Swimming in the Fountain

So there I was, eighteen and a new freshman at college, standing in the library fountain, dripping wet and in my underwear. My recently made friends cheered as I stood there feeling a mixture of embarrassment and triumph. 'Sing, Sing,' they began to chant. So I began to sing our school's alma mater.

Everyone began to join in and then one by one, my friends stripped to their skivvies and joined me in the fountain. We splashed and played until the campus police showed up. How I ended up in this situation, you may ask.

Like so many people of every age, my most embarrassing moment ties back to a game of Truth or Dare that went awry. Urged on by a combination of too many Jaeger-Bombs and a desperate desire to fit in, I soon found myself sitting in a line in the Stillwater police station with my friends, all of us dripping water on the dirty linoleum.

I was mortified. I was always such a good kid in high school. My parents would always say to others, 'We never have to worry about Melanie. She doesn't have a rebellious bone in her body.' And now here I was, two weeks into my college career and I was finding that I evidently possessed the rebellious bone equivalent to the femur.

The campus police called us in for questioning one by one. They asked us all the same questions. 'How old are you?' 'How much did you have to drink?' 'What on earth possessed you to go swimming in the fountain?' I answered each question as truthfully as possible, dreading the moment when they threw me in jail.

I sniffled out my answers in between tears, and when I looked up I was surprised to see the officers grinning. 'Not used to getting into trouble, are you?' In the end, we all ended up with a few hours of community service and the charges were magically dropped, but we did make the campus newspaper.

'Students Skinny-Dipping in the Library Fountain' was the headline. Almost everyone I knew had a good laugh about it, but I learned an important lesson-never pick 'dare' again!