You Dirty Rat

When I first started law school, I roomed with a student about a year ahead of me. She was originally from England, but had lived in the US about 10 years, and was a U.S. marine. In the beginning, she tried tirelessly to intimidate me, asking me every night if she could see the briefs I wrote for class and quizzing me on the names of the cases in the reading assignment. Our year together was replete with bizarre experiences and encounters.

When I cooked she would stand over me and comment, usually that whatever I was making was weird. She had five-star tastes, evidenced by her daily specialty of frying a whole onion in vegetable oil, and cutting it up over ramen noodles. She kept several rodents in a huge tube cage in her 10-foot by 12-foot bedroom and never cleaned it out; so when she opened her door, the smell of a pig farm wafted throughout the apartment. Then she met this dude fromon the internet and once when I got up to use the bathroom about 4:00 am one morning, I heard her telling him on voice chat what time I went to bed and got up. Turns out, she was chatting online with him between the hours of midnight and 7:00 am, closing shop just before I got up.

When I learned she was leaving, I started looking for another roommate and prayed the prospectives would forego a tour before moving in. When I finally got a serious inquiry, the candidate understandably wanted to come over. I gave my roommate a head’s up and she indicated she would clean up around her room beforehand. When the new potential roommate came over, my roommate was in the kitchen boiling ramen noodles and blending onions and ground sausage in a food processor. All you could smell was onions. That is until I opened my roommate’s door. It stunk horribly of rat feces; but it was the nipple-piercing paraphernalia in plain view and the gun on the nightstand that really sealed the deal.