I walked into the bathroom on Monday night, rinsed out my mug at the sink and went to grab a paper towel from the dispenser over the trash can. My friend Maddie was standing by the door telling me about her day. When I was done drying my mug, I walked over to the trashcan to throw away the used paper towel, and I spotted the white rectangular strip with one pink line across the middle. If you have spent any amount of time with me, you will know my default reaction to anything, especially shock, is laughter. Wondering why I was laughing, Maddie walked over to look. As students who are aware of the George Fox University life agreement, we were startled to see this. Maddie needed to get to a meeting, so she left almost immediately after this occurrence.
About an hour later, she returned and found me in the hallway. She hurried over and told me her few theories of whose it might be and how it might have gotten there. As Maddie was listing who she thought it might be and who it might not, our friend Grace walked by, and we immediately stopped talking. Grace was confused by our abrupt silence and asked what was going on. After some hesitation, Maddie told her “let’s take a walk” and walked her over to the bathroom. About a minute later, Grace came into my room with a look of sheer appalment. My two friends sat in my room, explained what was going on to my roommate, Kelsey, and continued to narrow down their list of whose it could possibly be. A few minutes later, our little investigation party ended, and Kelsey and I went back to doing what we were doing before all this excitement happened.
An hour later when I walked out of my room, I realized seven people had now seen the negative pregnancy test in the bathroom trashcan and were filling in the two people who had just gotten home from work. Kelsey and I walked into the room, and they filled us in on some of their new theories of whom it belonged to, and Maddie told us that it might have also been put there by the RA to “see how much we as a floor would gossip." Before we got a chance to respond, four of the other girls we live with, who were in the city for the night, had gotten back and were wondering what was going on.
An average Monday night for Kelsey and I consists of going to the store, getting groceries and running errands. This particular Monday as we approach the Christmas season, Kelsey and I decided to stop at the dollar store to pick up some wrapping paper. We needed to be back in time for dinner, so we quickly grabbed what we were looking for and went to the checkout line. Only one counter was open, so we stood in a line behind several people. As we waited to check out, we started to browse through the items they put by the counter to encourage last-minute impulse buying. Within a few seconds, we both spotted the pink box that guaranteed a 99.0% accurate result. For reasons I only understood at that moment, we both thought it would be pretty funny to buy a pregnancy test at the dollar store. Kelsey suggested emptying out the box and filling it with candy to give as my secret Santa present, but that idea got shot down pretty quickly as I didn’t feel like I knew her enough to do that. By the time we were at the checkout counter, we had convinced each other we needed to buy the last box of Assured pregnancy test.
As we drove home, we very quickly realized we had no reason for purchasing a pregnancy test and had no idea what to do with it. We got home and sat our room and continued to wrap presents. And then our friend Cara walked in and saw our box of dollar store pregnancy test. Cara’s immediate reaction was “I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO PEE ON ONE OF THESE”. For lack of a better idea of what to do, we agreed to let her do it. All three of us walked into the bathroom, read the instructions and waited the three minutes as instructed. Just this one time, I think we were all hoping we could be the 1% where the test was a false positive so we would have a better story to tell, but we settled for the negative we got. Our awe-inspiring wisdom of the day continued, and we decided to leave the negative pregnancy test in the trash can for everyone to see and for us to conduct our own social experiment.
