The Roommates

by Stephanie Wu

  They went into his room, which I hadn’t been in for months. I kept saying, “He’s on antidepressants, he sees a psychologist.” And they said, “No, ma’am, he’s drunk.” I told them he didn’t drink anymore, but they looked under the bed, and it was filled with bottles in brown paper bags. I felt like a complete idiot and couldn’t believe I was so willfully blind to the fact that he was a functioning alcoholic.

  I was so furious I wanted Chad committed. He’s a cigarette smoker, and I was afraid he would burn down my house while I was out. The police couldn’t have him committed, but they helped me get him into my car so I could take him to the hospital. On the way there, I kept yelling at him to give me his family’s home phone number so I could have someone come get him. This was also the day I was supposed to send in my dissertation proposal, which I had to postpone. I went through Chad’s wallet to get his sister’s phone number. But it was a Saturday, and she had married an Orthodox Jewish man, so she wasn’t answering the phone that day. I called the police in his sister’s town, and asked them to knock on her door and have her check her machine. I told her I wanted to have Chad committed, but she’s a doctor and told me that he couldn’t be committed against his will. She contacted other family they had in Ohio, who were a few hours away, to come deal with him. But he kept denying he had a problem, and said I was overreacting. After that ordeal, I kicked him out of the house. While we were living together, I didn’t even realize what a crappy situation it was—I guess I thought that was life.

  Unfortunately, a couple of years later, after I had moved away, somebody called me to let me know that Chad had been found dead in his apartment. He had been fired from the public radio station where I met him. Since he was unemployed, no one was aware that he wasn’t checking in to work. The landlord noticed the mail piling up, and that’s how they found him. He was only in his thirties, and drank himself to death.

  —J, 45 (F)

  THE MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES

  DURING COLLEGE IN THE MIDWEST, I signed up for an off-campus apartment complex and was placed with five other girls. Most of us were students in our early twenties, except Sandra, who was a bit older.

  All six of us went to church together and slowly got to know one another. It wasn’t until after the summer that we learned about Sandra’s dissociative identity disorder. When she moved in, Sandra had hoped that we wouldn’t have to know, but she realized she couldn’t function in a situation with five strangers not knowing about her condition. She told us she had been abused when she was younger and often had regressions. Depending on the trigger, she might scream or freak out, as if the abuse were happening to her again.

  She had been in heavy therapy—in fact, before she came to live with us, she was living in a mental health facility. She was trying to get better, and had moved into our college town to be closer to a therapist who was working with her. None of us had any idea we’d be exposed to this, but we dealt with it pretty well. Opening up about it helped her heal. We were all religious and wanted to do what we could to help her out. Sandra didn’t have much family as a support system—her mom had passed away and she had an elderly father who wasn’t able to take care of her and an older sister who was paralyzed from the waist down.

  After a particularly violent episode, where one of her personalities smashed all our mugs in the sink and was cutting her hands on the shards, Sandra suggested that we go to roommate therapy—the same way you go to family therapy when someone has a mental health issue.

  We all went to meet with the therapist, together and separately, who gave us methods for coping and for understanding what Sandra was going through. We learned a lot about her history. When she was abused, her personality was split so Sandra, the core person, didn’t have to deal mentally with the abuse. Through therapy, she was trying to integrate those multiple personalities into her core being so she could accept what had happened to her.

  In the two years we lived together, I probably met five or six of her personalities. I remember Blue Eyes, Johnny, the Hero, the Nightmare, and the Playgirl. Once, I was talking to Sandra, the core personality, and she froze. As I watched, her hazel eyes turned bright blue. It was the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced. I don’t know how it was physically possible. Blue Eyes also blinked and didn’t speak. Some of the others, like Johnny, did.

  Johnny was a thirteen-year-old boy who was very funny. We interacted with him the most. It’s weird to say, but he was a cute kid who came out when we were playing. Once, he wanted to shave Sandra’s eyebrows, though we didn’t think she’d like that. The Nightmare was the one who broke the mugs—she was scary violent. I actually took a knife away from her once, and got a cut on my hand. I still have a scar from that. There was another personality I only met once who called himself the Hero. He was young, and he said he protected Sandra from bad men. That broke my heart. And the Playgirl didn’t interact with us much, but had a very promiscuous personality.

  When she came out of the regressions, she didn’t usually remember what had happened. She only recognized that she was waking up and things were different. She described it once as, “You’re at the top of the stairs and hear things that are going on, but you don’t know what’s happening downstairs.” We only told her what had happened if she asked, because we didn’t want to make her feel guilty.

  The therapist told us there was nothing we could do when a personality came out. The best thing to do, he said, was to continue to act normally, since we couldn’t avoid them. The only thing we could do was make sure we didn’t get hurt. He believed Sandra was strong enough that she would stop herself if one of the personalities put her in danger. Sometimes, if it was a milder personality, we’d say things like, “Can Sandra come out? We need to go to church.” The therapist gave us many tips to deal with it, and we had his number if we ever needed to call him.

  Not all the personalities were aware of one another, and Sandra wasn’t aware of all of them. It depended on how far she was in her integration. The milder personalities stemmed from less severe abuse, whereas the therapist told us the more intense personalities came from ritualistic abuse. Johnny seemed to be the most aware of them all, and in the two years we lived together, she was able to integrate him. Sandra was able to recognize the abuse he had come from and own that it had happened to her, and that’s when he ceased to exist. But as she integrated the easier ones, the others became a lot harsher. So she was improving from a therapeutic standpoint, but living with her became harder.

  We never knew what would trigger her. Church was hard, because she’d been abused by a church leader, so we were all on alert when we were there. Surprises also triggered her, so we learned to announce ourselves before touching her or getting her attention. As she progressed, she started to realize if she was getting uncomfortable—such as if we were watching a movie that was dark—and she knew to remove herself from the situation. She took responsibility for herself in that way. At the core, she was a very talented and sweet girl.

  Once, all of the roommates went on a vacation to California together. Sandra was normal the whole trip and it was so much fun. There were hard times, but we had good memories too. The girl who roomed with Sandra was an inherent caregiver, and had been planning to study math, but instead went into the health profession as a nurse. I think living with Sandra defined her life—she realized how much she could affect someone who needed help.

  I moved out of the apartment to live abroad for eighteen months. Partway through my trip, Sandra’s personalities got so violent that they had to put her in another home. She’s living on her own now and doing well. When I look back on it, it wasn’t a traumatizing experience—the roommate therapy truly helped. We were in it together, and it forced us to bond and support one another. The six of us lived together for more than two years, and I’m undoubtedly closer to them than any other group of roommates I ever had.

  —R, 35 (F)

  ADVENTURES ABROAD

  THE KLEPTOMANIAC

  I SPENT M
Y FRESHMAN YEAR of college in Florence. Most rooms in our dorm had three or four people living in them, but we had a huge corner room with five girls total. It had high ceilings and was a relatively large space—we even had a private bathroom, while everyone else on the floor had to share a communal one. It was set up as two bunk beds and a single, which I had for the first semester. My roommates were from all over the world—Malaysia, Germany, Qatar, China. We were all different in personality, but when you live in such close quarters, you have to get along. Maybe it was a six-month honeymoon stage, but we were strangely close. We traveled a lot together, and even spent Thanksgiving in Qatar at Lana’s house. When I came back from winter break, I remember being happy to see them again.

  During the second semester, things started going missing in the dorm. One girl in our building lost an expensive fur coat. Two of my roommates bought international calling cards in bulk, and a few of them went missing at a time, but we didn’t think much of it because they were only about fifteen euros. Then one morning, I woke up and for some reason thought, I have to check the drawer under my bed. It was the only lockable compartment we had, but it wasn’t secure at all. We were close enough that I didn’t lock my drawer anyway. I had six hundred euros stashed there under my clothes, and when I checked, five hundred of it was missing, as well as a bit of currency from my home country that I’d put there for nostalgia’s sake. There was so much missing that I was in disbelief. I remember opening and closing the drawer, and wondering, Did that happen? Am I dreaming? My roommates felt terrible for me and offered to spot me money. The RAs weren’t very helpful, and it was something I had to let go.

  Soon after, another roommate, Cathy from Malaysia, had three hundred euros go missing, and Lana told us that she had four hundred euros go missing, as well as a diamond ring her grandmother had given her. That’s when things blew up and we realized it wasn’t an isolated case anymore. Even then, we were sort of still in denial that it could be one of us because we were such good friends. But at the same time, there were five of us in the room. It’s unlikely that someone could have come in while we were all out. By this point it began to dawn on us that the culprit had to be someone in the room because there was almost always one of us in the room at any given time. It wasn’t until later, when another roommate, Tina from China, left her wallet on her desk while she was in the shower and two hundred euros went missing, that the accusations started flying. The only person awake at that time was Julie, whose desk was next to hers, and Tina immediately assumed she was the thief. She spoke to Lana and me, and Lana became very defensive. “This doesn’t feel right, I don’t want to accuse Julie,” she said. I thought the facts were suspicious, but knew it was something we needed to talk about. Tina and I spoke to Julie, who was typically very shy and reserved, and she was visibly super upset. We didn’t have any proof and couldn’t draw a conclusion, so we brought it back to the room for a larger discussion. We were all pointing fingers at one another and claiming it wasn’t us, since we had all had money stolen from us. Suddenly, everyone was a potential enemy. It was very battle royal—anyone could turn on you at any moment.

  During the argument, Tina and Lana clashed the most, with Lana claiming that it wasn’t fair for Tina to turn on Julie and accuse her. Lana even went to the RAs and said that Tina and I were going around accusing people of stealing money left and right. It was a standstill where we couldn’t get any help and we had to continue living with one another in a single room, so the next few months were miserable. Lana and Julie became closer, and Lana turned the campus against Tina and Cathy, which broke our room apart. And Tina was unhappy with me because the two sides hated each other but I was trying to be neutral. It was such a dark transition from the previous semester, when we traveled together and hung out all the time.

  After the big talk, for a while nothing went missing. Tina was now convinced that Lana was the thief, but we no longer bothered pointing fingers. Much later in the semester, I was in the dorm’s study room, and Lana said to me, “I’m going to go to our friend Vic’s room for a smoke.” Ten minutes later, Lana came back and abruptly announced she’d lost four hundred euros. Then a few hours later, Vic’s roommate came by and told me that Vic was missing a hundred euros. The roommate had returned to their room earlier and Lana was the only one there, and looked shocked to see him. That’s when he said to me, “I’m starting to believe she did steal money from you guys.” At this point, the whole campus knew about it. There were only about a hundred of us in Florence, so word spread quickly.

  In our last week in Florence, right before Tina was about to take a trip to London, she lost ninety pounds. The night before, she and Lana had gotten into a disagreement of sorts—Tina found out Lana had used her computer to send herself a bunch of movies, and since they were deep enemies at this point, she was infuriated that Lana used her computer without asking. Tina woke me up early that morning to tell me her money went missing, which she needed because she was about to go to London. So she went to Lana, and in a gentle way said, “Hey, did you take my money? I don’t care if you did, but I need that money.” Lana denied it completely. It was a painful morning, and I don’t even know how Tina’s money was taken—she slept on an upper bunk with her wallet next to her head.

  We all parted ways at the end of the semester, and after I got home, I received a call from Julie, the girl we had first accused of being the thief and Lana’s only friend in the room. Since Julie was from Germany, she was the only one with an ATM card while abroad. Her parents had looked at all of the transactions on her card, and noticed that there were a bunch of withdrawals at three or four in the morning, totaling up to a thousand euros. The only person in our room who stayed up that late was Lana. The card had a PIN, but they often went to the ATM together. And Julie thought the two of them were such good friends because Lana had to come to her defense, and boom, there goes a thousand euros. The worst part was, they were planning on rooming together the following year.

  We never got a confession out of Lana, but at this point we all knew it was her. She had a tendency to not be truthful in general. While in Florence, she flew home at least once a month to visit her boyfriend. She told us that her family was funding these trips because they were wealthy, but when we visited them in Qatar over Thanksgiving, we found out her parents didn’t know she was coming back—they didn’t approve of her boyfriend and certainly weren’t paying for the flights. The only way she could have afforded those flights was probably from the money she took from us. She was also a crazy girlfriend—there were nights where she screamed at her boyfriend over the phone at the top of her lungs at two A.M.

  The incident that sealed the deal for me was during our junior year back in the States, almost two years later, when Lana and I met up because we were taking the same class and decided to study together. We had maintained a friendly facade after the mess of our first year, and I wanted to put those events behind me. But as she greeted me and we sat down together for the first time in years, the one thing I noticed was the very distinctive diamond ring on her finger—the exact gift from her grandmother she had claimed was stolen.

  —J, 28 (F)

  THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT

  I’VE ALWAYS HAD a very strong interest in Africa, and I thought Botswana would be a cool, off-the-beaten-path place to study abroad. It appealed to me because not many people went there—I was actually the first from my college to study abroad there.

  I arrived at the University of Botswana with no idea what I was getting myself into. Nothing was what I’d expected it to be, which goes to show how little we truly know about what we’re going to encounter in a foreign country before we show up there. For the most well-rounded experience possible, the program paired Americans with local Setswanan-speaking students as roommates. And for half the time we were there, we had to do a homestay in a nearby village, which required us to hitchhike to school in the morning and back because there was no bus. We often stood out on the road, hoping that there
was someone making the half-hour drive to our university.

  Our dorm, which was relatively new and sparse-looking, resembled a military compound or prison cell. Then we realized that there was no air-conditioning or hot water. We arrived at the tail end of winter, and since Botswana is sort of desertlike, it gets hot during the day and cold at night. We sweated during the days, with no hot water to shower with. This being Africa, there was a Chinese construction firm building a stadium down the road from us. Rather than laying more pipes for water, they diverted all the hot water to the construction site. Midway through the semester, all the water had been diverted, so if you wanted to brush your teeth in the morning, you had to go outside and find a spigot or sprinkler.

  My roommate, Keletso, was absolutely gorgeous but really shy. She didn’t speak to me for the first two weeks, so I thought she hated me. But it turned out that it was because her English wasn’t that great. I also thought she didn’t know my name, because she kept calling me “Lekgowa.” It took me about two weeks to realize that lekgowa is the generic term for white person. That’s what she called me all semester. I was the first white person Keletso had ever met. All her friends came over, and they took turns hanging out with her and sitting on her bed and staring at me across the room. Sometimes they took out their camera phones and pretended to be texting but were really taking photos of me. It was hilarious. I always told them it was okay, but they never came over to my side of the room. If I talked to them, they giggled and ran away or asked me questions like, “How rich is everybody in America?” There was one guy who every single time I met him said, “How much money do you have?” It was one of those culture shock moments—in his mind, every single person who is a white Westerner is extremely wealthy.