I was minding my own business at the kitchen table, eating my much-anticipated chicken nuggets—the kind of chicken nuggets you buy in bulk from the frozen section of Wegmans. Now, I don’t eat chicken nuggets very often, but it was a special occasion. I'd just written almost a fourth of a memoir (22 pages to be exact) for one of my classes, had spent all of my Saturday slaving over those pages, and managed to get it done before the next day's deadline. May I add that while these chicken nuggets were well deserved, I was also drunk. And not just any drunk, I was wine drunk, the kind of intoxicated where you belly laugh until you’re breathless and smile at your friends until you have charlie horses in your cheek bones. It's basically the adult version of a sugar-high. And my candy of choice was Barefoot Moscato.

So back to the chicken nuggets. There I was at 1:00 in the morning, scrolling through my phone and double tapping on all the late-night Instagrams, when I saw a blur of grey scurry from the corner of the room, under my chair and across to the stove area. I reacted as any normal person would: I gasped and, mid bite, scrambled to stand onto my chair (which was pretty difficult to do because my kitchen floors are slanted). I’m 21 years old, but in this moment I felt about 5.

Maybe it was my drunken state, but the mouse seemed to smile up at me with its small, poppy seed eyes. It mocked me before bounding across the floor and disappearing under the drier. Hell no, I thought, and raced into my room with a lid from the only pot my roommates and I own. As I slammed the door and crouched on my bed with the shiny, silver cover, I wasn’t sure why exactly I was holding it like a shield. I mean, I was bigger than the mouse. I was stronger than the mouse. And all I was doing was squatting on my bed with the lid at my face, staring at the wooden door like the mouse was just going to mosey on in to fight me.

Alright, Sam, you got this. I willed myself out of my room, squealing as I ran into the kitchen and perched back on the chair. I watched the laundry room intently, waiting for my opponent to show its face again. I tried a slew of different calls, coaxing it out of the dark with a few “psst, psst” sounds—you know, the ones cats love—and when this failed, I tried talking to it. “Come on mousey, mousey,” I cooed.

When it finally scurried out into the open, I leaped off the chair, grabbed a pasta strainer from the drying rack next to the sink and trapped the mouse underneath it. Now, at this point my adrenaline was really going. And I kept thinking I was on an episode of “Fear Factor.” I had a single mouse trap I could set up, but my friend (who I secretly named Mel, Mel the mouse) was smarter than that and would know not to fall for it. I needed to get rid of it—not kill it, but take it outside like a bug you don’t want to harm yet need out of your house.

While a contestant on “Fear Factor” would probably use their bare hands, no amount of wine could've made me that brave. So, I had to get creative. I remembered that the cashier at the liquor store had given me and my roommate a big cardboard box for our wine earlier that afternoon—and thank God he did. I ran to the dining room to retrieve it and returned to the kitchen, standing over the pasta strainer with the box in hand.

You've got one chance to get this right—let's do this. I released the mouse into the open, and it seemed to blink the light from its eyes before frantically darting across the deep green tile. “You’re mine now, Mel!” I yelled, chasing it around the room with the cardboard box. We were playing cat and mouse—and I was getting enraged.

Finally, I had it cornered. It stared up at me, wiggling its little nose. I had to admit that it was pretty darn cute, and after seeing movies like “Ratatouille” when I was little, I felt sorry for it. You know, the kids' movie where the main character (a rat) is a secret chef in the kitchen of a famous French restaurant? Maybe Mel here had the potential to be more than just a sleazy, food-stealing critter. Or maybe that was just the wine talking.

I used one of the cardboard folds to trip the mouse's legs from underneath its body, and it fell into the bottom of the box. I could hear little Mel’s feet scampering against the cardboard, trying to escape in a panic. But I was faster. I ran to the front door and into the night air and threw the mouse onto the porch. Well, actually, I threw the whole box along with the poor thing, but Mel shook it off and bolted down the steps into oblivion.

I felt triumphant. Never in a million years would I have thought I’d be so brave. Maybe it was the wine (it was definitely the wine). And the best part? I remembered that I still had my chicken nuggets.