To whomever left his mattress outside a FroSoCo door the other night, I sincerely apologize. Please, take it back: it has done enough damage to my house and my family.

Maybe I should explain.

Legend has it that the Hope Diamond is the world’s most unlucky diamond, having played a role in the assassination of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette, and bankrupting everyone who has ever held it for any amount of time. Its obvious allure has taken in hundreds of victims throughout history and brought them to mysterious fates. And I believe — no, I know — that I have received the Hope Diamond of Mattresses.

Wandering the FroSoCo halls late at night several days ago with a trusty companion — as I the adventurer am wont to do — I came upon a mattress lying outside of a door on the third floor.

Taking for granted that if something is lying outside of a door it is free for the taking and being a big fan of free crap, I decided with my companion to “steal” the mattress from its current location, and “spirit it away” to my dorm, Larkin, on the other side of campus.

This was no easy task. First, we had to get the mattress down from the third floor. This entailed quite a bit of shoving from a balcony, over a plant trellis and onto a rack of bikes. Even after all this the mattress was still a mile from Larkin.

After attempting to slide the mattress onto cardboard boxes and drag it behind our bicycles and failing to “liberate” a golf cart for our nefarious purposes, we finally settled on a wonderful idea: strapping it to my back while I biked it across campus.

I had a cable bike lock with me to use as a strap, and did just that. I was on top of the world: a McGuiver-style clever renegade traveling across a barren campus at 2 a.m., singing Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” with a 20 pound blue mattress dangling precariously from my shoulders (and at least twice causing me to run into passing pedestrians). When we finally reached Larkin, I anxiously displayed my loot to all present.

My roommate Kevin, the obvious matriarch of our humble abode, was unfortunately unhappy with me for having stolen some poor FroSoCo-ian’s mattress. He berated me for inviting bedbugs to our dorm, causing the room to smell bad, and, finally (and really, this was a bit unwarranted), killing Jesus — all because I had dared to improve our room with a mattress-couch.

Several days went by without serious repercussions. I lofted my bed to the highest possible setting, and laid my newfound mattress under the old one. This amounted to a “Super-Loft,” in which my head was literally only several inches from the ceiling. I thought this was Super-Awesome.

After a time, however, a smell began to permeate the room: rancid chicken meat. Our room, usually foul-smelling (due to the rotting fruit in the garbage can and the spoiled milk in the fridge), had acquired a new, decidedly worse smell.

Kevin immediately suspected our new guest, and, according to his wishes, I created a listing on SUPost about a missing mattress, hoping someone could relieve our room of this horrible plague.

Here is where things took a turn for the worst: I got a reply to my post. “Peter at FroSoCo” kindly informed me that he’d left his “bedbug-ridden” mattress out into the hall and was waiting for the dorm staff to come by and pick it up.

Needless to say, I freaked out. Kevin and I immediately ran the mattress outside to the dumpster, and prepared to burn it. We removed our sheets, backed up our hard drives, and searched our bodies for red pocks. In our haste, we acquired quite a crowd, themselves very concerned that now they too would have bedbugs. I took quite a bit of flak for my innocent adventuring.

Before making a too-drastic move, we decided to find this Peter character and injure him in some way. This was only just, as he had caused so much grief. Biking back out to FroSoCo, this time with a mob of three people, we hunted down Peter, who was innocently typing away at his computer.

Well, a long and awkward 20 minute conversation later, we discovered this was not the same Peter, and later, found that the mattress didn’t have bedbugs after all, and that the guy down the hall was pranking us.

What had started as a joke turned into a knife: tearing apart the tender bonds of rommateship, dividing a dorm, and nearly maiming poor Peter.

Please, come and get your mattress: It has done its karmic counter-attack already.