I wasn’t a fool. I went into this whole thing fully informed: you do not sing out of your range. Don’t even try. It’s not funny to sound bad, it’s just awkward — for everyone involved. Awkwardness and other people sounding bad had, in fact, been my main reasons behind avoiding karaoke for all these years in the first place.

“You should come with us to karaoke tonight!” Nick said. He had since quit working to become a full-time partier, but occasionally stopped by to use the wireless. “Every person you think is totally cool will be there. Also, Sharlene and I will be singing Meatloaf’s “I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t Do That” as a duet. And we might choreograph a dance to go with it.”

“Uhh . . .”

“Oh, and it will be in a private room.”

“A private room? Like in Lost in Translation?”

My eyes clouded over with charming scenes of midnight sparkling Tokyo, sparse dialogue, strong drinks and Bill Murray crooning into a microphone as a group of beautiful blonde and black-haired twenty-somethings giggled.

“Yeah, like in Lost in Translation.”

I thought about this. I thought about this long and hard. And then I realized, you know, if you sing “Crazy” by Patsy Cline you can’t go wrong. You could sing any song by Patsy Cline and basically be all right — I mean, you sing along with her in the car all the time and sound amazing — aaaaaaaand you know all the lyrics! Convenient. Years of research had shown, Patsy Cline was totally in my range.

“Do you think they have anything by Patsy Cline?” I asked.

“Dude,” he said, “they have, like, every freaking song.”

My roommate’s always been the one afraid of the mice, not me. I’ve openly mocked her about it. “Hey,” I’d nudge her jovially like a quarterback, “I uh, I noticed that your cereal box seemed to have been thrown in the sink with your bowl and spoon, what’s up with that?” She’d mumble something about maybe she thought she saw a mouse when she was in the kitchen this morning, and so she’d just chucked her breakfast materials and ran.

“Haw haw,” I would say.

I’d check our humane traps, giving them a little shake and nudge to check for the weight of a body: I took a live one in my gloved hands and set it free in the park. I planned on naming them witty, carefree names: Beasty, Lucretius, Joyce Carol Oates. I thought they were just adorable and frightened, small, harmless, doe-eyed.

And yet, somehow, alone in our apartment tonight and packing up my things, when I opened the sink door and saw a mouse skitter away from the garbage can, I did not react as if it was adorable or frightened. I recall my mind processing these reasonable thoughts: “look, there is a small, furry mouse. It will not hurt you.” But then suddenly I realized I was letting out a blood-curdling, Looney-Toons variety scream and jumping ten feet in the air.

I have never screamed like that before in my life. It was an authentic scream, it came from the heart. It was the kind of scream that, in the wild, said to other mammals in the vicinity “I am being murdered: come quick and help, or flee with your children.” I stood there for a moment afterwards in a kind of shock, adrenaline coursing through my veins. I could still feel the sound of it echoing through my body. “Christ.”

Thankfully, we are in Boston, and no one — not the mother downstairs, or the boys next door, or the people across the street whose car I helped move last December — questioned a thing. I resumed packing.