THE BAT INCIDENT

This was an extremely traumatic incident in my lifetime. Don't laugh, okay? Seriously, I am never, ever, ever going to be able to forget this. Ever. Ever. My family still laughs about it. I still tremble with fear...

If you know me personally, you should be aware of the fact that I can't cope with anything that flies. Seriously, I can do birds and butterflies, but that's about it. Pair that with my pathological fear of rodents and you get a teenage girl hyperventilating in a foetal position. So you can just imagine me with a bat. In my mind, the only thing worse than a bat is a lizard. Or a flying lizard. Or a flying lizard as big as my food. Ugh.

So my family and I were staying in a hotel in the middle of nowhere. No names mentioned; I don't want to get sued. We managed to get one of those shaley thingies where theres a double bed downstairs, and then two single beds in a tiny attic room above it. With a thatch roof. I'm sure you can see where this is going. I was already in hell. I was trying to download Hunting Lila onto my Kindle, and, with us being in the middle of nowhere and all, I had already had to practically climb onto the roof for an hour just to get signal for it to start downloading. After which I found out the hotel had free wi-fi, while I was trying to get like cell phone service (*face-palm moment*).

After dinner, my sister and I were sitting in our tiny little beds, reading and getting ready to go to sleep, all innocent, when this THING just flew at my face.

As I mentioned before, I don't DO flying things. So you can just imagine my reaction when it flew at my face. There was a lot of screaming (from both me AND my sister, no matter her version of the story) and we ended up in my parents' bed downstairs, me almost in tears. So, my dad, being the man of the house, went upstairs with my sister to check it out, thinking it was probably this huge moth or whatever, because that was what it looked like. You've guessed it already, it wasn't a moth (well duh, the title is "THE BAT INCIDENT") but I didn't know this yet, okay? What little logic I had was trying to figure out: "Why me, God? Why is it always me???!!!"

My dad and sister couldn't find it, so I went up to help them out (by peering in from the doorway with a pillow as a weapon). I saw a THING on the curtain, so I pointed, shrieked, and ran downstairs like a typical teenage girl (which is what I am, so shut up). From the bed, under the covers, I heard my dad hit something (with a shoe, I found out later - nice, dad *face-palm*), then my sister said, "THAT is DEFINITELY NOT a moth," followed by: "SHHHH... Don't tell your sister..." after which I almost burst into tears and half died inside. My dad, being the city-boy he is, then covered it with a PILLOW, and sent us back upstairs.

I shouldn't have been surprised that, not even twenty minutes later, as I was falling asleep, my sister screamed something along the lines of, "GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT!!! THERE'S ANOTHER ONE!!" but I seem to remember a couple of swear words no twelve-year-old should know thrown in there, too. Which sent me hurtling downstairs and into the bed. Again. There was a lot of crying and screaming, and I flat out refused to go upstairs again.

So my dad phoned management, and basically they moved my sister and I into a honeymoon suite on the other side of the lodge. Happy days. And I managed to convince my sister to tell me that THE THING was actually a bat. So I didn't really sleep, but when I did, my dreams were haunted by flying lizards (don't ask me why). Thankfully, we left the following day, and I don't think we'll ever be going back...