by Stephanie Wu
—N, 26 (M)
THE PLANNED PARENTHOOD CHAPERONE
THE FIRST AND LAST TIME I’ve ever shared a bedroom with anyone was my freshman year of college. I was very into the indie punk rock scene at home and thought I’d meet a ton of other cool people when I moved to New York. My roommate, Anna, was a raver from a one-stoplight town in the South. I immediately knew we were very different people, but did want to try and get to know her because we were going to be roommates.
We’d been living together for two days when she suggested that we go dancing at Webster Hall, a club down the street. That was not my idea of a fun time, but I figured I’d entertain the idea, since I wanted to be open-minded and make friends. We pregamed in our apartment and walked down the block to the club. Webster Hall on ladies’ night is the worst type of club scene—women get in for free, and the guys who come for the girls are gross and unsavory. I tried to have as good a time as I could. We got drunk, came home late, and went straight to bed.
I woke up at nine A.M. completely parched, went to get some water, and saw that Anna’s bed was empty. I figured maybe I had been snoring or something and she had moved to the living room. Then I saw the dry-erase board with a note: “Went to a doctor’s appointment, be back later. XO, A.” I thought it was weird that she hadn’t mentioned anything about waking up in a few hours when we were out partying until four A.M., but didn’t think much of it. I went back to bed, and a few hours later, the landline in our dorm rang. I woke up to it ringing over and over again, and it was Anna on the other end. She sounded like shit, as if someone had punched her in the gut. I was half-asleep, but asked if she was okay. “I need you to come get me immediately,” she said. “I’ll tell you more when you get here.” She gave me an address, which I plugged into Google Maps. I didn’t have money for a cab, so I hustled as fast as I could on foot. As I came upon the address, I saw a giant Planned Parenthood sign and immediately knew what had happened.
When I saw Anna, she was limping a bit. She had called me because I was one of the only people she knew. Since she was put under anesthesia, she had to sign a paper saying that a chaperone would come pick her up, or they wouldn’t release her. If they hadn’t, she probably wouldn’t even have called me and just come back alone.
I had invited friends to come visit that weekend—I wasn’t exactly expecting my roommate to have an abortion the first week of school—and they were arriving that night. I offered to tell my friends not to come, since it was a sensitive time, but Anna didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. “I feel fine,” she said. “I don’t want you to change your plans.”
So my friends came, and we were all hanging out in the dorm room and drinking. I went downstairs to smoke a cigarette in the courtyard, and all of a sudden Anna ran past me and shot me a look of disdain. When I got back upstairs, my suitemate said, “What did you say? Anna says you told your friends what happened.” And of course I hadn’t. I would have admitted it if I had, but I felt it was so personal and not information that I should share with others.
I later confronted Anna, because I still had no idea what my friends might have said. She shut down completely and kept saying, “You know what you did. I’m not saying anything.” My friends must have made some sort of joke that led Anna to think that I’d told them. I knew she was going through a tough time, but she refused to believe anything I said.
We had a contentious relationship for the rest of the year. I worked a full-time job since I didn’t have any financial assistance from my parents, and every expense was a big expense. I bought my own groceries, and I had to confront her about eating my food. I couldn’t afford to be feeding myself and someone else. She understood and was a bit embarrassed, but kept doing it. She did things like leaving eggshells in the garbage can with a piece of paper towel perfectly laid over them. We even fought over little things like whether or not there could be any dishes in the sink. Going into my sophomore year, I knew I could never share a bedroom with anyone else ever again.
—A, 28 (F)
THE IMPERSONATOR
BEFORE COLLEGE, I went on Facebook and joined a bunch of roommate search groups. I wanted to find a roommate I liked instead of getting a random placement. It was very much like online dating—I posted information about myself and cruised other people’s profiles. That’s how I met Serena. She seemed chill, and we both liked the same type of music. I’m half Filipino, and I thought one of the things I’d do in college was find my Filipino identity, and Serena was full Filipino. We talked about that and how we both wanted to keep eating Filipino food, and it seemed as if we had a lot in common.
The two of us agreed to live together, and were placed in a suite with three other girls. Serena, Alison, and I lived in one room, while Meredith and Lucy were in another. I remember feeling intimidated when I first got to college, but we all got along beautifully. I still have photos of us getting drunk and eating ice cream together on one of our first nights there. Serena, in particular, was super generous—she always bought us food and made sure everyone was having fun. We spent a ton of time together in the first few weeks. We even shopped at the same places and dressed similarly.
As time went on, Serena got closer to another roommate, Meredith, who was a writer, and suddenly started dressing like her and wearing glasses more. Later, she got close to Lucy, who was more of a hipster, and did the same thing. It seemed as if Serena adjusted her wardrobe based on who she was hanging out with most.
We were careless freshmen, and at one point, we noticed that money was often missing from our wallets in the morning, but didn’t think much of it. We figured we’d spent it when we were drunk. Serena and I stayed close, but I started dating a guy and spent a lot of time with him, so I wasn’t hanging around the room as much.
One Monday, I got back from a weekend away and was walking around campus without my wallet. That afternoon, Serena texted me to say that she had found my debit card in the quad. At that time, I wasn’t thinking about the fact that I hadn’t brought my things out with me. But when she brought the card to me, it was beat up and looked like it had been messed with, so I had to get a new debit card. Later that week, I needed to make a copy of my driver’s license for my internship. I had a fake ID at the time, which was the one I kept in the front of my wallet. When I went to dig for my real ID, it wasn’t there.
I called my boyfriend to tell him what had happened, and he told me that considering my card was stolen earlier in the week and that my ID was missing, I needed to file a report. “You need to check your bank account,” he said. I was never good with money. I only ever had a hundred dollars or so in my bank account at once, and if I ever ran out, my parents were happy to spot me fifty dollars. When I logged on to my bank account, I was four thousand dollars in the red. I called my bank immediately, and they said they’d get back to me with more information. Meanwhile I went to the police station, and Serena came with me—I was inconsolable, and she bought me ice cream to make me feel better.
I filed an identity theft report, and back at our apartment, everyone was on edge. Two days later, my bank confirmed that someone had gone to the bank and pretended to be me. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just someone stealing my money—I was actually being impersonated. I checked my account again, and someone had tried to deposit a four-thousand-dollar check into it, which had been flagged for unusual activity. Later, Alison, the other girl in my room, came up to me and said, “You know that check that was cashed into your account? It was mine.” And she showed me a copy of a blank check that her parents had given her for enrollment fees. We saw that someone had written on the check that four thousand dollars was to be paid out to me for babysitting.
This was even more terrifying, because not only had someone been in our apartment to steal the check but they also knew that I was a babysitter and thought they’d be able to get away with writing that on a check. During this time, I was in touch with a detective at the police station, who kept asking if there was anyone in my l
ife who might be trying to hurt me, but there was no one I could think of. The detective was also trying to get his hands on security camera footage from the bank to see who had gone into the bank that day pretending to be me.
All this was happening during finals week, and as I was writing a paper, I got a message from the police station saying the footage was in and I should come down to take a look at it. I went back to my room and told my roommates that I was going to see the footage later so we could finally get to the bottom of everything. As I was finishing up my paper, I got a text from Serena. “Oh my god,” she said. “You’re finally going to figure out who it is, I wonder who it will be.” She also told me that Alison was going to the police station later to talk about her check, so maybe we should go together. I thought that was a good idea, and told the detective I was coming with Alison around three P.M. “No,” he said. “Come by yourself.”
I told Serena and Alison the police wanted to talk to me alone, and I was working on my paper when I got a call from an unknown number. I picked it up and a weird-sounding voice said, “Hi, we’re calling from the precinct. The detective is sick right now and can’t see you, so don’t worry about coming in today. Do you have this number to call back if you have any questions?” And I remember saying, “Yes, you called my cell phone, so I have the number saved.”
I hung up and thought it was a weird call, so I went on the precinct Web site to see if any of the listed numbers matched the one that called me, but it was a completely different area code. That’s when I called the detective myself to ask if someone from his office had called to tell me not to come in, and was met with dead silence. “No,” he said. “Someone doesn’t want you to be here right now, and you need to come here without telling anyone what you’re doing.”
I went back into my room and slipped my books under my bedsheets so people would think I was still in the library. Thankfully, no one was there. As I was taking the stairs down, I bumped into Serena in the stairwell. She started speaking, and I had a sinking realization that she was the one who had called me on the phone. I freaked out and ran away, but then had a moment of doubt—was I insane to be accusing Serena? I went back and apologized, and she asked where I was headed. I told her I was turning in my paper, and she offered to come with me, but I made up an excuse to go alone.
I’m bad with directions and was on the phone with my boyfriend while trying to get to the precinct. I made a huge loop, and while I was on the phone, I got two more calls from the mysterious number that had called me before, plus a text from Serena saying she was in the library. Twenty minutes later, I was approaching the police station and could clearly see her standing across the street. I freaked out and ducked into a shop on a side street and called the detective again. “My roommate is outside,” I said. “I think she has something to do with my identity being stolen.” The detective told me they had her in custody—they spotted her walking around outside and recognized her from the bank footage. I asked the police to send an escort because I was so scared. When I got to the station, I told them I didn’t want to see Serena. They showed me the security tapes, and sure enough, it was Serena at the bank, in an outfit I’d helped her pick out. Then the detective asked if I called the police station saying my boyfriend had broken up with me and my computer had crashed and that I couldn’t come in today, which I clearly hadn’t. Serena had been impersonating me and the police using fake phone calls the whole time.
She went to jail that night and was charged with four felonies: grand larceny, impersonation of a cop, possession of forged documents, and identity theft. She had gone to the bank that day to get another debit card in my name using my ID. We don’t look anything alike, so they must not have looked at it very closely.
The next morning, Alison found out that all the calls and e-mails she’d been getting from the police were actually from Serena too. She thought she was communicating with a detective the whole time, but never was. Serena called me the next day after she was released, crying, and said, “I’m so sorry, I want to let you know this is the only time I’ve stolen from you.” It sounded like something her lawyer had told her to say. She went back to the apartment with her parents, didn’t look at anyone, took a few things, and dropped out of school that day. Later that week, she sent a long Facebook message to our good friends, a clichéd message about how she was just a girl who had gotten in over her head. She had an entire story about how she’d been dealing with drug addiction since high school and had taken my money because she knew the bank would give it back to me and her cocaine dealer would hurt her if she didn’t pay him. I knew the story was fake, because my friends told me she’d only started doing coke recently and was obsessed with it. It was as if she knew she needed a story for cover.
Since then, none of us have heard from Serena. I heard she got off with community service and didn’t have to spend any time in jail, because of her drug addiction story. The scariest thing was the way she cloned herself into the people she was hanging out with—it was as if she never had an identity of her own.
—V, 24 (F)
STUDENT STRUGGLES
THE ELEVEN-WOMAN SUITE
I’VE HAD MORE THAN THIRTY-FIVE ROOMMATES, including a gay video gamer who never left his bedroom—he was constantly playing World of Warcraft and having Craigslist hookups in the middle of the night. The biggest contribution to my number of roommates was when I lived in an eleven-person suite two years in a row in college. I chose the suite because it was low-cost and allowed smoking. I figured that the type of people who wanted to live in a smoking apartment were people who liked to have fun. If a few people each had one friend over on a Friday night, it turned into a huge party. We had all come in as random roommates but formed a real bond, with the exception of Michelle, an alcoholic with a serious eating disorder. I think it was genetic—her brother was an addict too.
Michelle weighed about ninety pounds, only ate boiled chicken and broccoli, and went straight to the bathroom after she ate. Once she passed out in the bathroom with the door locked and the water running, and we had to break the door down. When the girl who shared her room found laxatives under Michelle’s bed, we knew we had to confront her, but nobody knew the right way to do it.
One day, she busted her two front teeth on the pavement while wasted. After she came back with her teeth knocked out and blood all over her shirt, we told her that she had a problem. She slammed the door in our faces and refused to talk to us. It didn’t help that her mother was an enabler who had bought her porn-star breast implants as a high school graduation gift. She called her mother the next day for emergency dental work, lied about what happened, and said she fell on the stairs. Her mom sued our school and essentially made back what they paid in tuition.
The next year of college, six of us stayed together, but the other rooms were filled with even more characters. One was a conservative Jewish girl, and she always stirred up some sort of war about having the lights and the oven on while she was observing the Sabbath. Whenever anyone came over, it turned into a very intense political conversation about Israel and Palestine.
But no one can quite compare to the roommate we nicknamed Hooky. She was into some bizarre things, like suspension on hooks. Some people are into it as an erotic thing, but to me it’s a form of masochism. Hooky went to parties and BDSM conventions where people get together and hang from the ceiling on hooks and swing.
Hooky kept to herself most of the time. There was a time during finals when no one saw her for a long period, and we all texted to ask if she was okay. I thought maybe she had gone home to Westchester, but one day I came home to her casually smoking cigarettes in our living room area, like she’d been there all along. “Where’ve you been?” I asked. “No one’s seen you in ages.” She told me she’d gotten depressed, hadn’t left her room in a month, and then went to a doctor who gave her medicine for schizophrenia. “Now I feel great,” she said.
The guys she brought over were weird too—one had a split tongue, a
nd another had implants under his skin so it looked like he had lizard bumps. She also had hooks in her bedroom. We told her she wasn’t allowed to hang in her room, but she said she couldn’t anyway because the hooks were too low. The hooks were more display items she had for shock value. Living in the suite honestly felt like The Real World with only women.
—A, 30 (F)
THE OBSESSIVE LESBIAN
MY SOPHOMORE YEAR OF COLLEGE, I was looking to move out of my apartment because my two roommates, a guy and a girl, had become a couple. They started hooking up about a week after moving in together, and I figured it wasn’t any of my business. But the way we handled the roommate affairs was that each of us voted on everything. And when they became a couple, they started voting as a block, because they didn’t want to make the other one mad. So when I didn’t want to get cable because I wasn’t home that much to watch it, they said, “We’re both for it, so you have to pay for it.” We used to take turns buying household supplies, and they took a turn as a couple and then it was my turn. It went quickly from we’re going to be great roommates to I have to get out of here. I felt like I was in their relationship, and it was a nightmare scenario.
A guy I studied abroad with said he was moving out of a two-bedroom, and his female roommate went to a different college but was in the same city. He said she was a nice person, but he was a neat freak and she was a little too messy. “How messy are we talking?” I asked. And he told me how she threw her keys on the table, or left her jacket on the couch instead of hanging it up. To me, that’s not messy. I thought he was sort of anal-retentive. Little did I know, he was just trying to say anything he could to get out of there, because she was such a terrible roommate. I went to visit the apartment, and it was all decorated from Pier 1, very world-art themed. It was in a cute old building, a Victorian house that was subdivided into apartments. She seemed perfectly nice—she was a very polite southern girl with a thick accent. It seemed like a great arrangement, and we both knew we weren’t going to become best friends.