We’ve all had the roommate with whom we don’t want to live again. I’m very lucky in that of 5 roommates I had, there’s only one that I wouldn’t live with again. Otherwise, I lived with 4 great girls. My roommate senior year, specifically, was awesome and while we were so different, we got along so well and I learned so much from her. We met on a Wednesday night our junior year when my neighbors hosted their weekly “Southpong” nights where there was beer pong on a table suspended from the ceiling and countless cases of Southpaw awaiting all who cared to join in the black-lit cave of awesomeness that was their apartment. We recognized each other from when I went to get my tongue pierced earlier in the year and she worked at the parlor. Through continued conversation, we realized we were from the same area back home, she needed a place to live the following year, I didn’t want to live with my current roommate another year (and the apartment was kind of “handed-down” to me from my brother’s friends so I sure as Hell wasn’t moving), we got along really well, and why not live together since she has friends in my complex and it sure beats putting an ad out for a random person? When she moved in she brought her NES. Like, original NES. I knew it was going to be a good senior year. For me.
Best Friend, however, did not have such an experience senior year. For the record, Best Friend has the worst luck in the world, in all areas of life. Freshman year she first lived in a building that smelled of rank ass and her roommate single-handedly assisted in contributing to that. When you walked in the building, you found yourself catching your breath because the stank just hit you square in the face. When you went to Room 147, you actually had to hold your breath. Her roommate let her dishes sit out long enough that the stuff growing inside started overgrowing the rims of bowls and mugs (they had to buy new dishes). Her roommate sometimes didn’t want to climb all the way to her bed on the top bunk, so she and her boyfriend would just lie in Best Friend’s bed where they drank wine and ate cheese and crackers from Best Friend’s desk. When my roommate left school in February, Best Friend moved in with me. Best Friend and I said we’d be roommates in the dorms the following year as well. Best Friend’s luck had another plan. Turns out, Best Friend was not going to get on-campus housing. She wasn’t even wait-listed. She was outright rejected for housing while I (and all of her other friends) were accepted and had our on-campus housing secured for the following year. She had to find a place to live. With strangers. And quickly.
Through her search, she was lucky enough to find S & M. Fortunately, the three of them got along extremely well and sophomore year was great fun. Unfortunately, however, they were prevented from living together in that apartment another year because they were going to be turned into condos. Best Friend’s luck can probably be blamed for that one too—it cares not of other casualties.
M lived elsewhere the following year so Best Friend and S moved into another apartment complex, where they lived with E. That year was incredibly fun. I became the unofficial fourth roommate who slept on the futon many many weekend nights (and a great deal of Mondays as well). Then, to our dismay, S graduated at the end of that year and Best Friend and E had to find yet another roommate for senior year. Best Friend’s luck had decided that it had left her living situation relatively calm for a while, and that was not to continue for her final year.
Enter T-Rach.
Her name was Rachel, but it didn’t take long before she earned herself the nickname by which she would be forever known. T-Rach was a big girl who lived…bigly. She made no attempts to walk or perform any other action with any notion of delicacy, but really just kind of barreled through the space around her. Her nickname came about one evening when a group of us in the living room heard her begin walking in her room and subsequently entering the hall. The drinks we had on the coffee table in the living room literally began to vibrate like that scene in Jurassic Park. We could feel her before we could see her.
T-Rach was innocuous at first. She kept to herself and didn’t bring much attention to herself (except for her tyrannosaurish walking tendencies), usually hanging out in her room unless she came out to make her dinner. We didn’t think much of her at the beginning.
But then we noticed things. Those dinners she came out to make? They were a master-level culinary creation of steak with a side of steak. Those two steaks were covered in cheese. There were no vegetables or carbs, just steak and more cheesy steak. She’d go outside in the freezing cold, huddle over this miniature grill in sweatpants that were hung too low and a thong that was pulled too high for a girl who easily weighed over 250 pounds. We’d have to witness this for several minutes at a time because steaks don’t cook but so quickly on a toy charcoal grill and we’re not talking about steak medallions here. Then she’d take her two cheese-covered steaks and head to her room and we wouldn’t see her the rest of the evening.
One night she told us she was going for a run. More power to her right? If only the rest of us larger people could gather the determination for exercise! Go T-Rach! When she left, though, we realized that T-Rach wasn’t going running.
She was going hunting.
You know what you don’t wear if you’re going running at night? You don’t wear a black sweatshirt. With black sweatpants. And black shoes and socks. And you really don't pull the black hood of the black sweatshirt over your face. No, you don’t wear that to go running. You wear that to hunt small nocturnal woodland creatures in the creek beside your apartment complex. When she returned from “running,” she was neither sweaty nor out of breath. Instead, she had 2 bags of Chips Ahoy, walked straight into her room and those cookies were never seen again.
When she decided she wanted a puppy to stash in her room, she went and got herself a puppy. I think the puppy’s name was Max. Max was adorable the few times I saw him. I say this because he stayed with T-Rach, and because she never left her room, neither did he unless he was going outside (which wasn’t often, poor thing). When Max did come out, you’d go to pet him and be left with a greasy hand since he was covered in the grease that results from handling multiple cheesy steaks and then slopping it on a dog in petting attempts. This grease was also on the back of the fridge handle, which was ALWAYS a nice surprise when all you wanted was a drink and what felt like the result of dipping your hand in lard.
In the middle of the semester, T-Rach decided she was going to move out. When she made this decision, that meant she finally left her lair long enough for Best Friend, E and I to investigate.
Oh Holy God.
In addition to the dank smell, it really did look like an animal had been caged in there and not just the puppy that was actually caged in there. The bottom of the door had been clawed away so badly that chunks of door were missing. There was a plethora of crumbs in her bed, which was a sloppy mess. Gaping holes were in the walls of the bedroom and the closet. The closet! We’re not talking about holes from nails for picture-hanging. No no, they were holes of destruction where the carcasses of the creatures she managed to successfully capture must have been placed after she had devoured what she wanted of them. The only pictures on the walls were colored pictures of Ariel and Sleeping Beauty—you know, from the coloring books all of us college students had.
Then there was her bathroom. The linoleum had been ripped up at the door like something had been held in there against its will and was attempting to fight and/or dig its way out. But why would she lock her puppy in the bathroom of the bedroom she kept shut all the time anyway? Perhaps she thought cleaning its waste from the linoleum floor was so much easier than actually taking it outside to walk it? The toilet seat was broken in half. Amateur repair had been attempted with electrical tape but it was still quite obviously broken. The toilet seat. What could she have possibly done to that toilet seat that caused it to literally break in half?
When T-Rach did finally leave, it was both a relief and a royal pain in the ass for Best Friend and E. She left no forwarding address but she DID leave her mattress (which served as a great brace for the beer pong table we spray-painted with chalkboard paint--best college idea ever, by the way). We knew she lived in a nearby county, but didn’t know where or with whom. The state of her room alone cost them their security deposit and then some. Even if everything else in the apartment had been pristine, the damages in her room still would have exhausted the security deposit and racked up additional charges. They had to pay significant fees for the damage and T-Rach, of course, couldn’t pay this. Nor could she continue paying her rent because she was apparently going to file for bankruptcy and had numerous medicals bills from phantom doctor visits. The doctor visits couldn’t have possibly actually taken place because she honestly never left her room. I believe the creatures trapped in her room and hidden in the walls, scraping and clawing for escape, would confirm this.
Life seemed boringly normal after T-Rach vacated the apartment, leaving us with only the memories of her nighttime hunting, grease-covered dog, ill-fitting sweatpants, and the gnawing question of “where does one possibly purchase thongs that large and why on Earth does anyone manufacture such items?”
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