honestly this is a trigger for me

Freshman year we ordered a lot of pizza. Almost every weekend we would end a night by crowding into my McBride double as we inhaled a pizza within minutes. For a while, we were so in sync with the punctuation of pizza to end the night that we became confident. Until one night, my hubris backfired and made me regret my entire existence.

That night I was in charge of ordering the pizza. After a long, raucous night at the Ganter ™, we all trudged home in pursuit of that sweet 11 inch ‘za. As we decided on our toppings, I furiously clicked the necessary buttons on the Papa Johns website.  I dragged and dropped, I double clicked—I did it all. Seconds before final check out, I I saw in the corner of the screen an intriguing offer. The small button preceding the final confirmation button said something to the extent of “pay 2 more dollars, get an XL.” Immediately, I was sold—truly an incredible deal. I clicked and just like that the pizza was on its way. I was so proud of my incredible ordering capacities.

We sat in a circle on the floor of my first floor McBride room, anxiously waiting the arrival of Pizza. After seven minutes of dozing off and scattered conversations, the fateful phone call came—and I rushed outside to receive the treasure.

What I had failed to read in the fine print of the “$2 more get an XL” is that they would be adjusting the order as well. This pizza, was the not one of our dreams. It was not one we even recognized. It was comprised of the following:

• as a base, meat chili: NOT the red pizza sauce Papa Johns is famous for, but instead the meat, bean, sauce make up found in the Village Market every single day
• for the cheese, cheddar cheese: Shredded cheddar cheese.
• toppings: sausage and jalépenos: this was the only part of the pizza preserved from our original order. It was weirder/more awful with the new changes
• toppings for the toppings: fritos. I don’t have anything to say about this except; never again.

My friends looked at the pizza, looked back at me, and then looked at the pizza. We were also so disgusted, but also very drunk and hungry. We needed food, and we needed it immediately. So we ate it. We ate the whole thing. It tasted acidic and chunky at the same time. We started to cry while we ate it because we had literally brought this upon ourselves. We were stuck in our own disaster.

The next morning, we told every single person we knew about The Pizza. Never again— never Again.