by Stephanie Wu
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To Ashley and Meera, the best roommates a girl could ask for
EDITOR’S NOTE
The names and identifying characteristics of some persons described in this book have been changed, as have some places and other details of events.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Editor's Note
Introduction
Growing Pains
The Creative Bullies
The English Boarding School
The Twenty-Year Friendship
The Public Backstabbing
The Bunk Beds
Freshman Year
The Amateur Taxidermist
The Close-Knit Family
The Secret Keeper
The Garbageman
The Alcoholic Genius
The Planned Parenthood Chaperone
The Impersonator
Student Struggles
The Eleven-Woman Suite
The Obsessive Lesbian
The Party Poopers
The Overexcited Bladder
The Best Friend Gone Wrong
The Fake Move-Out
The Suicide Attempt
The Plumbing Problem
The Gang Headquarters
The Goldfish Killer
The Swedish Neutrality
The Faulty Wiring
The Princess Palace Dream
The Recovered Addict
The Multiple Personalities
Adventures Abroad
The Kleptomaniac
The Foreign Exchange Student
The Manic-Depressive
The Business Shower
The Superyacht
The Russian Missionary
Recent Grads
The Four-Month Hangover
The Persistent Pests
The Roommates with Benefits
The Pseudo-Frat
The Passive-Aggressive Pig
The Teenage Protector
The Heist
The Mormon Household
The Pet Feud
The Roach Motel
The Rent Stiffer
The Ex-Boyfriend
The Craigslist Best Friend
The Business Partners
Young at Heart
The Three-Month RV Trip
The Jersey Shore House
The Roomance
The Shower Intruder
The Naked Nanna
The Staged Robbery
The Serial Roommate
The Cabdriver
The Widowed Escort
The Top Chef
The Newborn Baby
The Potheads
The Geriatric Retirement Hotel
The Houseboy
Acknowledgments
About the Editors
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
Over the course of my twenty-seven-year-old life, I’ve had about twenty roommates. Some—including my current one—have become my closest friends, who know more about me than anyone else; others have faded into the deep recesses of my memory, only to be dug up while browsing yearbooks and Facebook. And then there are the select few who are remembered by their eccentric habits as opposed to their names, like my camp roommate who stepped inside a wardrobe and closed the doors behind her every time she wanted to change.
As far as roommate experiences go, I’ve been on the lucky side. I’ve never had anything stolen from me or dealt with a mental health problem—that I know of. And after interviewing close to seventy people about their roommate experiences, it’s clearer than ever that most people have at least one, if not two or three, crazy tales of cohabitation that they’ll be sharing for the rest of their lives.
Whether for financial or social reasons, people prefer to live with others. The last time I had a chance to live alone (while studying abroad in Paris), I swapped out my university-assigned sterile studio for a cozy two-bedroom apartment with a friend. As much as I appreciate the ability to walk around naked, I’d rather come home to someone I can talk to and order delivery with. I’m not alone in this—in New York City, where I live, the number of people residing in nonfamily households increased by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2010. Throughout America’s biggest cities, rising rents and an increasing age of marriage have allowed people to embrace roommates (whether an old friend, a total stranger, or one’s parents) long past college graduation and their early twenties.
It’s no surprise that cohabitation breeds great stories—whether you’re sharing a dorm with two beds within arm’s reach of each other, a twenty-person summer home, or a thirty-foot RV. And pop culture has always been obsessed with the coming-of-age ritual of sharing a home with others: it’s the entire premise for shows ranging from The Golden Girls and Three’s Company to Friends and New Girl. In this book, you’ll meet roommates who span from a nonrelative newborn child to a seventysomething with a proclivity for nudity.
Some of the stories in this book happened more than twenty years ago—before the 1996 debut of Craigslist, which has made finding new roommates easier than ever, and before the widespread use of cell phones and texting, which has greatly contributed to the ability to be passive-aggressive with said roommates. And then there are the thoroughly modern stories, made possible thanks to recent technological developments: college buddies who use their social networks to create start-ups from their apartments or roommates who abuse technology to commit identity fraud. There will always be boarding-school mean girls, hoarders, and those whose activities become questionable when they’ve had too much to drink, but I also discovered situations that seem rare but are becoming increasingly common, like dealing with a roommate with multiple personalities by attending therapy together, or the thirty-two-year-old Ph.D. who exchanges rent for cooking and running errands.
I couldn’t be more thankful to the individuals who shared their stories with me for this book. Some have been told so many times that the tales come easily to them; other conversations led people to remember roommates from their past who they’d long buried away. Some surprised me by tearing up when recalling their stories, a reminder of just how emotional and meaningful it can be to live, sleep, and eat in the same space as another person. One thing’s for sure: living with a roommate is an incredibly universal ritual that we can all relate to—though some of my interviewees are so scarred they’ve vowed never to live with a stranger again. As highly personal as these stories are, together they paint a picture of a twenty-first-century household and how it’s changing impossibly quickly.
—STEPHANIE WU
GROWING PAINS
THE CREATIVE BULLIES
I’VE HAD ABOUT THIRTY ROOMMATES—including three classically trained opera singers—but none of them were as horrible as my high school experience. In my junior and senior years, I went to a residential arts school to study creative writing. My roommate was a girl I’d met during a summer program, also for creative writing, at the same school. It was fine at first, but it didn’t take too long for things to go really, really bad.
My school was a very isolated environment, with two hundred kids living under one roof. There were only about fifteen people in the creative writing department, and you saw everyone for hours every day. I can’t remember when it all started falling apart, but suddenly, I was the target of a group of eight girls—and my roommate was one of the ringleaders. Art school kids aren’t just mean, they’re creat
ively mean. They’re almost better at assessing your character and the things that will bother you than kids at a typical high school. I think they chose to bully me because I was easy to pick on—all my clothes matched, like a big pink blazer with matching pearl earrings. It was clear that I was bothered by their bullying and didn’t stick up for myself. That made it more fun for them to torture me. They were mean to others as well, but I think my suffering was unique because of the close proximity.
The worst part was, I had to see these girls every day. It was especially hard during workshop time, because we writers were always sharing personal stories, and I knew they’d be able to use my stories against me. And my roommate was a compulsive liar—we took a poetry class and she told me that she made up things that had never happened to her. She once wrote a poem about how, when she was cast as a princess in elementary school, someone said, “How could there be a black princess?” Everyone else thought it was such a moving poem, but it was all made up.
The girls did things like taking an unflattering photo of me and setting it as the background on the school computers. When I went home for the weekend to see my parents, my roommate and her friends stole my food, slept in my bed, and went through my makeup. I found swipes of their fingers in my lip gloss and eyeshadow. They also started stealing things from me, like one shoe but not the other. They wore my clothing when they went downtown, and then took photos and put them on Myspace for me to see while I was home. When I was in the shower, they went on my computer and combed through my instant messages and sent them around to one another.
By the end of the semester, my mom was really upset. She spoke to the people in charge of residential life and told them my roommate was stealing and breaking my things. Their best suggestion was to take photos of my room before I left for the weekend, and they said, “If anything has been disturbed, we’ll handle the situation when you get back.” As soon as I went home, my roommate wrote on her LiveJournal, “It’s too bad my horrible roommate’s Bose speakers went missing.” My mom read this and called the school, and of course the speakers hadn’t been touched—they were messing around with me. I went to my writing teachers—in art school, they’re almost like your parents because you see them so much—and they told me to tough it out. “Girls are mean sometimes,” they said.
I remember they took my pads and taped them to the mirrors and wrote next to them, “What is this, a jumbo plane?” I had a sign of my name in my room, and they wrote swear words all over it. They stole at least a hundred dollars’ worth of my stuff. I even spoke to a therapist a few times. At this point, all the friends I’d come to school with had teamed up with my roommate, so finally I decided to sleep on the floor of a friend’s room until they moved me to a different room.
My problems with that group of girls persisted throughout senior year, but at least I had a different roommate by then. The girl who moved in with me was the first opera singer I lived with, and she acted like a diva, even though she was only fifteen. She got up at seven every morning and played one of two CDs, either Renée Fleming or John Mayer. I always woke up to her singing along. She was also very high maintenance—every night she painted her fingernails to match what she was wearing the next day. She had a portable bowl hair dryer that she sat under, wearing a gold brocade blazer and opera diva clothing. She bought her prom dress at a secondhand store for girls who can’t afford expensive dresses. She lied and told them she couldn’t afford a dress, and then bragged about how cheap it was. Of course she became friends with the group of mean girls, but she didn’t go out of her way to make my life worse.
I don’t know if there was one worst thing the girls did to me, but they had a huge effect on my overall confidence. Despite the fact that I knew what they were doing was mean and wrong, a part of me always wondered if it was my fault or if I was asking for it in some way. I still have moments where I’m very self-conscious because I’m wondering what people will think or say about me.
I’ve had a ton of crazy roommates since then—my college roommate listed her number one interest as Everclear, the drink, and named her fish Sushi. She liked to party a lot, and during the first week of classes started sleeping with a male cheerleader on our floor. One night they were having such rowdy sex that my friend in the next room over, who shared a wall with her, fell off his bed.
One summer in college, I did a homestay in France. That’s where I had my second opera singer roommate—this huge, six-foot-three guy with bright blond hair. I assumed he was gay—he told me he was an opera major, he loved Kelly Clarkson, and he worked at Sephora—which partially explained the makeup I saw on his dresser and the fact that he wore mascara. When we climbed stairs, he said, “These stairs are working my thighs like a Hungarian shot put.” Then one day he came into my room and said, “Hey, your friends are cute. Do they have boyfriends?” I was completely speechless.
I later studied abroad in Rome too, and lived with eight other girls in one huge apartment. These girls were overwhelming—they partied a lot harder than I ever did. One had a threesome in her room. One night, two of them came back and there was blood everywhere—apparently one of them had punched a taxi driver. They never cleaned or took out the trash, and left trash bags on our balcony. I went out there once to find it covered with maggots.
But none of them could ever compare to the mean girls. After all these experiences, I guess my tolerance is really high.
—M, 24 (F)
THE ENGLISH BOARDING SCHOOL
I WENT TO A PRETTY PRESTIGIOUS ALL-BOYS BOARDING SCHOOL in England for five years, starting when I was thirteen. It’s a surreal situation to find yourself in. You’re with all kinds of boys who have been mollycoddled by their mothers, including children of billionaires and aristocrats who’ve never had to look after themselves. One guy even had a bodyguard. There were a lot of students who were utterly incapable of survival in the real world.
At the boardinghouse, the older you got, the more private space you had. My first year, I was in a big room with nine other people. One guy in my room, Henry, was a huge tosser. He was disgusting and never washed his clothes. At thirteen, some of the boys were still prepubescent, and it’s intimidating to share showers with eighteen-year-old men, especially when you don’t have any pubic hair. Henry was resistant to the idea of a shower, which meant he stank. The smell coming out of his corner of the dormitory was unbelievable. We offered to wash his clothes for him, but that didn’t make any difference whatsoever.
The other thing about living in a dorm is that you don’t have any privacy. Teenage boys are going to masturbate, and one guy, Ken, was particularly obvious about it. The only place you could masturbate was after lights-out, in the dorm room or in a toilet stall. As you can imagine, it’s not very dignified. Every night after the lights went out, we all talked for about an hour and everybody went to sleep. There was a bit of silence, and then we started to hear shuffling from Ken’s corner of the room. It was horrendous. Everyone knew what was happening because of the audible sound effects—he had a little tub of Vaseline or something he used in the process. One night, someone replaced his tub with BP, a cream you rub on muscular aches. We all lay there in gleeful silence waiting, and sure enough, we heard the usual unscrewing of the pot. There was a thirty-second silence, and then Ken ran out of the room at high speed. I’m happy to say he stopped masturbating in the room after that. He must have known that we all knew, but never called us out on it because he was so embarrassed.
Then there was Jack, who was very obviously paranoid about the size of his penis. Everyone was convinced that before he showered, he had half a wank so that his penis was a bit bigger than usual. You could tell he was doing it because it was always at a different angle. It was terrible.
Yet another guy somehow managed to have sex with his girlfriend in his room, even though we weren’t allowed any visitors. It was unbelievable and depressing, partly because most of us had never had a girlfriend in our entire lives. It’s not a very nice way to live
, but once you had your own bedroom it became more bearable.
I was quite a pretentious teenager—I had pictures of Bob Dylan on my wall and was desperately trying to imagine myself in a slightly more sophisticated life. And then I’d go to the bathroom and find that someone had taken a crap in the urinal. You couldn’t escape the grossness.
The furniture was horrible too. In one of my semesters, I had a bed with a broken spring that poked out of the mattress. It was pretty sharp, and even though I turned the mattress over, it poked back through after a week. The maids and housemaster said they would replace it, but never did. I put towels on it, and for the rest of the semester slept carefully on my side at the edge of the bed—it’s a habit I’ve had ever since.
There were about sixty people in each house, and you were paired with the same guys over and over again. Who you were roomed with was very important to the success of your year. I remember my last year in the dorm, when there were only five of us to a room, and smelly Henry was one of them. The older Henry got, the worse the smell got. His feet literally went green at one point. We confronted him all the time, but he got angry and defensive. He even got in trouble with the housemaster over it. And he’s still kind of smelly and gross today, or at least he was the last time I saw him.
The school was stern about discipline, but students rebelled against it. Even at seventeen, you had an enforced bedtime. But invariably we found ways around that to sneak out. On Fridays and Saturdays, there were teachers whose job it was to go around to the pubs and make sure that if anyone from the school was drinking, they were legally old enough. Our nights out were punctuated with looking around and making sure that no members of the staff were around. Most of them hated it—they’d find one pub, sit there in the corner with a pint, and wait until their time was up. But a couple of teachers enjoyed it. We got a text message once when all of us were in a pub, saying that a teacher was spotted coming up the hill toward us. There was nowhere for us to go without being seen, and it would have meant real trouble if we got caught. So we all crowded into the toilet together and stood there in silence, hoping he wouldn’t come in. I remember the door creaking open, and it not being him, but some random guy. He looked into the room, saw a dozen seventeen-year-olds holding their drinks in a tiny bathroom, and backed out immediately.