The wrong house.

What to do when you're home (rather than work), sick (rather than alert and productive), and bored (because your Time Warner Cable box is broken)? Only one solution: tell stories.

So, this is one of my all-time favorite treats from the New Jersey Story Vault. (Inexplicably you see, all of my best girlfriends are originally from Jersey, even though they currently live here in Austin). This happened last summer, just a few month's back, and it does involve excrement / #2 / whatever your preferred term for "shit" is, so if that's not your cup of tea then a) I don't blame you, and b) may I direct you to many perfectly sanitary posts available on the right-hand side of the screen.

Alright, where were we? So it's July, and my friend K. is walking at night with her sister through a neighborhood in North Jersey. It's pretty dark, and they're trying to make their way home from a party, but fortunately it's not a wandering-around-lost situation since they're in a familiar part of town. K. and her sister are happily walking, talking, regaling each other with tales from the evening, when all of a sudden K. has to go. Right now.

"Dude, can it wait?" says K's sister.

"Uh, no - I have to GO," says K.

"Alright, hang on a minute. Let's see. I used to live in this neighborhood."

"Have to go now!!"

"Alright alright - how about we go find my old house, and ask the people living there if we can just use their restroom real fast?"

It's a little intrusive, but sadly, shit doesn't care about manners. So K. agrees. Is the house nearby?

"Yeah it is, actually - oh hey look! There's my old house!" says K's sister.

They walk up to the porch, and realize that there is a party going on out back. Perfect: They'll just sneak in the front door, K. will quietly use the restroom (the restroom that previously belonged to her sister), flush, and they'll slip back away into the night, undiscovered and undetected.

"Let's check to see if the door is locked," says K's sister.

It's not. They cautiously open the front door, step inside the foyer, and K's sister directs her to the restroom. It's really, really dark inside.

"You use it, and I'll stand guard out here, in case anyone comes in from the party."

So K. gratefully enters the restroom, closes the door behinds her, locks it, and starts doing her thing. (And without being inside her head, yet knowing what it's like to be desperate and scarily on the verge of #2, I imagine her internal dialog to be something like "THANK YOU, THANK YOU JESUS.")

Then there's a knock.

"Um K? Hey, K, can you hear me?"

"Yeah."

"Alright, hey - hey, I just realized -"

"Dude, kind of in the middle of something?"

"Sorry, I know, but - uh, this, like, isn't my old house."

"WHAT."

Reader, what's a lady to do in that situation? If you're anything like my clever friend K., you finish your business, wash up, and get the hell out.

And you know, that is exactly what K. and her sister did, disappearing back into the cloak of night, undiscovered and undetected, K. having just shat in a total stranger's residence.