Reptiles are different. And so is she. Senior Olivia Grieve sees herself in them, and she sees them in her future.
The similarities started when she fainted on the stairwell on her way up to the nurse’s office. Grieve knew something was wrong — she had been on her period for 72 days straight, since the beginning of the summer. She couldn’t walk more than five steps at a time, and she slept more than 12 hours a day.
So she went to the ER and found out she was anemic — a condition where her blood has a lower than normal level of red blood cells and an iron deficiency. That meant she was always cold and pale despite the summer spent outside. She stood out among peers who wondered why she wasn’t tan. There was nobody to show her around East after three days in the hospital, and she was lost.
“I just got really interested in reptiles because I was just like ‘I feel different, and they’re different’ and people looked at me like I was weird,” she said.
On December 24, 2012, Grieve got her first pet snake — an okeetee corn snake named Kalika. After that, she knew what she wanted to do with her future. Five years from now, she sees herself with her own reptile farm, hopefully somewhere warm. She wants to breed crocodiles, tortoises, lizards and snakes, and sell them as a business.
Though it won’t take a degree, she knows it will be hard — she’ll have to care for their veterinary needs, clean their cages and pay for their food — but she wants to take it on anyway. Next year, she will take general education classes at Johnson County Community College before heading somewhere like Kansas State University.
At five feet 2 inches tall, even the freshmen in the hallways tower over her. She thinks of her snakes, who are always so close to the ground and tiny next to the people around them, and relates. How, in Environmental Ed class, a bull snake lashed out — slamming against the walls of the cage because it was threatened by Grieve leaning over its cage.
“I was like ‘oh, that’s kind of how I feel in the hallways,’” she said. “Because everyone’s toppling over me and I just want to throw my arms everywhere.”
Most people, Grieve feels, look at reptiles with an ‘ew, what’s what?’ kind of attitude. Yet her future is based on the fact that she looks at them differently — that they have feelings, and she can tell what they are.
“They can talk back, you know what I mean?” she said. “Like humans have more complex emotions but animals, I see them and they just brighten my day.”
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