...because a post on Go Fug Yourself asked readers to tell their Very Worst Roommate stories, which reminded me of my very worst roommate. This story usually "wins" whenever I have the "bad roommate" discussion with people. I swear on my life, this is all true. I wish I was making it up, but...
I went to Emerson College in Boston, and had two roommates freshman year: A, who was a stoner who really did nothing but lie on her bed and listen to the same Grateful Dead/ Jerry Garcia Band mix tape over and over and over and over (and is the reason I cannot abide that music to this day) and S, who was… well.
On the day she arrived, S. marched into our room and announced that she was a “Jewish American Princess,” and thus got whatever she wanted. No hello, no introduction, just that. Her favorite thing to do was to open the window (we lived on the fourth floor, facing the dorm on the other side of the street), sit on top of her desk, lean out the window, and scream the word “PENIS!!!!” at the top of her lungs, then laugh and laugh. She could, and often did, do this for HOURS. She made it her goal to sleep with one guy for each letter of the alphabet that year, and since I was dating a guy named Andy at the time, she decided he would be letter A. He stopped coming to our room because she would try to stick her hands down his pants, or tell him that if he got bored with me, she was available. She also had no qualms at all about having sex in the room when A. and I were there. Not while we were sleeping, mind you — I mean in the middle of the day. You’d be doing homework, hear suspicious noises, look up, and she and whichever guy she was with would be going at it. Sometimes with the door to our room open, so people in the hallway could see.
The best part, though, was this: (I advise you to skip this part if you have a weak stomach…) She and A. had the bunk beds in our room, while I had the single bed. A. was on the top bunk, S. had the bottom. S. got a steady boyfriend halfway through the year, and decided that, as a show of how deeply in love she was, she was going to KEEP ALL THE CONDOMS THEY USED AND HANG THEM FROM THE TOP BUNK’S SPRINGS. I wish I was kidding. She had one already dangling there when she announced this plan. She changed her mind about leaving them there when A. and I informed her that we would literally set her bed on fire if she did anything that disgusting. (I think she still kept them, though. I suspect they were in her desk drawer. I’m not sure.)
S. also had a boyfriend back home, who she'd been with all through high school. M. was... oh, he was a very nice guy, but dumber than a bag of hair. He had some sort of heart condition, which meant he came to Boston a lot for medical appointments, and also to visit S. S., of course, treated him like shit -- she was on some sort of remedial program at Emerson, I think because her grades weren't good enough to get her in, but her SAT scores were? Something like that. Anyway, it meant that she never had morning classes, and didn't have classes on Fridays, and had, I think, a lighter course load than normal. Maybe she only had to take two or three classes per year, instead of two per semester? And they were special classes, too -- you could only get them if you were in this program, and they weren't anywhere near as challenging. (This also meant that S. would stay up partying with her one or two friends all night every night, even though she knew I had classes in the morning. I think A. did too, but she almost never actually went to class, so it wasn't really an issue for her. A. dropped out after freshman year to follow the Grateful Dead around... just a year or two before Jerry Garcia died.)
But back to poor M., who would often come to Boston on Fridays, wanting to spend the weekend with S., who would lie and tell him she had classes all day on Fridays. Andy and I would frequently arrive at our dorm on Friday afternoons to find M. forlornly sitting outside on the front steps, waiting for S. to "come back from class." Except she wasn't in class, she was upstairs in our room, probably screaming "PENIS!!!!" out the window, as was her hobby. We didn't want to lie to M., and were also thoroughly sick of S., so we'd sign M. into the building and bring him up to the room. I don't know what bullshit S. told him, but he kept coming around. (She would also make up reasons why he had to leave much earlier than he had intended, so instead of staying for the weekend, he'd end up going back home on Saturday morning or something.) I think the only reason she didn't dump him was because he gave her money every time he visited, and because she wanted someone waiting for her at home.
My freshman year of college was pretty horrible to begin with -- my parents split up right after I left home, and I didn't find out until I came home for Thanksgiving, since that was when my mom could no longer hold off on kicking my dad out of the house. And then Andy dumped me the day we all got back from Christmas break -- like, within an hour of my getting back, he did the "we need to talk" thing. Dude, timing. I was very nearly suicidal that year already, and then you add in S. and the fact that her antics kept me from getting more than a couple of hours of sleep per night... it wasn't pretty. And I'm still holding a grudge against the housing director who wouldn't let me change rooms, even though there was an empty space available in a triple with two of my friends -- their third had moved to an apartment -- because she had "already dealt with too many room changes and didn't want the hassle." My RAs were both appalled, and did the best they could, but alas, being a complete asshole isn't against dorm rules, you know?
S. was a horrible, horrible little troll of a person, and I still sometimes wonder whatever became of her. I stopped seeing her around after freshman, or maybe mid-sophomore year. And that is my sad, true story! Top that, if you can, in the comments!
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