TToML 7: Would You Eat It with a Mouse?

Junior year, living in 109 with Linds and McKensey.

In this apartment we had the tiniest fridge in the world. With four people (we had another roommate who isn't ever involved in these stories, as she thought we were crazy) trying to share a refrigerator, there is very little room to spare.

Therefore, we had to improvise. And this is why living in Utah can be awesome: in the winter, outside is a constant sizeless refrigerator. On occasion it's even a freezer, but that's not as constant.

So yes. We used outside as our fridge. Now, not all the time. It's not like we had our ketchup and jam and milk all lined up outside our front door. Just those extra big items that you have once in a while, like a 2-liter of soda or a pizza. I thought it was very resourceful.

Well, this is not all to my story, don't worry. Outside our apartment (until the fire marshal declared it a fire hazard) we had a couch. A big, old, scary, gross couch. We fondly called it the Cougar Couch. The reason is two fold: 1) we covered it in navy blue sheets, thus sporting our school spirit as BYU Cougars, and 2) underneath the sheets it looked like a cougar and mauled the couch to death.

There were some awesome times on that couch, but those are stories for other days. The point of the Cougar Couch in this story is that it held our pizzas and other items when needed. And it also housed things that ate our pizza.

You see, there was this one time that McKensey was storing a pizza on the couch. We had done it before and no harm done, so naturally she did it again this time. Well, the next morning, we found that the box had been tipped over, off the side of the couch. One of us picked it up and set it back on the couch, not thinking much of it.

Well then later, McKensey decided that she wanted a piece of pizza. A reasonable thing to decide. But when she went to get a slice, she made a new discovery. There was a slice that had been significantly nibbled on. Notice the use of the word nibble. I don't mean a bite is missing. I don't mean there is just a crust. There was a wild creature that nibbled on a piece of the pizza. And this isn't like my crazy battery-stealing-hobo theory. There was a hole nibbled through the pizza box that we had failed to notice earlier.

And then we remembered Trisha, our next-door-neighbor, telling us that she had seen a mouse in the little pathway in front of our apartment. And it was then that we realized that the Cougar Couch housed more than our overflow refrigerator items.