I jolted awake in the middle of the night, disturbed by my annoying full bladder that kept forcing me to take my lazy ass off the bed and go to the bathroom, but I was too comfortable beneath my blanket and kept resisting Mother Nature's call.
It was so warm and cozy in bed, the stark contrast to my chilly basement. It took me a few minutes of insistent pleas from my bladder for my brain to finally start to poke me awake in a more incisive manner. The brain's warning was very clear:
You listen up, punk. Bladder isn't horsing around down there. You better hurry up or things will get messy in here very soon!
I gave up trying to go back to sleep and opened my eyes, straining to see in the dark room. The only source of light came from one small window close to the ceiling, so I could only see the outline of the furniture in the room and not much else.
I tried to move and only then I realized there was something odd going on in my bed. To be more precise, there was a heavy arm wrapped around me, preventing me from moving.
The heavy arm of another person.
A human living person, lying next to me.
In my bed.
With me.
I think you get what I'm trying to say.
I screamed at the top of my lungs and scrambled away from the person holding me. I didn't know how I managed to hold the contents of my bladder after that, it was truly a feat of uncanny prowess.
The stranger woke up to me kicking and screaming and bolted out of bed as fast as I have ever seen someone moving. "Wait!" I heard the stranger say in a disoriented – and very definitely – male voice.
Oh my God. A strange MAN had broken into my basement, in the middle of the frigging night, to sneak into my bed! What kind of a freak does that? And why was he sleeping with me? Did he plan to murder me in my sleep?
I screamed again and pulled my sheets up to my chin, trying to hide beneath it but then I realized how stupid that was, I mean, what a thin piece of fabric was going to do to protect me anyway? I tossed the sheet away and scrambled to the corner of my bed, trying to reach for the lamp, but I ended up knocking it out of the nightstand and it crashed on the floor with a loud crack.
"Wait, Mia! Hold on! Please, don't panic!" The guy said, crouching on the floor next to the bed and raising one pleading hand in my direction.
Wait. What in the hell?
This dude knew my name? How on Earth did he know my name?!
"Who are you, freak? What are you doing in here?" I shouted at him.
"No, Mia, it's me! It's me! Lucky!"
Did he know my cat's name too? I looked panicky around, trying to find Lucky but I couldn't see him anywhere. What had he done to Lucky?
"Listen, pal, I don't know who you are but if you lay one finger on me, I'm going to scream so loud, the whole town is going to hear me, okay?" I threatened, raising a trembling finger toward him.
"No! Don't scream! I'm not moving, okay? See? This is me, not moving. Please, don't scream. I'm not going to hurt you!" he said, frozen in his crouched position on the floor.
His voice sounded young, but I couldn't see Jack shit in the dark, so I couldn't tell for sure how old he really was.
"Shit, I changed back..." I heard him mumbling to himself while he opened and closed his fingers as if he was inspecting whether they were working properly or not.
"How did you get in here? How do you know my name?" I asked and looked frantically around. "And what did you do to my cat? I can't see him anywhere! If you hurt him, I swear to God... I'm going to call the cops, you won't get away with this!"
"I didn't do anything!" he protested, offended. "You have to listen to me, Mia. I'm Lucky, okay? The cat you've been talking about? Remember him? It's me! Lucky!"
Oh my God, was this dude on drugs or what?
And this meant I was locked in the basement with a crackhead, tripping so bad that he thought he was a damn cat.
Just freaking perfect.
I was so going to die tonight.
"Listen! You have to let me explain," he pleaded but I was scared out of my mind and wasn't listening to anything. The guy was clearly hallucinating. I had to do something to get him out of here before he decided to kill me!
"If you don't tell me what you're doing in here right this second, I'm going to start screaming, I swear," I told him, my voice shaking with fear.
He realized I was dead serious when he heard the rising panic in my voice. I was one second away from losing it.
"Okay, I hear you." He conceded, standing up slowly with both arms up in surrender. "Just... just let me show you then."
"S-show me what?"
A piece of glass tinkled by my side and I flickered my eyes for a second away from him, but when I looked back to the spot where the guy had been standing, there wasn't anyone there. He had disappeared – literally – in the blink of an eye.
In his place, there was now a small lump on the floor in the shape of a cat.
I gasped and scrambled back in shock, my mind a mumbled mess of fear and confusion while I tried to understand what the hell was going on. No one could move that fast, I don't care how much drugs that dude was on. It was just impossible!
I tried to think of an explanation, but none came to mind. The only logical explanation was to believe a man could really turn into a cat, which was utter madness.
Was I going insane here?
Lucky was sitting in the middle of the floor, looking at me with eyes that shone in the dark. He quietly mewled a sound that resembled eerily of my name.
'Meah.'
"T-this is crazy. It must be a dream..." I whispered, terrified.
When Lucky slowly advanced in my direction, the precarious thread of sanity I've been struggling to hold onto snapped and I finally lost it.
All I could think was 'Run!' so I jumped over him, ran for the door, and got outside as fast as I could. I bolted up the stairs to the sidewalk and ran down the block at the top of my speed. I only stopped when I had run four blocks down the street and was forced to take a break to catch my breath.
After a few minutes had passed, I managed to stop panicking and began to think more clearly about my current predicament.
Here I was: in my pajamas, barefoot, standing by the side of the road, in the middle of the night, looking as if I had just escaped from a mental institute. And let's not forget about my overloaded bladder, a true champion for being able to hold its contents for this long during all this insanity.
Thank God this was a small, quiet town, where everybody retired early to their homes and the probability of running into someone right now was minimal. People already thought I was crazy, can you imagine what they would say if someone saw me right now? I don't think my reputation would ever recover from this.
But I still had to face the facts: if I stayed out here for long, there was a chance – even if very slim – of someone spotting me. It was a possibility and I really didn't want to risk it, so the only solution for that was to get out of the street, as soon as possible.
But if I walked back home, I would have to face whatever it was there in that dark basement, waiting for me. That was definitely a no-way-in-hell option for me.
Or maybe I could go back home and wake Marie to ask her if I could stay up there in the apartment for the rest of the night... but then I'd have to tell her what happened and to be honest with you, the whole story seemed unbelievable to my own ears, Marie was going to think I had a breakdown and gone insane for sure.
There's the fact that there wasn't a spare bed for me upstairs anymore, so what was the use to bother Marie anyway? She was just going to think I was crazy and send me back downstairs, which left me back to option no way in hell at hands.
I had to find another solution – and a quick one – because I needed to pee badly and a decision should be made before I wet myself in the middle of the sidewalk.
I glanced around and realized Frankie's house was a few blocks down the left... She would let me stay in her house for the night, surely?
That sounded like a good reasonable 'maybe' to me, so I headed quickly down the road to Frankie's house.
Soon I was throwing pebbles at her window until she finally poked her head out, trying to see who was the lunatic tossing rocks at her house at this forsaken hour of the night. She didn't seem as nearly as surprised as I thought she'd be, as she snuck me inside her room a few minutes later.
Maybe I had been overdoing the weird a bit too much, for my best friend to not even bother to make a comment about why I was showing up at her house in the middle of the night, barefoot, in my pajamas, and looking like a deranged cave-woman.
If Frankie thought that was a normal occurrence for me, I was really weirder than I imagined.
...