Once Upon a Time: True Stories of an Aspiring Writer

21: The High School Hostage Situation and other horror stories

THE FIRST TIME I WAS IMMERSED IN THRILL was in music class.

Danielle and I took it together. This particular elective was about music in the movies, analyzing instruments and soundtracks, seeing how they enhanced the story playing out on screen. One movie that we watched was Psycho. My first foray into Hitchcock fascinated me. The idea of an evil guy living in a motel was fascinating, too. It made taking showers scarier and every time we passed a motel that had #1 on the door, I couldn't help wondering what horrors might have happened behind it. 

And so began my interest in more thrilling stories. 

For the past couple of years at the time of this writing, I have begun to pick up thrilling novels, wondering if mine would ever be among them someday. The Wife Between Us. Behind Closed Doors. I loved the twists and the turns, not knowing what was coming, and then finally putting the pieces together so that finally, everything made sense. Boarding school was an interesting experience in many ways, but before I could graduate, there were several SUPER hurdles I'd have to cross that would make for great thrillers. None of them are long enough to warrant chapters, so enjoy some bite-size horror. 

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#1: THE BUGS

The school had students from all over the world, and NYC was a particular hotspot for students from the States. In the fall of 2010, though, this became a problem when they brought bedbugs. 

At one point we had dogs come in to sniff them out. Nobody was happy at how the handlers treated our rooms--my roommate, Emily, had posters taken down, and my Buddy Valastro bobblehead was broken (and carefully placed in a desk drawer so I wouldn't see it after they left). I was pulled from study hall by Emily, actually, so we could see the condition of the rooms. This made nobody happy. 

As for the bugs? We found that Emily had them on her side of the room, but my side of the room was miraculously fine. Perhaps for the same reasons that mosquitoes don't usually favor me, the bedbugs didn't either. I woke up with some itchy spots on the day of the winter performance, but they never bothered me again. 

On the first night they were discovered, we had to move rooms for the night. Emily and I were going to live in a spare room in another dorm. Danielle was going with others to the basement with eight other girls. The rooms would be opened by the academic dean after study hall. But the dean never came to unlock the rooms. Seeing the chance, I decided to move in with Danielle instead, bringing the small bag of clothes I was allotted. It wasn't a terribly fun night, living with eight other girls, and it seemed like we wouldn't be getting much sleep. We did move back to our own rooms (though many others stayed in their temporary dwellings) where Emily voiced her displeasure that I had changed my living arrangements, but the dry ice they had put down didn't really work. As a result, we just ended up living there anyway while the school tried (allegedly) to figure out the next steps.

They announced that the rooms would be treated again over Thanksgiving break. Unfortunately, I got back and immediately saw a bug crawling up the wall. But they didn't ask everyone to move this time. Instead, we all just stayed put, the staff at a loss to do anything else. Nobody wanted to visit each other's rooms. We had been told that bedbugs didn't spread. But if that was the case, how did they get here from New York, which was having a bug epidemic? And because they could live in the walls, they were challenging to get rid of, to say the least. Poor Emily was still waking up itchy every day, and the girl next door had it especially rough. You didn't want to e living in a room next door to someone with bedbugs, because you would get them too.

Finally, they called the affected students together before Christmas to ask us to bring all of our electronics home--the new plan was to heat the rooms to super high temps a few times. Everyone was in a good mood at our Christmas banquet. Our class sponsor, in this case the music teacher, had us go all out to create a Night Before Christmas theme. It looked pretty great, and we all had a good time talking with our friends and getting ready for the holiday.