Before my senior year of college, I was a bit uncertain where I would be living. I had just been named the editor of the school literary magazine, and there was an apartment that traditionally went to the new editor. But the last editor seemed unsure if she was moving out, and I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to live off campus.

A good friend had three open rooms in his on-campus apartment, but that would mean finding two more new roommates and cooking for myself. I had also gotten used to living in a single, and because my last two roommates ranged from “whines about everything” to “from Massachusetts,” I wasn’t sure I wanted to chance letting someone else into my bubble.

So on the day that housing requests were due, I went to make my choice. I flipped through the housing binders (I’m sure this is all done online now and my early 2000s housing experience makes me sound like a caveman) and saw a single room in Smiley, one of the older dorms on campus.

“I’ll take this one,” I said.

“That’s in the women’s wing,” the poor student dealing with me said.

“But it’s a single. If I can find another guy to take the connected room, it would be no different than a single anywhere else.”

The singles were connected by a bathroom between them. The rooms were right around the corner from a co-ed hall. It seemed odd that this small stretch was designated as female when the rooms were no different than any others in the building. Well, they were different in that they were the only singles.

The poor student seemed to have a Squeaky Voiced Teen “I’ll have to check with my manager” moment. He left the table, went into another room, and returned after a few minutes.

“It’s OK, as long as you can find someone to take the other single,” he told me.

At that moment, my friend with his own housing issues walked in. We talked for a moment, and suddenly we were the two guys living in the women’s wing.

And if you were hoping this post was going to be a “Bosom Buddies”/“Three’s Company”-like sexy tale of two guys living with college girls, let me go ahead and rip off the bandaid of disappointment right now. This is a story about two college guys filling a fridge full of urine.

But this isn’t an entirely sexless story. It all started with sex. I returned to my room one afternoon to find the bathroom occupied. The shower was running, and there were… noises coming from within. Wet, slappy, grunty noises.

I really had to pee. I went to school in Florida, so I drank a lot of water to compensate for the gallons I would sweat out every day. My options were limited. I had a sink, I could walk down the hall to the common bathroom, but it was on the other end of the dorm, and who wants to pee in a communal bathroom?

I also had an empty water bottle. Seconds later, I had a mostly full water bottle.

Problem solved, I could dispose of the bottle and no one would be the wiser. But I was a little annoyed that our common shower was being used for sex when he had a bed at his disposal. So when I heard him leave the dorm later, I snuck in and tucked the bottle into his mini fridge.

A few days went by, and I had mostly forgotten the bottle of whiz. One night I was writing on my iMac when I heard “What the hell?” from my neighbor’s room. He had found the bottle. He barged in.

He wasn’t upset, just a little perplexed. I explained my reasoning, expecting some kind of urine-related retaliation. Sure enough, a day or so later, there was a bottle of pee in my mini fridge.

But he hadn’t thrown out my bottle of pee. So there we were, each in possession of a bottle of each other’s bodily fluids. What should we do with them?

I proposed a plan. Late at night, we would sneak down the hall and place them in the common room fridge. Then we would be free of the pee pee curse.

And we were free, until one day my friend showed me he had filled another bottle. “What was he thinking?” I wondered. But I had empty bottles, so I joined in. Before long, we took another half dozen bottles down to the fridge.

I treated this as a covert operation. It was weird that we were doing this, there’s no denying that. My friend, however, couldn’t have been more open about this new habit of relieving ourselves in old 20 ounces. One day one of his friends came in all proud that he had filled up about a third of a 2-liter bottle.

Let me tell you, 2 liters are no good for peeing in. You can’t fill them in one go. Then you’re forced to reopen the bottle, releasing the built up piss smell. 16.9-ounce water bottles were my preferred choice, though 20 ounce Mt. Dew bottles were a logical choice, since pee more closely matched their original contents.

Late at night, we would sneak down the hall to deposit a few days worth of piss bottles. One of us would scout out the hall, signaling the other to rush out, hauling a shopping bag full of bottles of our own waste. At first it was easy to tuck the bottles into random spots in the fridge. Then it started to get full.

Since it was a common fridge, there weren’t anyone’s groceries being kept in it. It was just things like boxes of random pizza or ice cream treats from dorm meetings. Before long, we had to throw those things out to make more room for our golden fluids. When the shelves were full, we put bottles in the door, then the crisper. Once the fridge was completely full, we moved on to the freezer.

How many bottles did we end up filling? I couldn’t guess. How many 20 ounce bottles could you fit into a medium sized fridge? 200? Maybe it was more, maybe it was less. Still, it was more piss than either of us had seen at one time in our lives.

It was a spectacle to behold.

Then, one day, we walked our recently filled bottles down to the common room. We opened the door, and there was nothing. Months of work was gone, likely literally poured down the drain.

I wondered about the person who had opened the fridge and became curious about what the bottles contained. Did they open one? Did they have to call someone to dump the bottles down the drain, or haul the lot to a dumpster? I feel a little bit guilty about making someone work hard to haul away our pee. Especially when we didn’t have a good reason for what we did.

I just had to go to the bathroom. Things just snowballed from there.