Crazy is the Name of My Game

( 10 ) I stand alone.

Erica Santos

I have always hated dealing with new people for as long as I can remember.

I don’t like the clingy type, those who nod and hang on every random word I spout. You know, the kind of individual who wholeheartedly believes me when I say that I keep a Micropachycephalosaurus as a pet. To dumb it down, yes, it is a freaking dinosaur.

 I also dislike the smart-asses, those who try to grab my spotlight, who think they’re better than everyone else because they know more. It was one shade of hell after another when bull-headed people like us clash. Challenge fires us. No one steps down. And based on experience, disaster lies down that path.

Even lightning will fear us when we scowled. Hah. Okay, that’s an exaggeration.

But when a new friend gets frank on you, I realized that it was nice to receive bits of reality every now and then, even if it meant I had to reshape my rock solid view of the world. Not.

***

Back to earth, the sound of shattering glass alarmed me. I dragged my useless foot as I braced myself against Jen’s ear-piercing scream.

“ERICA! Oh god, Erica! Kill it! Hurry! Kill it!” she shrieked frantically. “OMG! Kill it! Please!”

If Jen wasn’t in hysterics, I would have laughed at her position. She was standing in tiptoes on top of my couch, her face as bright and red as her hair, her arms flailing as she pointed all over the place.

“What?” I looked around bewildered. What could have terrified her? Jagged pieces of glass were dangerously sprinkled all over my cheap terracotta-colored carpet, reflecting specks of light like dew on the leaves at dawn. Jen was too preoccupied with finding a safer, higher place, so I had to repeat myself. “What?”

I groped my surroundings for something to throw, something to defend ourselves against the invisible foe. I found the oven toaster. And a sponge. And a soap?

“There! There!”

Was it possible that her voice got louder?

“Where?”

My other free hand wrapped around a plastic flower. The vase was missing.

“Oh my god!” Her terror was contagious, I couldn’t think coherently at all.

I threw the flimsy flower away, shuffling to the drawers in the kitchen. I finally got my hand on a knife. Bread knife. Great.

“What? Where?” I asked again.

 “Roach!” she cried. “Cockroach!”

“Where?”

Finally, I saw the source of all trouble.

Tossing the knife away, I strutted towards the thrown square pillow lying on the floor. A tiny black insect, the size of a penny, quickly skittered away.

“That’s a beetle.” I turned towards my ashen classmate who was reluctantly climbing down from my couch. “A baby beetle.”

"B-Baby?"

Really.

Jen was breathless and near tears, but I wasn’t in a mood to comfort her. The sight around us – the broken shards, the upturned table and worse, the CD rack that I bet she accidentally knocked down – wasn’t a particularly happy picture.