Story in notes and credits Another English class assignment! I like this one because it is A LOT lighter and more humorous than my last one T-T (see: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1179996502 ) though I suppose it is also proof that I can’t write a story without something dying. Also I searched up tarantulas for the thumbnail… BRO TELL ME WHY these things are SO CUTE AND FLUFFY like man, gimme rn idc if it’s venomous XD anyways, hope you enjoy ;)
I glance up to the board, where a projected slide from a PowerPoint presentation explains the body of a spider in great detail. I take down the words robotically, my hands scribbling down what my eyes see. ‘The abdomen,’ I look back at the whiteboard and continue, ‘of a spider,’ I write. I sigh of utter boredom, and wish for something to break the endless loop of regular daily life. Like the school catching on fire or something. “Sorry I’m late, Miss,” a bundle of dark hair and grey-blue eyes smashes through the door and rushes into the classroom. But my eyes are fixated on what he is carrying, terror and fascination pumping through my arteries as I meet beady black eyes behind a glass wall, looking at me with the same mix of emotions, an internal tornado. “Oh, it’s no problem, Jonas,” Ms. O’Brien assures him, “at least you brought the tarantula.” Jonas places the terrain in the teacher’s table and takes his seat in front of me. “Okay, class, settle down,” Ms. O’Brien commands, as the class has gone into a frenzy. Once the class has calmed, she continues, “Jonas went through a lot of trouble today to bring us his tarantula, so I expect you all to be careful with it. You can pass it around,” she hands the spider to Amanda in the first row, “but this is no excuse to ignore your notes. When you don’t have the tarantula, I expect you to continue writing what’s on the board. As you can see, the tarantula has eight hairy legs protruding from its abdomen…” she explains, but everyone had gone deaf to her the second the spider was among us. My stare remains on the tarantula, as does everyone else’s, and by the time it gets to me in the fourth out of five rows, I feel like I could sketch it from memory alone. I hold the cage up to eye level and watch the arachnid steady itself. It turns its angry eyes at me and I feel a thrill of danger at the storm in them, even through the safety of the clear walls of its cage. A swirling hurricane is building up behind those corneas, and I'm stuck in its eye. “Ick, can’t you just pass it on to the next row already?” Alessandra, my lab partner, seating neighbour, and the girl who camps in the bathroom whenever she’s supposed to be doing a dissection, complains. “You didn’t even look at it!” I groan. Alessandra stares at me like I have just told her to hang cat guts up in her room as decoration. “God’s sake, Alice, stop being such a wuss.” I plop the tarantula on her side of the table. Alessandra jumps off of her chair like she’s on a bungee trampoline and shrieks louder than a smoke detector. As she leaps up, her knee knocks over the table, bringing the tarantula and its glass box down with it. “Everything all right over there, girls?” Ms O’Brien rushes over. I watch helplessly as the terrain goes flying, crashes into the floor with a tremendous boom, and splits open into four pieces. If the spider had any chance of survival, that chance gets squashed along with the spider as the table hits the ground. I glance up at Jonas, who is glaring at me. His irises are clouded over with the storm his fallen spider once owned, a lightning quick look promising the thunder of revenge, a look that steals my breath and makes me think, “Damn, I should really squish more of his tarantulas.” Then I look back down at the mess Alessandra and I have made, where glass is shattered, one arachnid leg is much farther from the other than it should be, and I think I see a trickle of blood. I curse.
