, “I’m stuck... help.”
Zack had been carrying around a small flashlight on his keychain. With his head packed full of good intentions, he pressed the button on the pen-sized light and shined it into the other end of the log.
He saw them at the exact moment she did. Four or five good-sized spiders were crawling around in there, inches from Julie’s face and hands.
She screamed. She wet herself. And she was still stuck.
Zack had to run back to get help. Eventually, a man from the volunteer fire department came with a hatchet, and split the log enough so that Julie could get free.
Unfortunately, it had taken him a half-hour to respond to the call and reach Julie’s aunt’s house. For thirty minutes, the spiders, with their pointy legs and furry feet, crawled all over hands, her arms, her face, and her neck.
She didn’t stop shaking for weeks. The nightmares continued for a solid year.
Ever since, each time she saw a spider, her mind would instantly be drawn back to that fateful spring day when she was seven.
Cowering there against her bedroom wall, she felt like she was back inside the log again.
The little brown bugger was still crawling towards her.
Desperate, Julie reached up to grab something, anything to swat the spider with.
Her fingers brushed across a familiar swatch of leather and nylon. She stretched upward to grab it.
“Eww! Eww!” she exclaimed, grabbing the shoe off the dresser. In one catlike motion, she tucked forward into a crawl and raised high the tennis shoe she was holding.
The spider continued its charge and she responded by slamming the shoe down onto it.
“Eww, Eww, Eww,” she echoed as she repeatedly slammed her size 8 into the carpeting.
After a good nine or ten wallops, she pulled the sneaker away and peered down at the dark spot now marring the peach colored carpeting. The spider no longer looked like a spider anymore.
Satisfied, she chucked the shoe behind her and started rifling through her clothes to find the perfect outfit to wear.
Julie could almost hear her mom’s voice inside her head. “Don’t kill it. Let it out,” mom would argue. Easy for her to say—she wasn’t the one with creepy critters leaping out at her. She wasn’t the one that had been stuck in a log with them when she was seven.
Sometimes, to make her mom happy, Julie might make a half-hearted effort to let one go, if she saw it from across the room and there was a cup or something nearby to scoop it up in. More often than not though, Mr. Spider met his end at the bottom of Mr. Shoe in the heat of the moment.
Julie stood up, steadied herself, and looked at the bottom of her shoe.
Gross, she thought. I’ve been seeing these things a lot lately
Is it the rainy, fall weather that’s bringing them out?
As she picked through the litany of sweatshirts, blouses, and t-shirts—all emblazoned with some company’s logo or a trendy slogan—she heard someone jogging up the stairs.
Her mom called out to her from the hallway: “What was that scream all about? You OK?”
Julie made up an excuse to avoid telling her mom about the reason for the spider entrails she was currently wiping onto a disheveled towel.
“I woke up confused, tripped on my shoes! Sorry, mom,” she called out, loudly.
“OK, sweetie,” her mom said as she started her way back down the stairs. “Now hurry up and get ready. The bus will be here in twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes?! Julie’s eyes grew wide.
I need to shower. I can’t go to school looking like this.
“Oh man, Oh man, Oh man,” she repeated over and over, dashing through the doorway and into the bathroom down the hall.
She showered and dressed in record time. At two minutes past seven, she crashed out the front door with her mom yelling behind her: “Have a good day at school!”
“I doubt it,” she mumbled quietly.
She hated school and she most assuredly hated Mondays. Who in their right mind could have a good day with five days of school to look forward to?
At the end of the block, she fell in behind the other poor saps waiting to be dragged to Granholm High School on this particular chilly fall morning.
Sarah Shepard, her best friend, wouldn’t be among them. Her mom usually drove her to and from school, except on days when she had a board meeting.
Julie peered down the street to see if she could make out anyone at the stop two blocks down. Her other friend, Aimee Chu was probably standing down there. Julie couldn’t wait to grab a seat next to her and gab about their plans for tonight.
Halloween. Yes! I just need to get through the day...
Julie’s thoughts drifted to all of the fun she and her friends were going to have that night. They were going to dress up and go “trick-or-treating.” Well, not trick-or-treating—that’s for kids. They were going to throw on plastic cat ears and rubber cat noses, dab a little make up on their cheeks, and get the parents in the neighborhood to give them candy. Then, they were going to toilet paper Nina Johnson’s house.
It’s going to be so much fun.
Standing there, her eyes glanced back at the thick bushes bordering the walk in front of old man Samuels’s place. A gray haze was mixed in among the leaves, which, on closer inspection, revealed itself to be a thick mass of spider webs. “Gross”, she said, backing away.
Mercifully, the bus arrived.
She stepped onto the bus, walked to the back, and took the open spot next to Aimee Chu.
“Hey Chewie,” Julie said to her friend. “Some morning huh?”
Aimee Chu looked up and nodded.
“Yeah. . . and don’t call me that. You know I hate that!”
Aimee was, of course, referring to the nickname—Chewie—that their other friend, Sarah Shepard, had given to her in fifth grade. You’d think she’d earned it because her last name sounded like “chew.” In fact, Sarah dinged her with it when she caught Aimee absentmindedly chewing on her long, black hair while reading in the library. The nickname stuck.
“Oh, don’t be that way,” Julie admonished her. “Are you looking forward to tonight?”
For the next fifteen minutes, the girls compared notes about their plans for the night and traded gossip about their classmates.
CHAPTER 2-Math
Aimee and Julie stepped off the bus at seven thirty-five. The three story façade of Granholm High School loomed in front of them—its ninety-year-old architecture looks like a mash-up of a prison and a hospital. Julie often wondered how they could make brick and concrete look so ugly.
The girls made their way up the front steps with the other students. However, as Julie took hold of the door, she noticed a cobweb had been spun inside one of the tiny window frames built into it. She recoiled and shoved the door open.
“Watch it!” Aimee shouted.
“Sorry. Look,” Julie said, pointing to the web-covered window as Aimee made her way through the door.
“Sick,” Aimee replied. “But you didn’t have to smash my face in! It’s just cobwebs.”
“Whatever... they’re disgusting.”
There were five minutes left to first bell, which left them no time to stop for breakfast in the cafeteria. So, the girls each just popped in to grab a bagel and hustled down the hall to their first class of the day: Math.
They shuffled into room 108 with mere seconds to spare. Mr. Turk, the balding, overweight math teacher, was already at the whiteboard writing formulas and scrawling something about “Angle pair relationships.” The whole year was going to involve geometry and proofs, which terrified Julie. Because of that, she sat in the back corner, as far away as she could get from Mr. Turk, the board, and those evil formulas.
Instead of paying attention to Turk’s lecture, Julie spent the first half of class staring at the ceiling. Her imagination was lost in the dot-like indentations and water stains in the tiles overhead.
Aimee tapped Julie’s shoulder and pointed toward the corner near the door. There, near the ceiling, a good-sized spider of the two or three inch variety was hanging out—just chilling on the molding like it was some kind of couch or something.
Julie wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Jeez, look at that—,” she whispered to Aimee. “It’s so big.”
Aimee pulled her glasses down from her forehead to get a better look at the creature. Its body was brown with dark spots. There was a faint web behind it and its front legs were moving. She wondered if it was eating a fly or just working to make the web bigger.
“—and uugggggly,” she said, finishing Julie’s thought.
Julie opened her notepad to a blank page and scribbled on it. She quietly tore out the sheet and passed it to Aimee.
Have you seen a lot of spiders lately too?
Aimee leaned forward to shield the note from Mr. Turk’s view. He was too caught up in a rant about A-squares and B-squares equaling C-squares, whatever that meant. She jotted a reply onto the paper and passed it back
Yeah. We keep finding them in our basement.
Julie’s interest was stoked. She knew that changes in the weather would cause insects to retreat into homes and basements, but this many? She had been squashing one or two a day for weeks now. And they were never the same. Large, small, brown, black, short legs, long legs—she was becoming a regular Entomologist trying to keep track of all the varieties.
For the remainder of class, they passed the note back and forth. By the time the bell rang, they had amassed quite a conversation.
J: Have you seen a lot of spiders lately too?
A: Yeah. We keep finding them in our basement.
J: OMG—same here! The brown ones with skinny legs are the worst!
A: I take them outside, but they come back.
J: Not me. I smash as many as I can.
A: Gross! I bet that annoys your mom.
J: It does, but that’s just a perk. I HATE SPIDERS!!
A: Me too. When I was a little girl in China, I’d see some big ones. With fangs!
J: STOP! You are freaking me out!
A: Still, there weren’t as many as I’ve seen here lately.
J: I know! It’s creepy!
At the bell, Mr. Turk reminded the students to remember their proofs homework that was due the next day. “Halloween is no excuse for slacking off,” he told them.
Julie looked at Aimee and rolled her eyes. Homework wasn’t in her plans for Halloween night.
On her way out the door, Julie tossed their note into the trash bin. She and Aimee parted ways until lunchtime and Julie began the grueling trek upstairs to her English class.
Halfway up the steps just past the second floor, Julie stopped to take a breather. She looked out one of the big latticed windows in the stairwell to survey the neighborhood outside. As her gaze moved downward, she noticed a large circle of webs padding the one corner of the window.
Seriously?! You have got to be kidding me. This whole town is turning into a house of horrors. At least there’s no spider this time.
CHAPTER 3-English
Parked in room 300, Julie was happy that there weren’t any cobwebs or spiders to be seen. No real ones, anyway. Plenty of fake webs and skeletons adorned the walls, courtesy of her English teacher, Mr. Ware—but nothing of insect origin.
Sick buggers probably can’t climb that high. Good!
With nothing to distract her, she’d be able to focus on her English class, or as she liked to call it, the anti-Math. Mr. Turk’s nasally math lessons made her want to hide under her desk, but Mr. Ware’s English lessons had the habit of energizing her.
Keats, Kipling, Koontz—it didn’t matter who the author was. Mr. Ware made them all seem exciting.
He had the students do raucous readalouds during the week and he’d act along with them. On Fridays, he’d show the class the TV or movie version of whatever book they were reading. In a month, they were going to take a field trip to the playhouse to see The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe performed.
Talk around the school was that Mr. Ware had been the saxophone player in some regionally relevant rock-and-roll band in the early seventies. Julie thought that was cool.
“Alright now, alright now. Let’s settle,” Mr. Ware told the class. “We’re going to take a break from Ayn Rand today and do something in the spirit of Halloween.”
The class erupted in cheers, Julie included.
They had been reading The Fountainhead for what felt like weeks. It would be refreshing to have a break from the bickering of “Howard Roarke” and “Dominique Francon” for one day.
“Today, my doggies, we’re going to read a spooky poem by Mary Howitt: “The Spider and the Fly.”
Julie lowered her head and exhaled a defeated breath.
Wonderful. I get away from those things for 45 minutes and we’re still going to talk about them.
Mr. Ware passed photocopies of the poem down each aisle and told the class, “Alright, we’re each going to read a few lines. I’ll start.”
He cleared his throat and started to sing, badly.
“Why’s everybody always kicking my dog around? Don’t they know he’s just a—”
He stopped himself mid-song.
“Heh heh. Just kidding. That’s not it.”
The class laughed, out of pity.
Once the class had settled down, he cleared his throat and read the first stanza of the actual poem in drawn out, melodramatic fashion:
"Will you walk into my parlor?" said the Spider to the Fly,
"'Tis the prettiest little parlor that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlor is up a winding stair,
And I have many curious things to show you when you are there."
"Oh no, no," said the Fly, "to ask me is in vain;
For who goes up your winding stair can ne'er come down again."
Julie clenched her teeth in frustration.
Am I going to get no peace from those things today?!
The students each read a few lines. Julie became more and more tense after each verse. So much so, that when it came time for her to read her portion, she could barely speak.
“At last—” she coughed, clearing her throat. She took a deep breath.
“At last—
Up jumped the cunning spider, and fiercely held her fast;
He dragged her up his winding stair, into the dismal den -
Within his little parlor - but she ne'er came out again!”
Her lines escaped her throat like a whisper. Lucky for her, the class didn’t realize she was afraid. Instead of sensing her anxiety and frustration, the class thought she was just acting.
After finishing her part of the poem, Julie folded the paper and let it fall to her desk. The other students clapped for her. They actually clapped!
“Bravo, Miss Swanson—you really captured the spirit of the poem,” Mr. Ware told her.
She wanted to tell him where he could go, but instead cracked a halfhearted smile and said “thank you.”
For the first time since the semester began, she found herself watching the clock, wishing for English class to be over.
CHAPTER 4-Gym
After English class, Julie stuffed her books into her locker and grabbed her gym bag. If she could get through the next forty-five minutes without so much as a mention of spiders, she’d consider herself lucky.
During the walk from the main building to the athletic complex across the street, she didn’t notice a single spider or any sort of web.
She entered the athletic building and made a beeline to the girls’ locker room. She could already hear the loud chatter of her classmates’ gossip echoing down the hall. In terms of sheer volume, Julie was certain the girls’ locker room had the cafeteria beat, even when it was pizza day.
Stepping inside and rounding the privacy barrier, Julie saw the usual suspects. Melanie Jones and Sherelle Landis were sitting on a bench half-dressed, bickering over something. They always claimed to be best friends, but they fought constantly. Tomeka Smith was straddling the bench next to them, facing away from them and generally trying to ignore their current argument.
Other voices the next row over suggested that the cheerleaders were once again bragging to each other about which member of the football team they had done this or that with.
“Hey guys, B-R-B,” Julie said to Melanie, Sherelle, and Tomeka. For some reason, she hadn’t asked to be excused to the bathroom during either of her first two classes, and now she really had to go.
As she passed through the doorway leading to the lavatory area, she paused to look around.
No spiders? Check.
No webs? Check.
“Good, no creepy-crawlies in here to scare me out of my wits while I’m most vulnerable.”
She used the toilet and washed her hands without incident. However, as she was about to walk back through the doorway, she noticed a now-familiar shape attached just above it.
“Eek!” She screamed.
The sound of her voice caused the spider to scurry and then fall to the floor. It moved a few inches toward Julie before turning tail and scrambling off in the other direction.
In a tantrum, Julie stomped on the ground with her right foot and threw her hands up in the air. “I can’t believe it,” she said to the empty room.
“I just can’t believe it,” she said again as she re-entered the changing area where the other girls were waiting.
“Believe what?” Sherelle asked.
“The spiders,” Julie answered. “I keep seeing them around school. Isn’t there some law that says they have to get rid of these things?”
“I don’t know,” Melanie replied. “But you’re right, they’re everywhere. One of them jumped out of my locker this morning. I ruined a perfectly good book cover when I smashed it.”
Tomeka, the quiet one of the bunch, turned to face the girls and added her two-cents: “I’ve seen a few big ones in my garage. Dad says it’s the weather...”
Julie told them about her morning—the spider in her closet, the one on the entry door, the one in the bathroom. “Whatever it is, it’s creeping me out. I hope we don’t see any out on the gym floor. I need a break.”
The other girls nodded in agreement.
A few minutes later, Coach Shoales led the girls to the running track outside. Julie would get her break—the coach was making them run laps.
Julie knew there were spiders out there too, probably hiding in the grass or dangling from the football uprights—but it didn’t bother her. She wouldn’t stumble across any of them while jogging the quarter mile on the track, and she had no intention of going anywhere near the uprights.
Midway into her second lap, a voice called out to her from behind, “hey gorgeous, how’s it going?”
The comment startled her.
Julie stopped and looked back to locate the source of the question. Coming up behind her, out of breath, was Jonathan “Chip” Jackson, a fullback on the football team and the boy she currently had a crush on.
“Hi Chip!” She beamed.
It was rare that he spoke to her. What’s going on, she wondered.
Huffing and puffing, it took him a while to reveal his intentions: “Hey, Julie... I was... I was wondering... Sarah told me you were going trick-or-treating... I think that sounds fun... can I come?”
She couldn’t believe it. They had shared maybe 100 words since the school year began eight weeks ago, and now he was inviting himself to go trick-or-treating with her.
“Uh, OK... sure!” She told him, trying to play it cool. “—But that’s not all we’re doing...”
“Sarah told me about toilet papering Nina Johnson’s house too,” he said, smiling. “I can be down for that. You’re going to need a lookout.”
“Sweet!” She told him. “Uh, it’s a... date, I guess!”
Chip smiled and waved at her to continue running.
“Yeah, I’ll get your number from Sarah,” he said to her, adding “you go on ahead. I’m not used to long distance running.”
Julie debated cutting the run short and devoting the remaining time to more conversation with Chip, but she decided better of it after remembering what coach made her do the last time she slacked off: Squat-thrusts. One hundred of them.
Leaving Chip behind, she set off to finish the run.
“See you tonight,” he shouted to her, hoarsely.
Sitting in the locker room four laps later, Julie was all smiles. She was also relieved to see that no spiders had setup camp on the ceiling or benches while she was out running the track. When she went to shower, to get clean after the grueling run, she didn’t see so much as a single web—not even in the stall that’s been “out of order” since September of last year.
Gym wasn’t bad. Maybe I’ll get through the rest of this day bug-free after all.
CHAPTER 5-Lunch and Bio (Not)
Lunch at Granholm High is complete chaos. Instead of splitting the student body into two lunch periods, like some schools do, Granholm sends all 1,100 of its kids to the cafeteria at the same time. School rules state that only seniors are allowed to leave school grounds during lunch. Because of those rules, the two city blocks the Granholm campus occupies sound like a rock concert between 11:40 and 12:30.
“Hi guys,” Julie called out, taking a seat at the table occupied by Aimee Chu and Sarah Shepard, a.k.a. her very best friends in the world.
“Hey punk,” Sarah said right back. “Thanks for keeping us waiting.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Aimee said, sticking out her tongue.
Julie rarely made it to the cafeteria on-time after gym class. The walk alone killed a few minutes. And if she chose to shower—well, her friends were used to seeing her saunter in at 11:50 or even noon.
This was one of those noon days.
“Sorry, guys. Coach made us run laps. I had to take a shower or you wouldn’t let me sit with you.”
“You’re right about that,” Sarah replied, poking her in the arm.
Sarah always poked people in the arm—and she knew exactly where to poke so it would still hurt five minutes after she did it.
Julie had a number of theories as to why Sarah bossed around and poked her friends, but she always found herself unable to say them out loud for fear of Sarah punching her lights out. Sarah was two inches taller and had an extra thirty pounds over her, after all.
“OK, enough giving me a hard time,” Julie begged. “Let’s go get our food.”
Sarah and Aimee went through the line first while Julie kept watch over the table. In a cafeteria that packed, you didn’t want to lose your seat. Soon, they returned and Julie had her chance to grab her choice of chicken casserole or a hamburger. The casserole looked like it just fell off the medical waste truck, so she opted for the hamburger. Returning to the table, she saw that Aimee and Sarah had done the same.
“Oh, hey Sarah,” Julie said as she returned to her seat. “Chip Jackson asked me if he could join us tonight. He said you mentioned it to him.”
“Yeah?” Sarah asked, trying to jog her memory. “Oh, yeah... I did! He came over to hang out with my brother the other day, and I kind of got to talking about you and our plans. He seemed... interested.”
Julie turned five shades of red.
“Um, uh... thanks Sarah, I think,” Julie squeaked. “But, um, your mom won’t mind him going out with us later?”
“Oh, don’t worry about her,” Sarah said confidently. “She won’t pay him any attention anyway. He’s not coming to see me.”
Julie blushed again.
“I know he’s your crush. Why do you think I tried to set you two up?”
Julie smiled wide.
“Thanks, Sarah. If this works out, I’ll owe you big time.”
The girls traded gossip and gobbled down their burgers-and-fries in record time, leaving them just ten minutes left of lunch period to unwind.
“Julie,” Sarah began with inquisitive tone, “how do you feel about biology?”
“I’m dreading it,” Julie said. “I haven’t done my homework.”
Sarah shook her head.
“No, silly. What I meant to say was, how would you feel about skipping bio today? They just opened that new Hot Topic knockoff in the strip mall down the street. I want to check it out.”
Julie looked at the clock and considered the request. At this point, her day could go either way. Health and Spanish were practically guaranteed to go well, but she had to get through Biology first. She hated biology.
Spending some allowance on a piece of cute jewelry or a new top might be just the thing to put the day back on the right track, she reasoned.
“I’m in,” she finally replied.
“How about you, Chewy?” Sarah asked.
“Don’t call me that!” Aimee shouted back. “And... no, I can’t. I can’t skip chem today. We have a test.”
“OK, well, I guess it’s just me and Jules here,” Sarah said. “No big—just make sure to call me tonight, so my mom can give you a ride over. We don’t want to miss out on our Halloween plans.”
“I know, I know,” Aimee said, as she pushed her chair back and headed off to her chemistry class on the third floor.
“—Catch you guys later. Bye, Julie!”
When Aimee was out of sight, Sarah tapped Julie on the shoulder and pointed toward the exit.
“Let’s get going before the teachers come back,” she said. “If we aren’t out past the gym in five minutes, we’re not going anywhere but detention.”
The two girls hotfooted it toward the door.
Fifteen minutes later, they were standing in the parking lot of the Wilson Avenue shopping plaza, mouths agape. Zeitgeist, the store they’d hoped to shop at, was closed, and so were the other six tenants of the strip mall.
There was a sign on the door: Danger—Fumigation in Progress.
“Great!” Julie shouted. “Just great! I skip school to get away from those darn bugs and I come to a store that’s full of them.”
Sarah looked around.
“What are you talking about, J?”
“The spiders, Sarah. Haven’t you seen them?”
For the next ten minutes, Julie told Sarah the same story she had told Tomeka and the other girls in gym class. Sarah’s eyes grew wide as she listened to Julie talk about the spider that had chased her earlier in the morning, the big one on the wall in math class, and the one that tried to jump on her in the locker room.
When Julie finished, Sarah replied with a story of her own—and it was a doozy.
“My dad was out in the garage, right? Yeah, so he’s out there moving some boxes around. And mom and I are in the house doing whatever. All of the sudden, we hear this yell—it’s him screaming. Mom runs past me with the first aid kit in her hand. I follow her...”
Sarah kicked a pebble across the parking lot. Neither she nor Julie noticed the tiny, dark shapes scurrying away from the pile of leaves it landed in.
“We get in there and we see dad. He’s huddled in the corner with a plunger in his hand. In the other corner, oh man, it was the biggest spider I’ve ever seen.”
Sarah held her hands one-foot apart and made a circle shape with them.
“It musta been this big.”
She shook her hands for emphasis.