Despite it being served out of a Rubbermaid tub, I could not get enough of my friend’s jungle juice the first time I tried it. I took a sip and said, “This tastes like candy! Or a juice box!”, and then I drank it exclusively all night. I chugged it. I drank it too quickly in moments where I felt too awkward. I played beer pong with it, and I am terrible at beer pong. My opponents kept scoring on me before I’d finished drink the cup from the previous turn. In short, I got hammered. Hammered to a point where I could still form sentences, but I sounded like Beaker from the Muppets.

When I stumbled back into my dorm, my roommate was awake and sober like a church mouse, talking to her boyfriend on the phone. I changed into my usual drunk pajamas, which was just taking off my pants and unhooking my bra and sliding it out under my shirt, and climbed into bed. The next morning, I was in the fetal position, wincing at the slightest hint of light or noise, gagging at the thought of food. I’d been lying awake, convinced I would never feel better again, for about a half hour when my roommate came home from work. “Hi!” she said to me, in a chipper, perky tone usually reserved for Disney princesses. “How ya doin?”

“Merrrghh.” I said.

“Oh yeah,” she laughed. “You working tonight?” she sat down on her desk chair and pulled it closer to my bed. “Aren’t you bartending?” I nodded. “So you’re gonna be smelling alcohol all night, it’s gonna get on your hands…”

“MERGGGHH,” I said.

She smiled again. “So do you remember what you did when you came home last night?”

“Kinda,” I said. Then as she filled me in on what I did, I remembered every single detail.

After climbing into bed, I’d probably fallen asleep for about fifteen minutes, tossing and turning the entire time. Unable to ignore the two parts booze to one part Kool Aid churning in my stomach, I jumped out of bed. The jungle juice was going to make reappearance, and I needed to sprint to the bathroom. The only problem was, I was not wearing pants. I was only in a thong and a t shirt, because this was 2003. I was still pretending that thongs were comfortable because they went the best under my low rise jeans.

Before I could go puke, I needed something to cover my butt. I couldn’t find the pants I’d discarded when I got home. We were packing up the dorm for summer, so none of my clothes were where they were supposed to be. I dug through every single drawer, turned over every soft looking pile on the floor, crawled under my bed, and I couldn’t find a single thing to cover up my bottom half. “Fuck it,” I decided. “I can walk across the hall in a thong.” I threw on my flip-flops, and ran across the hall to the nearest stall.

I kneeled by the toilet for a while. Nothing came up. False alarm. I scampered back into my room. At this point, I was in the vomit free zone, and the only thing I could think about was how uncomfortable the string going up my ass was. I took off the thong, jumped into bed and made my blanket into a cocoon.

Some minutes later, I woke up. This time the stomach churning was paired with saliva forming in my mouth. “This is happening,” I thought and jumped out of bed again. This was the real thing; I was going to boot. But I was wearing ever less pants than I was last time.

I started knocking over my suitcases, digging through my backpack, looking for a pair of shorts, pants, a skirt, underwear, a towel, anything. I thought about fashioning a toga out of my blanket, but I didn’t want to rub it all over the bathroom or get vomit on it. I pulled everything out of my closest, throwing it across the room. I had nothing I could even wrap around myself. The saliva was getting worse, my stomach was gurglely. “You gotta go,” I thought. I went through my drawers again, checked inside each cardboard box, and I looked under my desk. Then, some place on the floor, I found a plastic bag from my campus bookstore.

I picked up the plastic bag and looked at it for a second. Then, I put one of my feet into the bag, and stabbed a little hole in the bottom. I made another hole with my other foot, and pulled the bag up my legs as if they were a normal pair of underpants. I pulled it up past my knees, to about halfway up my thighs, thinking I’m going to be safe, and then I couldn’t tug the bag anymore. Turns out, bags made for textbooks and sweatshirts are not designed to cover a human ass. I looked down at myself, my tee shirt ended a few inches below my belly button, the top of the plastic bag was right below my crotch, and there was nothing in between. My full bush and ass were on display. But there was no time for plan B. I was breaking into a sweat; I was seconds away from covering my dorm room in bright pink vomit. “At least I tried,” I thought.
I put on the flip-flops and tried to run across the hall, but it was more of a waddle. The plastic bag was around my thighs and constricting my movement to tiny steps. The moment I got inside a stall, I puked. I puked hard. I ditched the plastic bag at some point, I guess I needed freedom of leg movement to empty my stomach properly. I ran back into my room, reformed my blanket cocoon and slept peacefully throughout the night. In the morning, when woke up and had to pee, I, of course, found a pair of jammie pants in about ten seconds.

“Oh my god,” I told my roommate. “I’m so sorry you had to see that.”

“That’s okay,” she said, laughing. “It was dark, I couldn’t see much.” She said during the whole incident, she just kept talking on the phone with her boyfriend, deciding what I was trying to do when I was knocking over everything. When she told her boyfriend that I just left the room wearing a plastic bag, he told her that’s why he didn’t drink. “The plastic bag is still in the stall,” she said, laughing harder. “You should probably go pick that up. That’s something you’re gonna want to hold onto.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “When I went to the bathroom this morning, I saw it on the ground and thought “Did I try to wear that last night?