The Roommates

by Stephanie Wu

  The next year, Stacy went abroad. She messaged me a few times, and I responded once in a while, but I couldn’t fake it. I was glad she wasn’t my responsibility anymore, because she was in a different country. I never saw her again after that.

  —C, 23 (F)

  THE FAKE MOVE-OUT

  I TOOK A YEAR OFF DURING COLLEGE, which I spent in upstate New York, not far from my hometown. Four of us shared a one-bedroom apartment with a living room and kitchen, with a rotating cast of roommates. The living room was big enough for us to cordon off a part of it with a tapestry to make it into another bedroom. We slept all over the apartment, including on the couch.

  During the summer, we got a little crazy. We went to raves often and were always trying to have a good time. My roommate Charlotte got progressively weirder. One night we were preparing to go to a local club, and Charlotte, who had been planning on coming with us, suddenly said she was going to stay in and do some paperwork. We were all nineteen or twenty, none of us were in school, and she didn’t have a job. She pulled out a folder of all these papers and started spreading them out and moving them around. It was strange, and sort of the beginning of the end.

  None of us were the picture of sanity, but Charlotte was particularly eccentric and quirky. She always carried a tiny green backpack around. One night, we threw a party, and out of nowhere, she walked into the kitchen wearing her leather jacket and green backpack and started making pancakes. She didn’t offer the pancakes to anyone, or say anything else, she just silently made herself breakfast in the kitchen.

  She also wore glasses all the time, and one night she said to me, “People have to wear glasses because they want to see the truth.” She wasn’t frightening or creepy, but I always wanted to ask whether she was okay. Prior to moving in with us, Charlotte had had a heroin problem, but had gotten clean. We weren’t sure if she was maybe getting high again, and never had any proof.

  The other roommates and I had planned on going back to school in the fall, and wanted to get an apartment in the neighborhood where all the students lived. We started looking around, but realized that Charlotte was so unstable that we didn’t want to continue to live with her or sign another yearlong lease.

  Then I discovered that Charlotte had stolen a bottle of my painkillers. I used to get vicious cramps—so bad that I had to get a prescription for them. She must have thought they were muscle relaxants at first. I went to look for them one day and they weren’t there. That was the incident that made me realize I had to get her out of the house.

  When you’re an adult, you can say, “I don’t want to live with you.” But we were twenty years old and thought we were so clever. A pretend move was the best idea we came up with at the time. We hatched a plan to tell Charlotte that we were all moving back in with our parents because we couldn’t afford a new place.

  After we told her the news, Charlotte didn’t make any effort to leave or pack. We tried to ask her when she was leaving, but she didn’t seem to feel any rush. So we took it to the next level. In order to sell the story, we all started packing. We bought boxes and put all our things away. I started with the most visible things, like a makeshift vanity I had. I had probably packed 75 percent of my things when she finally got her dad to pick her up. She didn’t have a lot of furniture, and we somehow managed to get her to be the first person to move out. As soon as she did, we all unpacked our boxes—we decided not to move out after all—and two guy friends moved in with us.

  A week later, we were at a club, and we saw Charlotte there. “Hey, I heard you guys decided to stay,” she said. We made up some off-the-cuff explanation about how one of our friends decided to move in so we all stayed. We weren’t prepared to see her again so soon after—it was pretty uncomfortable. I didn’t stay in the apartment for much longer, because I didn’t like living with guys. I never stayed in touch with Charlotte after, but she did write letters to one of our other roommates. That’s how I later found out that Charlotte had moved to the West Coast with her mom, because she was being treated for schizophrenia.

  —H, 40 (F)

  THE SUICIDE ATTEMPT

  AFTER I TRANSFERRED COLLEGES, I met a guy, Jeremy, my junior year who I got along well with. I was a new student, so it was hard to make friends, and he was one of my first friends there. Three to four months after meeting each other, we decided to move in together. It was three of us in an off-campus apartment and we each had our own room—me, Jeremy, and another girl, Margaret.

  I guess the only way to put it is that Jeremy had a lot of problems—after we moved in together, he acted very erratic. So many things that other people take in stride were devastating to him. He was happy and sad and then inconsolable for long stretches of time. He was having a lot of problems with his sort-of girlfriend, and everything was very dramatic. In retrospect, there were so many red flags at that time. I just thought Jeremy was a sensitive boy. We were all twenty-one, and this happened within a few weeks of us moving in together.

  One night in September, I stayed late on campus. When I got home, I didn’t notice anything was wrong, and I didn’t check in with anyone. At five A.M., I got a call from Margaret, saying Jeremy was in the hospital. He had had a breakdown—that’s the best way I can explain it—and flipped out. We lived in one of those old houses that had a basement, and our basement was actually an old horse stable—which was not uncommon—with wooden rafters. While I was on campus, Jeremy tried to hang himself, I think with a belt. I never saw it and I never asked. But fortunately Margaret figured out what was happening quickly, and held him up and called 911 at the same time. Jeremy was okay, but he was in a psych ward for about two weeks. His parents came out, and we had a lot of uncomfortable conversations with them and the school. The school made him take a medical leave from classes, but couldn’t make him leave the apartment.

  The next day, Margaret and I spent a lot of time sitting in silence and getting high. Jeremy was in the hospital and we visited him every day. It was an actual mental hospital, which neither of us were prepared for, with people talking to themselves and shouting, and a lot of people on suicide watch. We spent a week not going to class or leaving the house—instead, we drank and did cocaine at three in the afternoon. We were super numb.

  After Jeremy got out of the hospital, he stayed with us for almost a month, in the same room and basically the same state. That was the worst part. I was scared all the time about what could happen. Without ever talking about it, Margaret and I took up this schedule where one of us was always home, because we were so worried. I remember feeling guilty whenever I left the house. I felt like we were the only people who knew what had happened. We didn’t tell any of our friends. I only told one of my professors because I missed a bunch of class, and for a while I thought about dropping out. He convinced me not to, which I’m forever thankful for.

  Jeremy was still manic and hard to reason with. I remember him flying into rages over the smallest thing. We shared groceries, which I realize now is a terrible idea to ever do with a roommate. He once sent us an all-caps e-mail about us eating too much peanut butter. It cast a weird, somber tone on all the normal roommate conflicts, and it made everything more intense.

  Jeremy’s parents eventually convinced him to leave. We were incredibly relieved, but the aftermath was the worst. Our washing machine was in the basement, and the rest of the time we lived in the apartment, my roommate and I only went down there together. Someone moved into his room the next semester, which made things much better. Margaret handled it well considering everything, and I was incredibly impressed by her. We both had trouble in our classes, and I had nightmares. We were so behind in our classes, we had to haul ass in order not to fail. Jeremy is now doing great, but it was the worst month of my life.

  One of the things I realized after was that a lot of the classic red flags about depression or other psychological disorders apply to everyone in college. When you go to a psychiatrist, they ask, “Are you sleeping late hours? Are you sleeping a lot or
a little? Are you drinking a lot?” And all of those things apply to basically all college students. So it can be hard to tell what means what. And the thing I learned most is that your home is so important, and when your home feels like a scary or hostile or uncomfortable place, it fucks your life up. I hated being home and I hated not being home. My roommate attempting suicide affected me so much more than it would have if it had just been a friend. I had to mature quickly in a short amount of time.

  —E, 26 (F)

  THE PLUMBING PROBLEM

  AS A GRAD STUDENT, I lived in a four-person house with George and Suzie, two friends of mine from grad school. The fourth girl who was supposed to live with us backed out because she had gotten into medical school, so we found our last roommate, Molly, through Craigslist—she was an undergrad at the same school. Molly missed the deadline for university housing, and when we met her, she seemed like fun. We were a bit older than her, but felt we could all get along. Molly was not only the youngest but also the flaky girl in the house. There was a period where she stopped going to class and was staying up late but not taking responsibility for a lot of things. The rest of us weren’t angels, but at least we got our stuff done.

  For the most part, things went smoothly in the house. Molly was known for eating other people’s ice cream, and other things that clearly weren’t communal, without replacing them, but that was the sort of thing you chalked up to living with a college kid.

  The basement of our apartment, which we used as storage, was unfinished and had a gutter system around the walls and the foundation. We had a bit of rain back up at some point, but nothing dramatic. We called our landlord in from time to time if there were any problems. He was a middle-aged guy who clearly didn’t love us but also thought we were decent tenants because we weren’t causing damage to the place and were paying rent on time.

  Then in early May, as the school year was ending and all of us were taking off here and there for a couple of days or weeks at a time, we started hearing weird noises coming from the basement. It sounded like water, but when I investigated, I didn’t see any problems that indicated something wasn’t working properly. Then I noticed a sewagelike smell. I went back downstairs, and sure enough, the basement was flooded with sewage. George had left for the weekend, Suzie was off seeing her family, and Molly was about to fly home because her semester had ended. She hadn’t been in a good place for a while, and we could tell she was on the brink of failing out of school.

  I called our landlord and told him, “Our basement seems to be flooding, could you send a plumber out as soon as possible?” The plumber arrived shortly after and started mucking around downstairs. He dug out the source of the problem, which he held up to me. “I see the issue,” he said. “You’ve got little white mice.” I looked at what he was holding up and realized it was a tampon. The first thing I thought to say was, “Well, it’s not mine.”

  “You guys can’t flush these down this system,” the plumber said. “This house is too old to handle this.” It was a standalone 126-year-old house with original plumbing, and as far as he could tell, there were three and a half dozen tampons clogging up the system. Our basement was full of garbage disposal stuff and waste water, which had all been going into one pipe when it got stopped up.

  The plumber did what he had to do, which was to unclog the pipe. “It’s up to you to clean up the basement now,” he said. Unfortunately, I was the only one home, and there was no way I was going to let it all sit in our basement. There’s certainly no WikiHow on how to clean up a basement full of crap. So I got boots, rubber dish gloves, and a bucket and started moving all the wet cardboard boxes that we had stored in the basement. I hosed stuff down, but also picked up solid pieces of who-knows-what off the floor, because it wouldn’t go back down the drain. I was fuming that I had to be the one to clean it up, because at that time, I didn’t know which of the girls had done this. It could even have been George’s girlfriend. And I realized, if someone was flushing tampons regularly, wouldn’t it have been a problem long before now? I probably spent two to three hours fixing the gross mess and pouring bleach on the floor and scrubbing it down as much as I could. I wasn’t sure what I had done to deserve this.

  The next night, I got a call from our landlord and let it go to voice mail. I knew it wasn’t going to be a good call. He essentially told me that he knew it wasn’t my fault, but that the women in the house should have known better, and he was going to charge us for the plumber. I had to figure out how to tell the girls—I didn’t want to call them up and say, what’s up with your tampons clogging the plumbing?

  I spoke to Suzie online briefly—we were close enough that I could ask if they were hers. “They’re absolutely not mine,” she said. I figured out that Molly had recently started using tampons for the first time in her life, and didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to flush them down the toilet. She was so preoccupied with school that it didn’t occur to her that it would be an issue. In the end, we never got charged. The landlord took care of the plumbing bill, which was good, because I would have given it entirely to Molly.

  Molly had been gone for three weeks or so at the time, and I had already told the story to a few people. I accidentally told one of her friends, and it somehow got back to her. When she returned, she flipped out on me. “How dare you tell that story about my personal business!” she said. As the person who had done the cleanup, I didn’t think she had the right to tell me who I could and couldn’t tell the story to. After all, the incident happened to me in a much different, and much grosser, way than it did to her. Molly moved out of the house shortly after.

  For my next apartment, I moved across town. I found out later that my landlord gave me a great reference and said I was an absolutely wonderful tenant. It all turned out fine, but did give me a low bar for my future roommates’ grossness and how much I’ll put up with it.

  —N, 25 (M)

  THE GANG HEADQUARTERS

  AS A SOPHOMORE IN OREGON, I was sick of the dorms. I’d recently been dumped by a guy, but was good friends with his sister, Carly, and she offered me a room in the cute but run-down house she was living in. I was skeptical about moving in with her, but we got along fine. Carly and I lived with a guy, Tony, who was the problematic one. He was the kind of person who never rinsed off his dishes in the sink or put the toilet seat down. When asked, he said, “My family is all guys, and we were punished for putting the toilet seat down.” He was sort of incompetent—he couldn’t even light a fire when we ran out of oil for the furnace while it was cold out.

  In the spring, he befriended a couple of twenty-year-old girls. Looking back, I think they were a bit skanky, but I was naive and wanted to see the best in people. The three of us went away for the summer but wanted to keep our lease, so I rented my room out to Nina, a sweet, mousy lesbian girl. Carly and Tony decided to sublet to the two skanky girls, and we didn’t know it at the time, but they were underage, maybe sixteen. We didn’t think to check their backgrounds at all.

  After we left, it only took a few weeks before the news started creeping out. The Los Angeles Crips and one of their leaders, whose nickname was Coyote, had come to town that summer and befriended the two girls. The Crips essentially made our house their headquarters. It might not have been the first drive-by shooting in our town, but it was certainly not a usual occurrence. After a couple of weeks of sharing an apartment with a gang, Nina, the girl who was staying in my room, escaped for her life.

  As the summer progressed, we heard more and more about how horrible things were, between the late-night parties and the shootings in the neighborhood. The cops kept being called to our house to catch drug dealers. With help from the police, the landlords managed to evict everyone, but the house was completely trashed and everything was gone. Windows were broken and mattresses were cut up. Fashion magazines, dirty underwear, tacky clothes, fake nails, black plastic hair, and used tampons were strewn on the floor. In retrospect, I’m amazed the landlords were so nice and for
giving to us—they even bought us new box springs. We didn’t have to pay for anything, though we didn’t get our deposit back.

  The landlords had already spent a week cleaning up when we got there, but it was still pretty bad. My down comforter was destroyed with a huge rip, Carly’s bread knives, stereo, and CDs were gone, and so were my pots and pans. They sold everything they could for money and destroyed whatever was left. They even sold all my books to a used bookstore—I had to buy back books with my own name in them. There was metallic blue nail polish splashed on the dining room walls and I had to scrub them with nail polish remover. The Crips had run up huge phone bills with different companies, so we had a hard time getting our phone line back up and running.

  Coyote’s bills and arrest warrants kept coming to us in the fall, because he’d used our house as his address. I tried to figure what brought the Crips to our tiny town in Oregon. Our town is on the I-5 corridor, the main interstate inland along the West Coast. I assume they were expanding their business. They weren’t the smartest—Coyote and two friends left their signatures on the back of a torn map in our apartment, so it didn’t take long at all for the police to find them and send them to jail.

  Of course Tony, who’d brought the girls into our house in the first place, disappeared off the face of the earth. He was useless during the whole ordeal. I tried to reach him several times that year, and even called his parents, because he owed us money for the phone bills that his subletter had run up. But it was futile. In the end, his parents threatened to sue me for harassment.