Good Things Happen to People You Hate by Rebecca Fishbein

Author:Rebecca Fishbein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Friends Stick with You Through Thick and Thin, Unless You Have Bedbugs

The other night, an acquaintance of mine threw a surprise party for her boyfriend. I had a bad cold and had just gotten back from an out-of-town weekend where I spent too much money, so I figured I’d go for a drink, give them a hug, and head home. But my hot friend’s hot twin brother showed up and announced he was “maybe” breaking up with his live-in girlfriend, so I drank four Fernet and Cokes and tried to make out with him. Then I went home and went to sleep, and when I woke up at two a.m., I got out of bed and threw up on the floor.

I have thrown up on many a floor in my day, including that very floor at least once, and so none of this story is remarkable, save for one very important fact: I wasn’t alone in my room. Was I with the hot almost-single twin? LOL, nope. There, blinking at me from a fold in my cotton pillowcase, was a tiny brown bedbug swelled with blood. That motherfucker had just bitten me, it was watching me clean up my stomach refuse in shame, and it was going to temporarily ruin my life. “FUCK YOU, LITTLE BUG!” I screamed as I squashed it dead, but that wasn’t nearly enough revenge for what was to come.

If you’ve never had a bedbug infestation or seen a bedbug or espied a bedbug on your pillow judging you for sullying its home with your vomit, let me assure you: bedbugs are exactly the nightmare everyone describes. Stories about unending infestations, evil little bites that leave dark marks on your body, and nights spent trying to cram every goddamn stupid piece of clothing you own into the dryer before the laundromat closes do not exist just to sell you mattress encasements. Bedbugs are real, and they are the harbingers of physical and mental destruction, a fact I can attest to because my sweet, sweet blood and I are to bedbugs what an overripe afternoon fruit basket is to a swarm of fruit flies.

I have suffered no fewer than four bedbug infestations in the past ten years, mostly very minor, all harrowing. I got bedbugs for the first time in my very first adult apartment in New York, a beautiful, crumbling little thing located next door to a pastrami factory in Williamsburg. My room at the time consisted mainly of a bed and an impenetrable pile of clothes surrounding it, and the bugs decided to transform that clothing pile into a luxury nest. My roommate and I were moving out in two weeks at the time of the attack, so we spent our remaining tenancy lugging trash bags full of our belongings to the laundromat, hoping to spot errant quarters on the walk over. I didn’t actually see any insects during that particular escapade, so to me they seemed like invisible little mites that nibbled at my skin whenever I was still.

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