I was awoken by frantic knocking on my bedroom door. Groaning, I glanced at my phone. 4:30 a.m.
"Julianne? Can you come over to my room for a sec?" my flatmate Ashley whispered, loudly.
Alarmed by the note of panic in her voice, I rolled out of my bed and staggered into the hallway, flooded with lights from Ashley's room.
"Uhhh... what's up?" I mumbled, still groggy from sleep.
Upon entering Ashley's room, I discovered a scene that would have been comical, under normal circumstances. Ashley was backed up in the corner of her room, arms crossed, eyes wide, and hairs astray.
"There's a cockroach on my bed," she hissed.
"What?! Where!?" I gasped. I hate cockroaches. Ever since I spent a humid summer in Hong Kong feeling cockroaches scamper over my legs at night, I get goosebumps on my skin even just thinking about them.
"It's there. Under the blanket. I think it crawled on me while I was sleeping," she breathed.
I spotted the unmistakable brown insect, half-hidden beneath the blanket. My heart rate quadrupled. Five years of friendship kept me from bolting out of the room.
I glanced at Ashley, who now seemed immobilized by fear. It was going to have to be up to me to dispose of this foul creature.
Okay, okay. Okay. I can do this. Moving quickly, I flipped a plastic cup over on top of the cockroach, before it even knew what was happening. Yes! It's trapped!.
"Oh no, it's trapped. Oh, no. What do we do now?" I realized, aloud. The mattress was far too soft to slide a piece of paper underneath the cup and release the cockroach outside, without risking escape. And to be honest, I had used up the last of my courage reserves with that cup maneuver. Trap-and-release was not an option.
We were going to have to fight this cockroach. We needed weapons. We needed a strategy. Bottle of bleach. Can of hairspray.
Handing both of these weapons to Ashley, I locked eyes with her. "I'll lift the cup. You start spraying. We are strong, educated women. Defeat by this puny cockroach would be the biggest embarrassment of our lives," I said, firmly. She nodded and gave a weak smile.
"Three... two..one!" I lunged forward and lifted the cup. Chaos ensued. The cockroach made a mad dash for The Chasm Of Safety between her bed and the wall, Ashley waged a major bleach/hairspray chemical warfare on the cockroach which did absolutely nothing to slow it down, and I grabbed Brad the MCB 150 textbook, which had been lying on the floor, and whacked the speedy little bugger with all my might. It got back to its feet and kept running.
"Hit it, hit it again!" Ashley screamed.
I screamed.
And slapped Brad back on the cockroach, leaning on the textbook with my full weight.
We gave each other horrified looks. "Do you... think it's dead?" she choked out.
"No, I don't think so." There was just no way; the mattress had too much give, and the exoskeleton of the cockroach was too sturdy.
"I don't think I have it in me to execute our strategy again, do you?" I rasped. The combination of adrenaline, fear, and a thick fog of hairspray/bleach had aggravated my asthma. Ashley, still gripping the hairspray with one hand and the bleach with her other hand, shook her head.
Long story short, we taped the entire perimeter of Brad the textbook to the duvet cover and slid a case of water bottles over Brad for good measure.
The bleach destroyed the duvet cover. The textbook/water bottle trap was left in place for an entire week (Ashley slept on the remaining 25% of her bed), until one of our mutual friends came over and taped the edges of the duvet shut with more packing tape. This entire duvet bundle went into the dumpster, because none of us could face the cockroach.
$100 dollars in damage, all for a cockroach. To this day, this ordeal remains the biggest embarrassment of our lives.
