Hippos Are Our Friends

Let me start this story out by telling you that my roommate is terrified of what she calls “stuffed people.” This entails people in mascot costumes like Mickey Mouse or SuperFrog. She can’t stand them. SuperFrog once came up behind her at a TCU baseball game and she wouldn’t look at him until he went away. She was super scared but of course I, being the great friend that I am, was cracking up. So now you have that context.

Last week, we were walking out of the back entrance of the rec around 10:00 at night with one of our other roommates. We were enjoying casual conversation. All of a sudden, out of absolutely nowhere, my roommate screams, squeezes my arm, and begins sprinting in the opposite direction. Now, with a reaction like this, I jumped and quickly looked around, expecting to see several gunmen standing there on the sidewalk, waiting to shoot us down or take us hostage. Instead, what do I find?

There is a person in a full-on hippo costume casually strolling down the sidewalk.

Quick sidenote: We have seen this hippo walking around the new dorms (where we live) before. I do not know who it is, and I am thoroughly confused by it, but it’s pretty comical. Unless you have an irrational fear.

Once my other roommate and I see what the scream and the sprinting were all about, we absolutely lose it. Our friend is cowering near the building, and almost instantaneously we have tears in our eyes. We legitimately were rolling around on the concrete we were laughing so hard. Our friend exclaiming “that was terrifying!” only made us laugh harder. But don’t worry, she was laughing too. We all sat there for a good while cracking up. I genuinely got a good ab workout in during this time. We continued to laugh all the way back as my roommate walked gingerly behind us, darting her eyes around every corner in search of the hippo. It was incredibly comical, and even now I can’t think about the incident without laughing.