Last week, we played a basketball game in a neighboring district.

Nothing special there, but yet, there was.

One of the reasons I jumped districts was to teach with the other sixth-grade teacher there. I’ve known her for quite a while, and she’s an amazing teacher. We’ve been good friends since our last school, and could easily communicate across a room when people would ask questions at the end of a meeting.

We both have an unnatural hatred of spiders as well.

When she went on maternity leave, I decorated her room with spiders on her return. She was not amused. Not at all.

Last year, she sprinkled spiders EVERYWHERE in my room. The kids had a field day finding them.

We laughed together at the absurdity of teaching middle school students, and each other.

Then she got an offer she couldn’t refuse. The district where her kids go to school had an opening, and when she texted, I knew she was gone. I could not blame her. She was stretched pretty thin dealing with two separate school schedules, so when it finally came time, we knew.

So those spiders I collected all year long ended up in the boxes she carried out to her truck as she was leaving. I got messages all summer about finding them (which was too funny!).

Jump ahead to the school year. I come into my classroom and find this awful, hairy, gross spider hanging from my light with this little note that says, “Miss you”. Grrrr. Her sister works at our school and decided to help out by “decorating” my room.

Pay back is a dish best served cold.

So, our basketball game happens to be played in the building where my old grade partner works in. We get there early so we can say hi, and do a little scoring, because unbeknownst to her, I have a bag of spiders in the van we came in! We thought, briefly, that there might be a problem riding on a bus; however, with us driving ourselves, we had all the time we needed. Plus, all our basketball girls had my friend in class, so the thought of decorating her room was very exciting to them!

So, we played, we won, and then, we tracked down the janitor to open her room up. The girls put spiders EVERYWHERE and were so giggly! They wrote on her board as well about how they missed her and she was their favorite teacher. We finished up and drove off to wait for the fallout.

And the fallout was delicious! She messaged our group chat with pictures of spiders. Then, messaged a picture of the board stating: “This was my favorite part.”

Now, we wait for that above mentioned payback. One of the things that I love about the last two places I’ve worked, we enjoy a good prank. It makes the exhausting work of teaching just a little less tiring.

And we all need to laugh at things like this; otherwise, we’d be curled up in the fetal position.