Page 47 of Kiss Me Now
“Uh, right, Miss Spencer. Um, that’s a boatload of spiders.”
I should probably say something funny about how “boatload” wasn’t a scientific measurement, but all I could do was inch down the wall away from the spiders.Pull yourself together, woman, I ordered myself. But myself didnotlisten.
“Can you boys...” I waved in the direction of the spiders.
“I got it,” said a girl from across the room. She hurried over to the desk. “Oh. These are crab spiders. We get them in our garden. They rarely bite.”
“Rarely?” repeated Kyle, also backing away.
“Justin, grab a paper and kind of sweep them in here,” the girl said, plucking up my can of freshly sharpened pencils and dumping them out on Justin’s desk.
He complied and picked up the index card where I had written my carefully rehearsed welcome speech for each class, using the stiff edge to send all the tiny spiders into the pencil cup, finally sending the mother spider to join them.
“I think we got them all,” the girl said, crouching to study the desk more closely.
The panic in my chest loosened, and I stepped away from the wall but also far away from my desk. I wasn’t going near those flowers again.
I crossed to the front of the room and cleared my throat before addressing the class. “I don’t love spiders.”
“No kidding,” one of the boys muttered, and the other kids laughed.
“I, uh, normally handle them better than that. I just didn’t expect to see a giant one crawl out of a flower right in front of my face.”
“Why not?” asked the girl—Hailey, I finally remembered—holding the cup full of spiders. “That’s where a lot of them like to live. You’re pretty scared of bugs for being a biology teacher.”
I swallowed. I could feel myself walking a delicate balance here. I needed to figure out how to cement my authority as a biology teacher despite having just freaked out over spiders. If I didn’t, I would lose their respect for the year, and that would make this class much harder, and probably my other classes too, if the story spread. And I had every reason to believe that it would.
“I don’t love spiders,” I repeated. “But I do find them fascinating. Like, for example, beneath the lens of a microscope. In fact, we’ll do a whole unit on the essential part spiders play in our daily lives without us even realizing it.” I had no such unit planned, but I immediately added it to my to-do list.
Hailey raised her hand. “You want me to keep these little guys for the unit?” She asked it as a dare, testing to see if I would lose my cool again.
“No, it won’t be for a while yet. Better release them. Um, outside. By some bushes.” I gave a slight emphasis to the last part, confident in my suggestion since there were no bushes beneath my classroom window, which meant the spiders would find a new home far enough away to give me peace of mind. “Bushes will be a great home for them.”
Hailey shrugged like that was fine with her but didn’t seem interested in further needling me. The bell rang to announce lunch, and I hid a sigh of relief beneath the clamor. I wished Hailey would have volunteered to take the peonies with her, but when the students cleared out, the vase still stood on my desk, mocking me as if it knew I would come no closer.
What were my options here? Ireallyhated spiders. No matter where I encountered them, they never seemedright. They were always eerily out of place, whether it was a dusty corner of Uncle Fred’s gardening shed or a flower arrangement, or even spinning a web across one of the paths I walked in the morning before the heat set in. There was no context where I’d run into a spider and thought,Yes, this one belongs here.
I hated them so much that I considered calling the custodian and asking him if he would mind removing the vase for me. But Miss Lily had cautioned me that the most important people for any teacher to befriend were the office clerks and the custodial staff, and I didn’t want to risk alienating the janitors by treating them like servants.
That meant I could either leave the flowers be and not go near my desk ever again as long as I lived, or...I could put on my big girl panties and handle it myself.
I took a deep breath and a single step toward the flowers, but I faltered on the second step at the memory of the disgusting white spider emerging from the peony.
There was no way. None. I couldn’t touch it again.
Great. Now I was held hostage by Ian’s peonies since my lunch and purse were by my desk as well.
Pull it together, Brooke,I ordered myself, and this time myself tried harder. What if I could get rid of the flowers without touching them directly? I checked the trash can beside the door for the extra trash bags the custodians stored beneath each liner for easy switching out at the end of the day.
I removed one and shook it out to make sure it would be big enough for peony/vase/spider containment. Then with a deep breath, I rushed the peonies like Elmer Fudd going after a rabbit with his net aloft, swept the trash bag over the flowers, cinched it beneath the base, and jerked the whole mess upright while dancing back from the desk in case I’d missed any spiders.
I didn’t see any of Satan’s beasties on the desktop, and if any remained in the peonies, my death grip on the garbage bag would make sure they didn’t escape. I whisked it out of my classroom and went looking for one of the large campus garbage cans to dispose of it, but each one I passed still felt far too close to my classroom.
I finally reached one near the outdoor basketball court that looked to be the last possible garbage can where I could drop the peonies, and I flung the trash bag in and pivoted toward my classroom, ready to eat my lunch and get ready for my next class.
“Hey, there,” a male voice called behind me, one that didn’t sound like a sophomore.
I turned and spied one of the PE coaches. He was new this year too, and I racked my brain for his name but couldn’t come up with it. I’d been introduced to so many other teachers during the in-service meetings last week.
