“Christi, wake up!” my friend and KU roommate Lisa shrieked across the dorm room, her voice trembling in terror. “Wake up!”

“What?” I drowsily replied (for I had been asleep for over an hour while Lisa had been up cramming for her calculus test).

“Our snack crate is moving! There’s something alive in there!” (We had ever-so-intelligently loaded a variety of sodium-laden, nutrient-deficient snacks, such as Cheetos, Doritos, Pringles, Saltines and Ramen Noodles in an open turquoise plastic crate and placed it on the ground by our heating unit.) “Don’t you see the shaking and hear the crunching?”

“You’re imagining things,” I replied, “your brain is in a hard-math hallucinogenic state.” “No!  I’m serious. I just saw something!”

Grumbling, I sat up in my twin bed and gazed at the offending crate.  Then “swish,” I saw a tiny brown being scurry out of the plastic blue cube.  It was so fast that I couldn’t follow its exit path.  It was simply gone.

“Aughh!”  

It was a mouse!  A minute rodent in our room!  I’m not sure why it scared us so, but we were shaking in terror.  We sheltered suburban girls, who had never experienced nature within the safe walls of our own homes, did not know what to do…did not know what steps to take.  

“Should we call security?”  I yell at Lisa.

“No, it’s 2 a.m.–too late.”

“Well we can’t sleep in here.  What if that mouse crawls into our beds and bites us—it will have long nasty teeth you know.  Or what if it gets tangled in our hair?  It probably has fleas, or mites.  And don’t mice carry diseases?  What if we get out of bed and step on it?  Gross.”  And on and on–our brains were creating many scenarios featuring a large mouse with black beady eyes and yellow scythe-like teeth, in which two innocent girls fall victim to its jaws.  We were doomed.  Life as we knew it was about to end.  Just throw us in a grave and pile on the dirt.  Guess Lisa’s calculus test didn’t really matter after all…well, at least she had that benefit.

“I have an idea,” Lisa said.

“What?”

“Let’s bunk our beds (for our twin sleeping vessels carried this stacking option), and both sleep in the top bunk!  The mouse will never climb all the way up there, right?”

Now, we had no knowledge regarding a mini mouse’s climbing ability.  But we figured something that small couldn’t or wouldn’t make the big climb.  So, the two of us hoisted Lisa’s fairly heavy bed on top of mine.  We frantically searched for the connection pins that we had stowed in her desk.  We found them and inserted.  

Ah.  Problem solved.  Sleep was possible.  

Now, did we move the crate, filled with food, off the ground?  No.  We just turned off the light and huddled in the top bunk, risking a 6-foot fall to the vinyl-covered concrete floor if either of us tossed or turned in our nightmares, our mouse-filled dreams.

Morning came and there was no mouse to be seen.  Okay.  We were the winners!  We finally realized the necessity of throwing out all floor snacks and moving the crate to higher terrain, and did so.  We went to class, and almost forgot about the incident.  Then night came.

As we sat studying in our room watching our 13-inch TV, what did we see?  A little mouse diving out of the right side of our heating vent and scurrying across the room.  After another freak zone episode, we trudged down the hall to security to inform them of our trauma.  They promised to tell the cleaning staff about it in the morning.

Another night in the top bunk.

After class the next day, we came home to find evil death mousetraps placed in the far corner of our room.  “Thanks, cleaning staff, we thought.  Now the possibility existed for one or both of us to lose a toe in midnight, pitch-black room wanderings.

For weeks, never a mouse was caught…but we continued to see one or more leaping in and out of the heater each evening, as if a mouse marathon or perhaps a strung-out rodent rave were underway.  They had no interest in crossing the room to partake in the cheese bait laid out to beckon them to their demise—until Christmas break that is.

We finished finals around December 15^th and headed home…home to mouse-free houses.  We would not return to school until the beginning of January.  We had plenty of time to forget the dorm intruder nightmare.  And we did. However, when we walked back into our dorm room after break, we were hit with a smell so ungodly, so horrifying, that it pulled vomit to mid-throat and forced an immediate room exit.  For, in our absence, five mice had been killed in the traps, had flipped in the dying process, and had now rotted and really become one with the floor.  Such a sight–such a stench!

This was the last straw.  We yelled again to security and the building staff.  We raised a ruckus!  Grumbling workers came and removed the poor dead dudes (yes, I did feel bad for them as well) and put new traps out.  Our floor was half-ass mopped.

Lisa and I did not trust the efforts of the staff—did not believe its work would be effective.  We looked around and decided to take measures into our own hands.  We knew the mice had a kingdom deep within the heating vents and pipes which connected all our rooms.  Our brilliant plan was to simply cover the holes in our heater (probably holes necessary for air intake and safe heater functioning)!  If we made our room inaccessible, voila–problem solved.  

We grabbed our quite-flammable notebooks and tore the cardboard backs off.  We then taped pieces over all possible exits in the heater/entrances to our room.  And from the moment of completion, we had no more mouse problem.  We un-bunked our beds and were able to sleep soundly, while unknowingly jeopardizing our room and entire dorm to serious flames.

Oh well.

We were then able to put our food storage bin back on the floor, where all college kids feel it rightly belongs.