Last night, you would have thought that the whole rat-flu thing would have scared everybody off, but God, she’d never seen Rush Street so crowded. The bars, the clubs, everything was full. There was this vibe in the air. Janelle couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it was as if the thought of danger had amplified the desire to escape into music and alcohol and lust. Everybody was going crazy, even the bartenders. She hadn’t bought one drink all night. She couldn’t move two steps in any direction without bumping into cute guys. She still couldn’t quite figure out how she and Brandi had ended up back at their place by themselves. Maybe it was for the best. She did have to work the next day after all.
Once downstairs, she was in luck. The women’s restroom was empty. It wasn’t nearly as extravagant as the guest restroom just off the lobby, but here, she knew she probably wasn’t in any danger of being disturbed. She stumbled past the sink to the two stalls, locking the handicapped door behind her. She wriggled her pencil skirt down to her knees and sank gratefully onto the toilet.
She set her phone on the toilet roll dispenser and pulled out her tampon. Just as she had thought, it was soaked. The sight and smell of the blood threatened to make her gorge rise, and that was the last thing she needed, to puke all over her panties and skirt, which were sketchy enough anyway, while she sat on the friggin’ toilet.
She gritted her teeth as her body evacuated what felt like white-hot lava into the bowl while she pinched the tampon string. She couldn’t dispose of it because some idiot, most likely a cock-sucking man who had no idea what he was doing, had installed the receptacle out of reach of anybody sitting on the toilet. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead and she tried to only breathe through her mouth.
The thought of the used tampon dangling from her hand made her stomach roll uneasily yet again, and in a moment of rage, she simply threw the damn tampon at the uncomfortable box on the wall. The tampon bounced off, leaving a streak of clotted red viscera, and dropped to the floor.
If she made it through the day without staining her clothes, she promised herself a long hot bath tonight, to hell with the period, and a glass of red wine. And if Brandi wanted in the bathroom, well then, too damn bad.
Janelle started to see how this was all Brandi’s fault anyway. Sure, Brandi would blame her, but who had been dragging whom to the bar for all those flaming shots with those DePaul frat boys? The more she thought about it, the more she thought Brandi needed to be suffering right along with her.
She fumbled for her phone and knocked it off the toilet paper dispenser. It bounced on the tiled floor and came to rest out of sight, behind and under her. “Really? Really?” she said under her breath, eyes on the ceiling as her fingers swept across the tiles, searching.
Something heavy, with matted, wet fur brushed against the back of her hand.
Janelle shrieked and jerked her hand back.
The thing hissed at her and scrabbled across the floor, darting through her stall, before disappearing around the corner to the sink.
The awful sensation of being chained to the toilet seat as seemingly everything inside of her, including all of her internal organs, slid into the bowl finally passed, and she cautiously bent over, peering under the stall wall. The bathroom was empty.
She sat back, worried that the fear might make her vomit. She tried to control her breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Relax. It was just a rat.
She gave a hitching exhale, like she was sliding down an icy road and flinched every time she bounced over crack. Just a rat. It was gone, under the door. She wasn’t happy to see a rat in the restroom on the best of days, but now, with all that flu stuff in the news, it made her want to cry.
She sniffed, looking at the ceiling again, determined not to smudge her mascara. She looked bad enough as it was. She bent down again, this time looking at the phone. It sat by itself. No more rats. Staring at the phone, she could think of one person that deserved to share her misery. It was the least she could do.
Brandi’s groggy voice said, “Oh, you bitch.”
“Oh, don’t ‘oh bitch’ me, you bitch,” Janelle said. “You won’t believe me. I just saw a rat. I’m dying in here, and there’s a damn rat running on the floor.”
Underneath her, out of her sight, two bedbugs wriggled out from under the toilet, where the bowl was bolted onto the floor. It had been sloppily sealed with silicone and the bugs oozed from a small gap. More bugs followed.
Brandi yawned. “You called me ’cause of that, are you kidding me?”
“Don’t you know anything? The rats, you know, the rat flu?”
Brandi grunted sleepily, said, “Yeah, that’s awful.”
A steady line of bugs emerged through the hole under the toilet. More crawled from the air vent in the ceiling.
Brandi yawned again.
“Oh, no. No. There’s no way you get to go to sleep. Don’t you hang up. I’ll keep calling. There’s nobody at work. So don’t think I won’t. I’ll call and call and call, and you’re gonna have to talk to me sooner or later so it might as well be now, bitch.”
Bugs burst from the gap between the toilet tank and the wall and marched steadily down the wall.
A fresh spasm jolted Janelle’s abdomen and she closed her eyes, riding the latest wave out. Brandi heard the sounds and wrinkled her nose, “Are you fucking kidding me? Please don’t, oh no. You’re in the bathroom right now, aren’t you? Oh. My. God. You are sooooo disgusting.”
“Bitch, please. Don’t. Just talk to me. I just wanna die.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s okay. That bathroom, what? It’s in the basement, you told me. So it’s probably just a rat that’s trying to get to shelter or something. It doesn’t care about you. It’s gonna be okay. Really.”
“But what about the disease?”
“It’s only if they bite you or something. So just chill, you’re okay, okay?”
The spasm passed, and Janelle wondered if she should dare to wipe herself and insert a new tampon. She had to get used to that thought for a while, and rested her head on her knees. Through half-closed eyes, she watched a little bug trundle confidently along between her shoes. She blinked, and watched the bug move with a purpose, straight to the used tampon.
The bloody cotton tube was crawling with insects.
She gasped and jerked her feet off the floor. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“You won’t believe this. Oh my god.”
“What?”
“This, this is how my morning is going. I’m not even going to try to tell you.” Janelle gave an unhinged giggle. “You need to see this yourself so you can see. I’m going to send you a video.”
“Oh, come on, I—”
Janelle hung up. Clicked on CAMERA, then switched over to VIDEO. Bracing her feet on the walls, she got a shot of the tampon, with what looked like fat red ants clambering all over it. She zoomed in. The lighting was awful, and the zoom didn’t do much but blow up all the pixels, but it looked like the insects were relishing the fresh blood. She zoomed back out to give some perspective. Several lines of bugs marched on the used tampon, all from under her toilet.
She scratched absentmindedly at her waist with her left hand, still focused on the phone in her right. The sight of the bugs had not sickened her; they hadn’t added to her nausea. Instead, she found the movement and documentation of the bugs fascinating. The opportunity to prove to her roommate that this morning was by far the worst morning in the history of the world was enough to satisfy her and settle her gag reflex.
Even when she looked away from the phone’s display and saw that the bugs had moved up the toilet en masse and were now crawling across her thighs was not cause for immediate panic. She stood, forgetting the lines of bugs that crisscrossed the floor, and experimentally tried to brush the bugs off her torso. They weren’t much bigger than bell pepper seeds, and clung to her skin with the same stubborn tenacity as those same seeds, resisting being washed away by the kitchen sink faucet or even the vegetable knife.