Okies so here’s the thing, sometimes there are things in the night that go bump and bang and scare semi-adults into screaming like little girls. 

When I was in university, I was lucky enough to be able to live at home for most of my undergrad. This helped me save a lot of money. Because of some unfortunate study habits, I sucked at first year and I had to end up taking an extra year (plus some summer courses so I completed 12 terms instead of 8). My last year, I could have stopped after the fall semester but my favourite professor was teaching a class winter term and I signed up for it. Just one class. Because of that, I had to move out on my own. My parents were moving out of town and if I wanted to stay in school I had to find a place. 

I did. I found a nice sublet that was equal distance to work and school, and easy access to the bus system and the club/bar strip but still far enough away that it wasn’t on the main street. 

There were four other people who lived there – 3 I loved, and we got along really well, and then one that no one really liked because she smoked pot in the house and her stupid cat pooped/peed EVERYWHERE except in his litter box and he stole food from the other cat that we all loved. 

One weekend, it was just me and this girl we didn’t like staying at the house. I was just about to fall asleep in my room when I heard a LOT of crashing and banging and muffled screams. I jumped out of bed to try to find out what was happening. 

When I got out into the hall, I just see this other girl running around with a towel on her head. “OMG, what is going on?!” I probably said. Maybe not out loud. Out loud I was probably all “Ummm are you ok?” I was half asleep and was not in the mood to be woken up by this person I didn’t like. 

She calmed down enough to tell me that there was a bat in the house. I guess she was smoking outside (for once! omg!) and when she came back in, the bat must have flown in. She threw me a towel and I put it over my hair (cos we’re girls so that’s obviously what we were going to do) and she had a broom and I had a mop. We found it by the front door and what happened next was about 30-45 minutes of us screaming like little girls (I was 23 and she was 21) as we tried to get the bat to come down from the ceiling. 

I’m not sure how exactly, but we got it outside. It was really quite a blur but I do know for sure that the bat got outside. And at the end of it, we were a little closer. 

Sunday evening we regaled the other roommates with our story and it was a topic of laughter for a few weeks to come. That is until the drunk dude with no pants tried to break into our house. But you have to wait until tomorrow to read that story.