What happens on Academy Street

           which means: a fictional retelling of an actual event, you could call it a legend.

            

           Courtney, Meredith and I are squatting in Meredith’s room. Actually, I’m squatting and they’re sitting on her bed. I just got home from a 10-hour workday at the newspaper. Naturally, I’m scarfing down cereal at 11 p.m.

We started talking about how gross our downstairs bathroom was. We have a cricket problem.

“Meredith, we need to clean our bathroom,” I laughed. “I found a dead cricket in there and I haven’t picked it up for two weeks.”

“I haven’t put it down in two weeks,” Courtney said.

“I haven’t put you down in two weeks and maybe I should, you jerk. The crickets in the bathroom have rigor mortis. They look like this.” I managed to contort my arms and face to fashion myself as rigor mortis cricket.

“Meredith, give me a good quote I can sent o Miguel on Skype,” Courtney said.

Miguel is her boyfriend. Fifty percent of their conversation happens, I swear, on Skype.

“Guys, look. LOOK.” Moving my cereal, I straighten out my legs, curl my hands, and draw my arms in like I’m trying to hide my armpit sweat. I do my best to copy the cricket I found in the bathroom.

Courtney starting laughing so hard she frickin’ cried.

“I can’t believe you moved your bowl for that,” she said.

By this point, we were all cracking up. I almost peed.

“Yeah, I did,” and copied what the cricket looked like for the third time.

Later, we were looking at Youtube videos of Stuff Nobody Says. Things like “please touch my computer screen.”

Courtney says, “Hey Erin, can you impersonate that cricket again?”