“I looked up at the corner and there was a lizard sticking his tongue out at me.”

My first shared bathroom I ever used was down in West Virginia. I was 12 years old and my parents had taken the family down there to hang out with family members. And my aunt and uncle lived up a holler in, in West Virginia, and they had no running water. They had a pump at the sink that pumped cold water. They would have to heat their water. And of course they had an outhouse. And me being a city slicker girl never saw an outhouse, let alone used one. And being that that’s all they had and I had to pee, I had to use the, the outhouse. So I went in there, and it was dark and dingy, and up in the holler in West Virginia, there’s little — I can’t remember what they call them, but they’re little lizards. And I’m sitting there with my pants around my ankles trying my best to pee and not cry. And I looked up at the corner and there was a, a lizard sticking his tongue out at me and I screamed. I’m crying. I ran out of the outhouse with my pants around my ankles, everybody looking at me. My mom came running. “What in the world?” She’s laughing at me. My dad’s laughing at me. My mom helped me pull up my pants, which were now wet because I had peed all the way on them. Oh, it was just a nightmare trying to use that outhouse the very first time. Nobody had warned me about the lizards. I don’t think it would have mattered had they warned me or not. I would have still ran out of the bathroom. I found out that another uncle who lived up the next holler had a bathroom. So I would hold it until we went to my other uncle’s house and I would use his toilet. First time using a shared bathroom was not a success.