The statue was like a temple, I decided, and so I treated it as such. I decided to appeal to its wisdom as I was pissing on it. Piss was the appropriate offering, and so I would offer it respectfully. It was too slippery and stupid to climb the thing, so I stood in front of it, unzipped my pants, and urinated on the base of the statue. Steam rose from the urine as it landed on the frozen metal and melted the snow below. I spoke a quiet prayer and felt like a fool as I zipped up. But nobody saw, nobody was around. I stood there for a long time with my cheeks turning colder and colder thinking about what I had learned so far at college. Everyone agrees that you don’t go to college for classes. You go to make friends and connections. You go to get laid. You go so you can leave your family but not be lonely.

And then I heard people coming. Two boys and two girls. Peacoats and parkas in the cold. They were leaning on one another, laughing, and holding one another’s arms. I took out a cigarette and lit it, resting against the statue next to a pool of my own urine in melted snow.

“Here, here,” said one of them, “let it be known that Dorothy has come to enact tradition.”

One of the girls seemed to be being dragged along.

“Come on,” said her friend, “we’ve all done it.”

They noticed me and the loud leader boy said, “Excuse me, fellow student, another of our kind must leave her mark on the fair founder.”

I nodded and backed out of the way, smoking my cigarette, but watched from close by. The kids paid me no attention. They were too busy convincing Dorothy to piss on the statue.

Eventually she did. I watched her climb up on the statue. She looked around nervously and her friends did, too, but no one was there but me. The girl stood on the statue’s thighs and his benevolent bronze face looked out at me around her shoulder. The light reflected off the statue cast her in dull yellow. It was an inexplicable scene, this panting little primate on the oversized bronze man.

“Turn around,” she shouted at her friends, and they did.

“We’re listening,” they said.

The girl had forgotten about me. The truth is I was hiding and watching. She steadied herself against the statue’s head, and then, like some circus chimp, crouched, and pulled down her pants. I could see, where she held back her peacoat, her spectacularly pale legs and a spot of pubic hair. Then she began to piss and the urine ran down between her legs and trickled steaming down the statue and she said, “Oh, this is freezing,” and her friends laughed and said, “Sounds like a good one, Dot.”