There were hundreds of them. They didn’t have names yet. All they knew was the dark inside of a giant blue cooler sitting in the middle of a college dining hall. Every time the cooler opened, one was scooped up by a giant green net and plopped into a tiny tank filled with green and purple rocks and a goldfish they may or may not have previously known.
At a carnival in 2009, the Resident Housing Association gave away betta fish to whoever could knock down the most milk jugs. But in 2011, RHA gave away pairs of goldfish to any resident who was in the dining hall.
Residents carried their tanks back to their dorms. They took pictures of their new pets and uploaded them to Facebook. They named their fish after their favorite TV characters or musicians – “Heisenburg and Jesse,” “Michael Jackson” and “Macy Gray,” or preferred politicians “Barack” and “Obama.” They blew their pets kisses before making their way to class. They made bets with each other about how long they would live. But within a week, about half of them had already been flushed down the toilet, forgotten like a mediocre lunch.
Sarah Savage, a Simmons tour guide and first year RA, was among the many who happily brought home a fish. Two, in fact –one named Cat, the other Dog. But her new pets only lived for a few weeks. Savage says they died when she first changed their water.
“It was horrible,” she said. “They gave you instructions, but I don’t think I let the water sit. They were basically in shock.”
She asked her friends to run to Shaw’s to get some distilled water in a desperate attempt to save her scaly friends which helped for a while. “They were still alive but not moving,” Savage said. “You could tell it was harder for them to breathe. I would tap the bowl so they could swim but they just jerked.”
Eventually Cat and Dog ended up in the toilet, flushed out through the Simmons sewage system.
For Zenaida Peterson, a sophomore and co-facilitator of Campus Conversations on Race, the fish were a surprise from her roommate.
“The first fish’s name was Missed,” Peterson said, “and the other’s name was…. I forget. I guess I never really used their names.
“I liked watching them exist in my room…. I always wanted them to have a bigger bowl.
“They’re meant to be in big lakes and big oceans and interacting with other fish. Not just the one partner they had,” she said.
When they were still alive, Sarah said that she would talk to them. “I recognized them as living things. They were something that was in my care.”
She said that not everyone was this invested.
After students flushed their pets down the toilet they left their tanks in the hallway, on top of the garbage bins. “They just expected tanks to be taken care of,” Savage said. “They were literally treating them as if they were a Bartol dish, expecting them to be cleaned up and thrown away.”
When winter break came around, many students who still had live goldfish did not bring them home. According to Savage, students packed up their things, unplugged their refrigerators, and left their fish in their rooms. “They were just leaving them there to die,” she said. And die they did.
When students returned to their dorms, unpacking their things and re-stocking their supply of midnight snacks, they encountered fish graves.
Some students left their fish in the care of others. Marissa Johnson, a sophomore at Simmons, says that during winter break, her roommate placed eight fish tanks in the backseat of her car, and brought them home. “They were in her car, just splashing around in the water,” Johnson said. “At least half of them died, except for mine and Zenaida’s.”
When summer came around, Peterson had to move back to Atlanta, Ga., so she put her fish in Johnson’s care.
Johnson, who was working as a summer RA, would religiously change her fish’s tank for most of the school year.  “They’re not supposed to be in that small of a tank though,” she said, “There’s supposed to be a gallon of water for each fish, and, well.” The tanks were pretty small.
Johnson said that eventually she gave up on cleaning Peterson’s tank because her cleaning didn’t make a difference. The summer air kept the tank muggy and dirty. The fish were doomed.
“It was traumatizing for them to pour them into a glass of water every day,” she said. “I just let it be.” Over the summer, one of the four fish in her care met up with the great big fish in the sky.
While Savage’s new fish did not survive, she put all of her attention into taking care of Rocco, a betta fish that she had before Cat and Dog.
For Christmas, she asked for a five-gallon fish tank, so that Rocco would have the right amount of space to swim around in. She read a betta fish blog. She learned that the number one cause of death in betta fish is obesity, so she sprinkled one pellet of food on one side of the tank, and then one on the opposite side, so he – Savage was convinced it was boy – had to swim a little extra for his meals. She left the shade up so that he had light during the day.
“I felt like he had a personality…. If you care about something, you put a little piece of yourself into it.”
When fall came around, Johnson passed the fish back over to Peterson. “I wanted them to be in a bigger tank,” she said, and Peterson had purchased a large one from a thrift store. “It was a bigger apartment for them.”
Within a week, three of the fish inexplicably gulped their last breaths of water and floated to the top of the tank.
A year later, most of the fish given to dorm residents by RHA are dead. Zenaida Peterson is an RA and has her own room in Morse Hall. As she comes back into her single from a routine Health and Safety check, she sniffs the air. Before each fish died, she says, a peculiar scent filled the room.
Sure enough, as she closes her door behind her, Peterson sees the last fish lying on its side at the bottom of the tank.
The little minnow had grown into a hefty orange creature since it and the other fishes were first put in her care. She bragged to her friends about how active and large her fish were. Now, the last survivor was dead and bloated, its eyes and mouth wide open, as if it were staring at something.
“It was devastating,” Peterson said. “I didn’t know how to save them.”
Savage brought Rocco home during the summer break, where she continued to care for him the best she could. After a few days of being away with her family, Rocco had been without food. When she came back to his tank, she found that Rocco was still flapping his fins and gulping water.
Relieved, she fed him extra fish food, hoping to compensate for the days he wasn’t fed. The fish quickly became constipated and died. “I buried him in my backyard,” Savage said. “I even made a little Rocco memorial in my room.”
She is considering whether or not to get another betta fish, but she thinks that most people who got them for free at the RHA carnival just thought of them as novelties.
“If you really want a fish,” she said, “you can go out and get one, rather than having one ’cause they’re there.”
Peterson said that people were excited about the spontaneity of it. But after coming back to their dorms and taking out their homework and calling their moms and texting their significant others goodnight, most quickly forgot to feed them.
She doesn’t think RHA should have just given the fish away to anybody, whether they wanted them or not.  “If you don’t have to do anything, you won’t,” she said. “But if you want the end result, you’ll work for it.”
She figures, however, that RHA knew fish have short lifespans.  “Goldfish don’t last forever,” she said, “and neither does the college experience.”
When asked if she wanted another pet, she said that she would love to have a turtle. “They live forever though,” she said, shaking her head. “And that’s kind of scary.”