out my wallet and dug out a twenty, a ten, and two ones. That pretty much wiped out my beer budget for the rest of the month. Who knew vengeance would be so pricey?
"Oh, there was tax, too," said Dave.
"Screw you."
We went into the kitchenette of my studio apartment and I made the cake batter, while Dave provided helpful advice about what I was doing incorrectly, and I provided very specific suggestions about what he could do with his advice. I cursed as some eggshell dropped into the mix.
"Who cares?" Dave asked. "If it's going to have a spider in it, it might as well have some eggshell."
"If she crunches down on a piece of eggshell, she'll quit eating the cake, then she'll never find the tarantula, and then my devastating revenge will have been that she ate a bit of eggshell." I dug out the shell bit and flicked it at him.
"Ow! Ow! Dammit! You got my eye!" He recoiled and stumbled backwards, smacking into the counter.
"I did not."
"Take a look! Take a look! Is it protruding?"
"Move your hand away so I can see."
"I think you poked my iris, dude!"
"Move your hand."
"Oh, crap, I'm gonna be seeing eggshell for the rest of my life!"
" Move your hand ." I grabbed his hand and pulled it away from his eye. "I can't see it."
"It's in there!"
"Okay, I see it. It's not jutting out or anything; it's just stuck in the corner."
"Oh, crap . . ."
"It's no big deal. We'll just run some water on it."
"What if the water flushes it up under my eyelid? It could slice my eye all up! Oh, crap . . ."
"Stop being such a baby. It's just a tiny little speck of eggshell in your eye." I took a dishcloth out of the sink, ran it under some cold water, and twisted the corner. "Don't move."
"What are you gonna do?"
"I'm gonna scrub your eye out with a scouring pad. What do you think I'm gonna do? I'm going to flick the shell out."
"Be careful."
I poked at the corner of his eye with the cloth. I could no longer see the piece of eggshell.
"It's out."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah."
"I can still kind of feel it."
"Well, it's not in your eye anymore."
Dave rubbed his eye. "Thanks, dude."
"No problem. Can we go back to making the cake now?"
"Yeah, yeah, sure thing."
I stirred until the batter was completely mixed, then I poured it out into the pan. "When should we add the tarantula?"
"I'd say now."
"How do we kill it?"
"What do you mean?"
"How. Do. We. Kill. It."
"Just bake it."
"We can't just throw a live tarantula into the oven! That's cruel!"
"Dude, it's a bug."
"I don't care. You don't cook things alive like that. It's uncool."
"That's how they boil lobsters. And I think it's how they cook deer."
"Well, it's not gonna happen in my oven."
"Maybe it'll drown in the batter first."
"Shut up." I peered at the spider, which was crawling around on a miniature plastic log. "So what's a quick and humane way to kill it?"
"Stomp on it?"
"Get the hell out of my apartment, dumbass."
"What?" Dave asked. "I wasn't saying that you should stomp it flat and scrape the mess off into the batter. But you could, y'know, stomp on it gently and break its back or something."
"No."
"Cut off its head. It'll still look like a tarantula."
"This would've been a lot easier if you had just brought home a dead one in the first place."
"They don't sell dead tarantulas locally! I already told you that! Maybe we could poison it."
"The cake?"
"The tarantula. To kill it."
I considered that. "I don't think I have any spider poison."
"Do you have any ant poison? That would probably work."
"No. I don't keep a lot of poison in the apartment."
"Do you have any cigarettes? We could blow smoke in there until it chokes to death."
Instead of calling Dave a moron, I gave him a look that said, "You're a moron."
"Fine. You're the leader of the 'Be Humane To Cuddly-Wuddly Spiders' movement, you decide how to kill it."
"I don't know! I have no idea how to kill a tarantula without squishing it. Screw it. Let's just bake the stupid thing." I turned on the