Rinckey: It’s a spider!

I’m studying abroad in England right now, and if there’s one thing we know about the country, it’s that they call soccer, football, and that it’s often cold and rainy. Because the weather is dismal throughout the week, oftentimes creepy-crawly things try to get into the warm dorms. In this case, the creepy-crawly things are spiders.
Back home in Michigan, I live in front of the woods, and animals try to get in where it’s warm all the time. I’ve seen the usual moth, mosquito and sometimes mice that end up in traps. Two years ago, my dad had to replace the central heating because a chipmunk made a nest in it and chewed up some wires. So spiders are no big deal for me.
But for the other girls in my program, spiders are public enemy number one.
I met up with two friends for dinner one night, and one girl told me how she found seven spiders in her room the night before, and she wasn’t able to fall asleep until 2 a.m. because she could feel their presence. She apparently has a sixth-sense for finding spiders. As we walked to the dining hall, she looked to the ceiling and pointed out the spiders that had previously been invisible to me. Personally, I feel like no one’s life should be influenced so much by spiders, so I offered to help her get rid of them.

She had gone to the store earlier that day and gotten materials to get rid of the spiders. She suspected they were coming from the cracks above her window, so I stood on top of her side table and used the communal vacuum, or hoover as it’s called in the UK, to suck up cobwebs in the corner of the window. It was night outside, and with the lights shining above me, I probably looked like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man to onlookers on the path to the dining hall below, my arms outstretched wide to reach the farthest crevices of the windowsill.
That wasn’t difficult, but then she got out the bug spray. I read the directions on the back, but I was concerned it wouldn’t work because it was meant for roaches and not spiders. I sprayed the liquid death towards the ceiling, and if it wasn’t lethal, it was at least annoying enough for a spider to descend from the ceiling Ocean’s 11 style.
It’s no Goliath bird eating spider, it’s no tarantula. It’s no Aragog from Harry Potter. It’s more like one of the millions of Aragog’s great-great grandchildren. And I know I shouldn’t be afraid of it, but there’s something about a group of people screaming that makes me scream too. So the three of us screamed in unison, and I scrambled off the table.
This is the point where I notice we’ve drawn a crowd. People who were puttering about in the kitchen came to see what the noise was about. Everyone could hear us because the door was open for the spider-poisoning fumes. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone in the hall was questioning, “What are the Americans doing?”
But I only had one thing on my mind in that moment: for the sake of my blossoming friendship, I need to kill that spider. I picked up my shoe that I had taken off before standing on the table, and I hit the spider.
Or at least I think I did, because there was no spider on my shoe, and no spider smashed on the window. Everyone cheered assuming I had killed it, which presumably I did.
I got back on the table and finished sealing the cracks above the window with clear packing tape. By the time we were done, there was clear plastic tape everywhere a spider could come from. We lined the windowsill, the place where the radiator meets with the wall, around the cork board on the wall and there was a piece that got stuck in my hair.
When I got back to my spider-free dorm room later that night, I sat on my bed and laughed at the ridiculousness of the whole situation. But as I laid down, I couldn’t help but scan my room for spiders. There were none there, and I was thankful I’m not scared to death of them, because no matter how awesome my new friends were, they were useless at dealing with bugs.
Morgan Rinckey is a fourth-year double majoring in English and communication.