When It Comes To Dealing With Dead Mice, I Am Basically Batman

Do you know why high school sucks? It is because teenagers think it is funny to make their peers look at dead mice.

Some of you are probably thinking, “That has never happened to me in my entire life. Is it possible that it happened to you and you are bitter about it?” To which I answer: be quiet. I hate your face. Also, you are not a psychologist and it is probably illegal to try to act like one when you aren’t. Sort of like pretending that you are a doctor. Do you know what happens to people who go around pretending that they are qualified to delve into people’s psyches, or administer brain surgery? Bad things, that’s what.

Now that we have dealt with those jerk-heads, I’ll move on to the real story here, which is: that I hate mice.

I don’t like them. At all. Ever. I don’t even really like Mickey Mouse, because he is bossy and a goody two shoes and everybody knows that Donald Duck is better. In real life, when I see them, I have been known to have what is medically referred to as a meltdown. This is probably partly because when I was younger, my family dogs liked to make a habit of killing mice or rats and laying them out where we (translation: I) could find them, as though they expected some sort of reward for scaring the living crap out of me. The only time when I have ever liked rodents was on Ratatouille, and that’s because they could talk and they weren’t all pompous and uppity and Pixar is magic and can make even the most horrifying things, like monsters or talking toys, endearing and cute.

You get the picture. Mice and I are not friends. In fact we are enemies. Even if, say, Stuart Little, who is arguably the most likeable of all the mice in the world, came up to me and said, “Hey, you want to be friends?” I would say, “NO!” and then maybe hit him with a frying pan.

Of course I don’t demonstrate this aversion to rodents in public because people (by which I mean: teenage boys) like to make other people freak out by subjecting them to the object of their fears. High school (I don’t know if you have noticed this) is full of teenage boys. So of course I didn’t bring it up. It is like bringing up the fact that you are ticklish. Anybody with siblings knows that this is practically like giving people permission to tickle you. I was not going to give people permission to shove rodents in my face. It was just not going to happen.

Now, in high school, I was on the yearbook staff, and at the beginning of my senior year we were having an issue with mice in the building, mainly: they were trying to infiltrate it and make all of us their slaves (nobody ever came out and said that, blatantly, but I knew that this was the mice’s plan). Along those same lines, we had little electrical outlets in certain rooms in the school that I can best describe as small boxes that were installed in the floor. They had little covers over the top of them and space inside. The mice liked to crawl in here.

One day, during yearbook, we were sitting around, doing the things that yearbook staffers generally do—harass people for interviews, complain about picture quality, eat pancakes—when it came to my attention that something, I believe maybe the phone, needed to be plugged in. As I went around looking for a place to do that, one of our yearbook editors directed me to a specific electric box and told me to plug the phone in there. Unbeknownst to me, he and another editor had found a dead mouse in one of the boxes the day before and had already agreed that, when some poor sucker came along and the opportunity was appropriate, they would trick the poor sucker into finding the dead mouse and maybe they could make them have a heart attack.

I am sure that they thought this would be hilarious, because they apparently had no souls.

So when I opened the electrical box I was greeted by a dead mouse. Because I was practically an adult and fully in charge of my emotions, I descended rapidly into what is referred to in the medical community as freaking out.

Actually, in retrospect, I did better than I thought I would do in that kind of situation, mainly because I didn’t start screaming. Instead my heart stopped and I sat, very quietly, for a minute or two, waiting for it to restart, before it registered that I had been set up and, as such, I had the chase the person who had, to all appearances, set me up, down the hall and maybe possibly catch him and kill him.

I didn’t catch him, mainly because I am slow and out of shape, but also because my heart had only just recently restarted and when your heart restarts, it does not expect you to immediately start running and making it work hard. In fact it hates it when you do that. I was lucky it didn’t stop again, just to teach me a lesson.

Anyway, by the time I got back to the room, and forced the door open because they locked me out, probably to prevent me from strangling him, the story had spread around and there were about forty people in there snickering at my expense. My options at this point included:

1. Crying.

2. Kicking them.

3. Yelling, “HAHA! YOU FELL FOR IT!” and running off like a maniac, potentially leaving them all confused and sort of kind of saving my reputation.

I chose option 4, which was: be an idiot. In an effort to convince them that I was not afraid of mice but was actually merely surprised by finding a dead animal where I did not expect there to be one, I put on a pair of plastic gloves and pulled the dead mouse out of the box to throw it away.

I don’t want to act like a hero or anything, but I totally succeeded in throwing the mouse away. Because I am brave. And that is what brave people do.

And guess what? It only took me about three months to stop being afraid of plugging anything into those electrical outlets. That makes me basically like Batman as far as handling fear and stuff go. Everybody knows that Batman is fearless.

Also, if you see Mickey Mouse, could you not tell him that I was badmouthing him? The last thing I need is a giant rodent coming after me.

Thanks.