Suddenly I felt something flutter down around my neck. I didn’t really pay much attention and we kept on talking. There were a lot of bugs, mosquitoes, butterflies, etc., in that climate. Later on, I realized that the ‘thing’ seemed to be inside my shirt. I was wearing shorts and a blouse outside my shorts. I asked my friend to see what it was and to my horror, she started to scream “it’s a tarantula, it’s a tarantula!”.
A few weeks earlier we had heard of a little boy who had been hospitalized from a tarantula bite. Apparently he had put on his shoe not realizing there was a tarantula in the toe and it had bitten him quite severely.
My friend started jumping up and shaking her hands and telling me not to move. ‘I’ll go get help!" she said and ran away as fast as she could. I sat there for a while, wondering what to do, wondering if she would ever come back. I could feel the ‘thing' walking around on my back. Tarantulas have sticky feet and I could feel each foot as it lifted from my skin.
After what seemed like 8 or 10 hours but was probably 30 minutes, I noticed the school janitor approaching. I called to him in Spanish and he came over. I tried to explain to him what was going on but it was not until I pointed to my back and I guess he could see something moving under my shirt that he understood. In spite of the language barrier (my Spanish was not too great at that time), we developed a plan.
I would stand up and hold my shirt away from my back as much as possible and he would use a branch to stick down inside the shirt and knock the spider out. I still remember, it was a blue and white checked seersucker shirt! With my heart pounding, I did my part, and it worked! The tarantula walked down my back a bit, and I felt the branch pushing against him, but then he jumped to the ground. He was big! But not as big as I had imagined. In my mind he was about the size of a chicken.
I walked home and told my mother about my exciting birthday. I didn’t see my friend again until school the next day. Some friend.
