by Stephanie Wu
I soon started noticing that she lied to me a lot. I often came home to find the apartment reeking of smoke, as if someone had been smoking in the living room. When I asked if she’d been smoking, she said, “No, it came in from outside, I’d never smoke in here.” And she did typical bad roommate stuff, like eating my food out of the fridge and using all my shampoo. Whenever I asked her about it, she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” It was annoying, but not a huge deal.
Then one day, things got weird. I came home and she’d left her diary in front of my bedroom door. The diary was open on a passage about how she was questioning her sexuality and she wasn’t sure if she had feelings for me or her male best friend. And I thought, If she wants to have a conversation with me about this stuff, I’m happy to talk to her about it, but what a weird way to go about it. So I closed her diary and put it back near her room, and didn’t say anything about it. Then she started leaving these weird little sculptures in front of my bedroom, made out of pieces of paper she’d gotten out of my bedroom trash, like a letter from my mom or a birthday card I’d thrown away after a few weeks. She took these pieces of paper and folded them into origami and piled them up into a sculpture and never said anything about it. Sometimes my clothes or CDs went missing, and a mutual friend told me she was wearing my clothes out, and rotated them and then put them back in my closet, hopefully before I saw they were gone.
Then I started noticing that she was coming into my room when I was asleep. We were not best friends, or nearly close enough for this to be a normal thing. When I woke up in the morning, things that I knew for a fact had been in my room when I went to bed were now in the living room. She had come in while I was asleep and took my cordless phone off its cradle and left it in the living room, though we also had a landline out there. It was a little creepy, and I dealt with it by spending more time on campus during the day and nights with my boyfriend. Sometimes I came home from his house and my sheets were all rumpled, as if someone had slept in my bed, and it smelled like cigarettes. But my roommate said no one had been in my room, though she had clearly been sleeping in my bed or letting someone else sleep there.
I thought of trying to lock my room, but I had one of those doorknobs that could only be locked from the inside, because there was no key. One time I had locked the door and I heard noises that sounded like the doorknob jiggling. I opened the door quickly, and my roommate was standing there with a penny that she was trying to place in the slit and turn it like you would with a key. “I was looking for something and thought maybe it fell out and got into your room somehow,” she said. After that, I never truly felt like my things were secure.
At this point, the weirdest thing she’d done was leave a pair of underwear that she’d had her period in on the living room floor. Then one day, I asked her about something else of mine that had gone missing. She denied it and said I was being weird. When I came home later, on the front door of our apartment building was a page from a catalog I’d thrown out, with all these mean things about me written on it, as if I was the girl from the catalog picture. She wrote stupid things, like “I think I’m a feminist but I spend every night at my boyfriend’s house,” “I spend too much money on clothes and won’t share my food with anybody,” and “I’m a bitch and everyone hates me”—nasty things she thought were true of me. And she’d crossed out the girl’s eyes, like you would do to a dead person, and drew a pentagram on her forehead.
That’s when I decided I’d had it. I’d tried to have conversations with her about everything that was happening, but she denied it all. It almost felt like a multiple personality thing, where I was dealing with two people—one was a prim and proper southerner, and the other was a crazy person who was always acting out. Whenever I tried to talk to her, I got the buttoned-up one who always said, “I don’t know what you’re speaking of, that’s disgusting.” The note on the door was the last straw. I called my boyfriend, and he came over and kept me company while I put everything in garbage bags and moved into his house. And I never went back. I still paid rent to the landlord, but I didn’t do anything that necessitated us staying in touch. And I do feel like she knew she’d done something wrong, because if you thought you had a fairly normal roommate relationship, and then you came home one day and all your roommate’s things were gone and she’d moved out without a word, you’d text them or ask if something had happened. But I never heard from her again.
Afterward, I lived with my best friend, which went great. And I decided I’d had too many bad experiences living with strangers, so unless I could live with my best friend in the world, I was going to live by myself. Even when I moved to New York, where most people have roommates, I did whatever it took to save enough money to live alone, whether it was taking a second job or never going out for dinner. My only roommate in the past ten years has been my dog.
—S, 32 (F)
THE PARTY POOPERS
I WENT TO BOSTON COLLEGE, where the housing system is lottery-based and you need to find a certain number of roommates to fit a lottery slot. It’s a very dramatic situation that can ruin friendships. As seniors, everyone wants to live in the Modulars, a group of dorms that is the hub of the party circuit on campus. You need six people to apply for an apartment, but it’s the most desirable place to live because you have a huge yard, or Mod Quad, which you share with about forty other people. I was studying abroad while we were applying, and some of our friends had decided to group together without telling the rest of us. So in order to apply for the Mod, my best friend, Mandy, and I joined up with Nina, a good friend from abroad who had a group of four.
We got an apartment at the Mod, which was exciting, because the friends who screwed us over didn’t. When it came time to move in, Mandy and I quickly realized we weren’t on the same page as these other girls. We wanted to live in the Mod because it was a party area, and if you live there, it’s assumed that you’re okay with people up at all hours, any day of the week, and that you’ll be throwing your own parties. But any time Mandy and I wanted to have people over, it was a knock-down, drag-out brawl. The other four girls never wanted to contribute to alcohol or food or clean up or set up, and then at the eleventh hour, their friends all showed up first and drank our beer before our friends got there.
We threw a huge Christmas party, and I spent hundreds of dollars getting tons of drinks, food, and even an ice luge. The day of the party, one roommate, Angie, showed up with her soccer team after telling me she wasn’t willing to contribute more than twenty dollars. And then the other roommates complained throughout the following week about how we didn’t clean up quickly enough, and that we were loud, and people were there late.
On St. Patrick’s Day, we threw a Kegs and Eggs party so we could drink and have some food in our stomachs before we went out. A friend of Mandy’s and mine got too drunk and had to be dragged into our shower and hosed off, because he had somehow rolled in mud. I didn’t even know he was there, and when I found out, I kicked him out because he was way too drunk. A couple of days later, one of the roommates sent a text to the group, saying, “When is the disgusting mud going to be cleaned out of the shower from your friend on St. Patrick’s Day?” Our Mod had two showers, and I never used the other one. I’d already cleaned the entire apartment after our party, and had I known the shower I never used was dirty, I would have cleaned it too. But they were telling me they’d showered in two inches of mud for four days before passive-aggressively saying anything. I didn’t even feel bad for them.
In April, the Boston Marathon rolled around. BC is located at mile twenty-one, right after Heartbreak Hill, the hardest part of the marathon. The school encourages people to cheer marathon runners on and have a great time. We wanted to throw a party, but our roommates were hesitant and didn’t want to be involved. Which was fine—we told them, if you don’t want to be around, go somewhere else. We got money from another group of kids to throw the largest party in the Mod, and we had tons of food, jungle juice, and beer.
Angie showed up with her friends again and drank our beer and ate our food, but the marathon was such a happy event that we brushed it aside.
The bombings happened later that afternoon. Mandy and I cleaned up the party, like we always did, with no help. The rest of the week in Boston was bizarre—the bombers were on the loose, and no one knew what was going on. On Thursday night, we were out in Boston and got an emergency text message saying that the suspects were driving on a road toward BC from downtown Boston, and that they were throwing bombs out the window and an MIT officer was dead.
My friends and I knew we weren’t going to take a cab from downtown in the same direction as the bombers, so nine of us spent the night at a hotel where a friend’s parents had a timeshare. The next day, the entire city was on lockdown. Everyone on campus was given fifteen-minute time slots where they could be escorted to dining halls. We were downtown the whole time, so when the younger bomber was apprehended three miles from BC, the city erupted into a huge party. We made our way back to campus and were celebrating at a bar when we started receiving text messages that there was a huge party of four hundred people in our Mod Quad, with some waving American flags out the windows and blasting music across the yard.
This sounded awesome, so we got back on the bus, where everyone was singing “Sweet Caroline” and “The Star-Spangled Banner” and going absolutely nuts. People were walking in and out of our Mod, mostly friends of ours who needed to use the bathroom. The police broke up the celebration around two thirty in the morning, and we were still standing around, watching the crowd disperse. We’d never seen anything like it before.
At some point in the night, our roommates had decided to lock our doors. So every time we wanted to go inside for something, or let one of our good friends into the bathroom, we had to pound on the door. Two roommates kept saying we were waking them up, even though there were four hundred people in the yard and school had been canceled the next day. Two of my friends had passed out in our apartment, and one roommate decided to wake them up and kick them out. We eventually got into a huge fight—Nina slammed the door in our faces, then cried about how mean we were being, even though she was the one who had locked us out of our own dorm.
The next day, things were obviously awkward. We were pulled into a roommate meeting and accused of throwing a party without telling anyone or allowing them to invite their friends. They said we had let things get out of hand, as if we had invited the entire population of BC into our yard, even though we had been downtown for the whole thing and arrived when it was already under way. It was the type of blowout that happens after the World Series, or after Osama was captured, and they blamed the entire party on us because it happened in our yard.
When the year ended, three girls booked it without cleaning up—my parents and I stuck around until late at night cleaning up the apartment. I honestly think my roommates were sour people who were unhappy for some reason, and we were easy targets because we liked to have fun. I still had a great senior year, but living in the Mod with people who didn’t ever want to entertain was really difficult. At BC, if you’re lucky enough to get one of those apartments, it’s your duty as a senior to entertain.
—Z, 24 (F)
THE OVEREXCITED BLADDER
I FIRST MET NANCY my sophomore year of college, and that summer, we lived with a few other girls on campus while taking classes. Nancy and I got along very well, so when both our fall housing arrangements fell through, we decided to continue living together. The two of us shared a very small off-campus apartment, with two bedrooms and one bathroom.
As we were moving in, she told me an embarrassing story that had happened on her birthday. “I was making out with a guy,” she said. “But I drank too much and peed on myself.” Thankfully, she had a small bladder, so it looked like she’d been sweating a lot.
I’d seen Nancy drink before, but she was always fine. I don’t know if it was a combination of drinking and stress, since it was right around the Thanksgiving holiday, but I woke up early one morning and was heading to the bathroom barefoot when my feet hit a wet spot on the hallway carpet. That’s weird, I thought. Our walls must be leaking. The apartment was ratty—I woke up one morning with plaster on my bed. I went to the bathroom and came back out, and realized the wet spot smelled kind of funny, but ignored it.
When Nancy woke up, I told her my theory about the leaking walls, and she said, “Well, I might have wet my pants.” She told me she had been drinking the previous night, and thought she had been on the toilet when she peed herself, and this was the first time it had happened. We had a good laugh about it and moved on. By the time she got around to cleaning it up, it was already dry and inside the carpet.
Because she was a great roommate, I didn’t think much about it until the exact same thing happened a few weeks later. It became this thing where every time Nancy drank too much, she peed in the exact same corner on the floor. I felt like I had a Chihuahua or something.
The hallway started to smell like urine, and it didn’t help that the floor was carpeted. I was determined never to clean it up. I was an EMT in college and had to deal with plenty of other bodily fluids on weekends, so I did not want to deal with it in my home. We tried a few solutions. We got a cat spray that has an ammonia smell and prevents cats from peeing there, as well as a pet-stain spray to keep the smell away. There were visible stains, but thankfully we weren’t the first people in the apartment to stain the carpet. I actually came close to putting a wee-wee pad there. She always put a bucket of water on the spot, but that lingering pet-spray smell never went away.
The peeing put a damper on our relationship—no pun intended. How do you have a conversation with someone about an issue like that? I encouraged her to seek medical help but I don’t think she ever followed through with it. I don’t know if it was my faulty communication skills, but the problem never got solved. She could still be peeing on the floor somewhere. I hear she lives alone now.
—K, 23 (F)
THE BEST FRIEND GONE WRONG
I MET STACY my freshman year, and we became fast friends. She was one of my best friends that year, so we decided to live together our sophomore year. We wanted to meet new people and roomed with two other girls we didn’t know.
Stacy spent a lot of time crying over boys throughout freshman year, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. When we got back to school sophomore year, Stacy had broken up with her long-distance boyfriend and was severely depressed. I thought this was a bit irrational, since she hadn’t liked him all that much and was sleeping with someone else while they were in a relationship.
That first week, Stacy stayed in the room all day with the shades down, sleeping and crying. I thought maybe something else had happened that she wasn’t telling me. I was concerned that she never wanted to go out or socialize. I started to make new friends because Stacy wouldn’t leave the house. She only wanted to get stoned with the guy she had cheated on her ex with. She started spending more time with him, and at one point was only sleeping at our apartment once a month. There was a lot of under-the-surface tension between us.
Then in the spring, I threw a surprise birthday party for my boyfriend, who was also a good friend of hers, in our dorm. Stacy missed the surprise and showed up two hours late, stoned out of her mind with her guy, and made a big scene. I went into my bedroom as we were getting ready to leave for dinner, and she said, “Are you annoyed at me?”
“Yes, I am,” I responded. “You’re two hours late, which I think is disrespectful. I thought you were going to be here. So, yes, I’m annoyed at you.” And she burst into tears. She was crying and heaving so hard that she couldn’t catch her breath. I felt bad, but I thought she was looking for attention, and I didn’t want to comfort her. Stacy locked herself in our closet, so I sent her boyfriend in to deal with it.
After we left for the restaurant, I didn’t see her for the rest of the night. She didn’t come back to our room for days, and when she did, we agreed that we needed to talk.
Stacy was very quiet and particular about choosing her words, and said, “You hurt me. You didn’t comfort me when I started crying. I was so upset over this that I’ve been cutting myself over the weekend. You made me feel so guilty, and this is the only way I know how to deal with it.”
First of all, I felt terrible—I knew something scary was going on. Even though I didn’t think I had made her cut herself, I said I was sorry and suggested that maybe she was a bit depressed and needed to see someone. During the conversation, Stacy went from talking slowly to bursting out in rage. I talked to the RAs about it afterward—I didn’t think she was going to cut herself again in our apartment, but they needed to know in case it happened again.
I also had to tell our suitemates about the situation—they weren’t the brightest bulbs in the world. They had both bought hamsters from Petco, and a huge cage for them. Two weeks after they got their hamsters, I went into their room and didn’t see the cage. “It’s in the closet,” they said. “The hamsters were so loud while we were trying to sleep, and were always running on their wheels.” They had no idea that hamsters were nocturnal, so they put them in the closet with a blanket over the cage. The hamsters both died, but not before one tried to eat the other one. They kept getting new hamsters (and taking care of them badly) for the rest of the year. So when I tried to explain what they needed to do if they came home and saw Stacy cutting herself, they said, “We call you, right?” “No,” I said. “You call an ambulance, or somebody who can actually help her.”
Thankfully, she didn’t cut herself again, but I did find Prozac in our room a couple of weeks later. Even though Stacy wasn’t around much, I knew she was slowly getting better, because she told me she was going to therapy. When she was there, she was super smiley and genuinely thought we were still friends. Whenever I saw her, I felt like we were walking on eggshells, and I was scared that anything I said would make her run to the bathroom.
