Dear resident pyromaniac,

Why are you like this?

I was simply minding my own business, curled up in a fuzzy purple blanket burrito and reading fan fiction on my laptop. My roommate was just as content in her room, a fellow burrito with Captain Hook's face printed on her outer shell, binge-watching a new show on Netflix. We were comfy. We were enjoying our lives and the tiny snippet of free time we'd been blessed with.

And then you brought the wrath of the universe down on us and set off McCaffrey's fire alarms.

I went from warm and cozy to drenched and miserable in less than ten minutes. Perhaps you were like my roommate and I, and you failed to realize how badly it was raining outside before you herded all of us out to the UC lawn with your shenanigans. Maybe you ended up soaking wet, too, with your thin sweatshirt chilling you to the bone and your jeans sticking to you like a squidgy second skin. Maybe you also found a nice tree to shelter under, at least until the rain decided it would take no prisoners and turned your tree against you, throwing massive water drops off its swaying branches. Maybe you were among us poor, sopping souls who were sent to the UC with our tails between our legs, forced to wait out the storm while some very disgruntled firemen tried to figure out what the heck was going on.

I still don't know what you did to anger the fire alarm Gods, to be honest. No one ever explained to us exactly how we got thrown out of our nice, dry apartments. It could have been a simple mistake, for all I know. I'm sure everyone forgets to put water in their cup noodles sometimes. Or perhaps some malfunctioning appliances are to blame here. I know the stove in my apartment is more than a little scary. My roommates and I once spent about fifteen minutes fanning smoke away from our fire alarms, thanks to an oversight in how much oil was needed to cook a steak in a frying pan. At least the universe decided to have mercy on us that day.

Apparently it was just waiting for you to come along. Perhaps it's unfair of me to call you a pyromaniac, since it's likely you weren't even playing with fire in the first place. If you were, I have even more concerned questions for you. If not, then okay, accidents happen. For the sanity of your fellow McCaffrey residents, though (and my poor sweatshirt, which took the entire night to dry), please try to be more careful in the future.

If nothing else, you gave me a nice chance to relive one of my most memorable traumatic experiences from middle school. Let's just say that one involved several dozen half-dressed P.E. students, a rain storm, and a leaf that scared an outdoor fire alarm so badly it started screaming at us. So yeah, thank you for that one.

Love,

A neighbor who will never feel dry again.