I turned my head from one side of the room to the other, something brown scurrying across the floor under my chair.

A major rite of passage associated with college is moving into the dorm. An even bigger rite of passage, is getting your own apartment. My sophomore year, after only one year in the dorms, my best friend Tara and I were fortunate enough to be able to do just that.

Our apartment was a basement deal, high up on a hill, with wood paneled walls and drop tile ceilings. It smelled musty and the carpet was dirty. It was the perfect first apartment.

The year had begun ordinarily enough. We dived into school and a social life, pulling all nighters to finish homework and all nighters for friends. The third week of school, while sitting at my computer, I heard a scratching within the ceiling. I told my roommate, and a friend on line, both of whom assured me that I was insane and I reluctantly returned to my work. Until about five minutes later when Tara mentioned that she heard something in her ceiling. We invited a friend over and they spent the rest of the night lifting up ceiling tiles searching for anything.

Fast forward to one week and two all-nighters later. We arrived home about 2:30 am, at which time I rushed to brush my teeth, wash my face, and crawl into bed. What felt like ten minutes later, I awoke to a loud crash. After quickly realizing I lacked the cat-like ability to see in the dark, I turned on my bedside lamp and noticed that the plastic light cover had somehow managed to fall from my ceiling to the floor below, cracking in half as it hit my dresser on the way down.

I convinced myself that somehow the wind had come in through the window and gotten up underneath the light cover, causing it to fall out. One can convince oneself of anything when she hasn’t slept in almost forty-eight hours. I turned the light off and curled up again under my covers.

Almost as soon as I had closed my eyes, I heard a light scratching. I reached for my light while cursing raccoons for choosing this night, of all nights, to rummage in the garbage outside my window. (Ignoring the fact it was more like a hundred feet away and not right outside my window.) The scratching stopped when the light turned on. Content that I’d scared them away, I turned the light off.

The scratching started again. By now I was sure that it was not, in fact, raccoons, but someone attempting to get in my window and murder me and had been thrown off by the light. Either that, or the scratching was, as my mom had assured me, just a moth who had been trapped in our ceiling and when I turned the light on this time I’d see a human sized moth such as the one featured in The Mothman Prophecies and soon I’d start drawing moths with beady red eyes until the day of my inevitable death.

Either way, I was going to die. So facing up to this fact, I turned the light on, once again, while sitting up on my bed to look out my window and stare down the face of the man in the mask who was going to murder me.

My lack of sleep was getting the best of me. Obviously there was no murderer, and there was no moth. There was, though, as I turned my head from one side of the room to the other, something brown scurrying across the floor under my chair.

Of the things I’m known for, bravery is not one of them. Upon seeing whatever it was that I saw, I promptly pulled myself into an Indian-style position and held my blankets tightly under my chin with my fists.

“Tara!” I said. There was no answer.

“Tara!!” I said again, a little more loudly, afraid to scream for fear that this brown-ness would come attack me.

What?” was the sleepy reply I heard. I still have no idea how she heard me from the other room.

“There’s something in my room.”

A pause, and then: “Where are you?”

“In my room.”

A few moments later I heard her bedroom door open, the three steps through the hallway, and then my door was pushed open gently. She stood in the doorway, looking from me to the broken light cover, and back to me. She didn’t say a word as she made her way over to my bed and sat down on the end, pulling her feet under her.

I told her what I had seen. Something brown, long, and flat running across the floor of my bedroom, and behind the thigh-high pile of clothes I had on the floor. I admitted that I didn’t have my contacts in and that I wasn’t exactly sure where my glasses were, but that I was fairly certain it was a chipmunk.

Tara, knowledgeable in every area, said that was impossible, but it might be a squirrel. I told her that it didn’t have a bushy tail, but what did I know? I could barely see three feet in front of my face. She said that there had been squirrels in her brothers room once and that they were able to catch them with boxes. I found my glasses, and left her sitting in the middle of my bedroom with a box, while I sat in the living room hoping she would catch it so I could go back to bed.

I waited about ten minutes and Tara came out and claimed that she never even heard anything move. We decided to call the landlord, but being responsible twenty-year-olds, quickly remembered that we didn’t have the number anywhere but on the lease which was home with our parents for safe-keeping. At 4:30 am, we called each of our parents to tell them that something had fallen through my ceiling and we needed the landlords number.

Pat walked in with a shovel about 5am. We weren’t sure what he’d do with the shovel, but figured he knew best. The three of us stood in my bedroom searching for this thing. Pat pounded his shovel on the floor trying to scare it out. Tara rummaged around under my bed and in my closet. I was picking up articles of clothing, one by one, from the thigh-high pile and shaking each piece out individually before throwing it on my bed. They could find whatever this was, but I wanted nothing to do with it. After about fifteen minutes of nothing, Pat asked if I would mind sleeping in the living room until he could send Vinny, our maintenance man, over in the morning.

I grabbed a blanket and a pillow and adjusted myself on our lime green plastic couch where I laid watching Animaniacs and other various cartoons while wondering if I had actually hallucinated the entire thing, if I was actually dreaming and would wake up in my own bed with the ceiling fully intact, or if there was something much more sinister than any of us could have imagined.

Vinny arrived at 9:30 and went searching my room. What felt like a half hour later, he came out of my room, walked past me quickly while saying, “It’s a possum, I’m going to get a stick.”

I stared at Bugs Bunny in disbelief and turned the volume up. Vinny came in with a two by four and walked back out with a garbage bag. This was the night I realized how bad my eyesight really is. He returned to my living room to tell me he knew where it had come in, he was going to get stuff to fix the hole by my window, buy a new light cover, and carpet cleaner. Which said to me, “there are blood stains on your floor where I smashed this bastard’s brains in with my two-by-four and that pounding you heard over Bugs Bunny was not actually the boy upstairs.”

For the rest of our time there, every time someone new came to our apartment they asked to see the blood stains which were not completely gone. My bedroom became something of a museum exhibit drawing people in from all corners of our social circle. Many returned again and again, bringing people along with them to show it off. A friend told me that I should have asked to keep the carcass so he could have stuffed it and displayed it on his mantle. Then he warned me he would going to find a stuffed possum and leave it in my bed. (Never happened.)

Despite our unexpected guest, we were prepared to stay in the apartment the following year. Until April when we were infested with spiders and our kitchen and bathroom flooded numerous times.

Now we’ve spent two years in a nice apartment with real ceilings and no spiders. But if we had to go back and do it again, we would. Who wouldn’t want to be able to say, “That’s like the time a possum fell through my ceiling.”