Simba

In life we are faced with many challenges, some of which, we are more keen to face than others: a book report: troublesome, a root canal: a doozie, and a chronic ankle-biting Chihuahua: a force to be reckoned with, but I gladly would have taken on any of these, maybe even all three, than have to deal with my current ordeal: my new "roommate".
About 411 miles north of Grand Rapids, is the city of Marquette, a pleasant tourist trap and major shopping center in an area entirely surrounded by wilderness, and was bordered by the awesome Lake Superior to the North. The landscape there was amazing and the wilderness, breathtaking. It were these qualities that brought me here, to attend the local Northern Michigan University, where I would unknowingly have to bear the new torture brought upon me by my new living arrangements.
When I first moved into the dorm, I was struggling to haul all my luggage across the threshold, my back bowing over the weight of the medium-sized cardboard box I was carrying, which contained my boom box and CD collection.
My roommate watched passively, as I staggered over to the empty desk on the vacant side of the room and gingerly placed the box down. When I had my hands free again, I turned to her to introduce myself.
"Hi, I'm Melanie, but people call me Mel for short." I held out my hand.
Her sea-green eyes lit up as she shook my hand warmly. "Nice to meet you. I'm Courtney. Do you maybe want to go down to the cafeteria later and grab a coffee? It's freezing here."
I smiled and nodded. "Yeah, sure. Sounds great."
We walked down from the House to the Dining Hall, bundled in our jackets and bracing ourselves against the cold wind that blew off Lake. We sat for at least an hour, sipping hot coffee and shamelessly scouting out the guys on campus. It turned out that Courtney was majoring in entomology, more commonly know as the study of bugs. This surprised me, but I didn't think much of it at the time.
By the end of the afternoon, as we headed back to the dorms, I felt so relieved that I had made at least one friend up here, and relived that I wasn't going to be stuck living with someone unbearable for the entire school year.
As soon as we returned, Courtney suddenly brightened. "Oh, I almost forgot to introduce you to our other roommate."
"Um, other roommate?" I was pretty sure there were only two students per room.
"Yeah." She smiled. "He's my pet."
"Oh." I laughed. "Well, I'm excited to meet him." I always had small animals growing up. A little critter in the room, would only make it feel more like home.
"Okay, let me get him." She bent over her bed, and lifted up a small clear box, the kind they use for bug-catching or mice. Mice were cute.
She brought the container over, carrying it by a bright blue handle, but all of a sudden, I realized that it was no mouse, but something I hoped never, ever, had to come into contact with, not to mention live with ever, in my lifetime.
"Melanie, I'd like you to meet Simba."
I swore my heart skipped a beat, because inside the carrier, was a brown hairy spider the size of a tea saucer.
I felt my pulse go into double-time, as I thought of something nice to say. "He's, um, magnificent." I choked.
"Isn't he, though? He's a Rosy-Toed Tarantula," she said, opening the top of the carrier, and letting the arachnid crawl into her hand. She lifted him out and held him out for me to hold.
I gently declined, feeling my knees go weak, and my head starting to swim.
Did I ever mention that I was arachnophobic? Well, I remember I used to sleep on the couch back home, if I saw even a tiny house spider in my room before bed. What was I supposed to do, now that I had a spider as big as a grapefruit only a few paces away from where I had to sleep every night? This was going to be a nightmare...literally.
The first couple weeks were the worst. Every night I would hear that accursed arachnid scuttling about its terrarium, hunting down the crickets unfortunate enough to be to that evening's meal. I really hated that Courtney fed him before bed, but she insisted that it encouraged "natural hunting behavior," since tarantulas were nocturnal or something. Eventually, I pooled my resources and invested in a box fan to drown out the noise of Simba's evening activities.
After about nine weeks of restless nights' sleep, I finally began to feel somewhat comfortable living with a dinner plate of a tarantula. I still didn't like the thing, and by all means, wanted the bugger out of my life, but he was tolerable.
After my afternoon classes, I would always come back to the dorm to find Simba sitting in the middle of his habitat, basking in the light of his heat lamp. I would settle down on top of the covers on my bed and prop my textbook upon my pillows. It was then that Simba would reposition himself so all eight of his black beady eyes were focused on me.
I swear the thing knew I didn't like him. I think he could smell my fear when he flexed his fangs. Sometimes he would find an exoskeleton of a past cricket and fiddle with it, picking it up with his forelegs, and placing it in his jaws, creating the soft crunching noise I hated so much, all the while, watching my mortified expression with what must have been delight, shining in those eight black orbs.
"Hello there, devil." I told him from where I lay on my bed, tracing the eraser of my pencil along the glass, snickering, as I watched the stupid thing chase after it, trying to grasp it in its hairy forelegs. This was my favorite form of procrastination and my personal revenge. Of course, I would have never gotten away with this when Courtney was in, so I made the most of every moment, taking lots of study breaks between questions to play my cruel game.
One day, towards the end of the semester, Courtney surprised me by returning to the dorm early. Her eyes were red and puffy, and she looked about as pale as a ghost.
I immediately forgot my homework and rushed over to set her down at the desk before she keeled over. "Courtney? Courtney, what's wrong? Is it Jeff? Did you two get into a fight or something?"
She wiped her sweatshirt's sleeve across her face. "No. No, we're fine. It's just... I just got a call from my mom. My grandpa had a heart attack early this morning."
"Oh my gosh! Is he okay?"
Her face fell, and she shook her head. "I guess he's in pretty bad shape. I'm leaving tomorrow morning on the bus... to say good-bye." She choked again, and I put my arm around her shoulders.
"I'm so sorry. If there's anything I can do for you, please let me know."
"Well," she sniffed. "I'll need someone to watch Simba, while I'm gone. Do you think you could...?"
"Oh, don't even worry about it," I told her instantly, "just worry about getting home right now."
Her arms were suddenly around my neck in a tight hug. "Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to me."
Courtney left early the next morning on the Greyhound. She looked very shaky and tired, as she boarded. I guessed she didn't have a whole lot of sleep that night.
The dorm was eerily quiet, without Courtney there, with only the spider for company, and Courtney would have killed me if she knew that I disrupted his feeding schedule. As long as the little devil was on my watch, he was not going to be engaging in "natural hunting behaviors" while I was trying to sleep, boxfan or not.
The look I received from that arachnid could only be simple and utter loathing, when I fed him in the middle of the afternoon, instead of at his normal time, but hey, he was asking for it, wasn't he?
Now, I know what you must be thinking: How could I be so cruel? Your friend is out of town, saying her final good-byes to her beloved grandfather, and all she asks from you is to take care of her spider.
Okay, first of all Courtney has nothing to do with any of this. This was between me and Simba, nobody else, but little did I know, that this was the beginning of the end.
Since it really was too quiet without Courtney there, and it was a Friday night, I took the liberty to invite some friends over for a movie night. The snow was piling up in mounds outside, at the time, so driving really wasn't an option.
Sarah and Kelly arrived around seven that evening. Sarah had an entire case of Monster with her. Kelly had several bags of microwave popcorn and both Transformers movies. It was going to be an epic girls' night.
So that's what we do from eight at night to about one-thirty in the morning. We eat popcorn, indulge in most-likely unhealthy amounts of caffeine and ginseng, and watch giant, alien robots blow up stuff, but then things turned – well, kind of bad.
See, Sarah loves Monster, or any kind of caffeinated drink, some might say she's an addict, which is no different from most college students I know.
"Alright, I-I'm gonna do it. You dare me?" Sara gibbered standing on top of my bed, crouched over, in a prepared spring across the desk to Courtney's. Quite arguably, this was nit the best idea of the evening, but sleep deprivation and the overload of caffeine had impaired every one's judgement.
"Do it! Do it! Do it!" Kelly chanted, pumping her fists.
I should have stopped her then, but for some reason I can't remember, I went along with the whole thing. "I dare ya, Sarah!"
She crouched over farther, bouncing once, twice, three times on the balls of her feet before launching herself across the desk, only to fall short. Her hands got to the edge of the bed, but not the rest of her, and her knees came down on top of the desk, knocking over the terrarium and sending it spiraling to the floor, the sand, rocks, and lid flying across the room.
Kelly and I both shrieked and leaped onto my bed, as the bristly, brown Simba scuttled out of the overturned habitat and dashed, as nothing more than a brown blur, across the pale carpet.
"Sarah, what did you do?" Kelly wailed, frightfully. "You let the monster spider out!"
Sarah was shaking on the bed opposite us, either from fear, or from her nervous system being overloaded with stimulants. "I'm- I'm sorry!"
"Well, it's a little late for that now!" Kelly snapped. "Now, we're going to have to catch it."
My blood went cold in my veins. "Catch it?"
"Well, duh. You don't want it crawling around while you sleep, do you?"
My blood ran colder. "Let's catch this thing."
Armed with thick mittens, a car scraper, a broom, and a shoebox, we tentatively started the hunt. The dorm, as all dorms were, was quite small, so it was only a matter of a few short minutes until we found Simba huddled beneath the TV stand.
My hands started to sweat through my gloves, as I held onto my car scraper, as if it were some kind of lifeline. I was crouched down next to Kelly, our faces nearly to the floor, as we watched the spider from his hiding place. He seemed perfectly at ease.
"Okay," Kelly said, "Mel, you get him out of there with the scraper, and Sarah and I'll try to grab him, when he runs for it."
I swallowed noisily and nodded. I bent down and reached my car scraper towards the spider. I poked it once and flinched, as it scooted a few inches to the right. Gathering whatever courage I had, I nudged the thing again, and this tine he bolted. I heard Sarah squeal from the other side of the TV stand. I popped up into my knees to make sure she was okay.
"Ewww! It ran over my hand, and it was HAIRY!"
"Oh my gosh, Sarah, it's a tarantula, of course it's hairy!" Kelly told her, bravely back on her hands and knees looking for Simba beneath my bed, where he must have just taken refuge.
We repeated our earlier strategy: me prodding the arachnid out of hiding, while Sarah and Kelly tried to shepherd him or sweep him into the empty shoebox. However, we didn't have much luck. Eight legs must mean eight times the speed, and eight eyes eight times more vigilant, because we were chasing that thing all around the dorm, until 4:30 am, and none of us could bare to keep our eyes open any longer. By the time Sarah and Kelly left, I was too tired to worry about falling asleep with a Simba loose in the room; I was out by the time my head hit the pillow.
I slowly opened my eyes to the grey winter light that filtered in through the dorm window. I stretched my legs. Still drowsy, I turned my back to the windows, and rolled onto my side. I was just at that point in between sleep and consciousness, where the two seem to bled together, when my nose itched. I wrinkled my nose to avoid moving my arm to scratch it. It helped for a second, but the sensation returned a couple moments later, this time covering my nose and forehead. I shook my head, but the itching didn't go away this time. I sat up, thinking I'd just give up on sleeping in, when I felt something land lightly in my lap.
I looked down, as I flinched, to see eight beady eyes looking up at me. I screamed, forcefully swatting the spider off of my lap. It smacked into the boxfan with a plastic-sounding thud and lay stunned at its base. I leaped from my bed, going for the shoebox on the far side of the room. My landing shook the floor slightly, and a loud crash sounded from behind me, as the unsteady, plastic fan tipped over.
With a heavy feeling in my gut, I took the box and hesitantly pulled the boxfan into its upright position. Horror filled my chest, as I laid my eyes on the spider's crushed, disfigured, hairy form. I've just killed Simba! I wailed internally. What was I going to do now? Courtney loved that spider,. and was going to kill me when she got home!
The bitter taste of guilt flooded my tongue. I shouldn't have been so reckless,I thought. Courtney was my friend, and she'd trusted me to watch over her most prized possession for a mere forty-eight hours, and in the first twenty-five, I'd managed to blow it.
I sulked and mulled over what to do the entire morning. In a way, it was a bitter-sweet victory. I'd managed to get that freaky thing out of my life for good, but I could, as well, be losing my best friend. After another forty-five minutes of mulling, I came to a decision.
I swore I had to be crazy, as I drove through the constant fall of thick snow, and into town, where I pulled into the local pet store. Yep, that's right. I got her a new spider, just as big and hairy as the last.
Well it turns out, I wasn't as crazy as I'd thought. Courtney arrived home the next day, and I gently explained to her what had happened to Simba. She started to cry, when she saw his lifeless skeleton resting peacefully at the bottom of the shoebox, where I'd put him in until she got home. I was almost shocked, when a wet tear ran down my cheek. I told myself I was just responding to Courtney's tears, and no true emotion.
After she had said her good-byes to Simba, I suggested we go back to the dorm, where I presented her with her new pet. She was absolutely ecstatic, not just because I'd bought her a new pet, but because she'd known that I was arachiphobic, but because I was willing to face my fear to save our friendship, and I guess that's worth something.