I didn’t move out of home until I was 21, and was lucky enough to move into a huge place with cheap rent that was close to the city. Even better, I got along well with my housemates (two guys and a girl, all friends prior to moving in) and we never had any problems bigger than whose turn it was to do the dishes. Unfortunately our female housemate wanted to move interstate and we couldn’t find anyone in our large circle of friends to take her room, so after weeks of covering the extra rent ourselves we bit the bullet and advertised in the local paper. We wanted a girl to keep the balance even, but as I worked a lot and my two male housemates were home during the day, I let them interview the potential candidates. They decided on “Ally”. She seemed nice, although a bit of a space cadet.

The first week should have been a dire warning. Although none of us were opposed to drugs, we didn’t really do anything harder than weed and especially not with any regularity. Ally spent the entire first week off her chops on ecstasy. Who gets high alone on a Tuesday afternoon just to celebrate moving in?

One night around 3 a.m. I was awakened suddenly by my bedroom door flying open and someone staggering over towards my bed. Luckily I had a clothes horse with fresh washing on it by the door and the intruder got tangled up in it, turned and walked out. When I asked Ally why she was in my room she denied it being her, although it quite clearly was. If that wasn’t creepy enough, a few weeks later I had smoked a joint and was just chilling out in my room watching some TV when Ally walked in and sat extremely close to me on the bed. She started up some small talk and then looked me in the eyes and asked if I liked girls. I’m not gay and I told her this, and she got up and left. One of my housemates later told me she had also come into his room one night while he was in bed, sat down and started telling him she liked him “more than she should.”

She wasn’t working, since she was meant to be studying, but it soon became obvious she wasn’t doing that either. Her parents, who were of some kind of Eastern European descent and didn’t speak much English, had been paying her rent and bills. We hooked her up with a job down at the local pub but she quit after two shifts for no apparent reason.

One Wednesday night she came home at 4 a.m. with two strange men and started blasting drum and bass music. They were running up and down our wooden hall that connected to all the bedrooms, yelling and shouting. One of the strange men burst into my room and asked in Ally was in there and I flipped out and screamed at him to get out.

The final straw came one weekend when both my male housemates were interstate playing a show with their band. Ally was spending a night at home with her friend and I had a night shift so I went out to work and came home straight to bed. The next morning as I was walking down the hall to the bathroom I heard two girls giggling coming from one of my absent housemates rooms. When I opened the door, Ally and her friend were laying in his bed talking. I asked why they were in there and Ally claimed her friend had felt unwell during the night so she slept in our housemates bed, and in the morning she had come over to visit. I asked if the housemate had ok’d this and she gave me an incredulous look and said “Why would he mind?”. Why would he mind you let a strange sick girl sleep on his sheets and invade his personal space and treat it like a common living area? He was furious when he found out.

We didn’t even have to kick her out in the end. She sulked about feeling unwelcome and left a week later. Sucks to be whoever she lives with next!